May 1, 2015 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Design your sales process
Everybody in business is in one way or another, in sales.
After all, you do not make a living by giving stuff away, you actually have to sell it.
It is also true that not everybody will want your stuff, in fact, usually very few will want it, so the challenge is to find them, engage them, demonstrate the value, and then create a transaction.
All this takes time and effort, it will not happen by some sort of osmotic process, giving a bloke a sales folder, a car, and map no longer works, the sales process needs to be specifically designed to create the circumstances in which a transaction can take place.
35 years of designing them in one way or another has led to a few conclusions on the best way to go about it,
- Ensure you understand the buyer, and their buying processes. One size does not fit all, each will be different, and by whatever means you need to define their processes, pain points, and priorities so you can build messages that resonate.
- Design a detailed process. Given each prospect will be different, the process needs to be both robust and sufficiently agile to accommodate the nuances of each customer. Generally it will have a number of stages that fits the product you are selling. Office supplies will differ substantially from power stations, but the principal remain the same. Set the stages, and the triggers that move a prospect from one stage to the next.
- Develop a playbook for each stage. This will involve both the response to the persona of the prospect and delivering the type of content that they will respond to at their point in the sales cycle, the delivering the content in the most appropriate manner.
- Routinize the sales process. Like any process, a sales process is best if it works routinely, in a predictable and consistent way. Improvements then come from the anomalies and outlier things that pop up, and become very obvious simply because they are outside the norm. it may be a inquiry from a market you had never considered, or an idea on how to improve your product for a particular purpose, whatever, the sales process needs to make the odd thought obvious so it does not get missed in the welter of activity that occurs.
- Manage the metrics. Like any process, a sales funnel can be continuously improved, you can also ensure sales priorities are optimised, and KPI’s set and managed.
- Engage your sales force in the process design and ongoing improvements, and feedback loops. Over time as the process evolves and new sales people come along, to keep a sales process delivering it needs to be able to evolve at least as fast as the customers you are seeking to serve. Sales people come in many colours, like the rest of us, and managing any diverse group of people requires that they buy into the objectives of the strategies in front of them sufficiently strongly to resist the temptation to chase the new shiny thing.
None of this is easy, despite all the verbiage out there that seems to indicate it is. Designing an effective sales process takes time, effort, investment, and iteration. The good pat is that effective process design quickly pays for itself.
Apr 29, 2015 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
sales rule No. 1
Shut up!!.
I have been spending a bit of time recently helping develop and implement strategy in a very interesting start-up with an innovative, and potentially extremely valuable piece of Intellectual Capital. Even after doing this stuff for so long, there is always something to learn, and being involved with this process has brought home a lesson learnt a very long time ago about what works in sales and what does not
The founder is deeply, irrationally, in love with his product.
Usually this emotional attachment to the product is seen as a great thing, but it can be a bad mistake, as potential clients rarely share the attachment.
As a result in this case, when he finally gets to talk to someone who may have the need for such a product, he delivers a passionate diatribe about all the things the product, can do, will do, can be adjusted to do, and how it evolved. Little about how it can deliver value to these potential clients, little about the potentially substantial problem successfully addressed, and little in words the potential client would use to describe his current situation.
Yawn.
Asking questions, followed by listening intently to the answer, and reflecting that answer in another follow up question is the single best sales technique there is.
The best sales people I have ever seen always do surprisingly little talking.
If you are the seller, and you do more than 30% of the talking, you have probably failed, or will fail. You will not at first know much about the potential customer, what their problems may be, how they are currently solving the problem and what they might be thinking when you show them solution, so you need to find out.
Ask questions: even confronting ones,
Why did you take this call?
How are you solving this problem now?
What would it be worth to solve this problem quickly?
How would it feel…etc. etc.
Sales however is still a numbers game.
Not everyone, no matter how well qualified, will want or see the need for your product. So, have many sales conversations in parallel, having done sufficient research on your targets that you know them sufficiently well to control the conversation, so you do not have to do the talking.
Follow up religiously, but politely and respectfully. They may not have opened your follow up email or called you back for the 3 times you called, sometimes it means you have made not piqued their interest and will make no progress, and sometimes it is just that life can get in the way.
However, do not forget that the most important resource a small business has is their time, so you need to invest yours wisely, and your prospects will thank you or not wasting theirs.
Apr 27, 2015 | Change, Governance, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
value chain arbitrage
There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market in the niche?
This question was posed to me many years ago as I pondered a new product business plan.
There was pretty clearly a niche in the market that was not well inhabited by competitors, but I was asked:
“Is this because you are just smarter than others, and had seen something they had not, or was it that they had concluded that there was no market in the niche”
Identifying a niche with no commercial potential that would deliver an ROI on the investment may be an interesting observation, one to be filed away for a look again later, but no real value now.
I have kept an eye on that niche for years, way after I left the employment I had at the time, and observe that at the time there was no return in the niche, but now, post digital marketing, there is, and it has been mined extensively and profitably by those who saw it.
The parameters of marketing have changed radically since I first identified the niche.
No longer are we constrained by geography, value chain middlemen who control key points and strangle out rents on the arbitrage value, and expensive, pot luck advertising.
Those constraints are gone, and we are left with a landscape of niches that do have a market in them, recently uncovered by the power of the digit.
Small and medium sized businesses have been delivered the means to scale their operations in ways not imagined 20 years ago.
Niches are now global.
They may be narrow, and deep, but when you find someone down there, they are there for a very good reason indeed, and are usually very receptive to offers that reflect their deep engagement with the niche.
Rich pickings for niche Small and medium players who move quickly, play well, and play smart.
Apr 23, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Uncategorized
Albert Einstein would have made a great marketer.
