Another year beckons – another sales challenge looms: How do you give your business the best chance to succeed?

We have all experienced the long hard slog to year end to squeeze every pip out of the pipeline to hit/exceed the year-end number. Some years back, I remember one particularly tenacious MD who insisted on face to face meetings with each business manager every day in December and the questions were always the same.

What is going to close today?
What have you added to your pipeline since yesterday?
What will your final number be?

It was always the middle question that bemused me the most – the idea that there were loads of IT decision makers sitting at their desks just waiting for a sales guy to pick up the phone and ask them to spend over a hundred thousand pounds on a new IT solution that they didn’t even know they needed – oh, and could you do it before year end please? Yes this year end…

Not only did it burn around 50% of every day for the entire sales management team focused internally chasing their sales guys and providing reports ready to receive a kicking for not finding a bluebird, it also demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of sustainable pipeline management and lead nurturing.

Of course, times have moved on now. There are sophisticated CRM systems with integrated pipeline reporting and digital marketing solutions which provide end to end visibility from an initial unidentified website visitor, through visitor identification, to qualified prospect, a forecasted opportunity through to a converted sale.

Well at least the tools exist to make the job easier now. But is your organisation taking advantage of the opportunity to find new organic leads and gain early visibility of potential buyers? And if you have more level 1 leads than you know what to do with, how well are you nurturing those leads and prioritising how to qualify and engage with them? Having got to your “best few”, how many do you convert, or are your competitors getting the lion’s share?

With the adoption of the internet as a fundamental tool for both buyers and sellers, the line between sales and marketing is more blurred than ever. Organisations which deploy a joined up and aligned approach to sales and marketing are able to engage early in the buying cycle and deliver highest sales conversion.

Here’s 6 top tips adopted by organisations with best in class B2B sales and marketing processes:

Consider the end-to-end sales cycle process from finding the lead, through nurturing the lead to closing the sale. Do the marketing initiatives support the sales function in providing valuable leads and sales enablement assets that align to your sales focus? Similarly, does the sales function give priority to qualifying and nurturing marketing ready leads?

Establish a two-way, closed loop process for engaging the lead, which moves the responsibility between sales and marketing in line with the buying cycle. The lead owner is responsible for employing appropriate engagement activities which best support the lead nurturing process to qualify the lead and move it through the sales funnel (or back to marketing to nurture).

Align the objectives of sales and marketing personnel to ensure they are all driving for the same goals and measured against the same metrics. After all, it doesn’t matter how many marketing leads are generated if they are opportunities for deals the sales team can’t convert! Both groups will consider the other to have added no value to the overall goal.

Measure the end to end revenue cycle from initial identification of a suspect through to closing the sale – what is the revenue potential at each stage of the process from identification, nurturing, qualification, quoting, conversion?

Establish joint accountability around the aligned objectives to support the common outcome of increased revenue with a focus on measuring marketing ROI as a percentage of revenue.

Gradually develop a collaborative and symbiotic culture between the two functions which creates common goals and vocabulary, rather than misaligned targets and miscommunication.

Organisations which recognise the benefits of joined up and collaborative sales and marketing systems and processes, will be in the best position to find new opportunities and convert the highest proportion of sales.

Is your organisation embracing the opportunity for finding and winning customers? Or are you already lining up for a kicking next year-end, too….

16
DEC

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

I’m Lost and It’s Your Fault!

A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,” Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.

“I am,” replied the woman. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of you, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault!”

It does highlight how people assess situations in different ways and the how different “personas” apply their own expertise to solve what may be their own perception of the problem.

Find out more how Get to Great can be applied to enable your sales AND marketing team to collectively identify performance inefficiencies and agree appropriate actions to resolve them.

http://www.gettogreat.com/how-it-works/

Get to Great® – Performance Improvement which is immediate, objective, collaborative and cost-effective.

We welcome your comments and feedback.

13
DEC

Blog, Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

Attracting and converting sales opportunities – are you even on the buyer’s radar?

When I think about how straight forward finding sales opportunities used to be, it makes me smile. Reminiscing back to the days when you leafed through various directories to identify target organisations, kept up to date with the business news by reading the FT and researched a company by reading their annual accounts.

Then having identified a potential target, you would pick up the phone, relying on charm and charisma to get past the receptionist / PA to the main decision maker to sniff out a potential opportunity and schmooze your way to an appointment.

These days, the boot is completely on the other foot. Thanks to the internet, the buyer will be so well informed, often the first you will know of an opportunity is when you are approached to provide a proposal – non-ideal on so many levels! The likelihood is you will have no insight, no relationship, no influence – and quite likely, no bid!

