Life experiences and how they impact your abilities to build conversations in sales

B2B, experiences, problem solving, Sales

One attribute that I have found very useful for B2B sales people, is the ability to ask questions to identify the core problem without getting the customer to feel that you are doing an interrogation. If a customer feels that she will just jump away.

But if you don’t understand what is driving the need for your product or service, you will end up being compared just on price.

If you can understand the Real Problem then you can become an advisor and help the customer in their journey. There’s one more reason why understanding the core reason is important….is it that the customer is actually facing a problem or is it that because she has seen others do it, so she doesn’t want to miss out – FOMO.

Visiting different places, interacting with different types of people from different cultures makes one sensitive to different nuances in the way people interact. You can gauge better about what’s being said and what’s left unsaid in a conversation. You can also therefore place yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand the dilemma she is facing.

All this helps in the ability to have a better conversation where you weave in stories and figure out the points where you can put in the questions that also help you build trust.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Nurturing leads

B2B, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

When you are capturing leads or getting opt-ins, you need to be patient with them. Like nurturing a seed, it takes time for the plant to come out, so it is with leads.

Most leads in the B2B space could take weeks if not months, to mature, to a stage that they actually give you a requirement. During this stage you need to keep following-up with your prospect, educating them and being top of the mind so that when they have a requirement, they reach out to you. While marketing nurtures a large universe, the moment they get a lead to qualify, they hand it over to sales.

Now most sales people only follow-up for 3-4 times and then don’t bother because they want leads which can help them meet their quarterly targets. Most of them are always behind targets because they don’t nurture the leads which can help meet the quota two quarters down the line.

As the value of the orders increase the amount of lead time goes up even further. For a million dollar kind of deal, we have had to even keep nurturing the prospect for around a year.

Due to the complexity of the corporate environment, by the time a requirement is recognised and then budgeted and then a RFP raised, its quite easily a 6-8 month cycle.For a B2B process, for high value kind of business, I would advice nurturing a lead for upto 18 months at least before discarding them.

Different companies have different priorities, so its like a moving parade, some may take longer and some may immediately feel the need for your kind of service. So after a lead comes in, you need to be patiently educating them and nurturing them. You need to look at them as assets which will give returns over a long period of time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The calorific value of a rat – in marketing

B2B, Leverage, Marketing

A lion is fully capable of killing a rat and eating it. But it doesn’t waste its time in hunting a rat. This is because the calorific value of the rat is so little that it will spend more energy in hunting for the the rat. So it focusses on killing deer and antelopes.

I got into a deep discussion with my team on this topic today. I have quite an energetic team which does not accept my arguments on face value. They have to be satisfied with data to prove my point. So today’s post gets inspired by them.

You need to choose the markets in which you operate. If the payoff is not enough calories (large enough market which can give us sustained business) or there’s no strategic benefit to target a market, its better to avoid that market.

I would go one step further and want to identify first the most profitable market in what I want to sell. Lets take an example in the B2B space only.

Suppose I have only 2000 customers in my territory who are big and profitable who outsource a managed services contract for their IT infrastructure. Also suppose I know that there will be a turnover of 5% every year whereby these companies will choose a new vendor, which means 100 customers will identify a new vendor. Each customer can get me a sustained profit of say $100000/- per annum , so even if I am able to pick up 20 of these 100 customers (20% of the customers who will decide) I am able to make about $2m in profits per year from these.

Now on the other hand there are also another small 100000 customers who outsource some project implementation in IT. Also suppose I know that at least 10% of these will outsource – which means a 1000 customers will buy some project implementation. So you have a larger number of prospects to whom you can possibly give proposals. Most people would like to address this because there is a higher absolute number and therefore the chance of success seems higher.

So let’s go one step further and assume that here also we will have a success rate of 20% so out of 1000 possible customers you can get 200. This number is 10 times higher than the 20 customers you were looking for the managed services example. Now lets understand the amount of profit that we can generate is $1000. So after executing these 200 orders you will be making $200000/- or ten times less than if you were focussed high value customers.

The amount of effort in executing 200 deals will be much higher than in executing 20 deals and the customer satisfaction issues will also be much lower.

Its the same logic that the lion uses for arbitration and targets the deer rather than the rat for its meal.

Always look at leveraging the highest and best use for your effort wherever – in marketing or otherwise – the lion teaches us the same lesson.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The B2B sales person’s tight rope walk

B2B, Sales

The sales person is the face of the company but she is also the interface of the customer. So while the company pays the salary, its the customer who gives the business, because of which the company earns revenue and can pay salaries.

So whose orders should the sales person take…..this is a very big dilemma. When I was young and new in sales , I actually ended up offending a few customers, because I literally took my boss’s orders on some issues.

Luckily I was able to salvage the situation and some of those customers gave me business for a long time after that. This situation could have happened with any sales person not only in B2B.

In B2B the challenges are that we are a looking at more than one person with whom you deal. In addition there’s long term business at stake because B2B buyers don’t change suppliers quickly. So if you offend one person, the news may spread and you may also lose business with the other buyers over time.

There’s another peculiar situation in B2B. You may be doing business with one buyer, let’s call him Sam. You may try to explore business with another buyer in the same company, let’s call him Tom. Now Tom is even willing to talk to you, but Sam wants you to route all your interactions through him and if you try bypassing him, he gets upset and holds your payment or other such issues.

You later find out that Tom and Sam are actually not on speaking terms and therefore Sam is penalizing you for talking with Tom.

This is a very delicate situation. You want to expand the business because that’s what your company and you want, but if you offend Sam you may actually even lose the business that you presently have.

If you think, I have an answer that can solve this problem for you….no I don’t. Each situation is different and has to be handled carefully, it really is a tight rope walk.

However one tool which I tell my team members to use is to “make me the bad guy” . Meaning for this situation, my team could tell Sam,’ you know my boss is such a jerk , he wants me to get the business from Tom at any cost, what do you think I should do’ . This works in a lot of situations for my team members because the sales person now earns sympathy of Sam.

See if this works for you and let me know. Also let me know in the comments below if you have come across some other things which have worked.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!