sales Archives - SOMAmetrics

Navigating Complex Sales: Build a Sales Development Team to Support Pipeline Growth

June 15, 2022June 20, 2022 by Alicia Assefa

Companies that have complex solutions have additional challenges in meeting their revenue targets due to obstacles or delays. This is a major problem that many of our clients struggle with. SOMAmetrics specializes in helping clients address a number of issues related to complex sales. This article discusses some important points executives should think through when it comes to generating sales pipeline for complex solutions.

For discussion purposes, we will define complex sales as those that typically target large organizations (Fortune 2000 companies and government entities); poses significant perceived risk and cost for the customer; involves, at the very least, a handful of key stakeholders besides the final economic decision maker (i.e. CEO, CFO, CIO, a CXO); entails a complex sales process and decision making process; and usually comes about as a result of a company or division-wide initiative.

Assessing the Prospecting Process

To complicate things further, different titles may be in charge of the same initiative or drive in a given sales environment. This makes it difficult to determine where to begin the prospecting process. Hence, a complex sale involves research over time to uncover the moving parts and weave together a coherent sales strategy or assessment. The following are a few examples of information that this assessment may address:

What is the driving issue/initiative behind the need?
Who are the key stakeholders involved?
What are the key pain points and concerns of each?
Who has the most urgent pain, and therefore wants to see this taken care of sooner rather than later?
From where is the funding going to come for this? Is it all in one place (department or division), or will it be shared, and how?
Are there multiple decision makers? Who is the final decision maker?

These are only some of the early questions to begin assessing whether there is a viable sales opportunity for your complex solution.

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

Often, we find that companies rely on their field sales reps to find viable opportunities within large, complex organizations.

We don’t think this is a good idea. This task differs greatly from what sales reps are expert at: calling on prospects who have agreed to see the sales rep. Prospecting, however, requires making 10-15 dials just to reach John Doe, who might not even be the right person to start with. Then, John may only have time for a quick conversation and suggest the rep call Jane Smith. Twenty dials later, the rep finally reaches Jane, who adds more to the story and suggests calling Mike.

And this is only the first round of calls; there will be follow-up calls to multiple stakeholders to find out more about one or more issues.

It is not unreasonable to expect that 500+ dials might be made into a single account to determine whether there is value in moving forward.

The question here is: who is better at quickly and cost-effectively uncovering viable sales opportunities? A field rep that will make 10-20 dials a day, or a seasoned SDR who makes 70-80 dials daily?

The SDR Solution to Complex Sales

Our experience repeatedly shows that field salespeople engage in early prospecting ONLY when their pipeline dries up. This, in turn, makes it very difficult for companies to reliably forecast what their revenues will look like over 3-4 months out. Since the sales cycle for most complex sales products tends to be six months or more, this means that a company cannot reliably predict revenues outside of the current quarter.

Our recommendation is to use SDRs to build the sales pipeline for the sales team (Read “5 Reasons Why Your Sales Development Team Is Failing“). This avoids the yo-yo effect and makes revenue targets more reliable. In this scenario, a senior SDR will do all of the initial research to gather the coherent sales opportunity story and pass it on as a Sales Qualified Lead. This opportunity story is a synopsis of the key initiatives; which departments or divisions are directly involved; who the key stakeholders are; which CXO is driving the initiative; what the individual pains, concerns, and desires of the various stakeholders are; and what a reasonable timeframe looks like for making a final decision on the acquisition of the solution.

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

The right type of Sales Development Rep (use our free Top SDR Interview Questions Resource) to successfully perform this would have the following qualities:

Has experience as a quota-bearing field or inside sales professional who understands sales, particularly complex sales into enterprise account
Is very comfortable and successful at accessing and selling to CXOs
Has the right temperament to work alone as well as to enjoy interacting with others
Is an avid learner, always trying to learn more about his/her industry and what the pain-points and new concerns for the targeted CXO’s are
Understands that this is painstaking work that will require hundreds of dials and many dozens of conversations that may or may not lead anywhere, and still enjoys the hunt
Is results-driven and has a strong sense of urgency

This is a specialty area, and the right person must align to the job. Start with Sr. SDRs while you grow your SD Organization. Once you have nailed the messaging, processes, and metrics, you can scale with SDR’s who are less experienced in this role.

Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development. This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Schedule a Meeting with Alicia

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

SDR Candidates: Best Interview Questions to Find the Right Fit

Prospects are Real People Too: Using Prospect Personas to Land Calls

Use Task Force Teams to End the Great Reshuffle

How Difficult Is It to Generate a Meeting? Common Misuses of SDR Teams in Appointment Setting

Use Task Force Teams to End the Great Reshuffle

June 22, 2022June 6, 2022 by Alicia Assefa

Using Task Force Teams to End the Great Reshuffle

Inc. Magazine’s recent article “Why Are People Really Unhappy About Their Jobs? The Whole Reason Can Be Summed Up in 2 Words” describes two reasons why the “great shuffle” happens today. Increased salaries and a basic “thank-you” are no longer working for burnt out employees. The studies presented in the article show that leaders must learn how to recognize employees in a way that they will feel valued to end the “great reshuffle”.

Setting Up Task Force Teams for Sales

During my career, the method that I used to win over hearts and minds of was task force teams. These team members should engage in setting processes, policies, metrics and KPIs for the SDR team.

When I am asked to re-tool a SDR or Inside Sales organization, I use task force teams to gain trust and energize team members. To do this, I conducted interviews with each team member within the first week ‌in my role. Then, I created task force teams regarding the specific yet common issues and concerns that I uncovered during these interviews. These issues and concerns have included topics such as Key Performance Indicators (metrics used to manage the team), Commission Rates, Quotas, CRM, Contracts, etc.

I asked that team members join one or more of the task forces to resolve the outstanding issues. I informed them that some executive-level ‌issues—commissions and quotas—may not resolve exactly as envisioned. My teams knew that once our recommendations were approved, we would be held accountable for achieving our projected numbers.

The Process

I limited participation to 5-7 members for each of the task force teams. Here is how I managed the task force teams:

I started with a brainstorm session or two which helped us get all ideas on the board for later review
Following the brainstorming session(s), I conducted the ideas review. During this phase, task force teams review and eliminate any idea(s) that are not viable
The team captures and reviews task force recommendations in a PowerPoint deck prior to presenting to the manager (me in this case)
Each Task Force Leader presents the approved recommendations to the entire team. The team understands that they should follow the approved task force recommendations. In most cases, there was a 95%+ agreement rate about the recommendations as outlined by the various task force teams

Task Force Teams—Case Study

One of the organizations that I turned around was the Inside Sales team for a company that had lost half its clients and hadn’t seen any new business since the recession. The Inside Sales team had not hit their revenue targets in many years.

During the assessment of the organization, I found that no one held the sales team accountable for their metrics. For example, Sales Reps didn’t have quotas. The sales funnel was full of opportunities, but 80% of these were no longer viable deals. There was no sales methodology in place to effectively manage deals through the sales pipeline.

In addition, there were no KPIs or metrics in place. Team members made fewer than 10 dials per day. I knew we had to get that number up because this was a phone job and the only opportunity to get more prospects was by calling them. I realized that my Sales Management experience was key in getting this team to achieve their goals and increase revenue.

The Turnaround

Working with the task force teams, we decided on a sales methodology and types of metrics that the team agreed would help them achieve their newly assigned quotas. Everyone agreed to the minimum metrics and worked towards them as a team. At the end of the first year, revenue had increased by 57%, and revenue from new prospects had increased by 80%

Sometimes, I don’t agree with task force recommendations. If their recommendations are way off the mark (from my experience), I work with the team to get their ideas to align with what I know will work. Ultimately, however, the caveat is that if we don’t see improvement within 90-days, we will need to regroup and come up with a better process or set of metrics. This becomes a continuous improvement process in which experimentation is essential. Similarly, Sales Management is not a stagnant process.

