This Week@Work a stepwise analogy makes the point about scaling your business with the systems and processes to prepare for growth, and repeating that process continuously to keep growing your business, sustainably.
This Week@Work there are fundamental lessons we can draw from trading businesses that apply to all businesses: Balancing supply & demand; customer concentration, and managing working capital.
Finding clients & customers takes time and money. To optimise your return on those let’s look at 3 strategies to land the right fish.
This Week@Work, be sure to split your time and attention into growing your business revenue AND deepening its capital value. The cost of realising this too late is as devastating as it is unforgivable.
ThisWeek@Work cut through the noise of a million products and services bombarding your target customer by creating an experience of your solution that leaves them feeling something.
This Week@Work scaling growth through funding raised a bunch of questions that we should all have answers to. I loved the conversation with you Master Artisan Sourdough Baker Barry Cork and Rick Hooper… and will follow the breadcrumb trails of your certain success.
How often are you ghosted after a positive, warm sales call? You were on fire; the client was positive and responding and it was clear that your offer was right on point. And then, nothing. You can’t get hold of the client. You’ve tried email, phone, social media even and nothing.
Getting this sales challenge sorted needs you to get a couple of things right. Listen to Pavlo Phitidis discuss this on The Money Show:
Whilst your purpose might be to make money, create wealth, support the economy, generate employment, or make a difference to the world, your businesses doesn’t care. Its only purpose is to solve defined problems through a great experience for its customers.
You hope that it is enough to have an excellent product or great service offering, with all the right features to solve defined problems. The problem is that your competitors have equally good offerings. Let me be clear, without a good product or service offering you wont even exist. But on its own, it’s not enough.
Whilst your product or service offering can fix a customer’s problem, how you engage with the customer creates the experience. This includes how you market to them, engage them in the fist meeting and should they select you, how you deliver on your service thereafter. All these activities stack up to create the overall experience. Your sales engagement process is an essential element of the experience.
Often when selling, you spend most of your time talking to your product or service offering. This product-centric selling was valuable in the 1700’s to early 1900’s. It simply is not good enough today. A smiling, nodding customer (seemingly hanging on to your every word) does not mean that they are engaged at all. Polite yes, but not engaged.
Problem-solving selling has 3 layers of sophistication behind it. The first is to engage with the customer in such a way that they tell you the problem that they have. This is where many sales techniques go wrong. Mostly, you jump in with how your product or service offering can solve it and…. deal done! A fatal mistake.
Once the problem is stated, you should transition your line of questioning to understanding how and why and when the problem comes about. Spend time on this conversation. Get into the detail. Let your customer really drill down into the detail. At this point, your customers would almost be living the cause of the problem, and then you transition into a line of questions to understand how it makes them feel. That is the gold in selling. The emotional outcome of not having the problem solved, creates the opportunity for you to solve it and remove that personal, emotional pain.
Now talk to how your product or offering can resolve the problem. Be sure also to ask how, with that problem resolved, the customer would feel. Be sure that in your engagement, that feeling, attributed to you and your product, confirms the emotional outcome of relief and certainty.
We all buy emotionally and justify logically. Fitting your product or service features to a stated problem is a lost opportunity and matches you to any other competitor in the market. Turning the stated problem into an emotive need matched to a personal problem is what sets you apart and ensures that “yes” is very highly likely a real yes.
Sales and marketing are two very different activities and should never be confused or combined. Getting customers to know about you is one of the single toughest things for entrepreneurs to get right. This is why you need marketing. Effective marketing should generate new business leads.
With a firm new business lead, your sales effort becomes paramount. Successful selling sees the conversion of leads into customers. This is how you measure your sales efforts: the number of leads that become your customers.
How do I make sure new leads translate into sales?
Align marketing and sales and tell a great story
Marketing and selling are both sciences. Each compromise different activities which should be organised by the the entrepreneur into a sequence, and then set up as two systems that can be measured. Marketing and sales should never be built on the back of a personality because one person’s individual style can never be replicated.
An effective marketing effort creates an expectation with a potential customer about what they can expect from your business. In turn an effective sales effort should create a unique experience that builds trust and cements a relationship based on belief that the expectation generated by marketing will be met.
