February 6, 2019February 19, 2019 by Zoe Edler

Social selling and the progression of leads

Social selling is a hot topic for anyone trying to build their personal brand and trying to grow deeper yet more trusted relationships with clients and influencers, but it has to link to lead qualification and pipeline discipline.

I’ve recently started doing it myself and it really felt like I was stepping off a cliff edge. I have honestly gotten over the apprehensiveness and thoroughly enjoyed establishing and extending my viewpoints, finding the topics I’m passionate about, meeting new and interesting people and winning work off it too.

The thing I love about social selling is that anyone can utilise it.

Marketing, sales, product and delivery can all engage in their own conversations with different people who work for clients and prospects. This is about a collective understanding, brand building, relationship development opportunity.

The one major difference to networking and social selling is that everyone should use CRM (client relationship management software), discuss it in ABM (account based marketing) client planning sessions and consider how it contributes to the overall sales strategy.

What I’m particularly interested in with social selling, is how it helps with the progression of leads through the buyer journey, and contributes towards achieving pipeline traction.

Client-centric thinking via debate

There are plenty of commonly shared stats on selling currently…

Stat: there are 6.4 stakeholders involved in buying decisions.

Stat: buyers are already 60%-70% through their purchase journey before they reach out to a supplier.

How many stakeholders for any prospect or key client are you connected to on social media, that you can have a decent conversation with? And how coordinated are you with the other experts in your organisation who can have complimentary stakeholder and influencer conversations with the people you cannot?

When using any medium by which you have a conversation with a client or prospect, consider what’s working for them as they progress from awareness to decision (in the buyer journey). Emotion in decision-making is just as important as logic. But how do you get to really know people, deeply and from every angle? What makes them tick or frustrates them?

Obviously face to face will never be replaced, but it can be complimented with social selling. In its simplest form, if you have a physical conversation or see what someone is interested in online, then write a blog post that gives your unique and differentiated insight on the topic and connected topics.

If you’ve done your homework with marketing, you will have typical buyer personas built, so you can tailor writing to logical and emotional aspects. This can impact the tone of voice and writing style you adopt. It can also impact the stories you tell and the experts you link-in for perspective and insight.

Share your thoughts through the different content channels and see what people interact with. If there’s no interaction, consider sharing the post with them directly and invite debate from them. Your client team and ABM team can help advise on the best content strategy and leverage, even deploying IP address tracking to see what your client or prospect is searching on, which helps if they are on social media but not particularly active.

The beauty is that it doesn’t just have to be on topics that relate to what you sell. You can also share info on additional things you know they are passionate about, even better if you are too. Classic relationship building stuff, it’s just online to compliment your in-person activities.

If you have a number of people with whom you are debating the same topic, consider offering to connect them as interested parties. You could include some existing clients whom you’ve helped deal with the topic already (and are non competitive to whom you’re targeting) who might be willing to share their experiences.

Introductions and networking are hugely valued. I’m making a point of growing my social presence. It takes time and a bit of trial and error, but I’m starting to meet people and I really value their insight. We share and debate topics, introduce one another to other like-minded people.

I’ve learnt that for anyone that connects with what I post, to engage in a brief conversation with them – what interested them about the topic? Do they have any different observations on it? Who have they learned interesting things from? Share who they find stimulating – podcasts, blogs, etc. Obviously bombarding people with a million questions won’t go down well, but a single question might.

By creating awareness and educating on the common misconceptions and alternative way of thinking, you can hopefully reach the core decision makers you’re targeting. But not all of online conversation opportunities will be with decision makers at the type of companies you’re targeting, so filter them for what’s most relevant or at the very least engage in a bit of learning and debate for context and insight.

Everybody can use social selling to personally get deeper into topics. Debate around the key emotional and logical aspects of any topic, in the eyes of all the different buyers you have. ‘Walking a mile in their shoes’ is helpful if you haven’t done their job before. Understanding the common topics of interest at the different stages of the buyer journey will allow you to prioritise across your pipeline.

While social selling can be a first point of touch, what works today in sales can last for 6 months, even in waves of success. For example podcasts and videos shared online are enjoying a reemergence, but they are nothing new – why is it good? Because clients can hear your voice and see how you think on the fly. You are truly visible and people can see if they would like working with you before they’ve even met you.

I’m just starting to become obsessed with podcasts, they are my own personal radio station. I’m not yet brave enough to record my own show, but who knows what the future will hold. Be aware however that a terrible podcast or video will certainly put people off too!

Taking leads and qualifying the @&%$ out of them

Obviously key growth clients take priority with social selling, but not everyone has the luxury to purely focus on this and needs a healthy mix of prospects as well.

There’s some key tips to understanding the purchase cycle of what you sell and filter the leads accordingly, when you know enough about them. Always follow up on what you start and that could mean 5-10 messages via different channels which get to where you want to be – obviously that much contact in one day would be unwelcome, but a thoughtful approach might go down well.

