Archives for category: Sales
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The OTE in Promote

March 23, 2015 //
2

There is a term in sales remuneration called OTE. It’s a three-letter acronym – aka TLA 🙂 – naturally. OTE stands for On Target Earnings or On Track Earnings, though I prefer Opportunity to Earn myself. In sales jobs you can have a base salary element and a commission element that together give you your OTE if you hit your sales quota.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of having a product/market fit. Once you have that, then you need to scale your business so that you can capitalise on your potential. Your ‘opportunity to earn’, therefore, is to be found quite literally in the word ‘promote.’ To attract the right customers in the right numbers, you need to effectively promote your business.

If you’re a business owner/manager with a successful product, you want to take your business to the next level and you think the key is something to do with this marketing lark, here are some things to think about.

– Do you know your market? Can you profile it, describe it, and define it, tightly?

– What slices or segments make up your market? Remember that you can slice the market ‘pie’ according to things like region, industry, size etc, but also according to what is important or needed by customers. How you segment your market is crucial.

– Which segments of the market do you want to sell to? Even though you want to grow, you can’t be all things to all people. Well, you can, but not for long.

– What are these buyers like? What are the buyer ‘personas’? How do they prefer to buy?

– How will you position yourself to these segments? Positioning is the third leg of the segment-target-position stool on which will sit much of your go to market plan. By ‘position’ I mean your messaging, or how you describe your value to customers.

– Does your brand truly reflect where you’re going, not where you are or where you’ve been?

If any of this is alien to you, invest in someone to help you figure it out. It’s the key to unlocking the OTE at the end of promote.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The One Thing You Need For a Successful Business

March 20, 2015 //
0

The one thing you need for a successful business is this (no drum roll necessary) …

Product/Market Fit.

You’d be surprised – actually you might not be surprised at all – how many product-based companies don’t have it, or can’t get it.

Product/Market Fit is this, put simply: people want your stuff. A lot of people. In fact, they don’t simply want your stuff, they need your stuff, and a good number of them would be up the creek without a paddle if you took it away from them.

You need Product/Market Fit for your business to grow, and people won’t invest in your business unless you can demonstrate you have it. Conversely, if you’re looking to join a successful company, and this is perhaps the most obvious thing you’ll read this month, join the one that you’re sure is shifting product.

If there’s no market for what you sell, or plan to sell, there’s no business for you. Too many companies find this out too late, usually after they’ve built their product. “Now, who can I sell this to?” In other words, do the marketing first, not afterwards.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Why is the Sales Funnel a Funnel?

March 13, 2015 //
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Your Classic Funnel

Your Classic Funnel

How on earth has the image of a funnel become the prevailing symbol of sales process and sales forecasting the world over?

Funnels come in all different shapes and sizes. The one I’m looking at in this post is your typical kitchen funnel, with a bulbous part that holds the liquid and then a long narrow shoot below it. Your classic sales funnel graphic, however, is a tall, narrow V shape with lines across it, within which lines are the sums of sales opportunities for each specific sales sales stage at that specific moment in time. The early stage opportunities are at the top, and the later stages are towards the bottom. The later stage opportunities are less plentiful – would that it were the other way around! – hence the unmistakable V-shape.

The differences don’t end there, however. Firstly, the sales funnel image is usually 2-dimensional, whereas you could really do with something in 3-D. Furthermore, when you think of a real funnel, all the liquid falls through the bottom, whereas in the sales funnel only the won deals fall through to be processed. Where do the non-deals, the lost deals and the qualified-out deals go? Do they evaporate from the funnel? And wouldn’t it be great if we could get a sense, over time, of how and when deals are dropping out or dropping down from one stage to the next, more advanced stage? And, while we’re at it, some sense of where the deals originated would be handy too.

No, the funnel is a lousy symbol, and so is the ‘hopper’. The ‘pipeline’ is no better.We need an image that acknowledges both the linear nature of a sales process but also the cyclical nature of continually qualifying a sales opportunity. Something that loses progressively smaller volumes as it goes along until only the good stuff comes out. Leave that one with me…unless you’ve any suggestions?

