Table of Contents
Winning the Competition for Corporate Funds
This post is part of a series to help B2B organizations understand and implement sales and marketing alignment. Part One was about making sure you have the right information to get started. Part Two showed how Marketing can Support “Provocation-based Selling” and help B2B sales teams and executives to close more deals.
Go get a piece of string and try to push it up a hill. Or remember AOL, you would do a search and make coffee come back and see your results maybe? It was like watching paint dry. Who has the time?
How Marketing can Support “Provocation-based Selling?”
The approach, I am about to describe can ensure success to any company with decent (i.e., not necessarily exceptional) product offerings in a relevant product or service category (i.e., not necessarily a recognized hot category). Furthermore, I will cover marketing’s role and make the following assertion:
Unless your company is a bona fide leader in an established, growing product category, every time you lead with the product (as most software vendors still do), I can assure you that you are likely to fail in today’s market. Missed Part One? Start here.
How can you Sell in a Recession?
In this part III, I want to cover three topics related to the hand-to-hand combat required for high-tech sales teams and executives to close deals. So let’s begin.
Marketing Support
To make this sales process work, the sales team needs significant marketing support in these four areas: introductions to line-of-business executives, provocation development and delivery, war stories, and diagnostics. Each requires a program to develop. Here are some key learnings:
Target Job Titles
It goes without saying that, to sell a complex enterprise-wide solution or project to a large corporate or government customer, sales teams must inevitably target ‘C’ level executives at some point during the sales process to be the key sponsors of any enterprise-critical investment, alongside the middle managers and others who also play important roles in the relationship. Furthermore, to align interests, it is important to bear in mind the different roles that each constituency has in the decision process. Here are some general examples, each with their respective concerns and responsibilities:
Each of these groups requires a different dialog and thus differentiated sales and marketing materials though in this article we are more interested on describing an approach for engaging successfully with “C” level executives.
In emerging markets, such as those being targeted by vendors in e-business categories such as collaboration, procurement, and others, the first four audiences above tend to be key. In established markets, such as cloud-based, client/server ERP or CRM, the last four above tend to become more important in the sales process.
Third, how you make it happen, get into action
Though it has been borrowed straight from the management consulting business, this ‘provocation-based’ approach is still uncommon enough among high-tech vendors that it can result in a definite competitive edge for those companies that use it competently.
Therefore, it is worth going beyond merely getting one or two aspects of execution just right; field engagement, for example, is especially critical.
In sharp contrast with what most executive teams decide to do with respect to new market initiatives, this is not a place to put your less experienced or less talented resources.
On the contrary, companies need to put their most experienced consultative people in the SWAT team(s) they field for the first solution-focused initiatives; even if they are fortunate enough to discover that as many as 10%-15% of the sales force has strong consultative skills, they should make sure to allocate their best business consultants as domain experts on the sales team.
Teams of two or three people – i.e., sales rep, business consultant, and possibly systems engineer – are probably best, provided that they can have priority call on other resources on the ‘bench’, including the executive ranks, as well as operational resources such as technical support, product engineering, customer service, finance and operations, as needed.
Above all, the most valuable characteristics to recruit from internal as well as external sources are as follows: non-conformist, even rebellious, thinkers, who are also determined, action-oriented types who will go through walls to achieve the mission.
Goals, metrics, and compensation plans are also important; these must be quite different from the time-honored revenue-based objectives that are typical of most sales plans. If accelerated penetration of a target market segment is the overriding goal, then all goals and compensation must be geared toward incenting and rewarding the teams for achieving, say, the first three-to-five deals of a defined size and scope within the target segment.
On the balancing side, any other objectives must count as anti-metrics – which means that any focus or energy spent on other activities may need to be actually penalized in the SWAT team’s compensation system.
Only in this way can such initiatives succeed. Oh, and last but not least, executive management must also be incented and rewarded in proportion to the importance of taking this hill, versus accomplishing the plan through other means related to business-as-usual activities.
In this case, the executive team needs to manage all the company’s business, not just the (new) target initiative. Nonetheless, their quotas and comp should represent a mix that is tilted toward the success of the target market initiative.
So that when push comes to shove, they will continue to prioritize resources, including their own attention, to the initiative that results in maximum shareholder value for the company – i.e., the strategic one that is aimed at securing market dominance for the company.
We’re listening.
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If you missed Part I? Start here.
Are you not getting the results you had hoped for with your current marketing agency? Let the experts at this Denver marketing agency help you generate more web traffic, converts more leads, and close more sales. Our team knows just what it takes to build and maintain a proven marketing strategy that drives high-quality leads. For more information, check out our marketing services or contact us to schedule a free consultation to discuss your needs and our services.
General FAQ’s
Improve Sales In A Recession Economy
1. Focus on Customers. Customers are egocentric.
2. Focus on Existing Customers. Every business builds a vast network of customers who are already sold.
3. Fine-Tune The Profit Path. Each stage of the sales process needs to be examined.
4. Add Value to the Product.
5. What is True Demand.
What products sell well in a recession?
Powerhouse Products: What’s Selling
Products Doing Well in the Recession. The retail industry is slowly creeping into a recession, from unknown sources like COVID-19 pandemic.
– Netbooks. In general, computer companies have been doing pretty lousy in this recession.
– Gardening Supplies.
– CBD.
– Condoms.
– Alcoholic beverages.
– Pets.
– Smart Phones.
What industries are recession-proof?
– Food and Beverage. No matter the state of the economy, people must eat.
– Retail Consignment. When cash flow is weak, people typically don’t buy new furniture, books, or clothes.
– Information Technology.
– Repair Industry.
– Health and Senior Service Industries.
– Cleaning Services.
What does it mean to be in a recession?
The classic definition of a recession is two or more quarters during which the economy shrinks. A “recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months,” according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
