Author Archives: Yafit Davis

Plan for a successful 2023

When I was thinking about what to write for my last blog of 2022, I found this quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Planning is everything, the plan is nothing.” The difference between “planning” and “plans” can be summed up in one word: Change.

The two phrases that best sum up our business lives are “expect the unexpected” and “the only constant is change.” Planning is an active process, setting goals, objectives, and strategies, and reviewing constantly to keep us up to date with market conditions. Plans are how we document the results of our planning and can end up as fixed points that the business tries to fit around. The process of planning helps us know what we need to do to accomplish our goals and fulfil our vision for the business. It allows to us control the effects of the unforeseen and helps our team become aligned with our vision and understand the part they can play in the company’s success.

Throughout this year our blogs have looked at building for the future, and specifically how you can build a bridge between your vision for the business and setting and achieving the goals to get there. In a time of uncertainty, the only thing you can be sure of is that your plans will need to change.

YBDT’s Sales Success consultancy programme starts with identifying your specific sales needs using our unique gap analysis system. Once we have that in place, we can create a tailored sales process, supported by training and mentoring designed for your team as they adopt the new processes.

The key to the success of your planning is an overarching business development strategy. This gives you an understanding of the market and your place within it, creates detailed and time-based goals, and the activities to support them, along with realistic KPIs to measure your success. Having the basic strategic framework in place means you can adapt aspects of the process and support that with additional training. This means that as market conditions change, you can avoid tearing your whole sales and marketing system out and starting from scratch repeatedly.

YBDT’s strategic approach and long experience in supporting the creation and nurturing of prospects has proven effective for many clients. For example, Graeme Brown, MD of Sentinel group Security, said that for his company it is the combination of experience with innovation offered by our team which has resulted in the creation of a much improved and better targeted pipeline.

The best quote about sales and marketing in a time of economic uncertainty came from Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. When asked, “What do you think about a recession?” he responded, “I thought about it and decided not to participate.” YBDT has the tools you need to step ahead of your competitors when they fail to look beyond the next dire headline. Get in touch to talk about how we can help you look forward to a positive, profitable future.

How to prioritise your follow up calls?

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According to Wanda Allan, author of Follow Up Sales Strategies, 80% of sales are made between the 5^th and 12^th contact, yet 90% of sales people make three contacts or less.

I am sure you that you have heard this or similar quotes as there are many of these formulas around. Whether it’s making 5 calls, 8 calls or however many it takes to get an answer from a prospect, the point of follow up is that it is consistent and continues. To achieve this, you need to set up a follow up process which is part of an overall agreed sales process for your company. If you are not sure what I mean, check our demo sales process document here.

One of the key issues with following up beyond setting up an agreed process, is having time to do it. We are all very busy and that means that often, important but not essential activities like following up can fall by the wayside. Once this happens it becomes harder to keep on top of the follow up and utilise opportunities to build a relationship. Rather than taking an all or nothing approach, in this case, we would recommend prioritising your follow up list and setting shorter sessions which you can stick to.

So how do you go about prioritising your list? Well, here are three tips:

Prioritise by intent: if the prospect is communicating with you and providing updates, they are ones to prioritise and keep speaking to. If you hear nothing back or communication is patchy than put those into a lower priority list.
Stick to timelines agreed: developing trust is a big advantage of regular follow up and keeping to agreed timing is key to it so make sure you set activity reminders. One useful time saving tip is to tie these timelines to your regular follow up sessions which become a part of your default diary.
Consider their personality type: identifying your prospects’ preferences is very helpful in the process of building a relationship and prioritising opportunities. Use tools like DISC to consider their personality type to help you prioritise and remove opportunities from your pipeline. For example, if they are introvert and detailed, they may need longer to consider whereas if they are executive and direct, they may have moved on by now.

What about those prospects on your pipeline who you are not able to speak to, should you give up? Personally, I would try a few more steps before you give up, things like:

Try different platforms for follow up, if you are struggling to get hold of a prospect, try different platforms like emails, LinkedIn messages or reaching out through a mutual contact.
Try speaking to other team members, are there any other team members you can reach out to in the company? Often you can get much more information form more junior team members that will help you move the opportunity on.
Send some helpful information, share some helpful articles you have come across to re-start the conversation or make some useful introductions if applicable.
Leave it for a bit, rather than bombard them with messages try and leave them be for a bit an get back in touch at a later date.

