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Revenue BootCamp:
Five Drills for Business Success Today
Debbie Depp, President,
The Fenemore Group, and Lee Levitt,
Managing Director, The Acelera Group
December 2002. Year-end to one
of the worst years in recent memory. Nobody sold anything!
Perhaps this is just a bit of an overstatement. The
economy hasn’t come to a complete stop, so somebody must be selling
something. To find out how, we convened a group of senior sales and
marketing professionals at a recent Revenue BootCamp to ask how they’re
doing the following:
- Connecting with the “best” prospects
- Communicating the value proposition
- Improving sales performance and productivity
Our goal was to help discover the sales and marketing
activities that they could take away and employ immediately…and this group
certainly had some great ideas.
If this group was any indication, not everyone is
sitting around crying in their tea about the lousy economy. We all know
that the best time to invest in a business is when times are tough and
competitors have cut way back. A few brave souls are out there plugging
away.
This group may be investing in their businesses…but
they’re not looking to score big…they’re simply looking to continue to
build a solid base of business through effective sales and marketing
activities.
What should I do now?
- Target fewer prospects. Wow! This
sure sounds counter-intuitive, but it works. As you spread yourself more
thinly over a broader range of prospects in more verticals, you lose
leverage. If you’ve never dealt with a CIO of a hospital before, how do
you establish credibility? On the other hand, if you can cite your
experiences with five other hospital installations, you’ve got a chance
of getting them to pay attention.
It’s all about the risk/reward tradeoff. Your
prospect isn’t thinking of you as a product or service provider, but as
the potential career-busting decision. Choose wrongly and they may
lose their job. You just lose a sale or a customer. As you focus you
reduce their perceived risk.
Put this strategy to work
and you’ll find that you’re uncovering more prospects that want to talk
with you. Do it well and you won’t miss the quantities. In the 1990s,
successful selling was all about playing the numbers…engage with enough
prospects and you’d sell something to someone. Today it’s all about
quality. Find more ways to touch your ideal prospect on a regular basis.
- Connect your company’s solutions to your
customers’ business drivers. More than ever, customers are looking
for trusted advisors rather than product hawkers. If you’re selling,
you’re losing. If you’re asking questions and probing for pain,
listening to your customers, you have a chance. Here’s a tip –
customers don’t care about your product. They care about the
benefits your product offers them. So stop telling them about your
product and start asking them what business issues they’re facing…done
right and they’ll assume that you have a solution to their pain.
- Test, test, test. Take nothing for granted.
One Revenue BootCamp attendee indicated that his company evaluates the
performance of the corporate website on a quarterly basis, and over the
past year or so has removed a lot of non-essential content. Less is
more.
Measure results on a program by program basis. Are
you really getting value from your branding campaign, the radio spots on
NPR, the visibility at the local trade show, the telemarketing or direct
mail campaign? How would you know? Establish a system for tracking the
total costs of these programs and the results. Measuring the results
will force you to put some good sales processes in place. Sure, selling
may be an art, but it needs to be supported with effective processes.
- Give up the price game. In this difficult
economy, it’s “easy” to try to win a deal on the basis of
price…but even if you do win a deal you lose. You’ve just positioned
yourself as the loss leader. And most of the time the prospect is just
playing you against the competition. Let someone else be that sucker.
Few companies can win at the
price game…for everyone else it’s differentiation or service.
And everyone has to play the same game…we’ve seen too many instances of
companies positioning themselves as the “high-value” provider, and then,
out in the field, the sales person is bidding at cost (or below) to win an
account.
- Think outside the box. In this age of
instant complete information, Internet auctions and who knows what else,
you have to think about different ways of doing things. We know of one
service company that won a good sized contract because they didn’t
return a prospect’s initial email inquiry – they picked up the phone and
established a personal link with the prospect. A BootCamp attendee
described his process of holding a lunchtime “trade show” at their
client sites…bringing in their engineers to schmooze with the client’s
engineers. The end result is deeper customer relationships and the
identification of new opportunities…with the cost being not much more
than a tank of gas.
Good luck out there…and remember, the economy
is only as bad as you think it is. Someone has to sell something…it might
as well be you!
. . .
Comments on this article appreciated
Article Copyright 2002,
The Acelera Group. All rights reserved.
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"People, customers,
and relationships -- they make up all of the soft stuff that determines what
really gets accomplished and how well it gets done."
Tom Peters
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