There are usually many unqualified and incomplete leads in any pipeline that need serious attention. So try to challenge and inspire a prospect soon enough in the sales cycle, something constructive and insightful that makes them engage, rather than put them off. Any sales team needs to close a smaller percentage of higher quality leads faster, and lose the distraction of poorly qualified leads festering in the pipeline. Less is more.

Also, as you look to the pipeline and KPIs you aren’t just looking for historical triggers, like win rate, you’re looking for future indicators, like customer facing time. You can also look at how much social selling, along with how many calls and meetings people do, would be good as an overall target. The trend line should be increasing. You’re looking for leading indicators as to how the sales person is going to be performing a few months from now. This all links to the pipeline likelihood of conversion and is forward focused, not purely looking at the bottom end of the funnel.

Social selling can help develop any pipeline and has the potential to replace blanket demand generation (like bulk email campaigns), but only if we all take personal responsibility to invest the time in treating our most important clients and prospects as individuals.

So go for it, I really cannot express how rewarding and enjoyable social selling is. It should be a key component of everyone’s relationship and profile building strategy.

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Tips and traps of moving marketing from demand generation to ABM

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There’s always a lag between professional services (PS) and the technology sector, which in this case for ABM (account based marketing), it’s close to 20 years.

The case for ABM is proven, there are plenty of case studies and award winners online that show the investment, strategy and sales ROI for ABM. Increased close rate, winning larger opportunities, shorter sales cycle, deeper client loyalty and advocacy, are but a few examples.

One statistic that peaked my interest was that of the companies investing in ABM, 84% are getting a higher sales return in investment (ROI) than from any other marketing activity.

Historically how hard has it been for marketing ROI to lead to sales? Very, even impossible.

Yet, still, it’s a pretty new topic for PS firms. I haven’t worked in a PS firm, yet, that’s managed to fully migrate from demand generation marketing to advanced ABM, so have been digging around.

So why is now the time for ABM?

PS firms are now much bigger and complex. Marketing budgets are smaller and resource needs to focus on the biggest growth bets, instead of trying to be all things to all people.

Digital advancement and PS realisation that a technology enabled strategy is the way forward.

Firms have been burnt by the traditional demand generation marketing, as it simply drowns prospects and clients alike in ‘noise’. Irrelevant content, that just gets pumped out without any real awareness of data driven interests at the individual level. The spray and pray philosophy certainly reigned dominant, especially as marketing just needed to crack on and produce brand profile.

Unfortunately the side effect is that this switched people off at the outset, especially when compared to how ABM 1-to-1 and 1-to-few strategies work. How many target groups have not even opened, let alone unsubscribed from what marketing pumps out? A lot.

1) ABM has a complex technology stack and needs expert help to kick it off.

Marketing Technology (MarTech) means moving the stack away from traditional demand generation to ABM. This is more important than you can imagine. It can be confusing for marketing departments to utilise, especially if they are relatively technology illiterate.

You also need good quality data in the technology – ideally internal and external to make it reveal true insight. And your IT, legal and risk teams all need to get comfortable with managing GDPR alongside opening up the MarTech stack and connecting it as an ecosystem.

Then you need a MarTech experienced team or person who can ensure appropriate selection, implementation and usage of the ABM MarTech stack. This needs to be connected to the wider firm technology platforms and have an architecture strategy in place (not a piecemeal approach to buying bits and bobs sporadically).

Another vital component is to hire an ABM expert or bring in an ABM agency that knows it inside out, where to start, how to filter what does and doesn’t work, and how to position and roll it out to a firm for the first time.

This all needs financial investment, miss any of the above out and you will suffer in the long run.

2) Be aware of what is needed to scale internally from demand generation to ABM.

It means the people, process and systems need a new organisational design for teams (not just marketing departments). It also needs buy-in from the leadership and all departments to get everybody aware and on side for ABM.

This includes a clear idea of what marketing no longer supports and how centralised the marketing function needs to be in order to scale through the:

1-to-1 – the push strategy for immediate key growth clients or specific opportunities that need a highly tailored approach. It’s based on their stage of the buying cycle, individual interests and specific relationships. But this is also where the sales team needs to not fixate on singling out individuals to pursue sales opportunities, it’s about using design thinking to bring stakeholders together, to help them see a different way of achieving growth or mitigating issues, by collaborating and reaching consensus on the way forward.

1-to-few – the pull strategy for priority client clusters and hot sector verticals that are closely related. You are aware more generally of their needs by buyer persona but it’s maturing. It encompasses digital, in-person and efficient grouping of activity. You can certainly convert new business here, but you might not be as targeted or fully aware of their issues, they might come to you a bit more with a specific need that you react to. Or you might push out themes into these clusters and refine your approach as you go.

1-to-many – growth clients of the future where you’re nurturing new markets, verticals, product segments and customer types to gain a deeper understanding of how people consume information and on which topics. This is the typical place for marketing to focus with digital activities, but it should now be augmented to funnel deeper understanding into the other two approaches. This is cost effective brand building.

