Category Archives: Business Development

These blogs focus on business development services we offer and what we’d recommend for you.

Why applying empathy is key to your sales conversion?

‘You can‘t understand someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.’

The person who first uttered this American saying is lost to history. The fact that it’s so well known is a good indication of the importance of empathy in living a meaningful life. It is also an important lesson to remember when approaching the planning of lead generation campaigns.

When I launched Your Business Development Team all those years ago, one of the first things I did was to ask business owners within my target markets what were their key issues with lead generation. Many said that they found it frustrating because the campaigns rarely provided them with sales; they got leads but very few of them converted. This fact was fundamental to the development of our key USP, which is the provision of a long term lead generation and nurturing service designed to support our clients along their sales journey and beyond initial lead generation activity.

Making sure you understand firstly, who your target markets are, and secondly what their key issues are within your area of expertise, is key to your sales success. Earlier in the month, we wrote about understanding the right lead generation for you. Our key point was that you needed to understand how people bought your product to get a better understanding of how you should approach your lead generation campaign. Today, I want to explore how you can go further down this road to improve your product and sales conversion.

Consider what you currently do to understand your prospects’ problems. Do you,

Make assumptions based on your market knowledge?
Run surveys or focused groups?
Read books, research and articles?
Ask questions to improve your understanding?

Based on my conversations with many business owners, I would guess that most of us stick to making assumptions and these are often correct. After all, if you have been operating in an industry for many years, you tend to get a good understanding of it. But relying solely on assumptions can be dangerous for a number of reasons including:

Market conditions change and industries adapt
Assumptions can be over simplified or too general
We can often become biased by our own offering

Another problem, is that people involved in selling often overestimate their preservation abilities and rely heavily on relationship building instead of getting a better understanding of their prospects true motivation to buy. People who talk about sales enablement often talk about understanding pain and asking pain questions. As you might know, this relates to the status quo bias which claims that most people are unlikely to make a change unless they are forced there. Simply put, this means that true motivation, the holy grail of sales conversion, depends heavily on our prospects’ issues. This means that by understanding their problems better we can achieve two important outcomes:

Improving our solution and increasing our chances of a sale
Improving our ability to understand the odds for sales success

Yet asking pain questions is not easy, particularly if you are a people pleaser, a common trait amongst relationship builders. It also requires us to listen carefully and apply empathy, being prepared to alter our understanding and start again. Putting this together with how overworked and busy many of us are and you get to a point where all of this becomes a step too far. Which is why so many sales end up with companies choosing to keep with the status quo and keep with what they have already got.

This is not so bad if you operate in a high demand environment where you attract many leads and can afford to convert only 20-30% of them. It becomes more important if you are struggling to find many leads because your offering is high end, very specific or a new product. So if you are placed with the latter, when you are considering your next lead generation campaign take some time to go beyond your initial assumptions of the problems troubling your prospects:

Talk to your current clients and contacts
Read related articles and analyse data
Put together some key pain questions
Make sure you ask them and listen carefully to the answers

This will not only improve your conversation rate, it will also help you ensure that your product is current and relevant to your future clients. If you need help understanding how to include this in your current sales practice, get in touch.

How can you tell what sort of lead generation will work for your business?

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The first question is, what actually is lead generation? It is simply the process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business’s products or services. The end goal of lead generation is to convert these potential customers, or leads, into paying customers.

Lead generation can involve a variety of strategies including many aspects of the work YBDT offer. Content marketing, email marketing, telemarketing and using platforms such as LinkedIn. These strategies are designed to attract potential customers towards a business where they can learn more about the products or services on offer and your business can build a relationship with them.

How can you tell what sort of lead generation will work for your business? There are some basic questions you need to answer to establish what is going to work for your business. The best lead generation strategy depends on your business’s unique context, industry, resources, and goals. That means it is crucial to keep learning, adapting, and innovating to stay ahead of the competition and meet the evolving needs of your audience.

Do you know who your ideal client base is? It is important to know who your ideal customer is and what their pain points and challenges are. Knowing who you are targeting will help you understand the most effective lead generation strategy to reach them. If your ideal clients are tradespeople who are on site all day then phoning them would be unlikely to work, but an email that they can read at their leisure may well do.
Do you understand your industry and how it operates? Researching your market sector will also help you understand what strategies will connect with your potential clients. Knowing how your industry behaves will let you see what is, or is not, working for your competitors, and allow you to develop the marketing collateral that will speak to your prospects.
Is there a pattern to how potential customers buy? This is probably the most critical question. If your potential clients are buying regularly, on subscription, or as an annual renewal then your lead generation process revolves around the data that lets you be in position to talk to them at the right time.
What are the key drivers to a buying decision? Another vital question for companies whose purchases are less predictable. Almost as important is where they buy. Is it direct from the manufacturer or through a distribution channel. That answer can affect who your lead generation efforts are aimed at and how you develop relationships.
How often do they buy? If your product is a repeat purchase or consumable item then the lead generation process also includes keeping in touch with existing customers and distributors to ensure you are in their minds when it comes time to buy.