On the other hand, companies who have recognised and executed on a digital marketing strategy that connects with current buyer behaviour will be loving the fact that their cost of sale has dramatically reduced and their win rate has increased.

To test which camp your company is likely to be in, start by answering these simple questions:

• Are you easily found on Google – does your website rank highly for search phrases your target customers are using?

• Do you capture visitor details – for example newsletter subscriptions or to download content of value?

• Do you have ways of showcasing your solution – for example online webinars, YouTube videos or explainer animations?

• Do you regularly update your blog with interesting and relevant content?

• Do you publish white papers or e-books which influence the market?

• Are you active on relevant social media channels or within specialist interest groups?

• Is your company LinkedIn profile current and presenting a positive experience of your company?

Will you feature on the shortlist?

Find Out More

25
NOV

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Marketing Tips, Sales Effectiveness

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

The single biggest reason why you don’t win bids…

Over the years I’ve read many articles about why companies don’t win bids and they all seem to focus on what people do during the bid process. In my experience, this is wrong, because everything that happens DURING the bid largely impacts where you end up in the also-rans, rather than the final result – assuming you don’t make complete hash of the bid process, of course.

The single biggest reason people don’t win bids is based on the work they do BEFORE the buyer goes to market. Some people call this ‘early-positioning’, getting ‘written-in’, ‘influencing the buyer’ any many other things and these phrases describe the activity well.

Think about some of the deals you’ve won – and as importantly, some you’ve lost – and analyse the work you did BEFORE the opportunity came to market. Did you meet all the stakeholders? Did they ask for ideas, or did you offer them? Did you take them on customer visits? Did you do proof-of-concept work? Did they ask you for indicative costs?

And equally important is how well your company and its propositions are represented on-line, through your website and use of social media. Research shows that today’s buyer completes around 70% of their selection to shortlist on-line, before ever reaching out to a company representative.

The benefits to the supplier who engages early are huge; insight, influence (solution and budget), COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, deal shaping, the list goes on, and on. The cost of not doing it are also huge; you’re bidding blind against someone who has done all the above. I hope you have the sense to no bid, or that you lose early.

During a recent Get to Great® workshop for a major IT services company, they assessed themselves as over 80% overall against the model, but ‘only’ 65% on Understanding and Influencing, and then put in place a programme to improve that score considerably. The priority question for them was:

How well does your organisation understand and influence the prospect and their business issues / requirement prior to them issuing a tender to the market?

What would your answer be?

Find Out More

19
NOV

Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

Is the sales role still relevant? Not if your company doesn’t make the buyer’s long list!

Remember when attending an exhibition or requesting brochures were the main ways of researching a new solution requirement?

Finding out which companies provided the type of solution you were looking for took a bit of effort on behalf of the buyer to identify potential suppliers and compare their various offerings. Not so these days! Within 30 minutes you can pretty much become an “expert” on anything you like.

With instant access to more information than you could possibly hope for, nowadays the buyer is better informed than ever and is likely to be at least 50% of the way through their procurement cycle with preconceived ideas on what they need, before a supplier is even aware of the opportunity!

Think of all the opportunities the buyer has for completing a review of the market: a simple Google search on a key phrase and you can check out a few websites, subscribe to newsletters, attend webinars, review blogging sites, check out LinkedIn profiles, join in on Twitter, download white papers, watch explainer animations – the possibilities for research are vast!

Having identified a list of potential suppliers and perhaps looked at videos on YouTube, or run an online demo, they might view community sites to find recommendations on supplier products, or searched Google with relevant phrases to look for complaints/issues or other bad customer experiences.

At this point the buyer will have identified potential suppliers. The key question is – Will your company make the short list?

The sales team can spend all their day, picking up the phone to identify prospects and sending emails to organisations that fit the profile for their solutions, but in reality, unless your company has a robust digital marketing strategy, opportunities will get to the tender stage without you even being aware of them.

Before all you sales professionals despair, there is an answer! By developing interesting and original content that adds value to the reader at each stage of the buying process, you can position your company as a thought leader and keep your propositions front of mind.

Not only can you attract prospects to your company and, but by managing your company’s online presence through a digital marketing platform, you can also track and measure your prospects level of engagement to influence their shortlist and develop a prioritised, steady stream of qualified sales-ready leads to follow up and close.

You can turn this situation to your advantage quickly and for minimal investment.

Alternatively, you can continue to leave a high cost sales team trawling the market in an attempt to catch a prospective buyer before it’s too late. And just hope you find them, before they find your competitors….