Everybody loves a pilot, right? Prioritise a small number of current growth client accounts and put them into a pilot programme, you 100% shouldn’t add prospects when you start out. Take a long term view and adjust strategies for each priority where needed.

Also decide if you have capacity to cover all 3 approaches up front, as biting off more than you can chew is likely, so baby steps. You could start at one-to-many and use it to build buyer personas, understand buying cycles, see hot topics, establish a content strategy. But that delays your core growth client initiatives so you could decide to start at the 1-to-1 (just be sure that your account team are 100% on board and willing to invest the time as the testing ground).

3) Take ABM implementation one step at a time and don’t ignore what worked in your previous demand marketing strategies.

Plan out the degree of change management and required path for change that’s needed to make ABM work. Decipher what the marketing priorities are across the firm so you can improve, reduce or cut what’s not working – start things that are not perfect but close enough with a degree of certainty to work – an innovate and fail fast approach. Proven and problem free is not a factor when trying something new.

Connectivity, education and tight involvement with sales teams should be at the core of ABM. The most strategic growth accounts typically have key account managers, an account planning process and established ecosystem – so ABM has to be aligned and operate in a cohesive environment.

Do more traditional marketing tactics still have a role within ABM? The short answer is yes.

One thing resonated in some of the things I’ve come across – don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ and go 100% digital. Progressing big ticket opportunities through the customer journey often takes high impact in-person activities for a lead to progress from awareness to engagement.

Also, if you consider a really traditional tactic like advertising, it can still have a place but more as a ‘halo effect’ activity alongside your digital and in-person elements. For example, if you’re at an industry conference where you’re targeting specific ABM clients, conference advertising could ‘drown out’ competitor brand presence and help increase meeting take-up.

Why? Because your ‘mind-share’ dominates.

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October 24, 2018February 6, 2019 by Zoe Edler

How do you enable sales and business development as an ecosystem?

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Having worked for a technology start-up and in the Big 4 accounting firms, building a growth engine and scaling a business organically is not easy. Sales and business development (BD) can be key players for growth, not just a supporting function. Nothing new there.

Many people believe the terms are interchangeable—simply two different ways to describe the same function… right? Not quite.

For any B2B start-up or professional services firm, the similarities on scaling the right commercial function are very similar.

There’s a million different ways to slice this topic up, so I’ve created a version that I think really works in professional services. Here’s my top observations on what the options are and how to go about it:

Observation 1: the difference between BD and sales – what are you ready for?

If I’ve learnt anything, it’s understand what you need and hire for the long term, and with a strategic mindset. The commercial model that will deliver the most growth and/ or biggest efficiencies should be highlighted and built.

Commercially focused roles in professional services have developed into both externally and internally facing, all with different features and benefits for careful consideration.

Externally facing

BD – often called ‘consultative sales’:

Forbes describes a “pure” Biz Dev job as – identifying and strategically assessing an opportunity to create long-term value and then executing on a path to pursue that value.

Longer term to develop and certainly the most strategic. Often the most successful when off market opportunities are created from scratch with the client, unearthing and prioritising problems, pushing them for greater value than even they had initially envisaged. It can also be deployed to open up new markets or launch new solutions and can be ground breaking to the extent that a partnership is formed to unlock previously untapped growth.

This is all centred around a challenger based or forward thinking outlook. The key angle is that it’s focused on a big curve sales growth. This is prioritised on solving complex business problems with innovative solutions. They are harder to sell, but they unlock more value for the client. This generally gives access to bigger deals, greater revenues and a longer customer lifetime value. All components across marketing and BD need to be fully aligned and functioning well, to efficiently segment and target large ticket opportunities.

BD people can be expensive and they will be senior, have a strategic mindset and/ or a proven track record selling big ticket client-centric solutions already. Seeing as they pursue clients over the medium to longer-term, they can be aligned to specific key clients and should focus on the ones with the largest growth potential.

Many professional services firms are seeing the benefit of this role progressing from the partner centric approach, towards a BD team getting in front of the key clients and helping massage the relationships, prioritising the longer term higher value opportunities and driving them forward, providing a consistent face while partners might get swamped in other client delivery and ensuring the client knowledge is leveraged.

Sales – often called ‘transactional sales’:

Key Differences says “sales involves offering product or service at a stated price, to the target audience” and gives some interesting comparisons on the differences.

Shorter term and fairly reactive to client needs as they actively look in the market for an adviser with a specific set of requirements. It’s more often associated with selling product (rather than selling solutions, like with BD). It often has a lower customer value and is easy to commoditise, price chip and replace. The customer lifetime value can also be much shorter. But the speed from lead to close is often very fast.

This might purely be a lead generation team that books meetings with targets and attend those meetings to help open the relationship up. It could be a sales team focused on selling the lower value, more commoditised or digitally enabled, services directly in the market. Or it could be a team of people working on the smaller growth clients but handling a lot more of them as a result.