As the manager of a team, you need to be flexible and listen to the suggestions of your employees. Sales Management is about working with your employees and, ideally, empowering task force members to work together to analyze the success of their recommendations. Review task force recommendations and results at the end of each quarter.

Increase Productivity

There are many studies about Sales Management and employee involvement in the decision making process. Most research agrees that active participation has positive effects on performance, and thus productivity. For example, C. A. L. Pearson conducted an experiment involving two groups of workers: a group of employees who set goals, and a control group that executed traditional work procedures. The results showed not only that those “who were engaged in participative goal setting reported […] greater job satisfaction”, but that “goal setting and performance were positively related.” [1] Similarly, another paper found that “empowered employees largely improve performance by finding innovative ways of correcting errors in service delivery and redesigning work processes.” [2]

These findings are in line with my own experience, and show that if you get the buy-ins from your employees, you will see an increase in performance, productivity, and eventually revenue.

So… what?

Rather than telling the team what to do, I give my teams the ability to determine their destiny. When teams have the opportunity to provide their input on specific aspects of the job, the manager has their “buy-in,” and team members can work toward the assigned goals. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their plans and ideas and, therefore, their responsibility to make them work. This process has worked for me and has helped my teams greatly improve their performance.

Employee retention should be at the top of every company’s list. Allow them to give input into how they should do their jobs in order to improve morale and reduce exits

The Radical Pipeline Strategy Book by Alicia Assefa

Schedule a Meeting with Alicia

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

How Difficult Is It to Generate a Meeting? Common Misuses of SDR Teams in Appointment Setting

Prospects are Real People Too: Using Prospect Personas to Land Calls

5 Reasons Why Your Sales Development Team Is Failing

Grow Sales Pipeline and Drive Revenue Growth

June 6, 2022February 11, 2022 by Eskinder Assefa

Grow Your Sales Pipeline to Fix Missed Revenue Targets

How can you grow your sales pipeline and consequently fix missed revenue targets? If you think of your total revenue operations, it is likely fed by four major revenue streams:

New orders from totally new logos
Reorders or renewals from current customers
Upgrades, up-sales, and add-ons from existing customers
New orders from entry into brand new markets.

In all but one (reorders/renewals), the key challenge is how to grow a sales pipeline of sufficient size and quality. It is also finding one that consists of informed decision makers who are actively searching for a solution within budget.

The fundamental thesis of this blog is that missed revenue targets happen primarily as a result of missed pipeline targets.

If you are skeptical about this, consider the following research findings:

New customer acquisition cost is increasing by an average of 10% or more each year.
Over 100 million new businesses are started each year, worldwide.
Partly as a consequence of that, nearly 80% of B2B companies change vendors within 24 months.
Nearly half of sales reps (49%) fail to meet their quota—a trend that has been consistent for some 10 years now.

If we put the stats together, the story looks like this: competition is intensifying and competitors are stealing customers. So, we have to find opportunities for new customers just to grow at the same rate. This is forcing us to spend more marketing and sales dollars to acquire new customers, creating a spiraling cost loop.

Furthermore, we continue to design, invest, and build our sales pipeline management the same way we did in the 20th Century—and our sales reps struggle to meet their sales quotas.

Things were definitely different then. Buyers more or less welcomed sales calls because salespeople were a source of valuable information about what competitors were doing and so on. Then internet boom allowed for buyers to research this data for themselves, so sales teams became more a nuisance than an asset and were mostly shut out.

Fast forward to the 2010s, content and social media became king as B2B companies began to invest in their marketing efforts. And then the global pandemic hit and sealed the deal of a new sales process. Now, marketing is everything: ABM, demand gen, growth marketing, etc.

