Adapt and Thrive by Pivoting Your Approach in Complex Sales
For B2B companies with a complex sale who had to pivot during COVID-19, this blog covers how to use market research to test new markets.
With the right elements in place - strong value prop, relevant content, effective sales process and talented sales executives – you could be well positioned to hit your sales goals for 2018.
However, to fully leverage those elements and maximize sales potential, you need to fill in the gaps that can occur at strategic points in the sales development process.
Those gaps are:
Knowing you have identified all the right accounts and the right decision makers and influencers within those accounts so that you are getting your message in front of ALL the right people.
Engaging with early stage leads that aren’t sales ready, but might get there faster if you knew more about their current situation.
Cyclical outreach to mid-stage leads to keep you and your solution top of mind when timing and need align.
Reaching back out to late stage leads that fell out of the sales process and into a black hole where no one is managing communication (marketing had already passed them along; sales has abandoned them).
Filling those gaps requires:
All four gaps could be ideally filled by your talented sales executives, if they had unlimited time and saw an equal return on investment for the time allocated to those activities as they do moving a sales deal forward. We all know that’s not realistic. But delegating these tasks to junior level account execs or low-skilled telemarketers, is ineffective. Outreach to a sophisticated buyer has to be handled by someone who can have a conversation at an executive level. In today’s world of the highly-informed buyer, you have to be positioning your organization as a trusted source of subject matter expertise at the very earliest stages of the sales process.
It takes 8 to 10 personalized touches to get an executive-level buyer to move to the next stage of the lead funnel after they have initially reacted to your message. And that’s just the ones who move forward immediately after entering the early stage. Mid-stage leads being nurtured over time might require dozens of touches. (I noted in one of our recent client reports that a prospect at a key account was finally ready to move to a later stage sales meeting after 71 personalized touches over a three-year period).
Blindly conducting outreach without a view into the metrics, means you are missing the chance to calibrate your message to get the best return. You need to be looking at which messages are generating better responses, figuring out the best cadence for nurturing middle stage leads who still need to hear from you but not get so inundated that they shut off communication.
MarketLauncher has a team of highly skilled market research and sales specialists with subject-matter expertise in multiple B2B categories. These talented team members focus on rotating through your lead funnel applying the right cadence of touches and engaging with leads to move them further along until they are sales ready.
Our analytics team produces weekly updates to give you full visibility into the activity, and monthly analysis reports to share our insights on your program, how it compares to benchmarks, and recommended adjustments to maximize the results.
Ultimately our goal is to give our clients a bigger return on their investment in sales and marketing. As we develop leads and nurture them until sales ready, we also help you develop an understanding of the market’s reaction to your offering, decide where best to apply your sales assets and forecast market potential.
