Archives for category: Customers

Why Your Sales Forecast is Off

November 7, 2014 //

Nobody likes a missed sales forecast, yet it happens so often. Is your sales forecast a lottery? Like sticking your finger in the air? Your sales forecast is usually off because one or both of the following facts is true:

1) You don’t have a well defined sales process

2) Your sales team are not following the sales process

Remember that your sales process should mirror the buying process of your customers. The more complex the product or service you’re selling, and the more expensive it is, the more sophisticated your sales process should be, because your buyers will want to have an awful lot of ducks in a row before they commit to you.

Forecasts miss because companies don’t take time to map out their sales process and coach their sales people to follow it. Forecasts miss because managers have to rely on sales people’s subjective assessments of how a sale is going. An objective, scientific sales process takes personality and guess work out of forecasting and gives you the manager a checklist for assessing with your sales people what could go wrong in the sale and how you could prevent the mis-step.

Don’t forget that the sales forecast is based around an artificial time frame, namely the timeframe of the selling organisation. ‘I think I can close that deal by the end of our quarter.’ But what if your customer is not ready to buy at the end of your quarter? When a deal slips out of the sales month or the sales quarter, it’s usually because the customer’s not ready to buy from you.

The better you know the steps your customers want to take to buy from you, the better you follow those steps, the more accurate your forecast.

Tags Forecast, Sales Process

Categories Customers, Sales

The Easiest Rule of Sales is the Rule of 3

November 3, 2014 //

One of the easiest – and most overlooked – rules of sales is this.

You have a satisfied customer, a delighted customer even, who’s seeing the returns or rewards from the product or service you have relatively recently delivered.

Ask them for 3 referrals. ‘What 3 people can you think of that would also benefit from this product or service, whom we could approach with your blessing?’

Easy. Nothing wrong with asking them to do a bit of work drumming up 3 names for you, that sort of thing is the hallmark of any great partnership. Of course they should be 3 people that don’t compete with your customer.

Think about this for a moment: If you had 2 or 3 personal recommendations from every satisfied customer, you might never need to do demand generation again…

Tags Reference, Referral

Categories Customers, Sales

More On the Voice of the Customer

October 31, 2014 //

I wrote recently, dear reader, on the voice of the customer and its importance for case studies.

I’d like to add to that post here, and improve on it somewhat, I think. When we talk about case studies in the wider context of customer advocacy, we distinguish between the shorter testimonials and larger format case studies. They have slightly different objectives and slightly different audiences – both organisationally and individually – and for that reason they are subject to slightly different best practices.

The testimonial is shorter, punchier, a bit more ‘gushing’ and works best in the voice of the customer – the first person singular or plural – as much as possible. It’s intended for earlier in the buying cycle where evaluators are researching alternative solutions – and solution providers – to their problem.

The ‘proper’ case study is longer, requires more narrative delineating the measured results or outcomes, and works better with a combination of third person accounts and amplifying quotes from the featured customer. You need more reason, more argument and more explanation in it. This kind of document is for further along in the buying cycle where influencers and buyers are getting into the nitty gritty and are seriously judging what you can do for them in their situation.

I should have made that important distinction in my previous post. Silly not to. Perhaps this post, then, should be entitled Moron on the Voice of the Customer instead :-).

Tags Advocacy, Case study, Voice of the Customer

Categories Customers, Marketing

The Bureaucracy of Big Companies

October 29, 2014 //

Working with big companies is not like working with small companies. The reasons are obvious of course, and it’s probably why large organisations try – and often fail – to engender a fast-moving and entrepreneurial culture.

Big companies have deeper pockets, so the rewards are bigger, but you also need to factor in the risks, the processes, the number of people involved in working with you, because they’re all deeper as well.

It simply takes longer to get things done.

A few years ago I worked in the tech security space, getting case studies written up with customers. The smaller the customer, the quicker the sign-off, the easier the process. It’s a joy working for smaller companies that can take decisions quickly. The downside is that their ‘logo’ carries less weight than a ‘battleship’ blue chip that takes you what seems like an eternity to turn around.

Make sure you have a good balance of small, medium and large sales opportunities in your sales pipeline. The big deals are great when they come in, but you can’t afford to have your hopper full of big slow-moving deals that can easily get stuck and leave you flapping in the breeze. If you can make your number from the small and medium deals, then the big one, when it comes in, is a rather large layer of icing on your cake.

Tags Big, time

Categories Customers, Sales

Are You Ready to Buy?

October 27, 2014 //

I wrote recently about asking for the order. It’s a pretty fundamental part of selling, and the good sales people delight in it, whereas the less good dread it.

The key to asking this question at the right time is this: is your customer ready to buy? They will never commit to the sale until they’re ready to buy. Some sales people ask for the order too early, get frustrated and tick off their prospect. Some ask too late, and go hungry.

Just as you follow a sales process, so your customer follows a buying process. Your sales process should be aligned to your customers’ buying process, not the other way round. You can’t sell to someone until you know how they want to buy.

When you guide your customer through all the steps you know they need to take to make the purchase, you know they’re ready to buy.

Why not use this as your closing question: ‘Are You Ready to Buy?’ They can only say yes or versions of no. If no, you have more to do to get them to be ready.

Tags Closing, Order, Ready

Categories Customers, Sales

Asking for the Order

October 24, 2014 //

A lot of people don’t like selling. They avoid careers in sales. They love community and people and conversation, but something doesn’t feel right to them about selling.