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Categories Sales

Everyone’s an Author

March 9, 2015 //
0

Have you got something to say? Do you think it will help other people? Do you think they’ll be interested in it?

Then write it! It’s never been easier to set up a blog and commit to writing on a regular or even semi-regular basis. We all have something to share that would either be useful for other people or entertaining to them.

You used to hear the common refrain that everyone has a book in them. The traditional barriers to publishing and the financial realities of getting projects to pay for themselves meant that for over 99% of people the cost of entry was too high, in both time and money. As a consequence, the impetus that people had to publish their writing was quickly snuffed out.

Nowadays, it’s easy for people to set up a blog page, free of charge, requiring nothing more than a little of their time. What’s more, the self-publishing phenomenon has made it possible for us all to publish a book of which we might sell as little as one printed or electronic copy. Talk about the long tail-leveraging power of the Internet…

“See that? It’s mine. I wrote it.” It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

March 6, 2015 //
0

The first law of retail in the pre-Internet era – so it’s still valid for over two-thirds of global retail trade – is location, location, location.

The first law of communication, leadership and business relationships, is, to this writer’s mind, consistency. If you are consistent in your dealings with people, then it’s easier for them to be aligned with you in terms of expectations. They know what they’re getting from you and this helps them save time and money in the long run. Your consistency makes them more productive.

If you’re inconsistent, they don’t know where they stand, they can’t plan properly and they can’t make progress smoothly. No-one finds the maverick or the loose cannon that easy to work with when there’s so much at stake.

You should be predictable and constant for all the right reasons with the people that are important to you. They will appreciate you for it and come back for more.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Pressure Good, Stress Bad

March 4, 2015 //
0

My late Dad, who oozed insight, guidance and modesty in equally Herculean proportions, was fond of aphorisms. One of his favourites was: pressure is good, stress is bad.

How right he was! We thrive on pressure, it helps us meet deadlines and increases our productivity. If we don’t apply pressure to ourselves, or we don’t get it from an external force, we’re get nowhere near as much done. It galvanises us, energises us, catalyses us. Just ask any journalist, writer or sports person.

Stress, on the other hand, is what happens when pressure overspills, or we don’t handle the pressure appropriately. Stress reduces our productivity, affects our equilibrium and harms our health, sometimes dramatically so.

The difference between the two is our relative ability to channel the inputs correctly into the desired outputs. And if we can’t do it, we should call for help – and call early.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Who Reads Long Stuff Anymore?

March 2, 2015 //
0

Does anyone read any long articles on the web these days?

Me, I love reading books. I like reading thrillers and crime stuff last thing at night before I turn out the light. These are physical books too, with the added thrills to the senses of smell and turning real pages.

I’m only just getting used to reading books electronically. This is in part because a couple of friends have taken the self-publishing plunge and opted for Kindle only, so otherwise I wouldn’t get the chance. In part it’s also because my screen-based reading habits have changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still read long documents for work, but I don’t read long articles on the web any more. I prefer to read small, pithy stuff and when I see web content that looks long, I give it a skip, or else try and glean the high points.

It’s also why I prefer to blog in small chunks, rather than those who only blog about once a week or fortnight and it’s a War and Peace job. Who has time for that these days? Who has the attention span for it?

The web is primarily for us to glean information, knowledge or insight, and for that we want it immediately, authoritatively and expeditiously.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

February 11, 2015 //
0

That’s what they say about imitation and me too products: the sincerest form of flattery.

I’m sure it rankles with the pioneers in a category when the giant comes in second with the massive resources and does it cheaper, better and more effectively. There has long between tension between the western markets who have laws in place to protect certain forms of imitation, copying and plagiarism, and the eastern markets where copying is considered normal. ‘Oh, we’re not copying your product, we’re improving it.’