Ultimately this saves professional services partners from having to spend so much time with new business lead generation across the smaller opportunities or embryonic growth clients.

These people are cheaper than BD resource. They can usually be found with a background in recruitment and are incredibly good at starting new relationships, both in person or over the phone.

Internally facing

Sales support – often called ‘client success’:

The most tactical one. Generally sector or capability team BD, pursuit and proposals, data and analytics, internal key account management, client feedback (sometimes face to face but often online and phone based), pricing and project efficiency, etc.

All of these roles are traditionally where professional services firms have focused their efforts. These people are experts in their own right and become much more valuable to firms as they navigate through the different functions, building skills and experience along the way. This does in turn run the risk of creating ‘jack of all trades’ that can lose touch with a vertically focused niche that dramatically modernises with new trends and technology.

I prefer to have a balance across all three commercial disciplines and think it can be pretty dangerous to put all the focus on just one component. But where to start and how quickly can you scale a commercial team?

Observation 2: calculate what commercial function you can support for growth, not purely to increase brand presence

Over the years I’ve struggled to properly position the ROI of my team, and often haven’t even been asked for ROI in the first place. I’ve seen the easy route where many firms allocate a % of turnover to their sales and marketing function, without actually knowing much about the ROI beyond click-thru stats, blog shares and delegate rsvp data.

There’s much to be learned from start-ups in building a solid commercial function that’s fit for today’s market, but also something that can scale profitably.

Calculating sales growth will not only help you scale a sales and marketing team that you can afford, it will also help you know the pricing parameters or client verticals you need to stick to.

How to calculate sales growth?

Looking at client financials, like a start-up, means at least doing this annually to benchmark investment and progress with the client gross margin:

Client acquisition cost (CAC) and management costs (overall or by client verticals if they have different characteristics)
Number of new clients won
Client lifetime value (CLV)
Cost of services sold, from implementation to ongoing management.

Start-ups often look for a baseline ratio of at least 3x CLV to CAC.

If you fail to meet the benchmark: target bigger deals, raise your prices, focus on the highest value customer segments, try to keep profitable customers for longer, prioritise or reinvent the route to market or remove the worst performing verticals.

When you’re comfortable with the numbers, you can grow the function in increments that gross margin allows.

Observation 3: strategy and tactics are key to prioritise what’s important

I’ve always struggled to scale a team if I don’t have the right building blocks in place to support it. So if you’re bringing in a new commercial team, what is essential for their success?

Have a go-to-market strategy, differentiated solution matrix and decent value proposition – I didn’t used to spend enough time on this and the lack of traction was poor. Based on research with target clients, existing clients and your market, not purely on internal perception. Know where you want to grow the most lucrative clients and stick to it.
Define the sales process and make it repeatable – A robust sales process will help solve the biggest problems, develop a client obsession, and establish a vision and roadmap for disrupting the market. Buy one off the shelf or develop your own one, above all make sure you have one. And if you need to teach people on how to use components of the sales process well, like properly qualifying leads and using CRM pipeline, then give this appropriate focus to help teams engage.
Develop a commercial playbook and teach, coach and mentor – I wish I’d done this more often. Make the approach clear and repeatable for what’s being sold, but also link into the sales approach to find, inspire and close the best clients. For the avoidance of doubt it sets the scene perfectly.
Educate the market – I’m a huge advocate of The Challenger Sale, by the CEB. Give people what they actually need, not what they are currently looking for. Educate and change the game for them. This also means all sales people need to engage in social selling alongside face to face activities.
Key client focus on growth – My biggest learning is to put the best people, method and resource against the top clients that will grow the most. Deploy account based marketing (ABM) and prioritise resources to this methodology. Do this as a higher priority to finding new clients. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to find new clients, you do, just prioritise growing your top existing clients.

Note: I purposefully avoided the whole recruitment, on boarding and performance benchmarking piece here. That’s for a separate blog at some stage!

Observation 4: add a CCO, before you scale

There is a tipping point when you are more able to sustain more than one person and are able to hire a team. This is especially relevant if your first hire has worked their socks off and faces burnout. It’s simply not sustainable or healthy.

The tech start-up I worked for took their best performing sales person and had them lead the sales team. Guess what happened? Yep, sales went down. Why? Because he was no longer doing what he was brilliant at.

HBR has proven the PeterPrincipal is true in today’s sales world. Top performing sales people do make bad managers, IF they have not conducted collaborative enterprise sales in a team on the way to promotion. It also provides evidence of the different tracks that sales people can follow. This is where a top performing sales person gets uncapped commission, prestige and the ability to migrate across different territories and products to reward their efforts, and the top performing sales managers get stock options, team commission and team promotion to reward them.

Any commercial team needs a leader and in this case I’m going to title the role Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). A big no-no is expecting a CCO to be selling in the market AND managing a team. That doesn’t mean they don’t spend time with the most important growth customers or work on the must-win deals. They have to be.