B2B Bottleneck

So, B2B companies created a bottleneck, an operational bow-tie with large Marketing spend and large Sales spend. They gave practically no spend or thought to what connects the two big operations, namely Sales Development.

Here is one way to think about this. Your marketing department is tight on time and resources on sales performance (as much as you spend there). So, marketing campaigns end up going after the Total Addressable Market (TAM) instead of a more focused Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM). You end up getting leads that are too small, too big, or in geographies you can’t really sell for whatever reason.

None of these will ever go on your sales pipelines, and yet these “leads” pass on to your sales reps. They become overwhelmed by all these leads just to find the ones that they can actually work with.

The Problem with your Sales Pipeline

So, you hire Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to help with that. Only, you hire junior people, provide them with basic training and lots of technology, and let them loose on these new prospects.

The problem now is different. You have someone who was just a few months ago working at Starbucks calling on a senior decision maker who has been doing this for 10, 15 years. It’s like a high schooler saying to an NBA player, “Let me show you some slick moves…”. It’s not going to work out well.

So, all the money you spent on your marketing gets throttled down in the middle. Good lead generation slips away because those tasked with following up and setting appointments simply don’t know how to execute social selling or talk to these people.

As a result, your sales organization has to do its own prospecting. They spend less time moving those in the sales pipeline towards a close. The end result is missed quotas and missed sales opportunities.

The Solution

The solution is to design your company’s revenue operations in such a way that you avoid the bottleneck. This allows revenues to smoothly flow from Marketing all the way to Sales, facilitated by SDRs who grow the sales pipeline for the sales organization.

Sales Development is a strategic revenue operations partner—equal to Marketing and Sales. It needs to be headed by a senior strategic thinking leader, and its members must be capable of talking at the level of senior decision makers in global companies.

Most importantly, your Sales Development organization has to grow the sales pipeline (not meetings) and should be compensated the same way your sales organization is—by how much it contributes to revenues. It’s time to really rethink our revenue chain, and redesign it from the ground up to meet 21st Century sales needs.

SDR Team Design: Four Common Mistakes to Avoid

June 6, 2022January 21, 2022 by Eskinder Assefa

In this blog, we will quickly cover four major mistakes made in setting up Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Each mistake has the potential of severely limiting performance. Unfortunately, a number of companies commit two or more of these mistakes, significantly hampering pipeline growth.

SDR Team Design Mistake 1: It’s an Entry Level Job

The work of the SDR is often considered an entry level job—a misconception that this is a “telemarketing” job. Since it is viewed, staffed, and supported that way, the misconception is perpetuated by the lackluster results obtained.

Think about these points for a minute:

On one side of the phone is your junior rep “Connor”, who is 24 and recently graduated from college. He has a lot of enthusiasm, some product training, maybe some cold calling and objection management training, and little else.
On the other side of the phone is “Amy”, SVP of Operations in a large trucking company. She has been in the industry for about 20 years, is ambitious, and has a long day that starts around 7:30am and ends around 8pm.

Let’s assume for a second that Amy picked up the phone when Connor called—a very long shot, by the way. But let’s go with that.

What do you think Connor can say to Amy that makes her curious enough to want to hang on?

Remember that Amy has talked to thousands of Connors in her career, while Connor has spoken to maybe 20 or 30 Amys. She knows what he is going to say before he says it, and gives him perhaps six or seven seconds to see if he is going to say something interesting. But that’s unlikely.

So, she says whatever she has to say to end the call politely, including saying “Sure” to a meeting she never intends to attend. Yes, Connor got his meeting and he can virtually high-five his team lead, but nothing really happened here.

But, what if Connor knew the trucking business pretty well? Could he have said something interesting to Amy that would have made her really want to attend the meeting?

