Category: Blog

Selecting your channels and designing your sales approach: the key to achieving cut-through in your market

We live in such a connected and always-on world, increasingly enriched with digital experiences, it’s hard to conceive that not everyone is just at the end of an email, phone, or WhatsApp message. Yet there are still people out there who don’t spend the highest proportion of their working day in a digital space. In other professions the lines are blurring, and research shows the pandemic has given rise to different channels and ways of connecting, even disrupting the sales cycles in some industries. In recent months, video and live chat have been the breakout stars. And research shows that 70% of B2B decision-makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases over $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000. That’s a significant shift from the perception of e-commerce as high volume, low-value sales.

Why is this important?

Choosing the right channels and tools is crucial to improving your sales numbers. In fact, understanding what your prospective buyer requires to make a decision about your products and services, empowers you to invest your time where it matters.

Keep your customers’ needs at the centre of your decisions

Imagine your primary buyers are busy hospitality professionals who spend minimal time at their desks and don’t have a wealth of time to peruse content online, they might really need the cut-through of a conversation to kick off any discussion around their buying decisions. Your plan will therefore look very different from one targeting CIOs in Fintech companies shopping for accounting software, or HR leaders procuring performance management software systems. For the latter examples, you may need to invest more time in your inbound strategy. For the former, a well-crafted script for an initial phone conversation, followed by links to engaging product information and an easy way to book a demo, might be just the ticket.

Find the parts of your sales cycle that need attention

This part can be tricky because it requires an honest assessment of how well your current strategy performs and forces you to examine undiscovered territory. Say you are limited to one or two channels, and there’s no formal funnel for your prospects; this leaves little room for optimisation and doesn’t give you much data visibility.

Where do you close most of your deals? And where do you find yourself fighting to stay in the game? If you’ve never diverged from the tried and tested phone call, how’s it working for you?

If your preferred outreach method is a phone call, are your sales team spending a lot of time aggregating follow-up content for the prospect before the conversation can proceed to the next stage? Do you find it difficult to get hold of senior decision-makers? Is it a challenge to articulate your offer over the phone?

The answers to these questions provide the insight you need to optimise and design your contact sequences. If the conversation with the key decision-maker is happening too early in the cycle, you could be squandering the opportunity to close the deal because you need to spend time generating awareness. It’s far more efficient to educate your prospects through outreach emails that give greater context to the problem you solve, or pose a challenge that sparks a conversation. Similarly, signposting to relevant video content could expedite your process, allowing your discussions to begin from a position of shared understanding.

Assess which channels and tools meet your needs:

There are numerous ways to integrate your user’s experience, from website transactions, payments processing, cross-selling, coupon codes, tracking, and maintenance, to name but a few. Whether your business sells products, services, or your sale is a more consultative, longer burn, you can create an experience that adds value at every stage of the pipeline.

Sales and Marketing integration is so important to your success in this area. When you work with your marketing department, you can use the content they create as a sales tool to attract potential buyers into the sales funnel. They can proactively help you find channels where potential customers search for answers your service provides, whether that’s through a more targeted social strategy or integrated live chat into your website. All of the above strengthens the quality of leads in the funnel, enabling you to establish strong business relationships with your buyers and gain their trust.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it gives you an insight into which strategy might best serve your audience:

Social selling: through leveraging your networks and building relationships on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, you can start conversations, respond to comments and engage with broader discussions about the challenges affecting your prospects. On LinkedIn especially, dialogues can easily migrate from the comments sections into a more formal approach. It also makes sense to talk shop where your competitors are hanging out, conversations are already in-flight, and people expect a sales approach. Here, the relationship is central to the sale, so this channel is best-suited to longer sales cycles that require more nurturing and time investment. You can complete your entire sales cycle via social selling, but it works best when used in conjunction with other channels and you migrate to a video call or meeting.