He made a number of statements that are highly applicable, but one that sticks in mind is:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, no simpler”
Marketing is simple in concept, but becoming ever more complication in the execution.
The huge array of choices to be made at every stage is enough to scare many people away, so their marketing remains sub optimal.
There are only four components, all are critical, and all interact with each other creating the huge mass of choice confronting us, but in its simplest form, it really is pretty easy to understand.
- The message. What is said
- The medium. Where it appears
- The mechanism. How it gets there
- The sweet spot in the middle. The customer.
Albert also said “if I had an hour to solve a life and death problem, I would spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem. The rest is just maths”.
Marketing is just the same, define the outcome you are seeking, the problem you are solving, and the game is over, you can go to lunch in peace.
See, now you know.
Simple to say, hard to do.
Apr 21, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I hate you
Small businesses are all aware of the power of Social Media, usually want to play, and mostly get it wrong. Following are the 11 Mistakes I have most often seen over the last few years. This is despite facebook being around since 2004, Twitter since 2006, and the others mostly 5 or 6 years, so you can’t really say this stuff is new anymore.
The application of Digital technology to marketing is the greatest innovation since Guttenberg put ink to paper. It offers small businesses the opportunity to be something other than bound by geographic boundaries and the economics of scale.
- You have no plan.
The last thing you want to do is overlook the first thing you should do every time you allocate some of your scarcest resources. Identify your target audience, do your research, determine your objectives, develop your content, and make your choices of the tools best suited. Then act accordingly, monitor results and improve, rinse and repeat.
- You are working solo.
Solo can be done but is really hard work. I picked up a typo in a mates newsletter a week or so ago, pointed out the page in an email, and he still could not see it. Working solo, you often miss what is right in front of you, and there are only so many things you can do yourself, so pick the ones you can do well, and are necessary, and ignore or outsource the rest.
- You think you are a writer
We are all taught to write at school, that does not make us writers. Of course, you’re not trying to be Hemingway, but quality writing makes a huge difference to the results, even in 140 characters.
- You fail to interest your audience.
Pretty obvious. We have so much blasting at us that we get little chance to impress, a fleeting second at best. Breaking through the mass of communication is critical. Best exercise I usually recommend is to haunt the shelves of your local newsagent for a while, read the headlines of the magazines. Those people know how to attract and interest an audience.
- You’re Not Being Yourself.
It is easier to outsource the blog posts and social media updates, but I recommend that you at the very least read and edit every post that goes out under your name. Authenticity is now almost a cliché, but that is why it is right. Unless you are Barak Obama, people will get annoyed that you are not writing the posts that are under your name. Social media is as much about opinions as they are facts, tell people what you think, recognising not all will agree, and perhaps even better some will dislike you and not come back, leaving a tighter group of advocates. Being a fake, bland, and opinion-less is a quick way to lose credibility and audience.
- You not consistent.
Be regular and predictable in the frequency and length of post, and keep the same style. To some extent this is inconsistent with the “be interesting” advice above, but it is a useful to be maintain the same persona. You would have trouble with a friend if they behaved inconsistently, sometimes late, sometimes early, often unpredictable and erratic. Once or twice can be fun, all the time is tiresome. Same in social media.
- You are careless.
Written communication is far more informal than it was in the past, but that is no excuse for typos, grammatical mistakes, and confusing messages. Some colloquialism and slang is OK, but a little goes a long way.
- You are not visual.
Human beings are visual animals, and visual is becoming easier by the day, so use it. There are many alternatives, stock images, your own shots, video, Instagram, vine, YouTube, and all the rest. Use it to make a point, stand out, and engage.
- You are not tracking the numbers.
This is the last, and most stupid of all, as well as being disturbingly common. The huge benefit of digital marketing is that suddenly, your efforts can be tracked, a genuine calculation of return can be made, suddenly we get to find out which half of our communication budget was being wasted before we had the numbers. if that is not enough, the free analytics are pretty comprehensive, more than most small businesses can easily use.
Apr 14, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
It is all about what goes in
Unlike a funnel for petrol into your tank, sugar into your cake, or production ingredient into your ribbon mixer, in a sales funnel there is no bloody gravity!
You have to create the gravity!
You have to create the customer energy, commitment, interest, whatever it takes to move from one point to another more committed point, and eventually to a transaction.
Not easy.
Most marketers inherently hope if not believe their prospective customer is just hanging out for their product, that even if they do not yet know it, their product will be the saviour. That is not because they are misguided or simple, that is how they are trained, and those that stick with it are usually the more optimistic, and sometimes thick-skinned amongst us.
The reality is that most customers are distracted by life. Their kid is sick, their car just terminally broke down, their daughter is going out with the “wrong” bloke, or they are planning a holiday. They really do not give a flying fig about your brand new, shiny, world beating gizmo anyway, and it is just easier to be nice and not tell you to piss off, and be busy when you ring, than to be a bad guy. You just misunderstand and wonder why the order has not come in yet
This rant was motivated by another of those annoying self proclaimed experts that extol the unmatched virtues of their particular cure-all, in this case a digital funnel template. Must have scraped my email from the website, twitter, or some turd sold it to him. Now my inbox is being flooded with spam, with the writer becoming increasingly concerned at my health because I have not yet bought.
“Just do X, so easy anyone can do it, and for an investment of just $279 for my exclusive, all singing all dancing funnel and 15 minutes a day the cash will roll in”.
Bullshit.
Selling is hard work, best done by professionals who understand their market, products and customers well, and have the emotional intelligence to work with the prospect to deliver value via a transaction. It never happens just because somebody bought a template.
Sales Funnels can only be as good as the input allows, and the process facilitates. When you need someone who can do this stuff properly, call me.