SDR Team Design Mistake 2: What we Want is More Meetings

The VP of Sales of a tech company once told me that he had two SDRs who were booking around forty (40) meetings a month for him. When I asked him how many of these were going on his pipeline, he replied “4%”. Yes, only 1.6 meetings per month went on the pipeline.

I am sure your situation is much better. But the point is that if you pay for meetings, you will get plenty of meetings.

The question is: do you want meetings or do you want a sales pipeline?

In another company, an SDR booked a meeting that represented a $500,000 opportunity for the sales team—the largest sales opportunity of the quarter. And yet, his manager only counted it as one meeting because the SDRs had a meeting quota, not a pipeline quota.

Imagine if we did that with our sales team—counted the number of deals our sales reps closed, rather than the dollar amount of sales they generated. If that were true, the sales rep who closed one hundred, $1,000 deals (or a total of $100,000) would be the sales champion rather than the sales rep who closed five or six deals that totaled $1million.

We certainly don’t set a number of deals quota for our sales rep—we know better. However, most companies set meeting quotas for their SDRs, rather than a pipeline quota, which is actually what they really want.

SDR Team Design Mistake 3: More Dials Get You More Results

I often see in LinkedIn groups discussions around how to get 100+ dials/day–what tools can we use? How do we set up our BDRs and SDRs to do 100+dials a day?

Implicit in these discussions is an admission of inability to make effective connections with their intended audiences, and thereby hoping that making more dials will solve this problem.

But, let’s pause for a moment and think through this one a bit.

In his book, ”The #1 Sales Team”, corporate sales trainer Stephan Schiffman explains what he means by his sales numbers, “Each day [I am not training], I pick up the phone and make 15 dials…Of the fifteen dials, I will end up having seven conversations with people who could conceivably give me an appointment. And of those seven discussions I will set one new first appointment with a decision maker. By decision maker, I mean someone who can move me forward in the sales cycle…so those are my daily numbers: fifteen, seven, and one.”

What happened here? Granted Stephan Schiffman is a highly skilled and experienced sales guy, but he is saying he had a 46.7% connect rate.

But, that was in 2006. No one has a 46.7% connect rate with total strangers today—thanks to the billions of robo calls as well as legitimate business calls we are all inundated with.

Hardly anyone picks up their phone today unless the call is from someone they know. In fact, many of us have set our phones not to ring unless the call is from someone on our contact list. We send the rest straight to voicemail–and we hardly check our voicemails anyway.

So, the discussion around making more dials, when our prospects are deliberately shutting us out, is not a fruitful one. We are better off spending our time and effort figuring out how to get our prospective buyers to want to take our calls.

SDR Team Design Mistake 4: We can Hire Our Way out of the Problem

So, let’s recap where we are so far.

We have junior SDRs who don’t know anything much about the people or the industry they are calling into. We tell them they have to book “X” number of meetings each month. And we tell them they need to up their dials to do that. We even buy them auto-dialers.

And after all of that, we still don’t make our pipeline goals and miss our revenue targets. So how do we fix this problem?

Based on our poor numbers, we determine that we need to hire more junior SDRs so our combined total can reach our intended target.

Here again, I ask you to pause for a second and think about it.

Let’s say the average SDR costs you around $55K/year in base pay, benefits, and licenses for the tech stack and you currently have six so your annual cost for your SDR team (not counting the manager), is about $330K/year. And now you want to hire three more, adding another $165k/year to the cost.

Even if you hit your numbers, you did so by increasing your SDR cost by 50%.

But what if you could have made your numbers without adding any headcount— with the six SDRs you had to begin with? What if you had spent time and effort improving on your SDR operations so you could obtain much better results?

In fact, after redesigning your SDR Operations, it makes more sense now to hire more. First nail it, then scale it.
How do you feel about your SDR Team Design? Would you like us to assess and provide you with a gap analysis? Let’s have a free consultation to get started.