They also need to help their team members by coaching, shadowing and leading when a sales team member needs help. This is really important. It’s more about showing by example that it can be done.

If a CCO is the first sales hire (with the ambition to scale a team up over time) they will have to face the market initially, but with a short term sales target that allows them to start recruiting. This short term sales drive will also allow them to implement the building blocks for observation 4, before hiring.

Ultimately it is more important for them to hire and oversee the team, than do it personally with a huge personal sales target.

A CCO is where you want experience. Someone who has successfully built a commercial team from scratch. There are many ways to bring in CCO talent and you can dial up or dial down aspects that are more or less relevant to your business. You will need to mull over strategic focus, management approach, process skill set, technology awareness and people experience.

There are some neat ways to interview a first CCO appointment with role plays, scenario analysis, presentations and even psychometric testing.

Need help in determining what sales and BD support you need? Contact Edler Consulting for an initial conversation so you can build a commercial function that delivers growth.

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October 15, 2018February 6, 2019 by Zoe Edler

Setting up sales and marketing in a B2B start-up

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Every company needs to grow, but a start-up runs on a knife edge between success and failure. Having worked for a start-up in my early career I’ve seen lay-offs and impending insolvency. The excitement of building something new was quickly replaced with panic that the ship was sinking.

Sales and marketing are the key players in B2B growth. Nothing new there, but there are ways to not over invest too soon, or to avoid investing where it’s just not profitable enough.

In a recent FT article a tech start-up CEO reflected on how much he’d underestimated his selling role. For many start-ups the variation of selling a new business concept to potential venture capital (VC) investors is quite different from selling to prospective customers.

A First Round Capital study also highlighted that sales is the hardest hire to afford and get right. The top 3 concerns turned out to be 74% of start-up CEOs were worried about hiring the right people, 72% were having sleepless nights about revenue growth and 69% were anxious about acquiring customers.

Burning through VC funding with sales and marketing that doesn’t deliver growth could be catastrophic, especially when the VC expects immediate achievement of revenue goals.

Here’s my top 4 observations on setting yourself up for growth using professional sales and marketing…

Observation 1: have a robust go-to-market strategy

What’s the best go-to-market strategy for start-ups?

Focus on new and existing customers

In order to secure VC investment, a start-up already got its ducks in a row here, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be refined. The go-to-market strategy is an essential component for the who, what, how and where sales and marketing will focus and deliver profitable growth.

Sales and marketing is not just about focusing on new business from new customers. Many start-ups focus on purely managing existing customers and fail to consider how existing customers can be grown as well.

What is a go-to-market sales strategy?

Analysing your existing customers with the largest growth potential
Developing a segmented key customer strategy, based on size, growth, margin, strategic importance and needs
Focusing efforts on their retention and new opportunity identification
Understanding the customer journey as they research options, speak to vendors, select and buy, embed and track value based ROI
Driving B2B sales and share of wallet, where it matters.

Know what customers value

This isn’t just quantitative (what’s selling at the best margin in which verticals), it’s also qualitative (how much they value your product over others, their sales experience and how well you retain them once they are on board).

This will progress your buyer persona understanding to feed marketing, but also tell you what competitors are doing and if customers are likely to stick around.

Know what works during the buyer journey as customer are attracted, converted, closed and retained. Likewise, route to market is key in B2B sales and this can be via direct or indirect channels, online and in-person (or a mixture of all of them). This will allow a start-up to keep doing what’s working, improve or kill what isn’t, or start doing something new.

Calculate what sales and marketing you can support to prevent cash burnout

There’s much to be learned from building a solid sales and marketing function that’s fit for today’s start-up, but also something that can scale without burning cash too quickly.

Calculating sales growth will not only help you scale a sales and marketing team that you can afford, it will also help you know the pricing parameters you need to stick to.

How to calculate sales growth?

Looking at customer financials every quarter can help here. This means benchmarking the customer gross margin, by tracking:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) and management costs (overall or by customer verticals if they have different characteristics)
Number of new customers won
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Cost of goods sold.

You’re looking for a baseline ratio of at least 3x CLV to CAC.

If you fail to meet the benchmark: target bigger deals, raise your prices, focus on the highest value customer segment, try to keep profitable customers for longer, prioritise or reinvent the route to market or remove the worst performing verticals. When you’re comfortable with the numbers, you can support professional sales and marketing in increments that gross margin allows.

Observation 2: hire the right talent

How to increase B2B sales?

For a first step into a dedicated sales function, many hire a single salesperson. The first professional sales hire should be senior enough to be comfortable flying solo. They should have the know-how to build a sales funnel from scratch or handle changing products, pricing and approach as you refine your go-to-market strategy.

Selecting the right type of person is hard. Many start-ups hire technical sales people because they can talk in-depth, like the CEO does, with clients. Technical people are good at stimulating conversations, but often struggle to adjust into sales people who enjoy, and are good at, both the pursuit and closure of new business.

