Blue Mine Group

Sales opportunities

The outcome of both prospecting and account development work is a series of identified sales opportunities. Each opportunity must be clearly identified as such, and systematically managed to maximize the conversion rate from opportunity into signed deals.

The best way to define your sales opportunity process is to match it to your customer’s buying cycle. Once a potential need is identified, customers typically move through a process of confirming that the problem is large and urgent enough to address, exploring options, narrowing the options down to a shortlist, evaluating each short listed option in detail, making a tentative decision, resolving any concerns, negotiating terms, and finalizing the purchase decision and agreement.

Your sales process should be designed to facilitate moving prospects through their buying cycles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Essentially, you are helping them problem solve, and your sales process will be much more effective if you think of it as helping your customers solve their problems in a systematic and thoughtful way.

Early on in the sales opportunity process, you must qualify the opportunity to see if it really is an opportunity, or if it should remain in prospecting or account development. Normally this qualification process includes asking the following questions – Is there a clear decision maker identified?  Do they have an urgent problem or need?  Is the budget approved and allocated? Is the budget a good fit with your solutions?

The early stages of the sales cycle should typically be focused on exploring customer needs in detail.  This includes quantifying the value of solving the problem and the cost of not solving the problem. Once the cycle progresses, it becomes important to provide in-depth explanations of your solution, pricing, implementation and support programs, etc. Of central importance is the ability to use facts to show how your solution fits the customers needs better than the other options they are considering.

The final stage is negotiating and “asking for the order”. While much had been said about closing techniques, in reality if you have properly identified and addressed all your customer’s needs and concerns, they will be happy to make a decision and proceed. If they don’t, it is because you have not yet uncovered all of the issues related to that opportunity.

It is best to manage the sales opportunity process like a project, with a written action plan that lays out each step. You should draft and share this action plan with your prospect, gain their input and agreement to it, and keep it updated on a weekly basis as you progress.

Account development

Account development is the second element focused on identifying sales opportunities. The focus here is on expanding your relationships within existing customers to identify new sales opportunities in both the same and in other areas within the customer organization.

Account development begins with reviewing your current customers and prioritizing these for focus. Not all customers are equal in terms of value and potential. You should evaluate your existing customers using a simple but disciplined opportunity matrix and triage them into A, B and possibly C target accounts. Your primary focus and most in-depth effort will be your A accounts. B and C accounts can use a limited version of your account development process.

For each target account, you should identify the account team and have the team prepare a written account plan. Such a plan should include a summary of key business trends in the account, identification of known or possible issues you can address, identification of current and desired contact relationships, and a clear action plan with tasks, timing and responsibilities.

The action plan can be similar to many of the tactics used for prospecting, including both relationship marketing and personal relationship development components. With your A accounts, it is frequently possible and powerful to create and convene educational / problem solving sessions with a number of contacts from the account around specific issues or topics. Such sessions can be followed up with summary memos defining the issues to be addressed, and recommending possible solutions to explore. In this way, you can raise awareness and organizational interest around the issues that will lead to sales opportunities.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the first of two elements where the primary goal is to identify sales opportunities. This element refers to identifying new prospective customers who have a need that you can address.

The process begins with summarizing from your strategy and market analysis activities your target markets and customers. In B2B sales, this normally means defining target organizations by specific criteria such as size, industry sector and / or geography, as well as target contacts within these organizations by job function.

Once your target prospects are identified, you need to define and test a process for initiating contact to introduce your company and products, and to invite prospects to begin a relationship with your company. It is rare for a prospect to express their real needs and concerns in the initial introduction. It is better to focus initially on learning about the prospect company and contacts, providing value of interest to them, and making it easy for them to become part of your relationship development program.

A relationship development program should have two components. One is managed by your marketing communications team and comprises newsletters, webinar, seminar invitations, and other methods of touching contacts regularly. 
The second is managed by the sales team members and comprises calls, emails, visits, birthday cards, meal invitations and other personal relationship building tactics.

To record and manage your prospecting and all other sales activities, you must implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce or SalesLogix.

Your sales organization

Organization
Your sales organization includes everyone involved in the sales process. To be successful, a B2B solution sales team requires a number of different roles. For early stage companies, team members may need to play more than one role. It is important to keep in mind that ultimately people are typically best suited to serve one role. Once you are financially able, you will want to include a number of specialists on your sales team.

Key roles typically include the Manager, Connector (inside sales), Dealmaker (outside sales), Specialist (pre-sales engineer), and the Administrator.

 

Role	Responsibilities
Manager	Managing the sales effort
Connector	Identifying target contacts Initiating contact Building relationships with target contacts
Dealmaker	Managing the sales cycle Closing deals
Specialist	Product expertise Demonstrations
Administrator	Sales administration

For each role, you need to clearly define both responsibilities and rewards. Responsibilities for each role should be defined in writing, so that there is no overlap and everyone understands their contribution. More than any other function, sales teams are motivated by rewards. These should be clear, simple, fair and tied directly to the key metrics that drive your core sales processes.

