Category Archives: Sales

Here, we discuss our opinions on sales in telemarketing and business development services.

What is Sales Enablement?

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?

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:

  1. Identified what they want
  2. Realised that things must change
  3. 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:

  1. What has your prospect got in place at the moment?
  2. What is the key issue with it?
  3. How problematic is the issue for their organisation’s survival or growth?
  4. 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

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.

Building results on knowledge

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

Bruce Springsteen knows all about sustainable sales results, do you?

We often lead our blogs with a quote from a writer or speaker on sales techniques, but inspiration for how you approach sales improvement can come from many sources. In this case Bruce Springsteen “Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose and of action over a long period of time.”  

As someone who has built a successful career on consistency and developing relationships with his audience, The Boss is a good role model when it comes to looking at the process which goes on in the mind of the customer when they are moving towards a decision to buy from you. All successful selling follows a process of building and developing relationships. These can take some time to solidify and yield results. To be effective the process of taking the initial interest and nurturing it needs to be very specific and based on a clear understanding of the prospect’s requirements and expectations.

The best way of achieving that understanding is to have a carefully crafted sales process that follows your customer’s journey from the initial interest through to cementing the relationship. Your Business Development Team works with our clients to create a tailored sales process which is the essential first step towards converting more prospects. Identifying and refining your target markets and the key points that will encourage them to buy from you leads into the sales process that guides them to an understanding of your business and how it will work for them. With the sales process in place YBDT can help you communicate it to your sales teams and support its roll out into your business.

Identifying and nurturing the prospects who will contribute to your sales growth is as we have said before, time consuming. We have pointed out in earlier blogs that it can take anything from five to eight contacts to bring a company to the point where they are ready to buy, and it’s a point we can’t make often enough as so many businesses give up early in the process. Using our specialist business development team to call the prospects in your sales pipeline to feed consistent high-quality leads into your account managers and salespeople frees their time up to concentrate on closing sales and supporting existing client retention.

Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums were commercial failures. But he had the building blocks in place to understand what his audience wanted from him, and the tools to deliver it, and used them to create the successful work that followed. YBDT can offer you the tools to build a consistent process which will lead to your sales success. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you generate, nurture, and convert your prospects.

Under promise and over deliver – really?

How many times have you heard the above phrase used by suppliers and various sales people?

Despite Oscar Wilde’s famous words, consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. When it comes to building a relationship, there is a lot to be said for providing what you need, consistently. All businesses plan their activity based on their own resources as well as those of their suppliers and sub-contractors. Whether you run a time-critical operation such as manufacturing or a service business like marketing business, you need your suppliers to deliver on their promises so you can deliver on yours.

When viewed in this context, under promising and over delivering is not particularly helpful. The problem here is twofold:

  1. When you first start to work with a client, you have a certain amount of guess work to do, and you can’t always guarantee your performance at that stage.
  2. We all get excited about taking a new client on board and sometimes feel we must be willing to provide extra services or do things differently to complete the sale.

So how do you manage new clients’ expectations whilst building a good relationship, without going out of your way and affecting your bottom line?

Here are some words of wisdom from Dwayne Johnson, ‘Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.’

I could not agree more, the key things to consider are:

  • As a business owner or sales manager, you need to have confidence in your product and its ability to deliver to your target market. The key here is to know what you are good at and with whom. That’s not to say that you should not develop new products or enter new markets but do so using the knowledge you have already gained. People generally understand that it’s hard to provide full proof guarantee in advance and respond well to honesty and social proof. So even if they are a new client in a new market, tell them it is so and then use examples from other markets to explain how you approach things and what worked for you in the past.
  • Bespoke service is one of those buzz words that’s easy to sell and appeals to some customers, but it can be hard to deliver on. To scale and grow your business, you need processes and every time you agree to provide a service outside of this, it affects your bottom line. It also makes it that much harder to deliver and is likely to cause issues and to affect your service.  Tell your new clients about your systems and how consistently they work, question their need to have things done differently and learn to say no. Most customers will appreciate an established business who isn’t a push over.
  • To work well with a new customer, there needs to be some synergy between your business and theirs. If you are finding that they constantly push for extras and question the way you do things, they might not be a good fit for you. In my experience, success comes from partnership and shared values, and this is definitely not an overrated buzz word.

Having a key definition of the products and services you deliver as well as understanding your target market and how to reach them is key to identifying quality prospect sand closing sales. Click here to find out how we can help and get in touch to discuss your requirements.

