This year has thrown many businesses into turmoil. Companies have discovered how significant cloud services are in a virtual world. They have found out that not every sales rep or channel manager can sell virtually. (It was easier when schmoozing was half the job, right?)
The basics of sales and marketing have been skimped on (or forgotten) by a host of people and companies. In today’s world, the Value that your services bring to bear on a problem are all that the prospect has time for. How can you solve for X? And how can you do it better than their current vendor or situation?
Pre-pandemic, many service providers struggled to explain their Value; now it is getting in the way of Sales.
Now that we have settled into Remote Selling, what’s your Sales Plan for 2021? You can’t wait any longer for things to return to normal; it is time to plan for what the reality currently is.
Here are 8.5 questions to answer to design a sales plan for 2021:
1) Who is my Ideal Customer? If you think the answer is Everyone, wrong. Who do you sell to the most – vertical, size of business, geography, Buyer Persona? If you have a CRM, you can pull reports to see: What verticals you most sell to; What size companies buy from you; and What title the buyer or decision maker uses.
2) Why are they the Ideal Customer? How do you impact their business – or solve their problem?
3) What is the Value Prop?
4) Why should they buy from you? Why YOU and not your competitor? Talk to your customers to find out how they use your services and why they like you. **Talking to your customers should be part of your sales retention plan anyway.**
4.5) What is your Competitive Advantage?
5) How do you get in front of your Ideal Customers? Where do you fish?
6) What 3 customers can you not live without? Why? What do they look like? How do you find 2 more like them?
7) What 4 companies would you like to close in 2021?
8) What skills do we need to add or coach up or improve in order to hit our sales goals for 2021?
At this point you can add revenue targets and quotas, but if you don’t nail at least the first 5 items, your sales team and partners are ill-equipped to go sell your stuff in a noisy virtual world.
Many do not grasp the importance of the Value Prop – or put another way: the competitive advantage that your services provide the customer. Think about omni-channel or chatbots tied to AI/ML – these provide a business with new ways to communicate with their prospects and customers where their customers want to communicate! It allows for a better customer experience. That’s the impact!
ABTO – Always Be Thinking Outcome! What is the outcome the customer wants? How do they achieve that from our services?