You’re looking for a grafter, someone that’s hard working and loves building something from scratch. They need to be devoted to building your sales from the ground up.

So how to get it right by knowing what to look for? There are a couple of options:

A rainmaking entrepreneur who can deliver complex solution-sales over the medium term? These people can be expensive. A B2B sales function that is consultative and focused on solving complex business problems with innovative solutions is harder to sell, but delivers more value to the customer. This generally gives access to bigger deals and a longer customer lifetime value.
Or a more regimented salesperson to conduct easier transactional sales with a shorter sales cycle? These people are cheaper. A transactional sale often has low customer value and is easy to commoditise, price chip and replace (especially if you already have competitors). But the speed from lead to close is often very fast. Here the customer lifetime value can also be much shorter.

Once you define the right type of first person to bring in you need to know if it’s working pretty quickly. Plan their on boarding, agree targets and set a time-frame for success.

Marketing is more than brand

As for marketing, there are some traps to avoid. Marketing is changing at light-speed with digital advancement. Relying on junior level support is cheap but not enough to help drive sales.

Weigh up the pros and cons before recruiting – eg in-house versus a senior consultant a few days a week or a marketing agency engaged on a specific campaign.

Marketing doesn’t need to purely build brand, it can focus on new business and existing customers. Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the fast becoming the ability to shorten and focus the sales cycle on specific client needs. It allows scarce marketing resource to focus on a pyramid of priorities eg prioritising 1to1 activities and cascading down to inbound marketing across markets and unknowns where you need it.

This will generate a more efficient lead-to-sale relationship between sales and marketing.

Technology and campaign budget

Along with the people recruitment and salary investment comes a need for technology and campaign spend (which can be increased as the ROI is improved). All start-ups will need customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing deployment tools at some stage. It might be something simple to start but with but offers the scalability to grow.

Observation 3: add a team leader, before you scale

There is a tipping point when you are more able to sustain hiring a team of sales and marketing people. This is especially relevant if your first sales person has worked their socks off and faces burnout. It’s simply not sustainable or healthy.

Any team needs a leader and in this case it’s usually:

A Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), if sales is the dominant route to market
Or a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), if marketing is the dominant route to market.

Here I’m going to focus on the CCO, especially seeing as most B2B start-ups have a sales first strategy. Note that the lines are blurring between the two roles now, as digital channels, social selling and ABM are proving to deliver 1to1 targeting through the buying journey and a shorter sales cycle.

A big no-no is expecting a CCO to be selling in the market AND managing a team.

That doesn’t mean they don’t spend time with the most important growth customers or work on the must-win deals. They have to be.

They also need to help their team members by coaching, shadowing and leading when a sales team member needs help. It’s more about showing by example that it can be done.

If a CCO is the first sales hire, with the ambition to scale a team up over time, they will have to face the market initially but with a short term sales target that allows them to start recruiting. This short term sales drive will also allow them to get to know the customers and refine the go-to-market strategy before hiring.

Ultimately it is more important for them to hire and oversee sellers and marketers, than do it personally with a huge personal sales target. Frankly, it’s a different skillset and a super high revenue generator isn’t always the best team leader.

A CCO is where you want experience. Someone who has successfully built a sales and marketing team from scratch. There are many ways to bring in CCO talent and you can dial up or dial down aspects that are more or less relevant to your business. You will need to mull over strategic focus, management approach, process skillset, technology awareness and people experience. There are some neat ways to interview a first CCO appointment with role plays, scenario analysis, presentations and even psychometric testing.

Observation 4: scale the sales team with solid foundations

Here you are looking for predictable, scalable revenue growth.

Hiring – Once you know what type of sales person is most successful, use this as your template to hire a team. Have a standardised recruitment process, know what your top 5 must-have qualities are and build an interview structure / review approach to flush them out. For example coach-ability and inquisitiveness might be of high importance. Accept that you won’t get it right 100% of the time, but you always need to focus on how you improve.

On boarding – On-board new people effectively and as a standardised approach. This means to train and coach to develop the skills people need, set SMART (specific, measurable, accessible, realistic, time-bound) on-boarding targets, benchmark performance when they start and at regular points along the way. Look for coach ability, sustained development, an inquisitive mindset, and strong team ethos.

Sales targets – Set SMART sales targets. Look at what you’ve sold, of which you want to repeat, and then scan the addressable market for repeatable targets. Consider what % of effort is spend on new business from new customers, versus new business from existing customers, as well as % of time spent social selling. Look at past performance of your best sellers and set the scene for what’s achievable from the rest of the team. Consider if sales targets and commission are capped or not.

Data & analytics – Use analytics to get under the skin of the sales metrics across top end funnel feeding meetings at the appropriate rate, win rate, average deal size per product/ service/ solution, cost of sale and delivery, gross margin per vertical etc. Also consider the level of research, data and analytics support you need to properly map and segment your prospect profile into target lists. Give a solid flow of quality leads each month but make sure they are mapped to the direct sales force strengths eg sectors. This comes from a marketing and lead generation function that deploys data driven insight that segments the market, targets the most profitable customers, prioritises where investment is dialed up or down.