Converting leads to sales
Translating leads into sales is informed by tow core systems that must be set up in the business first.
Organise each lead generating activity into a sequence
Multiple activities should be driving leads all the time (emails, direct selling, cold calling etc) with each activity organised into a logical sequence that can be measured. For example, sending a promotional email to a database involves:
Create a selling system based on your unique offering
Selling is less about a great personality and more about creating a compelling experience for the enquirer. This experience is informed by what makes your business special and what differentiates it from others in the same industry. Selling completes the story started during marketing when the anticipation is formed is its the encounter that wins the customer over to your business.
Knowing how to focus your sales efforts on the most profitable customers can accelerate the growth of your business exponentially. It is a critical exercise because, with limited resources on hand, you need to focus your efforts, to maximise your impact and build your business’ momentum. On The Money Show with Bruce Whitfield, Pavlo Phitidis outlined a useful technique for positioning your business:
As the owner of a growing business, you may feel tempted to try and be everything to everyone. This impulse is rooted in wanting to generate an income as quickly as possible, but it’s never a good idea to try and solve every problem, for every potential customer that comes your way. Finding, and knowing, the customer that you are best suited to serve, and who would be most profitable for your business, is vital.
We used this technique with a group of technology entrepreneurs and, through it, you’ll be well equipped to find the right kind of customer for your business, and solve their specific problems. This technique will help you to build your business to be customer-centric, rather than product-centric, by positioning your business correctly. To showcase this technique, we’ll focus on the product of a tin of baked beans.
Undertaking an in-depth analysis of your product will help you to better understand and define its capabilities and suitability for customer groups. Create a brief, feature-filled definition of your product, isolating what it can and cannot do, what it looks like and how it works. If we look at a tin of baked beans, we may ask the following questions: What does the tin look like? How many beans are in each tin? What do these baked beans taste like?
Once you understand your product, look towards discovering the types of customers it can serve. Define who the people are that your product can serve, by detailing their demographics; lifestyle; likes; dislikes, and needs. We’ve outlined four definitive customer groups who may enjoy or eat our tin of baked beans:
Each of your defined customer groups will have unique problems they face, that your product could solve. These are some of the unique problems each of our chosen customer groups may face:
Plotting your customer groups onto a matrix may sound complex, but it’s really a simple, four-block graph, that helps you to define your most profitable customer group. You’ll assign your customer groups into each quadrant by showing which group:
Has high or low profitability: Which of these customer groups can I serve immediately, with the product I have right now? How useful is my product to them?
Has a few, or many, members: How many of these customers are out there?
Through this, you’ll discover your ideal customer: the most reachable and most immediately profitable customer will be in the top right quadrant. For our tin of baked beans, that turns out to be the Business Executive.
You can now focus your marketing strategy and messaging on your most profitable customer group, and find ways to communicate with them, in line with your business positioning.
Focus most of your marketing effort and budget on your most profitable customer groups, and remember that persistence is the key to momentum. Wealth, and the development of a successful business, is a cumulative exercise and not an overnight task. Once you’ve established a solid marketing effort that focuses on your ideal customer, you can look at apportioning some marketing effort towards the other customer groups, and perhaps even think about new product developments that may serve them best.
Do you need help with figuring out your ideal customer is, or positioning your business correctly? Aurik can assist, as we work alongside you to build your business into an Asset of Value.
Getting sales right is one of the most difficult tasks an entrepreneur faces, it is the ultimate testament of business understanding and sophistication.
Great salespeople don’t build a sustainable business – they do deals.
Pavlo chatted about the need to build a “selling engine” in your business on The Money Show . Listen to what he had to say here:
Things to consider:
1. A sales engine is bigger than a sales team and its more sustainable
2. Sales people walk in and out of the door daily, the engine if properly built is locked into the business
3. Horror stories
4. Success stories
You should always take the Asset of Value approach which means:
1. Turn the business to the customer
2. Understand the experience that customer wants to buy from you
3. Map out the activities that you need to create that generate that experience
4. This creates the selling system
5. Employ against that system
6. A clear job description is vital
7. Measurement of the system is vital