The Hidden Cost of Sales—Low SDR/BDR Performance

June 6, 2022January 5, 2022 by Eskinder Assefa

The Story Behind Rising Cost of Sales

According to HubSpot, the cost of new customer acquisition (cost of sales and marketing) has increased by 60% over the past six years or so.

What makes this even more alarming is that when we combine it with another finding. A 2019 Accenture study reported that 80% B2B buyers are switching vendors at least once in a 24-month period.

Let’s add a third stat: a 2019 Salesforce study found that 57% of sales reps weren’t making their numbers.

I don’t know about you, but I am having a hard time reconciling these numbers. If 80% of B2B buyers are changing vendors within 24 months, how are 57% of sales reps having trouble meeting their numbers? Shouldn’t it be easy to win new customers?

Looks like there is more to the story here.

And to tell that story, I have to tell another one first. In the 1990s (feels like a century ago, doesn’t it?), Dell Computers was growing faster than any other company—at least 100% every year for many years. Needless to say, they didn’t miss their numbers much.

One strategy Dell used to grow that fast was to cut sales territories by half each year. Sales reps screamed in anguish how this would kill their income…and each year they made more money than ever before.

Why? Because they got to know their customers more intimately when their territories were smaller. They focused more, learned more, and became far better resources to their customers—who became raving fans of Dell and wouldn’t buy anything else.

It seems that’s the story with every company that is growing fast—Zoom, Amazon, Netflix, HubSpot, Salesforce…They all know their customers—deeply. They, therefore, don’t lose customers, and their customers only buy more and rave about them to others—which means their cost of customer acquisition is going down, not up.

The “Cost” in Cost of Sales

With that setup, let’s focus our discussion on what we mean by knowing your customers deeply. And for our discussion, I’m going to focus on just the front end—sales and marketing.

In most B2B companies, and especially those that sell to enterprise accounts, their “front end” consists of Marketing, Sales/Business Development (“SDRs”), and Sales. Each is focused on a specific operation. Marketing builds the top of the Funnel, SDRs focus on the middle funnel, and Sales focuses on converting the bottom funnel into revenues.

Unfortunately, In many of the companies we work with, only their best sales people truly understand their customers, and thereby close the largest deals and have the highest win rates. Alas, they make up maybe 10% of the entire “front end”. The rest barely know anything about their customers, let alone deeply understanding them.

The inevitable consequence of that lack of customer understanding?

Marketing content that is too generic and doesn’t draw the right customers; SDRs not getting leads and sending their own generic emails that mostly lead to more unsubscribes; meetings that are canceled because prospects don’t see the value in keeping them; underwhelming pipelines forcing sales reps to spend their time generating their own leads rather than moving the sales pipeline to close.

In short…more sales reps missing their targets, leading management to hire more SDRs and sales reps in the hopes of making their numbers, leading the cost of sales to rise each year.

Before you spend more…

As yourself, in your company, who really deeply understands the customers? Who can talk for hours regarding the customers? Who is that person, “you can turn on your recorder, sit back and let them talk?”

How many will describe your customers in terms of: what they struggle with each day, what their priorities, concerns and goals are; how their company makes money and how they get compensated; what they have worked on for so long to get right, and what they are afraid could change to disrupt that? How many know where the customer’s industry is headed, where new competition, regulations, and other threats are?

Does your marketing team understand this clearly? Is that what they are building their marketing content on? Are they driving the right prospects into the top funnel for your SDRs?

Do your SDRs know this? When they pick up the phone and call a senior decision maker, do they clearly understand how they can eliminate the key pain/cost/risk of that person and improve their numbers by “X” amount? Can they articulate that? Can they book and keep meetings with highly qualified senior decision makers?

At the very least, hold off spending more until you know the answer to these questions.

The Hidden Cost of Sales

That is the hidden cost of sales for most companies—their SDRs/BDRs don’t really know how to engage their prospects to get quality meetings booked for their sales reps.