Sales process – Have a well developed sales process which follows the customer journey, seeks differentiation, manages pipeline, and establishes clear value proposition for every qualified lead. Social selling is just as important, as an inbound strategy, as outbound targeting is, but target the ratio that works eg 1:10 (1hr social selling for every 10hrs direct selling).

Sales support – Work out what stops your sales people from spending most time in the market, and improve the process that supports where needed. This could mean that for a proposal heavy sales pipeline, sales support is needed via a professional proposal resource is a key hire, although not client facing, to convert more RFPs and free up the sales team a bit more.

Scaling – Keep an eye on the growth of your start-up and the growth of your sales people. If the business outgrows the sales people you’re going to have an awkward conversation. Khalid Halim as a great way to set this up from the beginning:

PROMISE: “Let’s talk about your last day first. If you look at the latest employment data, it’s likely that you’re going to leave or we’re going to part ways somewhere between 18 months and three years. Now you may be an exception to this trend, but we know someday it’ll happen. So with the time we have, here’s my commitment to you: My pledge to you is that we will be committed to your growth. My pledge to the company and its investors is to its continued growth. I can only keep both promises if the two stay connected. There’ll be a point when they don’t, and when that day comes, I commit to having another conversation about what’s next, whether that’s here in another role or elsewhere.”

Know what sales roles need scaling

This is all about seeing where your current sales process fails. Is it Segmenting the market and building prospect lists? Is it following up on inbound leads from marketing? Is it proposal and pitch production? Is it on-boarding new customers? Is it handling customer success with a growth mindset, rather than a ‘do the bare minimum’ mindset? Plug these gaps with sales expertise to ensure the whole process flows seamlessly for the customer and they aren’t lost along the way.

Then think about scaling up the direct sales team when you have a base that can help them be in the market as much as possible. Don’t just hire to put bums on seats, hire for the longer term. You can hire less experienced people for certain tasks and help them develop by gradually doing different segments of the sales process. That way you can home-grow as well as recruit sales talent.

There are issues and benefits with both models, you just need to work out what is most important to you:

Home-grown sales people obviously take time and need a fully fledged education and mentoring programme. They also need access to different parts of the sales process to build wholesome awareness and skills, but also so you can see what their strengths are. Here you’re looking for trainability, inquisitiveness, willingness to learn, ability to take and react to feedback. Obviously this may take longer to hone the right sales skills over time and you may lose them before you see 100% of the return you want to justify the investment.
Experienced sales people are faster to get active in the market and would usually come with a black book of contacts to leverage. Just be aware that these people have often defined how they sell and don’t always possess as much ability to learn and adapt ingrained behaviors into how they sell. They also may struggle to leverage the black book of contacts as much as you’d thought. They will expect some kind of sales support so they spend as much time out in the market

Feel lost on hiring professional sales and marketing in your start-up? Contact Edler Consulting for an initial conversation on what might work best for your business as it grows.

Follow my blog on edlerconsulting.com.

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September 30, 2018October 31, 2018 by Zoe Edler

My 4 critical learnings to ensuring sales drives go-to-market activity and feeds ABM

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The buzzword on the street is ABM – or Account Based Marketing. While it’s a neat way of getting marketing to focus on a smaller segmented target list and utilise digital strategies, it can be smoothly incorporated into your marketing activity and link directly to sales through your go-to-market strategy.

Over the years I’ve battled with campaigns that want to be revenue generative but often fail to deliver to my expectations.

So what did I do wrong? I used to focus purely on the cool campaign elements. I would try and weave in sales KPIs after the campaign was built. I was often disappointed with the lack of sales evidence.

I’ve learnt the hard way, that a marketing campaign should never start with the cool marketing activities it plans to implement, it should start with what’s being sold and to whom; along with how and where sales will be converted. At its core should be what is unique, special or different that will lead to insight and sales. And I should be brutally honest when something’s not worked, even killing the initiative if I can’t redesign it into something that can.

I’ve seen marketing departments pulled from pillar to post, spreading scarce resource even thinner. Activities like ABM provides pinpoint focus and can generate valuable account relevance, targeted contact strategies and a nurturing approach on the clients that engage. Widespread splatter-gun targeting is 100% a thing of the past.

Most importantly, I’ve learnt the importance of a go-to-market strategy before campaigns or ABM is deployed.

Here’s my top 4 learnings and how to track sales ROI in campaigns…

Be crystal clear on what you are selling and to whom

1. Work you want to win: For any professional services firm it’s never easy to connect sales to marketing. Visualising the precise work you want to win should be the first and foremost activity, before any marketing activity is scoped out. Set the goal early on and ensure the relevant sales teams from across the firm are participating in building the differentiated value proposition and what they need to do, specifically to sell it. Consider how complex and long the sales process is and the competitors you’re up against – map this through the buyer journey (from AWARENESS, to CONSIDERATION, to DECISION). Define the expected engagement value, investments you’re prepared to make and how many you expect to convert during the campaign period, year on year. Sales teams should be trained on the new way to sell your solution (generating a buzz and excitement in support for the campaign), given sales tools and know the marketing strategy in relationship to the sales components.