Find Out More

11
NOV

Digital Marketing, Get to Great

Who’d be in sales management?…Don’t get me started!!

Some sales management styles are like the proverbial swan gliding across the lake with your sales pipeline and forecast completely under control. On the other hand there is the style more akin to a duck paddling as hard as it can to keep the MD appeased whilst managing a pipeline the sounds like something out of Jackanory, thanks to the ingenuity of your sales team who present their forecast with such conviction, that even you almost believe it!

They seem to be busy enough – attending meetings, keeping their appointments up (by visiting anyone who will see them?), submitting proposals (are they well qualified?) and hopefully winning deals…… (although probably not as many as you’d like – or need). And what about marketing? How does being measured on how many emails they send out, how many twitter followers they have or how many people “click through” to the web site help you do your number?? And then there is the fire fighting that goes on post-sale! Again, it’s up to you to pour oil on the troubled waters and cover for the rest of the organisation that didn’t deliver what the customer expected (or thought they had bought?)

And even if you are making your number, all that happens is the bar gets raised for next year. Can you really be expected to keep pulling a rabbit out of the hat EVERY year end??

Operating within a dysfunctional process for finding and winning customers is not only very stressful for all involved, but is also very inefficient and costly. However, when you are in the middle of the battle, it is not that easy to clear enough space to work out where the key problems lie – let alone start to resolve them.

A conventional solution is to “get an independent consultancy in” – you know, the ones who borrow your watch to tell you the time and charge you a packet for the privilege. Consulting projects like this invariably take a significant length of time, starting with an assessment of the problem, which at a minimum will take days and in large organisations, will take weeks, possibly months. The process is being “done to you”, not leveraging the expertise that lies within your organisation and seldom does it really secure the buy-in of the team on the ground, which after all, are the real experts here.

After the failure of many very large and high-profile consultancy led projects that have cost a fortune, delivered little and still left the organisations none the wiser as to how to really address the problems, organisations are rethinking their approach.

The power of an approach which brings together your own experts from across all aspects of the sales and marketing process to collaborate on a sales improvement plan which you understand intimately and have a vested interest in making work, is not only massively more cost effective but also ensures the ownership and buy-in of the whole team collaborating in the end to end process.

So, why bring in the suits to charge you the earth for borrowing your watch, when you actually have the expertise and ability to work out the time for yourself? Perhaps it is time to try another way.

Find out more how you can unlock this potential for your own organisation.

19
OCT

Sales Effectiveness

Five Marketing Initiatives to Consider this Summer

Summer Marketing Initiatives

Do you view the summer as a time to take a well-earned rest, or is it an unwelcome disruption to the momentum your marketing efforts have created so far this year?

If you would prefer to keep your business moving forward, then here are five key things you can do to make progress while your competitors spend the summer drifting backwards.

1. Assess Your Marketing Performance

With marketing activity planted firmly on the here and now in the current climate, it is often hard to fully review your marketing effectiveness based on past performance. As every good marketer knows, it’s not so much about getting things right all the time, but understanding where you went wrong – and then making improvements or identifying alternative approaches.

Consider an external assessment service to review your marketing effectiveness and transform your marketing ROI.

2. Clean Your Marketing Database

The dreaded list clean project! Despite advancements in closed loop marketing automation, CRM and e-marketing systems, the fact remains that with increasing employee and client turnover rates, maintaining clean customer and prospect contact data is still at best an uphill struggle and certainly a thankless task!

Outsource your marketing list of customer contacts to a specialist marketing agency that can validate your contacts and emails and transform your email marketing KPIs.

3. Conduct An Online Customer Satisfaction Survey

Always on the to do list, an online customer satisfaction survey is the ideal opportunity to develop more personal relationships with your customers. It helps you to gain direct customer insight and develop a deep understanding of the demands of your customers and their pain points. It can also reveal sales opportunities for your business.

Take the pain away from administering an online survey by engaging a marketing partner to manage the project, provide impartial and objective reports and conclusions.

4. Refresh Your Customer Case Study Portfolio

Customer case studies are always a key sales enablement asset for any B2B organisation. Take the time to review your collateral to see whether it is up-to-date and fully represents your current business priorities. Consider updating existing customer case studies in a high impact format on branded PDFs and ask your key customer references to participate in a video case study.

Get the job done more quickly with a marketing partner that has a proven track record in delivering customer case studies that sell your story.

5. Develop Your Digital Marketing Strategy

With digital marketing in a constant state of flux, developing an effective digital marketing strategy can seem like a bit of a black art.

If you are not using a fully integrated digital marketing platform, consider running a proof of concept pilot over the summer period to test drive its capabilities to assess your online effectiveness and help build your own business case.