If you are still struggling to keep up with follow up, remind yourself that selling is a process of building and developing relationships that can take some time to firm up and yield results. Following up is an excellent opportunity to do just that, even if it feels very slow and frustrating at times. New leads coming into your business are often very initial and require a structured approach to close a sale. This varies based on your product and industry, but the higher the sales value, the longer and more interact the process is.

Our Team at YBDT can help you with firming and setting up your unique sales process. If you and your team are still not managing to cover this off, we can use our business development team to give you a helping hand. Get in touch to find out more and read about how we can support your follow up system here

Selling your value not your price

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Brian Tracy has developed a technique he calls value selling, saying that, ‘If you focus on value, the price becomes less important. If you don’t focus on value, the only thing you can talk about is price’.

When you sell value, you focus on the benefit to your client, aiming to paint a vivid picture of the value they will receive through using your company. If clients grow to value your products and their perception of specific benefits, they will be prepared to pay the price you quote. When you sell on price, you do exactly the opposite and provide a service at reduced value to undercut your competition which can start a race to the bottom affecting your business’s sustainability.

Before we look at how you go about selling value, it’s also important to remember that 70% of sales are unsuccessful due to companies deciding to keep things as they are. Price is a factor, particularly in some industries, but it’s not the key decisive one.

So how do you go about selling value?

There are two stages to this:

Identifying and developing the key value in your business: This is key to the success of this approach as you and your team need to be clear on your offering and where you add value before you can go out selling it. Important elements to consider are:
Get clarity on your business USPs, remember that you can have as many as you like and they don’t have to be unique to your business
Consider your delivery, can it be faster, improved in quality, come with added value?
Improve your customer service and customer care
Make it easy to do business with you
Selling value not price: remember that the success of this approach relies on perceived value, meaning your customer need to understand how your product will bring value to them. This clearly means that you must get clarity on who they are and what they are grappling with before you discuss your solution. Key things to consider here are:

Fact find stage:

Get information about the person you are dealing with and not just the company. Identify their behaviours, style and preference
Make an effort to get to know you customer and understand what matters to them as people
Identify their key pain points, scratch the surface, and get to the bottom of it.
Understand their buying process, what works and what does not

Presentation stage

Only put forward relevant products and services based on their need. Putting forward the right product will make much more impact than rolling through your entire list
Explain the features but sell the benefits
Keep it interactive throughout, ask them for their opinion to try and get a true assessment
Always ask what you might have missed when you are done. Another good question is what they still found open or worrying. Give them an opportunity to guide you before you finish the meeting

It is important to remember that developing value in your business is a key stage to undertake before you go about selling value. While you and your team may know a lot of it already, making it a part of your sales process is very powerful. Not sure where to start? Our tailored sales enablement service starts with a gap analysis and the development of your blueprint sale process. Click here for more information: https://www.yourbizdevteam.co.uk/sales-consultancy.php

Giving your team the support to succeed

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One of the big changes in the sales landscape over the last ten years has been the move towards closer integration between sales and marketing teams. Sales integration allows marketing and sales teams to work together generating awareness of your products and services to a target audience, and then converting those leads into orders. In the past marketing was carried out to generate leads, with a sales team then picking up the leads to progress them to close. In the more integrated world of today both sales and marketing may be involved at all stages to ensure that no opportunity is missed.

Your sales pipeline is a representation of where all of your prospects are in the sales process, is essential. It helps you plan your likely revenue and gauge the state of your business. But it is reliant on the information you feed into it. W. Edwards Deming said, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”, and this is never truer than when looking at your sales pipeline.

By integrating the lead generation and follow up with the negotiation and closing of the sale you have the opportunity to review your progress, understand the client’s requirements and maximise every opportunity, now or in the future. The days of isolated external salespeople pounding the streets and knocking on doors are gone. The companies making a success of sales are the ones who have an integrated support network to feed their front-line sales team with high quality leads ready to buy. Attracting the best sales professionals in a market where they have their pick of jobs means that you need the team in place to generate and nurture those leads.

Your Business Development Team provide an end-to-end strategic service that supports your existing sales team and puts your business in the front rank of companies the best wants to work for. We take you through the steps to creating and managing a sales pipeline that will fuel your sustainable growth.