Remember that lead generation is an ongoing process, so it’s important to continually test and optimize your approach to ensure that you are generating high-quality leads for your business. It is important to be open to testing different approaches and measuring their effectiveness. As we mentioned in a blog recently, there is no fairy dust to be waved over the lead generation process. It is a careful process of building knowledge and understanding about the most effective strategies for each business we work with. After 15 years of building sustainable effective marketing for our clients we have a toolbox of techniques and insights into market sectors and prospect behaviour that make YBDT the ideal choice to support your lead generation. Get in touch to book a discovery call that is the first step to your business growth.

Playing The Long Game

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Successful lead generation and nurturing takes time. We looked in a recent blog at the planning which is needed to build a sustainable strategy for growth. That growth is not something that can be achieved overnight, so it’s important to set realistic expectations and be patient. There are many different tactics you can use to generate leads, the most important part of any strategy is discovering the most suitable ones for your business, and the markets you operate in.

A lead generation strategy will identify potential customers who are interested in your products or services and reaching out to them to start a process of understanding and engagement. By building relationships with them, providing information, answering their questions, and addressing their concerns you will be in an ideal position to act when they are ready to buy. Nurturing leads takes time because you need to establish trust and credibility with potential clients before they are willing to make a purchase. It’s important to provide them with relevant information and solutions that address their specific needs and pain points. This process can take weeks, months, or even longer depending on the complexity of your product or service.

My favourite lead nurturing statistic is Wanda Allan’s ‘80% of sales are made between the 5th and 12th contact yet, 90% of sales people make 3 contacts or less’. This stat says more about the reality of time poor salespeople than about their willingness or ability to follow up leads.

This is where YBDT’s sales enablement service comes into its own. Using our extensive experience of lead generation and sales we have put together a three-step process aimed at improving your sales success.

Gap analysis – Our unique gap analysis system identifies bottle necks and other blocks in your sales process.
Tailored sales process – We help you create a winning sales process that is based on your operation and becomes the blueprint to your sales success
Bespoke sales training – With these steps in place we can deliver training and mentoring individually designed to support your team as they adopt the new process.

With time always at a premium for your sales team, lead nurturing service may be the solution to making sure the follow ups are maintained consistently for as long as required, rather than risking the effort of acquiring the lead being lost as priorities within the business shift. The beauty of what we offer is that we can help you with both, providing a full sales support service, from lead generation through nurturing to improving your internal sales mechanism.

Successful lead generation and nurturing requires a long-term commitment to building relationships with potential customers. It takes time to establish trust and credibility, but the rewards are worth it in the form of loyal customers who are more likely to make repeat purchases and refer others to your business. YBDT has built a successful business over the last 8 years by applying the principles of sustainable relationship building to ourselves. And we can help you achieve the same long-term success. Get in touch to book a discovery call that is the first step to your business growth in 2023.

Don’t believe the hype. There is no fairy dust

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Like most people I’ve been getting a lot of emails promising to work miracles in all areas of business. One recent one told me how the sender had “helped John go from £100k/mo to £200k/mo in 3 months and Joe close $485k in new deals while working part time”. The truth, of course, is that the sort of magic needed to live up to promises like that does not build viable businesses. If you had found the secret formula to instant sales success, would you give it away? In the real world where our businesses live, we want to create sustainable growth that gives value to our customers now, in a year and in five years. To do that takes time, planning and developing a long-term strategy to prove your worth to your clients.

In 2023 sustainable growth means taking a clear view of how to achieve your aspirations for the business. It is easy to get attracted to each new opportunity and devote all your resources to chasing it down. Much like a football team where everyone is running after the ball, you risk of leaving your own goal, or existing business, undefended. Any game, or business plan needs to be built on a sound strategy with the tactics used to achieve your aims changing depending on the opposing team you want to beat, or the business prospects you are looking to convert into clients.

In a leading article at the CEO-Worldwide portal Colin Thompson suggests that: “The route to growth is more important than the growth target itself”. He goes on to point out that skincare company Natura, owners of Avon and Body Shop, has achieved success by concentrating on a relationship-focused business model. While having a target to aim for is clearly still important, putting the steps in place that make hitting targets repeatable is critical.

YBDT has 15 years of experience in doing exactly that. We create finely tuned sales and marketing strategies for business looking to build success for now and the future. Creating a successful sales and marketing plan calls for a comprehensive understanding of your business, it’s products, unique selling points, and story to help us craft the strategy. We can help you pit that strategy into practice by creating a tailored sales process and using our team of experts to produce the content and make the calls that will convert leads into customers.

We have worked with Higos Insurance Services since early 2020, here is what their Regional Manager Alan Clarke said about his experience of working with us, ‘I would say YBDT are ideal for businesses who are looking for a strong partner, who will represent them well, and deliver positive results in terms of strengthening your telemarketing distribution channel and sales pipeline.’