Work with a marketing partner that can provide a low cost, low risk proof of concept digital marketing platform with supporting services to benefit from immediate results.

6
AUG

Marketing Tips

How to Implement a Low Risk, Low Cost Digital Marketing Strategy… With Immediate Results!

The Internet has given today’s buyers unprecedented access to information. In fact a 2011 study by Forrester research concluded that “70% of the buy cycle is completed before sales engage”. While this may seem like a daunting statistic, there is good news for savvy B2B sales and marketing executives.

The same web technology that put power in the hands of the buyer can also be used to capture in-depth information about your website visitors—even before they reveal their identity through online forms or via an inbound enquiry. Implementing a digital marketing solution provides you with visitor and lead intelligence information that can become your sales enablement secret weapon.

For many B2B organisations, this can seem a huge leap, especially when you have previously been successfully using ‘traditional’ outbound marketing and direct selling methods. But as buyers become more online savvy, can you be sure that what worked in the past is going to work in the future?

An effective joined up marketing strategy integrates your outbound marketing tactics with inbound marketing methods to allow you to connect with your buyers earlier in the sales cycle, engage more prospects and accelerate your marketing ROI. By implementing a solution that integrates the latest digital marketing tactics and outbound marketing efforts, you can leverage your existing internal best practice processes, more cost effectively.

Fundamentally a joined up marketing strategy follows this process:

Drive More Traffic to Your Website
See Who is Visiting Your Website
Convert Visitors into Sales Leads
Nurture Leads into Customers

Understandably, many companies are not ready to take the leap of faith to a “big bang” approach of process intensive (and expensive) marketing automation. However, by following our low risk approach and implementing a digital marketing platform in phases, aligned with this closed loop marketing strategy, you can realise immediate business benefits.

Initially, we propose implementing a digital marketing platform supported by services that deliver more traffic to your website through organic searches. By combining visitor intelligence to identify and profile your website visitors, you can boost your telemarketing or internal sales activity, prioritise lead generation efforts and engage with companies that have searched for your solutions to their business problems.

As process improvement opportunities are identified, more sophisticated marketing automation processes can be implemented gradually to fully support and add value to the lead nurturing process.

Contact Us Today
for a free 30 minute Online Demo that introduces our SEO Boost & Visitor Intelligence service, supported by a low cost introductory offer.

Find out more about our SEO Boost & Visitor Intelligence Service

26
JUL

Digital Marketing

Generate More Traffic, Leads and Sales From Your Existing Website

If you are considering investing in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services or already have a monthly retainer with an SEO “expert” – take a moment to consider the alternatives.

Whilst SEO delivered to best practice absolutely drives incremental traffic to your website, how does that help you to connect with your online audience and convert more visitors into leads?

You may already use Google Analytics information to support your SEO efforts. Investing in a digital marketing platform provides you with much more.

It offers a complete integrated set of tools for:

Lead Generation
Marketing Automation
Lead Intelligence
Contact Management
Campaign Management
Reporting

It supports a strategy that not only attracts more visitors, it also enables you to identify actual names of organisations and individual contacts, each with a connected, comprehensive view of page visits and online interactions.

Take the next step in nurturing and converting more of your website visitors to sales ready leads:

Our SEO Boost & Visitor Intelligence service is a unique low cost digital marketing service that combines the benefits of best practice SEO with the ability to track and measure ROI through visitor intelligence on your website.

Our SEO Boost service is aimed at delivering more traffic to your website through organic searches

Our Visitor Intelligence service identifies companies visiting your website, enabling a lead conversion strategy

14
JUN

Uncategorized

Communicate Your Propositions Clearly With ‘Explainer Animations’

Benefits of Explainer Animations

Attract More Visitors to Your Website
Reduce Marketing Collateral Costs
Engage Your Online Audience
Place It On Your Social Media Profiles
Display it at Events
Use As a Sales Aid on a Tablet or Via Email
Reach Out to International Markets

Why Should You Consider Using an ‘Explainer Animation’ In Your Content Marketing?

Your buyers are now firmly in the driving seat with instant access to a vast array of web content to enable them to identify and shortlist solutions to their business problems.

So how can you attract your buyers and communicate your technology solutions, apps or services propositions effectively during that short window of opportunity?

Custom made ‘explainer’ animated videos provide the best opportunity to engage your target audience as they can feature a visually attractive and compelling executive summary of why your company should make your target buyer’s short-list.

Find Out More About Explainer Animations

4
JUN

Uncategorized

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Archive for 2013

Benefits of Explainer Animations