Tips to get access to the real decision makers
By Pascal Persyn on September 01, 2009 @ 08:54
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, funnel managment, know your customer, Sales effectiveness, Sales management, sales skills, sales tactics, solution selling
I’ve seen and heard it over and over again. It’s difficult to get access to real decision makers. It’s even more difficult to keep them in the loop.
Entering late in the buying cycle is probably the single most important reason. A project manager is taking the lead once an opportunity is in the closed minded phase (in some businesses when the RFQ/RFP has been send out). This means that all requirements have been gathered and translated into buying criteria. Therefore real decision makers and those faced with the business problem are no longer involved in the market research phase. They will of course come back into the loop at decision time but that’s way to late to build a meaningful relationship for this opportunity.
5 tips to help overcome the main obstacles:
- Research the power structure and contact the highest ranked person faced with the business problem:Marketing should influence all decision makers faced with business problems you can solve. See: how to influence key decision makers And the one with the biggest impact should be contacted by sales to make an appointment based on a value proposition adapted to the business problem you want to discuss. They will only accept an appointment if their ‘readiness to buy’ is far enough developed but not yet to the state that they’re already convinced to know the buying criteria the solution must meet.
- Speak their language: Sales people are often pushed down or don’t get access to them because they’re unable to have a value add business conversation. Decision makers are not interested in a product or technology pitch. Nor are they interested in knowing more about your company. Remember: Decision-makers believe they know the destination but they have a problem getting there.
- Understand the psychology: Your contact will probably have cold feet of introducing you higher up in the organisation. They’re not sales people and therefore be reluctant to sell the idea to their boss. Afraid of the impact in case of a wrong judgement or setting up an appointment with a sales rep that doesn’t speak the right language.
- Get agreement on value chain impact: Showing that the business pain has an important impact on other key people in the organisation will help you to get access even higher in the organisation. the reasons are:
- You helped your contact to build the needed story to sell the appointment
- You proofed that you understand and have experience dealing with the business problem
- You proofed that you speak the right language.
- Negotiate access: You have to negotiate access if all of above has been insufficient to get access. Remember to check the status of the opportunity in terms of readiness to buy. All of above will probably fail if you came in via the project manger or buyer because the opportunity is already too far down the buying cycle. So if you came in at the right time you will get access when agreeing on certain work or commitments from your side that are of value to your contact in exchange for that meeting.
Closing tip: Be careful with your forecast if you put in opportunities without having access to the real decision makers. These opportunities will drag on and on in your pipeline. Quit normal of course since you have very little insight and control over the ‘real decision’.
5 strategies to improve sales performance
By Pascal Persyn on June 03, 2009 @ 19:59
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Tags: , funnel management, hit-rate, lead generation, marketing effectivenes, Sales effectiveness, Sales efficiency, sales skills, sales tactics, value chain alignment
You typically have 2 main reactions of sales reps having problems to reach their quota. They start to:
- take excessive actions on their existing opportunities. They hope or are convinced to influence the outcome and decision date. These sales reps are typically faced with a starved pipeline. They will never experience the benefits of a balanced pipeline because of this. Moreover, they risk on ruining good opportunities by their behavior.
- call on more and more potential customers. They will take massive actions on each of them willing to have a meeting. This will lead to too many unqualified prospects in the pipeline and create time shortage at the same time. It will lead to a lot of good actions on the wrong prospect and/or wrong timing.
So in other words, both actions will never deliver consistent resolution in the long run.
5 strategies to overcome typical quota issues:
- Continuously qualify your opportunities:Is this really an opportunity? Will I be able to differentiate myself. Woun’t I be used to put pressure on the preferred vendor? Do I see a lot of similarities with already won projects? Will I be able to influence the buying criteria? Is a budget available or can it be made available. Can I get in contact with most or all decision making people? All of these are examples of qualifying criteria to make sure you spend time on the right accounts.
- Reduce your sales cycle: Stop using a sales-process. Use the buying clock. Think in terms of readiness to buy and adapt your actions and time between 2 actions. Who should be your next step contact? Use a structured way to prepare yourself. Think and report based on the outcome of your next steps instead of tracking the content of the next step. Keep all DMU members synchronized on their readiness to buy. Figure out typical time delays in the buying cycle and work ahead of time to overcome them.