As a result, pipelines are not sufficient to hit revenue targets and too many of your sales reps are spending too much of their time prospecting rather than moving leads in the pipeline towards a successful close.

Unsupported SDRs/BDRs are the hidden cost of sales and there is a simple solution to fix that—support them with these SDR services.

Let’s discuss your specific environment, challenges, and potential solutions:

Schedule a call with us today

Quadrant 1: High Growth Sales Strategy

March 14, 2022December 7, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

According to Hubspot, customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed in recent years, increasing by as much as 60%. What this means for B2B companies is that it will be crucial, now more than ever, to have an effective Sales strategy that will optimize customer acquisition and drive down costs. Customer acquisition falls within the first Quadrant of the Four Quadrants of High Growth model, which is a highly effective sales strategy that helps B2B companies optimize their Marketing and Sales resources through segmentation to achieve the highest ROI.

Quadrant 1 is all about attracting new customers to the customer base, with a general goal of growing it by 15-20% each year. This is normally where companies throw the most money, especially as compared to the other three Quadrants, and because customer acquisition costs have only gotten higher in recent years, it makes sense to invest in a highly effective strategy that will use these funds as efficiently as possible. In the following sections, we’ll look at the strategies industry leaders are using today to drive growth in Quadrant 1.

Content Strategy

Since Quadrant 1 is largely about attracting new customers to your company, content will be the most important element of a successful high-growth sales strategy. The Marketing and Sales teams should come together to define what marketing content needs to be created to drive prospects through the various levels of prospect awareness, which range from completely unaware to engaged and actively searching. This content should be created with the goal in mind to produce the desired amount of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and so a level of automation is required here to provide prospects with the right content as they engage with entry-level materials. To read more about the Funnel Framework and how prospects progress through their buyer’s journey via content, click here.

Hubspot has outlined the best content strategies we can employ to drive growth in Quadrant 1. Content marketing is quickly emerging as one of the most effective ways to reach new customers. Not only does it alert them to the existence of your company and expertise, but it also offers valuable, free, insights to them that will build their trust in your brand. Within this area, you can provide blogs, content offers such as ebooks or guides, and even videos that will all surface when prospects research their company’s pain points online. To drive results here, search marketing (both paid and organic) can be used to ensure your online presence makes an impact on your Quadrant 1 growth.

Additionally, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to directly reach and engage a customer base. Nurture emails can help convert new subscribers by delivering helpful information and slowly increasing brand awareness, and in later Quadrants, new product information and discounts can increase customer retention.

Sales Strategy

On the Sales end, having a broader, formal strategy is crucial to ensure you meet that goal of increasing the customer base by an annual 15-20%. This is done best by defining the qualification criteria that make a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and then by mapping these criteria into the Sales Operation and Sales Automation system. The automation of this process will ensure that Sales immediately follows up with SQLs, and a thoughtfully-designed compensation program can incentivize agents to drive the Sales Cycle through lulls.

Onboarding & Customer Support Strategy

Once we’ve reached a sale, the customer experience becomes only more important. The goal here is to turn new customers into happy and satisfied ones within 2-3 weeks一 and having a strong onboarding and customer support strategy can help here.

Learning how to use a new product can be tricky, especially for working professionals who may not have much time to dedicate to their understanding of your process. According to Salesforce, a great thing to keep in mind when crafting your onboarding strategy is to keep it simple; streamline your instructional content so that only the most essential items are present during the first steps of the onboarding process. That way, new users won’t be deterred or overwhelmed when interacting with your products for the first time.

Additionally, have an abundance of various materials available to them to reference during and after the process. This can include blog posts, video tutorials, instructionals, or even email sequences delivered over a set period following the purchase. To ensure things are going smoothly, it can be helpful to send out a follow-up email a couple of months down the line, which has the added benefit of delivering customer insights about the onboarding process.