Business Development Strategy – An integrated sales and marketing strategy is needed to bring focus to your activities. We build a clear understanding of your business to ensure that we can help you deliver your business aspirations
Lead Generation – In line with the strategy we find the best lead generation channels for your business. Digital and offline channels are used to ensure the best coverage of your ideal markets.
Lead Nurturing – This is the critical activity. Taking the time to nurture your prospects to the point that they are ready to buy can take your existing salespeople away from supporting and retaining existing business. YBDT’s lead nurturing service is the answer.
Sales Enablement – We support the creation of a tailored sales process for your business. Bringing a clear, concise, shared process together with all sales and marketing collateral into a single point will help embed the process in the company, and support ongoing staff training.

To succeed in sales, you need to recruit the best people for your market. Being able to offer them a clear path to sales success is what YBDT can do for you, keeping your best sellers focused on the critical path to orders. If you want results-driven services that are tailored to your specific business targets and goals, we can help. Get in touch to learn more about what we can do for your business.

Recruiting for sales success

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One of the main business stories, in many industries, this year has been the difficulty in recruiting staff. This is especially true in sales. There are many reasons behind the lack of exceptional salespeople available but, the main question is how do you maximise your chances of attracting the best candidates for your role, and showing them that your business is the one they want to work for? There is a vast amount of advice on the internet about how to build a successful sales team, motivating salespeople but there is a word that is often missing from this advice… Support.

If you remember the 80s and 90s adverts for salespeople were full of the phrase “self-starter”, meaning that they were expected to operate with high levels of independence and initiative, generating leads, qualifying them, quoting, and closing. If they didn’t succeed there would be someone else ready to take their place. In the very different world of 2022 expecting a good salesperson to achieve all these tasks to a high standard is not viable, and more often than not there will be another company happy to take your best salespeople off you if they can.

There is a simple solution to recruiting the best talent to your team. It starts with a typical sales technique, surrounding your offer with benefits. The days of “treat them mean and keep them keen” are over in sales recruitment. The best people know their value and a great candidate will often have multiple opportunities to change role, so they can be questioning you as much as you are interviewing them. The Sales Assembly blog discovered that the most common questions candidates asked at interview were around availability of sales intelligence and prospects, and how the company’s sales process works. In the post pandemic marketplace fulfillment is as important as the package on offer. You are recruiting people who you expect to deliver increased sales, so in order to attract the best you need to give them the tools they need to succeed.

Your Business Development Team are experts at supporting sales teams. We help you create a pipeline of qualified leads, and nurture them until they are ready for your sales team to do what they do best, convert prospects to orders. The demands on a salesperson’s time can leave them pulled in so many directions that they don’t achieve as much as they are capable of. Using YBDT’s services to support your team, taking away the pressure, while delivering high-quality leads and maximising your return on investment in the best sales people. YBDT’s services make sure that they are focused on the critical path to orders. If you want results-driven services that are tailored to your specific business targets and goals, we can help. Get in touch to learn more about what we can do for your business.

What is Sales Enablement?

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You have great products and services, and a team to support your drive to growth. What you need to do now is connect the two, and that is where sales enablement comes in.

Simply put, sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organisation with the information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively. A sales enablement programme should equip your sales team with everything they need to engage and convert customers.

Building knowledge

The first aspect to consider is an understanding of three key areas.

Firstly, defining your target markets and where they can be found and identifying the opportunities that exist within those markets.
Secondly, competitor research and analysis. This will demonstrate how the rest of the industry is connecting with their target audience while highlighting the areas in your offer that need improvement.
Lastly, isolate the key aspects of the buying journey that your clients will take.

Define objectives

Knowing what you want to achieve is critical point for any business. Putting numbers and key performance indicators to those objectives is also important. As the management guru Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Create the process

A survey form the CRM provider Salesforce suggests that nearly 40% of businesses have no identified sales process in place. YBDT’s gap analysis system will identify bottle necks and other blocks that obstruct your client’s journey to buying from you. By refining your sales process, you will simplify the route to an order for both the customer and your team. This can include introducing or improving CRM and other supporting systems.

Continuous training

With the sales process in place, you need you need to roll it out to your team. This is the start of continual training and mentoring activity. YBDT’s training framework includes sales skills development and sales process workshops along with long term mentoring to build confidence and resilience into your team.

All effective selling is a process of building and developing relationships. To yield results the nurturing process need to be made specific and based on a clear understanding of the prospects. Many companies fail to grasp this and let go of the process too soon, allowing sales to slip from their grasp. YBDT’s sales success consultancy is built on our own experience of lead generation and improving sales conversion for our clients.

