Despite the context, any manager would like to develop their
sales in 2021. But how do you manage to rekindle the flame of the beginnings,
where you thought everything was possible?
In this article, and so that your customers will fall in
love again, techsupportreviews I share with you 7 keys to revive your business development , based
on our own experience in this uncertain period, the latest McKinsey or Hubspot
studies, but also lessons from Mark Roberge, professor at Harvard and author of
The Sales Accelaration Formula .
Between your marketing teams who demand a high-performance
CRM to measure the ROI of their actions, your sales force who wants additional
resources (and conditions that reduce your margins), the training to plan to
anticipate and meet the new expectations of connected consumers , you're going
to have to make choices.
Before jumping into these 7 points, it is essential to have
the method and the tools. Modern and common sense , it goes without saying.
Why common sense?
Because commerce, even in the digital age, remains common
sense: it will always be necessary to seduce, surprise and retain customers by
offering them the best possible shopping experience and obtaining
recommendations, the famous word of mouth 2.0.
Why modern?
The distance selling
becomes unavoidable in 2021 , at a time when the health crisis is still very
present. This is a major change for many companies (except for those that have
already started their transformation and are accelerating their growth), but
which is essential to support business development. According to CRM publisher
Hubspot : 64% of sales managers with a distance selling strategy (and the tools
that go with it) have met or exceeded their revenue targets in 2020.
The B2B or B2C consumer have purchasing behaviors which have
changed significantly with the advent of digital technology and which will
continue to evolve after the health crisis. Customers today have more power :
they are connected, over-informed, less sensitive to advertising and above all,
much more demanding . In 60% of cases, he has already made his choice before
contacting your company's sales department (source Hubspot, “State of Inbound
2017” , September 2017). It will research, compare information online about you
and your competition. He wants to know where you manufacture, how you do it, if
you respect the environment, your employees, your partners and other suppliers.
"The customer may already be no longer at the center.
He is in charge."
Proof :
• 78% of
buyers inquire online before buying ( source BVA / Mappy, “Web-to-store”,
October 2015 )
• 93% of
executives do it systematically ( source IFOP, “The executives and the hyper
connection”, June 2016 )
• 89% of
B2B buyers (source Google) start their shopping journey online.
Consequence: if the customer has changed and “digitalizes”
their purchasing habits, your company must adapt sales and marketing methods in
order to retain its market share and seize the new business opportunities offered
by digital transformation.
And do not come and tell me behind your screen that for you
it is different, that your market is specific, that it does not concern you….
We have case studies in construction, industry, services, real estate and many
more that prove the opposite. And at another level as a reminder, from Toy's R
Us to Kodak or Blockbuster via Thomas Cook, the examples of "love
breakup" are legion.
That being said, here's how to do it in 7 steps:
Define SMART or OKR goals
The "Pope of management" alias Peter Drucker is at
the origin of this acronym well known to entrepreneurs and sales forces.
SMART
SMART is now used in most departments of a company to define
objectives:
• S imples
/ Specific
• M
easurable
• A
mbitious / Achievable / Accessible / Accepted
• R
éalistes
• T
emporels (or delimited in Time)
If you don't have goals, it will be difficult to reach them,
right?
To define them, use these reliable indicators and here too,
common sense:
• How is
your market evolving: who, what, where, how much (yes numbers), when etc. A
traditional SWOT analysis on your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and
threats can enlighten you. If you want to learns more about strategic
diagnostics, we tell you more in this guide :
• Who are
your ideal prospects and customers or persona analysis . Many businesses
believe they know their customers. It is not so. Put all the sales and
marketing teams in one room and ask them to define their 4 or 5 typical
customers. You may have surprises!
• How many
prospect accounts do you have in these personas and how do you plan to seduce
them and attract them to your net? We also talk about Account Based Marketing ,
the marketing of key accounts.
OKR
You can determine your objectives with the OKR method
(Objective & Key Results in VO), to
organize work and align teams. Thus, you will
be able to have an overview of the company's objectives with the means
that will be implemented to achieve them.
OKRs are divided into objectives and 4 key results over
periods of three months in general, to remain agile and to be able to measure
progress in real time.
Although the OKRs have the wind in their sails, they are in
reality an "old" method of management and organization of work
invented in 1983 by Andy Grove, (one of the founders of Intel) and very popular
in French companies. which are inspired by the US majors (Netflix, Disney ...)
or GAFAM (Google, Amazon Facebook and others)
Whatever method is chosen, we know from experience that without
clear and shared objectives, there is no team alignment (see point N ° 3 below)
Determine an ambitious strategy VS your market
An ambitious strategy is a strategy that is
customer-oriented. More common sense. With the customer at the center of your decisions
and the engine of your growth, you are sure to choose the right strategy.
For his part, Aaron Ross, former director of development for
Salesforce, confides in his book Predictable Revenue three complementary
strategies to boost his business development :
A. the spears
B. fillets
(net)
C. the seeds.
• A. Spears: necessary but
insufficient
This method known as “PUSH”, formerly very efficient, is
more and more contested because less and less ROIste (which returns less).
Additionally, the trend shows that buyers no longer want intrusive and
unsolicited advertising. Proof of this are the Stop advertising, adblockers and
company ... But beware, these traditional communication techniques, also called
“ outbound marketing ”, which consist in pushing your “exceptional” offer
towards the customer ( billboards, radio, TV, press, street, google ads,
display… ) can still be effective if done well. It's up to you to measure
whether these tactics have an impact on the commercial development of your
activity.
• B. The nets (net in original
version) or how to automate your digital prospecting:
Or the art and the way to attract in your nets the customers
which interest you.
This is called attraction marketing or Inbound Marketing , a
discipline that began in 2006 at MIT in Boston, a stone's throw from Harvard.