Email: Email works best when it’s personal but not presumptuous; a well-written email with an attention-grabbing subject line can pique interest. Generic, catch-all email blasts will never have the desired effect. Still, if you can segment your audiences and trigger relevant email content based on their buyer behaviours, you boost your chances of conversion. Even innovative templates that allow for some degree of personalisation and offer a gift such as a guide or a download can nudge your prospect in the right direction and helps you earn the right to a more in-depth conversation.

Phone call or video chat: Conversation is undeniable; even the most introverted amongst us get value from human connection. Where the phone call punctuates the sales cycle is entirely up to you. For some organisations, it’s their only strategy. Without a vast pool of potential buyers or a killer elevator pitch, it’s easy to burn through a database without getting real traction. Sales are about persistence, but it’s also advisable to align your sales approach with your buyer’s needs. If your buyers prefer to research online, amp up your inbound and digital outreach ahead of making calls. If your audience is tech-savvy, deliver innovative video content and let their response drive the conversation forward.

Live chat:  Live chat is one of the most potent sales tools out there. It enables direct real-time interaction with visitors to your website, capturing their immediate needs. It’s a valuable touch-point, but it works best where there are definitive answers, or you have a mechanism to book a demo.

Every business can benefit from a solid inbound strategy: Ample opportunities for prospective customers to research marketing content, participate in live webinars to see how your products solve their problems and lead to better quality, which means more qualified leads for your sales team.

Build an integrated tech stack that supports your prospect’s journey: A data-driven sales culture means that your sales representatives and managers monitor essential information that drives your business, such as sales dates, sales cycles, customer satisfaction and outbound activities. Business intelligence tools that centralise and combine data from your CRM, LMS, telephony and VoIP systems (and integrate with marketing automation systems) offer the best opportunity to examine where you’re experiencing drop-offs in engagement. You can therefore fail fast and fix things quickly, so your approach evolves with your market.

Getting started:

Armed with a plethora of tools and insight, you can continually optimise your sales approach. But this is the real world, not everything happens in the correct order, and we understand that not every business has the resources or the time to invest in systems and software. Optimising your prospect’s experience and driving better data visibility starts with setting up some joined-up internal processes. Even simple things like well-crafted follow-up emails, customer surveys and regular communications can drive better retention and increase sales success.

If you need guidance designing your sales approach, we can help. Contact us…

Onboarding your sales team represents a real opportunity to engage and educate your new employees about your business and shape how they speak to your market. If you get it right, your new hires will be productive sooner than you think and feel raring to go. Conversely, an ineffective or unclear onboarding experience will do little to inspire confidence in their ability to deliver their targets; or, worse, cause them to lose faith in your business resulting in a hasty departure. And this is why so many organisations experience high churn: they invest time and effort in communicating their culture throughout the interview process, but it all falls off a cliff swiftly after. You easily bridge this gap with some reflection on your onboarding experience. Think about what your employees need to know to do their jobs, e.g. product knowledge, playbooks, call scripts and training materials. Now think about what they need to be genuinely successful, training, support, mentoring and a culture where they can ask questions and seek knowledge without fear of knockbacks or reprisals.

Now you may be thinking, yeah, but salespeople will sink or swim, and they’ll be thick-skinned enough to weather anything we throw at them. That’s true for some salespeople but by no means all. As we covered in our previous blog, Planning and Hiring and Outbound Sales Function, all salespeople are different and will have a range of needs. If you take the ‘sink or swim approach’, you will experience high churn, and that’s demoralising for everyone in your team because it creates a powerful barrier to building team rapport and a high-performance culture.

Don’t overwhelm new hires

There are a few schools of thought around sales training. I believe you need to upskill and arm your new hires with the product training; they’ll need to sell your services and products effectively. You don’t need to block in two or three solid weeks of intensive training, and doing that could be counterintuitive. Research reveals 84% of sales training is forgotten within the first three months. It’s a lot for people to retain and remember, and it’s the antithesis of the in-role learning that people find so helpful once they’re taking calls. It’s worth thinking about how you can break up product training, where appropriate, with other equally valuable elements of the onboarding experience.