We know there is no fairy dust, but after 15 years of following our own advice and building sustainable effective marketing for our own business, we also know what is needed to do the same for your business. Get in touch to book a discovery call that is the first step to your business growth in 2023.

Top tips to improving your sales conversion rate

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Here is a key question for anyone who wants to grow their sales this year – what is more important for your sales success, lead generation or lead conversion?

I am sure it will not surprise many if I said that both were as important because one will not work without the other. However, most companies we come across will find it easier to invest in lead generation than conversion because it’s easier to measure and influence. It may also be because lead generation is often outsourced so it becomes somebody else’s problem then.

Whatever the reason, the problem with concentrating on lead generation alone is twofold:

Once the initial excitement wears off, you realise that you have spent the money but not got any sales yet. It then becomes harder to justify the spend going forward
Your initial conversion rate is likely to have gone down as you now have more leads and less time to develop and nurture all of them.

Clearly, lead generation alone is never going to make sales and bring growth, despite the fact that many think it will just happen automatically. So, to get the best outcome for increased sales you need to work on both lead generation and conversion.

Successfully improving conversion can be harder to achieve. To make a difference, you need to work on two key elements:

Your strategic planning:

In an increasingly tighter market where convincing companies to part with their money is becoming harder, a one size fits all approach is not good enough. If you are busy updating your business development strategy, make sure you go back to basics and define the following elements:

Your target markets: ask yourself who are they, where will you find them, which companies are ideal clients for you and why.
Their key issues: There is no question that alleviating pain sells but only if it’s specific and accurate. Ask yourself what are the problems that your target markets face which you can solve.
The best solution for it: It’s important to consider the best solution you can provide which is based on their problem and not your original offering. Your leads will only take interest if they feel that what you offer has the capacity to solve their issue but also relates specifically to them.

Your sales process:

So many companies forget the importance of a well-defined sales process which is shared by the whole team. In the SME world most companies utilise their entire team to sell meaning that without a sales process, the lack of clarity and direction will often result in sales slowing right down. When you look at your sales process consider the following elements:

Where do your leads come from, and which source is most successful in terms of conversion?
What do you need to know about a new lead to ascertain it’s right for you?
Do you use uniform sales proposals?
How often do you follow up?
How do you nurture existing clients?

If you have taken one thing from our blog, we hope it’s the recommendation to spend some time defining your strategy for both your lead generation approach and lead conversion approach. Being specific and considering the details will set you on the right course of action as long as you are putting together a process which everyone in the business can follow.

At YBDT we can help you with both strategic elements:

Click here to read more about our business development strategy creation.

Click here to read more about our sales process support.

Wherever you want to start, we will be happy to become a part of your sales success this year so get in touch to find out more.

Should you prioritise existing clients over new business?

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There are many statistics and quotes around how much harder it is to generate new business than it is to retain existing clients and build additional work with them. Bill Quiseng encourages us to “work as hard to keep a customer as you do to find a new one.” Starting from scratch will always be harder than continuing to work with someone who knows and trusts your business. You need to find that balance between the existing business that keeps the wheels turning and allows you the time to create the new business that grows the company. How that balance is achieved depends on what you do. In sectors like insurance or SAAS renewals are critical to building a sustainable business.

Locking in clients for another year is a task that cannot be left to chance. Discovering where your competitors are not fulfilling their customers’ needs is vital to building your business. Creating a strategy that will take account of both the requirements of existing and new business is the key to making sure nothing slips through the net.

The common factor is that both existing renewals and new business are based on relationships. Existing clients need to be nurtured every bit as much as potential new customers. A clear business development strategy will give you the information to make decisions about where your existing team is most effective, and what other resources are needed to allow your goals to be met. YBDT’s sales enablement service starts by creating exactly this strategy.

If you are looking to build a renewals pipeline then understanding your competition, and differentiating yourself from them is important in busy crowded marketplaces like insurance and IT. Whether you are talking to new or existing customers your sales conversations should cover three elements: creating interest, nurturing it appropriately and conversion. Taking clients for granted because they have been with you for years, is to undervalue them. Nurturing them when renewals are due demonstrates their worth to you. YBDT have put the nurturing of potential customers at the heart of our work for clients for a long time. It works just as well when speaking to your existing clients about their renewals, by reinforcing relationships and flagging areas of concern.

YBDT have worked with Higos Insurance since 2020 through our sales enablement programme. We have helped them identify renewals in new target sectors, allowing their team to concentrate on supporting existing clients and retaining their business. Higos regional manager Alan Clarke said: “I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending YBDT to any organisation that want to create a sales campaign or indeed want to enhance their current sales structure.”

YBDT can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy to differentiate you from the competition, maximise your client retention and build a pipeline that balances renewals and new business acquisition. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.

Plan for a successful 2023

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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

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.