Developing the hidden opportunities in your customer base

Whatever way you look at it, generating additional sales requires additional time and resources to maximise the opportunities available to you. As with most other things in business, working smarter rather than harder is the key to achieving the best return on investment.

You doubtless already have strong working relationships with long standing clients, but how well do they understand you and the full range of services your offer? Research conducted in 2021 for a leading B2B business portal found that 65% of the companies surveyed sold just one product or service to their top ten customers. There are two points to take away from this:

  1.  There is an audience who is already convinced of the key benefits to them of dealing with your company.
  2. Sales of one product or service is more vulnerable to your competitors than a wider range of sales would be.

A client who benefited from YBDT’s help in selling more products to existing clients is Harrier Pneumatics. Their core business was built around supplying new and replacement compressors to industrial customers. Working with our Sales Enablement Consultancy service helped them to identify the best routes to adding to the suite of products and services that their existing clients would benefit from. As in this example, an important part of YBDT’s sales consultancy is analysing your existing client base and their activity. This improves your understanding of the best opportunities to add sales, and to strengthen customer relationships. This goes well with another measure from the said report which states that 70% of the businesses surveyed said that they welcomed proactive approaches from trusted suppliers that saved money or improved their own customer service.

When working for Harrier Pneumatics we discovered that many of their customers were replacing components when regular maintenance would prevent failures, preventing costly production downtime and emergency call outs. Planned maintenance helped Harrier by keeping them in more regular contact with clients and putting them on the spot to discuss upgrades and system expansions. It moved them from being just suppliers of a single part to being a dependable partner in the upkeep of compressed air systems.

YBDT’s sales consultancy service is ideal for companies who need to understand how, why, and when their customers buy. It may be that purchases are made cyclically meaning that you need to be ahead of the competition in discussing renewals of maintenance contracts. Products bought irregularly mean that you need to be in front of the decision maker often enough to seize the opportunity when it arises. Likewise, if you depend on distributors to feed your business string relationships and knowledge of exactly what you do is critical to enable them to sell your products and services effectively.

A final relevant statistic: “It is six to seven times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.” I mentioned earlier the risk associated with supplying a single product into a major client. YBDT’s sales consultancy service can help you make the transition from supplier to partner, safeguarding existing work, and building firm foundations for the future. Get in touch with me to learn more about how YBDT can help.

Consistent messages inspire customer confidence

In one of our newsletters recently we used the quote “Consistency breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds confidence, and confidence breeds sales” from Jay Conrad Levinson. He was the author of the 1984 book ‘Guerrilla Marketing’. While many of the marketing strategies that he suggested proved short-lived, his key point about consistency being the best way to secure long term customers is more valid than ever.

There has been lots of research into how businesses buy. The main takeaway from it is that it needs an average of seven contacts before a client is ready to make a buying decision. When they surveyed clients from a range of business sizes and types the CRM provider HubSpot discovered that 44% of sales people gave up after a single follow up. Pressure of sales targets, and servicing existing clients was blamed for this. But whatever the reason there is a mismatch between what the average internal sales team can achieve and the potential customer’s mindset.

Connecting with the client is the most important thing you can do to build a relationship. Emails only take the process so far. Picking up the phone and letting them hear your company’s name and the fact that you are there to support them when the time is right to talk is the single most effective way of following up a sales conversation.

In a restaurant the waiter will often follow up delivering food to your table, asking if everything is OK. Often, we just smile and say, “yes thanks”, but occasionally we do need something else or have a problem that is stopping our enjoyment of the meal. The same applies in a sales conversation. You provide the answer to a question and then follow up appropriately to confirm that all was well with the resolution to the query. The biggest concern of a salesperson can often be that they are being annoying or intrusive with follow ups. The reason for employing a professional lead nurturing service is to make the difference between being supportive and the waiter who constantly asks if everything is fine.

New business is vital to your business growth. Generating and nurturing leads that build a pipeline of sales potential for the future can be something that does not fit easily into the working pattern of your existing team who are focusing their energy on servicing and retaining existing customers.

YBDT can help you create and implement a clear business development strategy to generate and nurture leads up to the point that your sales team can take them on to orders. We can’t put it any better than one of our long-term clients. David Champ of TC Consult. “Using YBDT gives you an opportunity to focus on your sales process. Ultimately, it’s a much quicker more efficient process than trying to organically grow a sales team. If you are familiar with your core business but not with sales, why would you try and create a spec for a business development manager when you could use experts to help you and see results a lot quicker?”

Get in touch to learn more about how we can help.

What’s more important, getting the strategy right or keeping activities up?