By helping you build an understanding of your markets and then creating the processes that support your sales growth we can support you in creating content, generating, and nurturing prospects and guiding your team towards improved sales conversion. Why not start by joining our regular lunchtime webinars. You can revisit our past programme and book into the latest event here.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can support your sales growth into 2023.

Dream V goal – how do you know if your prospect is ready for change?

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The ActionCoach formula for change is a brilliant insight, it says,

(D+V)x F > R

You don’t need to be a mathematical genius to crack it, just read this Blog. So, what do the letters stand for?

D is for desatisfaction

V is for vision

F is for first steps

R is for resistance

The formula basically says that, in order to achieve change, or a sale, your prospect needs to have taken three steps already:

Identified what they want
Realised that things must change
Taken some first steps, such as allocating a budget

In addition, all of the above must be greater than the resistance to change, which will naturally exist in their organisation.

I have written before about the Status Quo Bias, which so often stands between you and completing a sale. Well, this formula explains the key reasons for this phenomenon very well.

It also highlights the two key ingredients to take into account in the sales process: identifying the right time and building a strong relationship. Here is why:

Identifying the right time: How many times have you met with a prospect and came out feeling you have nailed it, only to end up with the opportunity being stuck in your pipeline? This happens because in your meeting, you did identify some buying signals, most probably around desire, and maybe even vision. However, you have missed some key information which would have explained the stagnation.

The reason the opportunity did not progress is that it was most likely not the right time because there was no budget or perhaps there was too much resistance to change in the organisation.

Building a strong relationship: Many sales people mistakenly think that building rapport is the most important step in building a relationship. Over the years, I have discovered that most decision makers are surrounded by people who are trying to please them. If that’s all you do as a sales person, you will not win their trust or get to the bottom of what is really troubling them.

If this is how you build prospect relationships, you probably came away feeling positive because the two of you had a laugh, or talked about things you both find annoying which you took to be buying signals. In fact, what you came away with is most probably their desire and not much else which, as we are discovering, is not enough to make a sale.

Hopefully, by now, you are starting to understand that most sales opportunities never mature because they should have never been described as such. Some key ingredients that make a sale were missing as you did not get all the pieces in the puzzle.

How do you make sure this does not happen again? You train yourself to ask hard questions and make sure you know the answers to the next four questions before you forecast a win:

What has your prospect got in place at the moment?
What is the key issue with it?
How problematic is the issue for their organisation’s survival or growth?
What is their plan of action for change?

If you can’t get the answer to the any of the questions above, you are not likely to make a quick sale. That does not mean you walk away from it, it just means you have to keep in touch, keep building that relationship and your knowledge, until the time is right.

Interested in finding out more? Why not take advantage of our one hour sales process gap analysis meeting. Offered free of charge for the month of August. Get in touch here.

Bridging the Gaps

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One of the main questions a business and its advisors needs to ask is, “what do we need to do to achieve the desired level of growth?” In other words, how do we get where we want to from where we are now. The answer is gap analysis.

Gap analysis involves the comparison of actual performance with potential or desired performance. There are several clearly defined steps to a typical gap analysis.

Identifying the current state of the business and its use of available resources
Setting growth and profit goals and other measures that may be important to the organisation
Analysing the gaps between the current state and the ideal future condition of the business
Establishing a plan to close the gaps between the present and future states, and move the business into a place where it can achieve its goals

As with many things in business, understanding what different terms mean is important. Gap Analysis and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis are sometimes seen as the same thing. The key difference is that SWOT looks outwards to clients, suppliers and the wider marketplace. Gap analysis looks inwards, focusing on improvements in internal processes and systems. While it is true that some gap analyses do look at external forces, the focus eventually turns back to what the company can do to improve internally. You can see SWOT Analysis as the wide screen view, where gap analysis turns a microscope on finding the areas for improvement.

Establishing a clear strategy and actionable objectives is the expected outcome of any gap analysis. When it comes to improving your sales enablement, evaluating the solutions that the first three steps identify and building them into a winning sales strategy is a process that Your Business Development Team are ideally placed to support. We use our unique gap analysis system to identify bottle necks and other blocks in your sales process. We then help you create a tailored sales process to support the outcomes of the gap analysis and work with you to train your team to ensure consistency. Analysing current and past performance enables us to help you create the measurements that will guide your business in the short, medium, and long term.

