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

Increase SalesWhen 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?

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

Who WhatOver 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?

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

Buying-Process

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….

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