2. Clients you want more of: Get examples of what good looks like, when it comes to client engagements. Defining your ideal clients, beyond generic client profiles or buyer personas to specific trophy client examples, sets the vision so people know if it’s been sold before. If you don’t have any examples yet, consider when is the best time launch an external marketing campaign after you have quietly tested the market with your value proposition and points of differentiation. Also make sure you don’t conduct ABM on your platinum clients with an untested campaign, unless you have good reason to beat the market with a game changing idea.

Better determine how and where you are selling it

3. Target list defined: Target job titles are way to flag in marketing plans, but there’s usually a missing link to the flow across ALL campaigns in the marketing portfolio – bombarding core job titles is just as bad as not reaching them. Your target list needs to be reflective of the experts you can leverage and their capacity. Engage with Key Account Management (KAM) teams as a two way conversation. Look at the online activity for your top targets and see how you can flex your campaign or the influence it might have on them. Seek data to mine or conduct predictive analytics, so you refine your target list quickly.

4. Supporting the pipeline: Marketing is 100% able to support sales with marketing campaign micro commitments that help move opportunities to close stage. Use the digital profile your core targets generate and use the disparity between yours and their current way of thinking to generate a meeting, change the game for them and close new business. Ensure your account teams are engaging in social selling via LinkedIn Navigator to personalise your campaign. Marketing insight needs to be tracked and added to CRM, flagged to client teams and followed up on – and marketing needs to analyse the sales insight added to CRM for the target accounts and adjust activities where needed.

ROI and where it will come from

Based on all these activities sales ROI (Return on Investment) can be tracked at the beginning of the campaign and during checkpoints along the way. CRM software is at the core of data driven insight.

Think reputation, relationships and revenue. Here’s some examples of the ROI to track across campaigns, some qualitative and some quantitative:

Pipeline: The value and volume of opportunities in the pipeline. Won/ lost opportunities and the win rate. Type and volume of leads originated by the various marketing campaign elements, from in-person events and direct targeting to social selling and digital lead generation. Shortened length of time to convert sales via ABM. Reduced cost of sale.
Clients: Profitability and margin, an improved position client by client. Client accounts you cross-sell and up-sell into, which were previously untapped. Stakeholder contacts added to over time and evidence of deeper understanding and trust. Client feedback that specifically references their experience to buying as a result of the campaign (and not going with the competition) or more generally as being improved. The clients you determine as not relevant for the campaign, and the new ones you determine are – moving away from limited and often weak opinion broad based targeting to data driven insight and pinpoint sales conversion.
Markets: Sectors and segments penetrated and grown over time. Campaign themes and markets that generate the most brand presence, inquiries, leads, meetings, opportunities and closed sales, and conversely what you kill which generates no interest.

This is a lot more than most of my old marketing campaigns did. I’ve learnt to do more with less:

Do fewer campaigns and focus on those with sales potential
Develop a go-to-market approach that’s connected across campaigns
Go deeper into enabling and tracking the sales strategy
Weave in digital marketing and social selling across key clients.

Want to improve the commercial outcomes of your marketing campaigns? Contact Edler Consulting for an initial conversation about how ABM can be incorporated into your go-to-market activity.

Follow my blog on edlerconsulting.com.

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Edler Consulting

Helping businesses grow

Tag / Go to market strategy

Tips and traps of moving marketing from demand generation to ABM

1) ABM has a complex technology stack and needs expert help to kick it off.

2) Be aware of what is needed to scale internally from demand generation to ABM.

3) Take ABM implementation one step at a time and don’t ignore what worked in your previous demand marketing strategies.

How do you enable sales and business development as an ecosystem?

Observation 1: the difference between BD and sales – what are you ready for?

Externally facing

Internally facing

Observation 2: calculate what commercial function you can support for growth, not purely to increase brand presence

Observation 3: strategy and tactics are key to prioritise what’s important

Observation 4: add a CCO, before you scale

Would you like to learn more about my Marketing & Sales Practice?

Setting up sales and marketing in a B2B start-up

Observation 1: have a robust go-to-market strategy

Focus on new and existing customers

Know what customers value

Calculate what sales and marketing you can support to prevent cash burnout

Observation 2: hire the right talent

Observation 3: add a team leader, before you scale

Observation 4: scale the sales team with solid foundations

Would you like to learn more about my Marketing & Sales Practice?

My 4 critical learnings to ensuring sales drives go-to-market activity and feeds ABM

Be crystal clear on what you are selling and to whom

Better determine how and where you are selling it

ROI and where it will come from

Would you like to learn more about my Marketing & Sales Practice?