Having a sales process that works and replicated by the whole team is at the heart of a successful sales operation. Whilst the key steps in the sales journey are the same regardless, each company develops its own unique journey which works for them. A gap analysis can help identify the strong areas in your sales journey and the areas that will benefit from improvement thus helping you to create your sales success blueprint.

YBDT’s long experience in business development and sales makes us the ideal partner for businesses looking to grow in 2022. We can help you create your ultimate sales process to secure more revenue going forward. For one month only we are now offering a free gap analysis meeting to start your journey. Get in touch to claim your free meeting.

Looking for gaps- are we just being negative?

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Looking for the missing pieces in a puzzle is something that we are taught from a young age. Have you noticed how much time you spend dealing with questions such as:

What could the business improve upon?

What could you do better?

What is missing from your current offering?

Could your team do more?

Whichever way you look at it, we spend a lot more time concentrating on the things we haven’t quite got right, rather then what we have already accomplished.

The question I wanted to examine here is whether this negative way of thinking is harmful. There is no right or wrong answer here. I have read many positive psychology books and think it’s an important concept to bring into your life, but I don’t believe you are either all positive or all negative. Life is more complex than that and requires different answers to different questions and needs.

When it comes to creating systems in your business, identifying existing gaps in the process is key to making changes that really matter. Many business owners enjoy doing more than strategizing or creating systems and there is a lot to be said about learning through action. But unless you ask what you could have done better, you will never get the full value out of these learning experiences.

One key system to get right in your business is your sales process. You could argue that selling is selling and always consists of five key elements:

Lead generation
Lead qualification
Pitch
Follow up
Conversion

This is very true, but every business still has its unique blueprint, based on trial and error, which creates your own unique sales success. So how do you go about bottling this? You analyze your actions by considering two key steps:

Start by considering what you and your team currently do in each step of the sales process above
Then work out what is missing and how you could improve the process

This will help you define your own sales process and help you identify some key steps you can take to make it even better and improve your conversion. Selling is all about conversion, so if you do this exercise often enough, you will see a real difference to your sales revenue which is the lifeblood of your business.

Coming back to my initial point, this is a great example of where a gap analysis exercise can help you appreciate what you already do well but allow you to increase your success through making improvements. So negative and positive thinking can work together to create a better outcome.

At YBDT, we start all sales consultancy projects with a gap analysis to ensure that we help our clients identify the key areas we can work on together to develop and improve. If you think this might be a good starting point, why not take our sales readiness test here.

Building results on knowledge

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A leading American sales strategist Mike Puglia said: “Establishing trust is better than any sales technique.” When you are looking at developing a strategy for sustainable sales growth the quality of the relationships you have developed with your prospective clients will be critical to your success.

Building those relationships and the trust that goes with them needs to be planned carefully. Without an overarching plan, any sales activity will lack focus and outcomes will be harder to measure. A sales and marketing plan needs to cover all the elements needed to deliver new customers to your business. To do that you need to build understanding of who they are and where to find them. In particularly, you need to consider the below elements:

Target market analysis – A target market analysis assesses how your product or service fits into the markets where it will gain the most traction with customers. A target market analysis will help you establish strategies for effective marketing and sales techniques, by simply being where your clients are.
Finding opportunities for growth – Identifying where clients’ needs are not being met within the market place, or where problems are left unsolved, are good places to find opportunities for sales growth.
Setting clear goals – We have all come across SMART objectives and they remain a good guide to goal setting. They provide a base for building KPIs against which you can assess the success of your plan.

YBDT can work with you to build a sustainable sales and marketing strategy. Creating that plan will require a comprehensive understanding of your business, and we undertake the analysis of both your business and the marketplace that will build the knowledge needed to create sales growth. With that strategy created we will then be able to support its roll out into your business through our Sales Enablement service.

Building a sales process tailored to your business and supporting the training of your sales team in its implementation are the first steps. It may be that our business development team can support the early generation and nurturing of the leads created by your plan, freeing up your skilled salesforce to concentrate on closing deals and supporting existing business.

Our experience in all aspects of sales and marketing support makes us the ideal partner for businesses looking to grow in 2022. We can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy and generate and nurture leads to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help or watch this 60 second video to learn more about our service: https://youtu.be/BFwVi-LxQqQ