- Increase your actual selling time:Figure out a way to decrease your admin time. Stop writing visit reports but send bullet-based short emails to your contact. Save them in your CRM and ask for feedback in order to stay in sync with your contact. Use CRM as your central repository allowing you to self-coach and become more effective.
- Build a pro-active opportunity pipeline over time:Make sure you work with marketing to create leads early in their buying cycle. This will allow you to educate them on their specific needed capabilities and link them to your differentiation. This will put the competition on the defence. It will lower your overall time spend per opportunity and increase your hit-rate at the same time.
- Improve your hit-rate: Get to know the impact your solution has on different people. Find the link between their specific problems, needed capabilities, benefits and results. Use that knowlegde to adapt your questions, value proposition and sales pitch to each of the individual contacts. Make sure you talk to decision makers (Source of Power), people negatively impacted by not having your solution (Source of Dissatisfaction) as well as influencers. Don’t make the mistake of having the project manager as your main contact. This is another reason why you need to get in early in de buying cycle. Add strategy 2 to the equation and you will experience massive improvement in your hit-rate.
The nice thing about these 5 strategies is that they create a snowball effect if you work on all of them at the same time. Make sure you share these ideas with your colleagues and help each other to become more effective with these strategies. Get pre sales support and marketing involved and create a value chain instead of trying to do all things by yourself. After all sales has become a team-sport.
How to be a topnotch B2B marketer part I
By Pascal Persyn on March 31, 2009 @ 12:35
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Tags: , B2B marketing, buyer-aligned messaging, know your customer, marketing and sales alignment, marketing effectivenes, Sales effectiveness, top-line growth
10 must do’s: (Part I, 1 – 5)
- Visit your customers: The best way to know your market is visiting customers and prospects. Research done by Micheal Treacy shows that “Watching what the customers actually do is more reliable than listening to what they say”. Don’t rely on market research.
- Talk to the users
- Understand what problems they were faced with prior to be enabled by your solution
- Be able to quantify the situation before and after
- Write a half-page pain-based reference story in bullet format from the perspective of each impacted “role” in the company to be used by sales when they speak to these people.
- Segment the market based on your differentiation:you can read more on segmentation in a previous blogpost: Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
- Educate the market: Building content deliverables such as white-papers, case studies, etc.. are the best tools in the quest to become top of mind. These deliverables should use the valuable information gathered during your prospect and customer visits. Don’t talk about your product/services or their benefits but rather explain a recognizable situation as is and a situation to be.
- Support Sales:One of your key roles is to facilitate sales’ ability to sell with the highest possible margin at the lowest possible cost of sales. Above mentioned deliverables are also key in helping your sales collegues to better understand their market. Work with them to build face2face best practices that work. You’re in the pivotal position to create and maintain an experience sharing platform.
- Study your competitors:Focus on their strengths not on their weaknesses and make sure you educate your internal and external customers on your differentiation not on your competitors. I see to many competitive reports and presentations leading to: ” We can do what they do and even better”. This makes your strategy to become defensive and positions you as a follower rather then a leader.
Don’t miss Part II, must-do’s 6-10 on “How to be a topnotch B2B marketer”
Necessity of Modern Marketing in times of crisis
By Pascal Persyn on March 04, 2009 @ 16:26
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Tags: , blog, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing ROI, Sales marketing alignment, SEA, SEO
More than ever, this generation experiences the world as a rafting trip rather than a rowing-contest. This makes it impossible to tackle problems one at a time. A holistic approach, adapted to the specific environment, is the best way to a lasting solution. The marketing field is no different.
I see more and more companies seeking salvation in isolated short term plan of actions. Unfortunately these will only keep them out of the danger zone for a short while. Typical examples are: searching new target markets, one-off lead generation efforts hoping to find prospects that are ready to buy. This last one is a typical returning strategy in an attempt to find the famous needle in the hay-stack (lead generation).
Furthermore, today, more than ever, we have a multitude of tools and -techniques at hand. Numerous studies, amongst others the study delivered by the Aberdeen Group , have shown that optimal ROI can only be reached by using the correct mix of tools at all times.