The phrase ‘putting the cart before the horse’ certainly comes to mind in this case, so here are a few interesting facts (kindly supplied by Phrases.org.uk):

  • The earliest known reference to this phrase was made by John Haywood in 1589
  • hysteron proteron is a figure of speech we inherited from the Greeks, in which the thing that should come second is put first
  • There are more ‘horse phrases’ in English than those referring to any other animal

Education moment over, let’s consider the question in the title, in terms of what’s more important; both a good strategy and quality activities are as important. The question to consider rather, is order and timing. The answer very much depends on your personality type and I have used some information from DISC profiling to explain this better below.

According to DISC research there are four key personality types:

  1. Dominant (D): Places emphasis on accomplishing results and “seeing the big picture.” They are confident, sometimes blunt, outspoken, and demanding. Whilst people who fall within the D behaviour style will appreciate the need for a strategy to run a successful course of action, they will generally feel that ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ and would therefore want to see some timely actions they can measure and analyse.
  2. Influential (I): Places emphasis on influencing or persuading others. They tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic, open, trusting, and energetic. People who fall within the I behaviour styles generally have low attention span for details and could find a strategy document cumbersome and limiting unless it’s entirely their idea. High I’s would prefer to get out there and approach things in a way that suits them, the moment and complements their skill.
  3. Steady (S): Places emphasis on cooperation, sincerity, loyalty, and dependability. They tend to have calm, deliberate dispositions, and don’t like to be rushed. People who fall within the S behaviour style would want to make sure that any new approaches or changes are accompanied by a clear strategy ensuring everyone is on board and in agreement. Once they have approved the strategy, they are happy to turn to action.
  4. Conscientious (C): Places emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise and competency. They enjoy their independence, demand the details, and often fear being wrong. People who fall within the C behaviour style find the notion of making a mistake terrifying and often procrastinate as a result. With high C’s, achieving timely action can sometimes be difficult.

So, the answer to the question does depend on your behavioural style but from a lead generation perspective our recommendation is to always create a detailed strategy first covering your goals, target markets and campaign approach. Once you have this in place, ensure you follow up with a timely action to ensure your sales are not delayed.

At YBDT we can help you create such a lead generation strategy and support it delivery. Read more about it here: https://www.yourbizdevteam.co.uk/sales-and-marketing-strategy.php

Selling clarity for your technical products

Some products are relatively straightforward to sell. Potential clients can appreciate the function and benefit of the offer. Other products need a certain a level of understanding before the business gain becomes clear.

An interesting example of this is Newicon, a client we started to work with sometime ago. They help companies to create effective digital products. That can mean websites, mobile apps, desktop software, or anything else that falls into the digital realm. One of the things that all their clients have in common is that they are doing something new and often untried.

Lead generation for a company like this is often about building confidence. Giving potential clients the information they need about Newicon to feel they can say, “I don’t know if this is possible but can you…” They have a vision for their business that they hope Newicon can turn into reality. This sort of confidence is not built in a single call or meeting and when Newicon approached YBDT to help them generate strategic leads they were clear that it was not an overnight project.

YBDT’s work was in two main areas, firstly, taking responsibility for the follow up for new and existing leads. The confidence we mentioned above is generated through understanding and building a relationship over time is the way to create understanding. YBDT’s telemarketing team spent time with the potential clients building trust and interest until they were ready for the more technical conversation that is the domain of Newicon’s own team.

The second critical aspect of this work was having a clear sales process through the efficient use of a CRM system that could keep the senior team up to date on the progress of prospects. This allows accurate sales forecasting and workflow management and can ensure that when a lead reaches the stage where the technical discussion is taking place that the resources to support it are available. Of course, “technical products” take many forms. Developing hardware solutions that fit the needs of a client demands the same level of understanding to effectively support development as software. Being clear on the potential customer’s values and expectations is often as important as their requirements for product performance.

The word “confidence” has appeared several times in this piece. Client’s confidence in Newicon to deliver the final digital product that they will build their business around, and Newicon’s confidence in YBDT to turn over a critical path to growth to us. Rich O’Brien, Newicon’s Head of Digital said of our work, “Since day one they have been attentive to our needs, provided expert advice, and patient support, and have been willing to go the extra mile to make the campaigns work.” Building a relationship with our own clients is the first step on YBDT’s path to supporting your plans for growth. Once we have your confidence, the possibilities are endless.

YBDT’s long experience in all aspects of sales and marketing support makes us the ideal partner for software and technology based businesses. 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.