If 89% of B2B buyers start their search for information
online and, according to Google , carry out an average of 12 generic searches
before contacting a company, it seems obvious that they must be attracted well upstream
of the sales process. . To achieve this, you must produce informative content:
on your blog and via guides or videos with an emphasis on quality at each stage
of the sales cycle.
Please note, digital is not intended to replace certain
classic actions, such as participation in conferences or certain trade fairs as
we mentioned here . But in the current context, and as mentioned in the
introduction, has remote sales (B2B and
B2C) is unavoidable in 2021.
What is certain is that by not investing in these tools and
methods or by not training your teams in webinars or social selling, especially on Linkedin , you
are not living with your time because you are not meeting expectations. and
requirements of your prospects and customers. Simply.
Check out our latest case study on this:
• C. The seeds (seeds in VO):
We assume that your customers are your best salespeople.
Word of mouth or recommendation remains a formidable weapon to attract other
customers because it has the advantage of shortening the sales cycle.
So ask your best customers (those who rate you 9 or 10 on a
scale of 1 to 10 on your NPS surveys) to recommend you.
Don't forget to involve them online: Facebook reviews,
Google My Business reviews and Linkedin recommendations count a lot in the
pre-sale decision-making process. Would you go to a poorly rated hotel or
restaurant?
Coupling your marketing and sales teams
Alexandre Robin told you about it in this article . Cédric
Macé also here
Aligning the sales and marketing teams , and thus
capitalizing on your knowledge of the prospect / customer, has now become one
of the key success factors to guarantee the best management of the sales cycle
and thus live a romance with your customers.
Believe me, this point is crucial. Teams aligned with the
same objectives allow:
• avoid
"couple" conflicts that pollute your performance
• optimize
the efficiency of teams by making them more accomplices
• speak the
same language and make compromises
• to use
the same tools and thus avoid household scenes.
To do this, put in place a kind of PACS contract called a
“Sales + Marketing Service Level Agreement ” (SLA in VO for Service Level Agreement).
Concretely, this means putting in place indicators on which both parties agree.
commit, in order to achieve the overall objective together.
Put your teams in phase, in particular on:
• what a
qualified lead is
• How many
of these same leads does it take to reach the number of expected proposals
(opportunities)?
• How many
of those proposals have then turned into customers?
But also on:
• The
targeted priority persona
• The
objectives to be achieved
• The role
of each
• Everyone's
obligations and commitments
• The
protocol / process related to the management of a prospect (we speak of lead
management): transfer, support etc.
Proceed to operational application
It follows naturally from the previous point. This is not
just theory, but practice. To paraphrase Edison, our American friends believe
that 99% of the results are in the execution of the strategy , not in its
definition. So a good strategy on paper that is not executed correctly is
unlikely to be successful. General Montgomery believed that it was necessary to
"make tactically possible what is strategically desirable"
To learn more, read this article on the differences between
tactics and strategies .
Establish a climate of trust "without friction" or arguments
Before there was the conversion tunnel, today we speak of a
flywheel (Flywheel in VO).
The sales funnel generated friction before sales, during and
after. To chase away these disappointments, it therefore made more sense to
cycle them.
To remove this friction and be reconciled with your
customers, you have to adopt new sales methods, particularly showing yourself
to be more interesting than interested.
Yes, I know it's complicated because “Jean-Pierre, 30 years
old, is our best salesperson and has a good network. And without CRM ... ”
To do this, you should test your sales process yourself by
simply showing empathy and critical thinking. A sort of mystery auto-shopper.
Have it confirmed with a mystery visit if necessary and test one thing at a
time, taking care to eradicate everything that harms, slows down, pollutes,
annoys, breaks the purchasing path.
If you want to know more, consult our page dedicated to
commercial prospecting or download the guide:
Record and measure your actions in a CRM to create vivid memories
No more excuses in 2021! There are hundreds of analysis
tools to follow the journey of your prospects and customers, including CRM
(customer relationship management tool).
Digital remains an excellent way to measure the
effectiveness of your business action plan . Indeed, thanks to CRM and data
analysis tools that you can connect to all your online media (website and
social networks), you will be able to closely monitor the performance and ROI
of your communication and development actions. commercial .
There are 3 important actions in setting up your dashboards
with reliable indicators:
1. Define
the key metrics you need . For example the turnover (weekly, monthly, etc.),
the margin per customer and per product, the productivity of sales
representatives (turnover, geographic sector, product), the number of new
customers signed, the average basket, number of appointments made by commercial
and total to obtain quotes, the number of quotes signed;
2. Share
these indicators with your employees;
3. Establish
a culture of management and reporting.
A good salesperson will assure you of significant sales in
volume and value, but that's not enough anymore. He must systematically ensure
a sector watch, feed information (customers, competition, issues, market ...)
to marketing by recording it in the CRM and adopt modern sales techniques.
Building customer loyalty or the art of perpetuating the relationship
Many companies continue to invest heavily in acquisition
campaigns, with sometimes uncertain results, to the detriment of their existing
customer base, which nevertheless provides them with recurring income. However,
if you want to avoid separation, it is essential to show tender gestures
towards them, every day of your relationship.
Retaining a customer costs, on average, between 5 to 10 times
less than acquiring a new one (source: Harvard Business Review ). If you still
doubt the relevance of investing, here are 5 good reasons to retain your
customers .
I would add that the turnover achieved with loyal customers
can be greater than that achieved with a new customer. It is the same for the
margin .
It is therefore vital for your business development to build
loyalty. To do this, you can, for example, set up bonuses for regular customers
or reserve them special offers, specific content and any other little touches
that keep the fire holy . We tell you more in our loyalty guide available for
free here .
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