Even some people in selling don’t like selling. By which I mean they don’t like the bit at the end of selling.

The bit at the end is asking for the order. It should be the easiest part of the process. You’ve done all the work after all.

‘OK, if I’ve covered all your questions, and you’re happy, can we proceed with your order?’ This goes two ways:

– ‘Yes, I think we’re good to go.’ Job done, pretty much.

– ‘Erm, no, I don’t think so, not yet.’ To which you follow with. OK, no problem. What is outstanding before we can move forward?’ And so on. Until you get the deal, or you lose it through being outsold, or there never was a deal – in which case you didn’t qualify properly – or you never should have been in the deal to start with – in which you didn’t qualify properly, or it’s a tender, which is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Asking for the order is a part of the process you come to hate if you haven’t done your job well enough.

I used to work for a guy who had his own family-owned and -run design and print business. He loved asking for the order and he was good at it. He used to joke: ‘OK so we’re ready to go at £9K? Great, I’ll put the order through for £10K, and we’ll invoice you for £11K.’ Lovely stuff.

Tags Closing, Order, Selling

Categories Customers, Sales

Voice of the Customer

October 20, 2014 //

People you sell to have long since grown tired of your marketing stuff. The adage ‘self-praise is no praise’ comes to mind. Maybe that’s why we’re told as kids not to blow our own trumpet. Graciousness in defeat, humility in victory.

When faced with a problem, the first thing people will do is ask their peers. Have you faced this before? How did you deal with it? Who should we be talking to? Have you used these guys before? Were they worth it? In the networked economy, review portals and social media make this very easy.

When people can’t get they want from their peers, then they seek out the views of other customers. There are various degrees of customer advocacy, from the verbal mentioning of a client, through the use of their logo, a quote, a success story, to a detailed case study and finally the reference site, the customer who will take calls and site visits on your behalf. The greater the degree of advocacy, the harder you have to work to get them. The bigger the company, the more drawn out the process. It’s hard work getting the blue chip reference client, but it’s also worth the hard work.

When you’re preparing a press release about a customer win, or drafting a customer success story of some degree, I advise you to interview the client if at all possible. Sure, you know your key messaging, but it sounds so much better framed in the words of the people who use and benefit from your solution.

Furthermore, do as much of the write-up in the first person, using the voice of the customer to tell the story. It’s more powerful, credible and respectful that way. And, your customer can use it for their own marketing too. You’d be surprised how many see the personal and corporate benefits of being a happy customer.

Oh, and make sure you get the customer to sign off on the words too. Then as long as you don’t change the words you can recycle them at will. They are the gift that keeps on giving.

Tags Advocacy, Case study, Voice of the Customer

Categories Customers, Marketing

Value to You, Value to Me

October 17, 2014 //

In a previous post on account management, I talked about creating opportunities to sell more stuff to your customers.

The value has to work both ways though. Your customer needs to feel they will get value from transacting business with you, but you need to feel that you will get value from the deal too.

If you don’t feel like you both got a great deal, then one side feels like the transaction was unequal and the balance has shifted. This is a major cause of customers churning. They don’t feel like they got value for their money. They didn’t see the return they were expecting.

If you don’t feel like you got a great deal, it’s probably because you ended up having to do too much work or deliver too much for what you were receiving. The opportunity cost to you of giving up another deal with a better margin can be significant.

Make sure the value to you – value to me equilibrium is sustained to keep long term relationships with your customers.

Tags account management, Value

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Create to Accumulate

October 15, 2014 //

In a previous post on account management, I talked about the joy of discovering white space, that happy place where there might be an opportunity for you to sell something else to your existing customer. I say ‘might’, because you don’t yet know if there is an opportunity. There’s something else you need to do.

In order for there to be an opportunity, you need to figure out if there is there something of value that you can deliver to your customer, something that your customer needs.

Researching your customer is probably the most valuable use of your time. The better you know them, the more you can help them. When you profile your customer, analyse their performance, figure out what they’re trying to do with the business, where their problems are, then you can start to figure our what they need to do to fix those problems. If there is something you can provide to help them fix those problems, you have created an opportunity to do business with them.

The best thing about this is that, right now, this opportunity is not a competitive one. It only exists when you proactively propose it to your customer. You created it :-).

Tags account management, Create

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

To Boldly Go into White Space

October 11, 2014 //

This is not about Star Trek and the most famous split infinitive in screen history. This is about finding additional value and revenues in the most important area of your business, namely your existing accounts.

When you manage opportunities, you can only win a certain percentage of the sales opportunities that exist, that you have either heard about or that your customers or prospects invited you to tender for. To get control back in your sales performance you need to do something quite obvious, quite simple, but to many people – quite radical. You have to create opportunities. But from where? From the realm known as account management.

One of the most powerful things you can do is draw a simple matrix. Across the top axis is the list of things you sell, all your specific products or services groupings. Down the side you put the list of your all existing customers. Then you take your customer records and plot which customers take which of your offerings, colouring in the box at the intersection of the particular customer and the particular product or service. Maybe you can colour the intersections differently to distinguish between different groups of customers or groups of products or services.

The most common colour in your matrix is likely to be the one you miss, the one you can’t see. Yes, it’s the white space. The white space is the area beloved of graphic designers because it lets the important content breathe on the page or screen. In account management the white space is beloved of sales and marketing people because it is the land of opportunity, the place where you haven’t yet sold something into your customer.

At this stage, of course, you haven’t created any opportunities. You’ve simply identified where they might exist.

Tags account management, Create, White space

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

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