Train outside the classroom because exposure to the entire business matters

Draw on the experiences of everyone in the business to give your new hires a real sense of your culture, your operating model and the way you conduct business. Shadowing can provide compelling insight for recruits, so invite them to marketing meetings to see the messaging and methods you use to talk to your market, which will help them when they’re talking to prospects. Expose them to account management calls and meetings so they can get a feel for how you collaborate with and support your clients. It’s also a brilliant insight into how you deal with challenges and objections in real life outside of a formal training environment. Peer-to-peer mentoring or ‘buddy systems’ can work well to support informal, on-the-job learning and give your new hire a go-to resource for questions they don’t want to bring to management or schedule meetings to discuss.

Set clear expectations and invite honest questions

As a founder and an experienced sales professional, it matters to me that new employees know that my door is open, and they can ask me questions about the business. I want to know their concerns, and I want to encourage them to be curious and seek knowledge from their managers and peers because it’s an organic and brilliant way to learn. Equally, it’s essential that I set clear expectations and communicate my vision for the business, so we start their journey on the same page.

Embrace ready to go attitudes (whilst providing support)

This might be deemed controversial, but I can only speak from my own experience. Early on in my career, I would have been very disappointed if I’d left a new sales role and hadn’t been allowed to speak to a customer on my first day. I fully understand that different organisations have different policies. Others aren’t comfortable allowing a new hire to have a customer or prospect until they’ve completed weeks, maybe even months of training.  Where possible, I would encourage you to embrace those enthusiastic types and give them all the support they need to get going as quickly as possible; it will instil confidence and achievement they cannot get from any amount of success in role-play or simulated training environments.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO

Over the next 12 months, we will be exploring different topics within our annual theme of ‘setting up an outbound sales team’. The first topic we will be exploring is ‘planning and hiring’ – the first step to creating an outbound sales function.

Whether you’re a Founder looking to make your first sales hire, or you’re a sales/revenue leader looking to grow your existing team, it’s important to have a robust plan in place that will help you hire the right person.

We understand recruiting sales professionals takes time and resources, looking through CVs, interviewing potential candidates and training successful candidates. Hiring a candidate without proper planning could put you back to square one, losing all the time and resources you had dedicated previously.

To help you make your first or next sales hire successful, we have developed the ‘Sales Planning & Hiring Checklist’ that consists of 23 questions you need to be asking yourself if you’re thinking about planning and hiring for your sales team.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Asking the hard questions and avoiding the pitfalls

Ask anyone who has done it, and they’ll tell you honestly: building your sales team is not easy. The road to a high performing, well-oiled sales machine is a rocky one, filled with challenges that you might have overlooked or ones that you knew you’d have to overcome. As someone who has been through this process with my own company and helped hundreds of clients shape their sales functions, I’m confident I can help you find an easier way through it. In this series, I’m going to show you the sharp end of sales success, taking stock of what you need to think about at every stage and hopefully saving you some time (and exasperation) while providing some inspiration.

Planning is essential to success

In my experience, there are two familiar scenarios: those businesses that want to build a sales function because the business Founder has been doing most of the selling. They’re at the point where to see serious growth; they need more sales resource. Primarily resource focused on selling rather than wearing many different hats. And there are those businesses that have recently secured funding and need to nail their go-to-market strategy and get out there and sell. To do that, they’ll need a team. They are looking for a repeatable and scalable sales model that will deliver against their financial forecast and demonstrate their viability to investors.

This is where it all begins. You know you need sales resource, so what do you do next? At this point, some businesses dive right into hiring their first dedicated salesperson. It might seem logical, but without a plan, the processes, the data, researched target profiles and the right messaging, how can you give your new hire the tools they need to succeed?

Developing your Sales Playbook

It’s why your Sales Playbook is so essential; this is your blueprint for how you define and reach your market, the message you use and the processes you follow to close business. And even the most tenacious and experienced salesperson will benefit from a sales playbook that brings together the best practice you’ve developed so far. I’ve seen less experienced SDRs ramp up their productivity much more rapidly when armed with the right messages, data strategy, technology, and objection handling practices.