I’ve noticed this tactic become much more prevalent with the German supermarket giants Lidl and Aldi, or Lidly Aldi as they’re sometimes rather hilariously known in Irish musical wag circles. They take a well known product and either call it exactly the same name, like Fruit & Fibre cereal of Kellogg’s fame, or make a very small adjustment so that you’re in no doubt as to what they’re ripping off, then sell it for about half the price of the branded version.

There are lots of examples of these marginally renamed products, but the one that sticks in my mind is the branded Angel’s Delight, that lovely fluffy dessert from our childhood, renamed in a German stylee as Heavenly Delight, with packaging so redolent of the pioneer product you wonder how on earth they get away with it.

What always strikes me as amusing though is that Lidl and Aldi are themselves, for me, completely interchangeable. I can never remember which one is which, which one I’m in when I’m in it and whose product is whose. It’s like the scene from Love Actually where the Bill Nighy character is interviewed by Ant & Dec, and replies to them as ‘Ant or Dec.’

They don’t really imitate each other. They are practically the same. Watch the song in the link above and you’ll empathise.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Volume or Deal Size

February 9, 2015 //
0

What’s your business model? Is it a high volume, small deal size business? Or is it a low volume, large deal size business? It really has to be one or the other. It’s really hard to fall in the middle or do a bit of both. How many medium volume, medium deal size businesses do you know? How many that have a bit of both?

High volume businesses rely on great metrics, reliable conversion rates, and a constantly full pipeline so that the army of small deals makes a big total. Low volume businesses face a lumpy, more unpredictable sales chart but when the deals come in life is good, until the next big deal.

You could argue that the best business model is a blend of all three, so that you’ve got a pipeline of big deals, middle deals and small deals. Getting the blend right, however, is a tall order, especially when you bear in mind that different deal sizes are usually subject to different groupings of buyers, different sales processes and different sales cycle lengths. Hmmm, you need to be a pretty sophisticated and well practised sales organisation to make that work.

I’ve seen a number of organisations with a volume business model who haven’t done the maths to figure out how much sales and marketing they need to do to create enough leads, to create enough pipeline and so on. When they do, it makes for a pretty sobering meeting. Then there are the companies with a large deal business model who don’t know their sales cycle length and so don’t know how long they need to go between deals.

Whatever your business model, if people don’t have a genuine need for your product, or if you have to evangelise and educate in order to create the need, you have an uphill struggle.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Religiously and Vicariously

February 6, 2015 //
0

There is one type of thing in business where it’s good to see the words ‘religiously’ and ‘vicariously’ in the same sentence.

Normally they might be words of questionable credibility. After all, ‘religiousness’ can sometimes be confused with over zealousness, fanaticism even. Then there’s the notion of living through someone else, like you sometimes hear being levelled at a parent who ‘lives vicariously through her daughter’s sporting achievements’, for example.

When it comes to marketing, however, especially areas of digital marketing like email marketing and web marketing, where conversions via landing pages or listing pages are what counts, there’s an excuse for both the religious and the vicarious. And that excuse is testing.

If you’re lucky enough to be in a volume business where you can see immediately the effects of a change in the customer journey, then you can test practically everything. The subject lines, lengths, action buttons and calls to action of your emails. The headings, processes and wording on your landing pages, product pages, listing pages and detail pages.

All your testing should be through the eyes of your customers, living the awareness-interest-decision-action journey through them, hence the vicarious part.

This is where ‘a/b’ testing comes into its own, where you can test 2 different versions of something like a heading, leave everything the same and see what the response or conversion is like. You can a/b test relentlessly on every element of your communication until you’re happy it’s as good as it can be, by which time you’re probably onto your next communication.

If you’re not in a volume business, then your results can be slower to come around and are not always statistically significant. Your testing has to be more anecdotal, more qualitative. But it can still be regular and rigorous.

Testing is like voting in corrupt countries. Test early and test often. Your business will thank you for it.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales
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