Overall, the process must be as quick and painless as possible for the new customers. At a broader level, it can be helpful for the onboarding team to be organized around facilitating an efficient process for the customer; at the start of the process, outline each key component and assign agents accordingly. This will allow them to complete the onboarding process efficiently and with the highest level of accuracy.

After the onboarding process is complete, make sure that the customer support is there to keep customers happy and loyal to your brand, important needs that fall under Quadrants 2 and 3.

Recapping

Quadrant 1 is all about attracting new prospects to your customer base, and creating a high-growth sales strategy can drive ROI in the face of increasingly expensive customer acquisition costs. Having an optimized content strategy, an automated sales strategy, and a simple, easy-to-use onboarding process can all drive sales Quadrant 1 and prime customers to remain for Quadrants 2-3.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Use Intelligent Sales Data to Grow Sales

July 2, 2021January 20, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

In today’s world, data is a vital element of any successful sales team—but B2B businesses should be smart about the metrics they track. Keep in mind, the goal of collecting sales data is to grow sales. It’s easy to get carried away collecting too much information, which can overwhelm a sales team.

Overloading people with data can be just as useless as giving them none. Not only does it waste time, but it also shifts the focus to the data itself rather than what the data was supposed to enable—getting more business.

It’s common for businesses to invest in collecting all the data they can, without a clear plan for harnessing that data to substantiate decisions. While claims of being “data-driven” may have increased in recent years, according to Gartner, the reality is that only 54% of marketing decisions are being driven by analytics. This means that a significant amount of valuable resources are currently being wasted on unnecessary data collection.

This problem is only accelerating during the era of COVID-19 as more of the sales process is conducted online. According to a study from McKinsey, today’s sales leaders consider digital channels to be twice as important as they once were. With more data generated by these online interactions, it may be tempting to collect more and more data.

On the other hand, the goal of intelligent sales data is to encourage a prospect to do business with a sales rep. To accomplish this, intelligent sales data focuses on collecting data that enables a sales rep to be more relevant and useful to a prospect. With the right amount of data from the right sources, companies can implement this strategy to grow sales.

Intelligent Sales Data in Practice

Today, sales can no longer be driven entirely by intuition and a vague sense of the customer’s needs. This might have worked in the past, but as nearly 90% of sales today are conducted online, data is more readily available than ever before. Businesses need to use this influx of data effectively to ensure that they reach the right buyers online.

Intelligent sales data focus on the target market and nothing else. To put this into practice, a successful data-driven sales team will track all prospect interactions to inform the sales process. With data on what works for their target market—in terms of where prospects originated, how sales reps reached out, what transpired, and why—sales teams can make better-informed decisions in the future.

Sales should only reach out to leads that fit certain criteria. By the time a new lead is sent to sales, it should have already accumulated a sufficient score as a result of significant marketing activity. It should also be the right kind of lead in terms of the role and persona. The role, level of activity, where the lead first originated, and how long it took to convert are all the pisces of information that lead into intelligent sales data. This is how intelligent sales data increases the effectiveness of the sales department—by targeting leads that are more likely to result in sales, the sales team can reduce the amount of time wasted on unproductive leads.

Plus, as we have shown in the Four Quadrants Model of High Growth, existing customers have proven to be an excellent source of revenue. Intelligent sales data should incorporate patterns established by current customers, which helps drive revenues.

With the right information from several tools—including marketing automation, sales automation, and accounting automation—intelligent data can transform the sales department and increase revenues. It is critica, however, to first determine what kind of information is needed, then build our systems to gather the necessary data, and then use reports and dashboards to inform what is working and what’s not.

SOMAmetrics is a revenue-focused marketing agency, delivering high-quality leads that close faster and at a higher rate. Our proven process identifies the best targets, defines the most compelling messaging, and runs highly targeted, digital campaigns—for about 35% of what it costs clients to do internally.

Let us know if you need any assistance in designing your intelligent sales data system.