Let me drill down on this new method of influencing your target market based on your own strengths (LEAD-NURTURING) rather than using lead-generation as a means of attracting new business. Lead nurturing means entering into a 1:1 conversation, on a continuous basis, with decision makers in your target market. This means communicating about the pains and the possible solutions your products and services can offer to solve these pains looked at it from the viewpoint of each decision-maker. The most common channels to market for lead nurturing are: email, website, blogs, whitepapers, documentation, speeches, 3rd party articles, follow-up by phone, webinars, podcasts.
Let me emphasize the most important advantages:
- The number of qualified leads will be at least doubled
- Cost of sales will be lower because your prospects will specifically seek your strengths
- Average revenue per order will be 57% higher (see Aberdeen study)
- Salespeople will succeed in winning more deals
- Next to your product-differentiation, your sales approach will also differentiate you
- A higher ROI of your marketing investments.
- Furthermore, these methods are cheaper than traditional promotional and advertizing campaigns.
Important to note is that the ROI is directly linked to the level in which you succeed to be perceived different. In order words: be different from your competitors instead of trying to be better.
Find more info on the Perpetos website:
To close off, some practical tips:
- Adapt the content of your message to the buying mindset of your prospect (meaning: Being interested, probably needing your solution or in the process of evaluating different suppliers)
- Define your product/market combinations directly linked to your your product-differentiation
- Make sure your website is optimized with the correct web key words (Search Engine Optimization – SEO). The website content must use language for all three mental stages
- Make use of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) to attract more traffic to your website
- Initiate a company blog. This is the ideal way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Don’t communicate about your products and services
- Use personalized landing pages to your website in emails. These will allow you to get more information about the click-behavior and the interests of each individual person
A step by step implementation of the above combined with follow-up by phone and email will guarantee your ROI.
Good Luck!
Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
By Pascal Persyn on February 16, 2009 @ 21:36
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, cost of sales, marketing and sales alignment, segmentation, solution selling
Companies have been doing their segmentation based on industry verticals for several decades. Vertical knowledge as a key differentiator has been added into the equation in a more recent history. Yet not all companies in a vertical are faced with the same problems and priorities at the same time. All of this has led to some important inefficiencies.
- People had to be trained on specific vertical knowledge and product knowledge leading to long ramp up times for people in a multi offering company
- Sales & Marketing facing difficulty to match specific needs in a vertical to the product offering
- Sub optimal Product/technology innovation due to conflicts in priorities
- Product releases not adapted to market readiness leading to a high cost of sales and low hit-rate
- A frustrated sales force and an unhealthy tension between departments because their concerns are left unanswered by management
- Sales loosing a lot of time in finding the “needle in a haystack” prospects
A lack of “scalability” throughout the entire value chain is the root cause . The impact on scalability of an organization should be taken into account in each decision you take.
Let me propose how to use segmentation as a way to better align marketing and sales thus improving the scalability of your organization:
- Get to “really’ know your customers by understanding the problems their faced with.
- Define KPI-level pains a prospect should be confronted with in order to seek your leadership. (i.e. VP-Sales- not meeting sales target or too high cost-of-sales)
- Map your differentiators and delivered capabilities to those pains.
- You will now be able to create a set of “pain-based segments”
- Plot your segments in terms of size, solution awareness in the market and level of differentiation.
- You will now be able to prioritize your pain-based segments
- Identify the impacted people in their organization as high as possible on the org-chart which could or will be involved in a buying cycle (key-contacts)
- Map above information for each of them and rank them in terms of impact. The most impacted person will become key in your marketing and sales approach
- You should now be able to write a value proposition for each of the targeted segments. This value proposition is the foundation for all buyer-aligned deliverables such as white papers, solution briefs, case studies, product collateral etc.
- Build a sales kit per segment covering the quantified pains, their causes, needed capabilities, quantified results, ideal buying criteria, benefits and unique features per key-contact
- Populate and qualify your database with suspects based on their pains and readiness to buy and launch a lead generation and/or lead nurturing program to start generating qualified leads for sales.
Above will result in an increased focus:
- More engaged employees
- A lower time to productivity as low as 6 to 7 months for complex solutions
- Increased hit-rate up to 75% and more depending on the level of differentiation you can proof
- Decreased cost of sales by at least 22%
Above shows how segmentation can have an important impact in terms of a better sales and marketing alignment.
Write a comment or question to dig deeper into this improved way of segmentation.