Building an effective sales capability

Building an effective sales capability is central to successfully taking your innovation to market. Developing such a capability is much more than hiring good salespeople – although that is frequently (but not always) a key ingredient. It is about developing a professional, systematic set of processes, providing the right training and coaching, implementing the right metrics and rewards, all with the right context of other strategies and capabilities.

In Blue Mine Group’s innovation methodology, sales effectiveness is predicated on several critical elements. You must have clear market focus on an identifiable customer. Your customer must have an urgent need, that is not currently being satisfied by alternate options. You offering must meet your customer’s needs in all key respects – product functionality, pricing, availability, support, and many others. You must have in place a sound marketing communications program, that provides effective messaging, relationship and reputation building initiatives. Your operations, delivery and support processes must deliver great customer experiences, that drive loyalty and referrals. Absent any of these, no matter how good your sales process, you will struggle to get traction and win customers.

Our sales effectiveness model comprises five key elements: organization, prospecting, account development, sales opportunities and sales management. We will discuss each of these over the next few posts.

Talking to customers

While you can gather some information on customer needs from online research, nothing beats talking directly to prospective customers. This should be one of the earliest market development activities a new venture undertakes, and it should never end.

The fundamental requirement for winning customers is to talk to them on an ongoing basis, and to continuously refine every aspect of your market development model until you have perfected the formula for unleashing the market’s potential.

The rise of social media offers a powerful new option for companies to understand customers and their needs. Paying attention to, and participating in, the ongoing conversations online about your market and product category enables you to get the pulse of your target customers quickly. 

Positioning and messaging

Once you have clarity on who your customer is, and how your offering meets customer needs better than all options, you need to develop an effective way of communicating this to your target customers. This is accomplished through branding and messaging, which includes every way in which you identify and communicate your company and its solutions.

Ultimately the goal of the communication process is to effectively position your company and products in your customer’s mind. The normal way we learn is to compare new things to those we already know and understand. So any new innovation we learn about, we position in our minds relative to something we already know.

Your aim is to ensure you direct and influence this positioning. The ideal is that when people think of your company and products, they think of you as a unique solution to a specific problem, and they call you when facing that problem. 

Many new ventures struggle with their core messaging – and as a result fail to get their message out to the market. To win customers, the way you talk about your products and services is just as important as the products and services themselves.

It is critical that your branding and messaging communicates:

·         Clearly, in a way that even non-technical people can readily understand

·         Concisely, as people do not have time to digest long communications

·         Consistently, so that whether customers visit your website, speak to a salesperson or read an interview with one of your executives, the message is the same.

Product development

Developing the right products and services is central to the successful commercialization of innovation. The goal must be to ensure your products and services truly meet customer needs, are superior to alternatives, and are optimized to capture value for your company.   

In evaluating and working with your product and service portfolio, we begin by categorizing them into three groups: current products and services, new product and services to be launched in the short to medium term, and long term future products and services. Each of these categories typically faces different types of challenges, and should be approached accordingly.

Customer research

Having identified your best target customer segment, you need to develop an in-depth understanding of these target customers, their needs and options.

The first step is clarifying exactly who is the customer. For consumer and small ticket business purchases, this is normally fairly easy to identify and define. For high-ticket business purchases, frequently a number of people are involved playing different roles, such as champion, recommender, decision maker, and approver. In all cases, you need to identify the typical profile and motivations of these different players, so you can tailor your marketing and sales approach accordingly.

Next, you must develop a deep understanding of the needs you address. Customer needs can be analyzed in two primary categories:

·         Core needs – these are the functional needs customers have that you address, normally driven by increasing revenue, reducing costs and / or managing risks.

·         Buying needs – these needs are to do with the customer’s ability to buy - what must happen from both a process and budget point of view to get to a purchase commitment.

Both these sets of needs must be clearly understood and addressed in order to secure a purchase order from the customer!

Market opportunity assessment

A market opportunity assessment is a summary overview of the size and nature of demand in a potential market, as well as the vendor ecosystem (competitors and channel participants) that exists to serve that market.  The goal is to develop a clear understanding of the “big picture” - how the industry is operating, and what are the key trends.

You can gather most of the information you need for this analysis through online research. Supplementing and sense-checking this research with conversations with industry insiders will pay big dividends. Industry insiders include leading customers, vendors, trade association executives, journalists and research analysts.

Your market opportunity assessment should include:   

·         a definition of what is and what is not included in the market

·         market size and growth rate

·         primary customer segments and a short profile on each

·         overview of the vendor eco-system (the key players at each stage of the supply chain) with a short profile on each vendor category

·         a summary of your:

o        best target customer segment/s

o        likely competitor categories

o        possible channel partner categories.