Failing to put in the groundwork and thinking about who you are targeting and the key benefit statements around your service is a missed opportunity and will make it far more difficult for your salesperson to sell. This is especially true if they’ve not been part of the Founder and the technical developers’ product development journey. And even if you have a very niche or defined market, where are you sourcing your data, and what channels do you plan to use to contact these people? Will you focus on speed and quantity or quality of engagement? And what will the sales process look like beyond that first engagement or conversation? Maybe you’ll decide LinkedIn outreach is the best plan, or perhaps you’d rather go for a cold calling approach. Wherever you land, you need a plan to make your chosen method work well. For example, if a customer asks about pricing reasonably early on in your conversation, what’s your stance? Do you readily share this with them? Or does it require a more in-depth consultative discussion bringing in other teams in the business? What’s the qualification criteria for passing over to, say, Business Development to advance the lead to an opportunity? And what collateral and process docs do you need to support their efforts? These are questions worth knowing the answer to because they allow for a smoother sale and a more seamless customer experience.

Not all sales professionals are made alike

Without a plan in place or a clear data strategy, you could hire an experienced salesperson and a more junior salesperson, give them each a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account and send them on their merry way. How do you know they’ll use consistent messaging? You can’t account for how much time they’ll need to spend researching ahead of a call or meeting. With no plan or foundation level messaging, they may need to spend more time tailoring more personalised approaches, with no certainty or assurance they’re going in the right direction. By which point, you’ll have to cycle back and rethink your targets and your plan.

And this neatly brings me to my next point; not all sales professionals are made alike. And how you plan to interact with your target audience hugely influences the type of person you need to hire. Suppose you’re planning high volume, top of the funnel activity. In that case, you need a very different type of sales professional than if you are expecting your hire to navigate large organisations as part of an account-based marketing approach and close a complex technical deal. It would help if you also thought about what matters most to you as a business. Do you care most about cultural fit, industry experience or sales track record? Do you need someone who is not afraid of the phone or someone who has finesse with their copywriting?

Furthermore, do you need someone who will grow a team and build your sales function out, or will they likely not get this opportunity. Each of these scenarios requires a very different kind of person.

If you’ve never hired a salesperson before, it can be tricky to match experience with what your organisation most needs to grow. It might be tempting to opt for somebody senior, but can they replicate their success in a lean startup without the resource and budget they may be accustomed to? It might be that they would prefer to spend more time on strategy and less time on delivery when you need both.

Realism can help you plan better

I’m sorry to say this, but you will fail before you succeed. Fail fast, and you will move on to bigger and better things, armed with lessons learnt.

And if/when you realise that you made the wrong call, do you know how to fix it? I’ve seen this quite a lot, where an organisation’s attempt at building out sales just isn’t working. Sometimes, it’s due to a misjudged hire, potentially poor cultural fit, or lack of experience. Sometimes it’s simply due to not enough clarity around the organisation’s sales cycle. If you haven’t accurately judged when your sales investment is likely to deliver a return on investment, you could be working blind and failing to produce enough leads to convert sales months down the line. Or you could have set the wrong expectations entirely along with other stakeholders in the business (including yourself).

Often a Founder or CEO who has brought in all the business to date unfairly expects a salesperson to replicate their success and deliver the same numbers. Without the Founder’s autonomy, experience, and depth of product knowledge, this is almost impossible. And however hard an employee tries, they cannot replicate the passion of a Founder. I know this myself, and while I expect my team to be enthusiastic and care, I don’t expect the vision for the business to take up permanent residence in their daily thoughts; that’s on me.

It’s also worth noting that a new sales hire doesn’t have anywhere near that amount of flexibility and creative control and is unlikely to be as warmly received as a CEO, which, as we all know, can open doors.

When it comes down to it, building a successful sales team requires serious reflection before you even begin. It’s my firm belief that with a realistic plan, a sensible approach to achieving your targets based on accurate sales forecasting and numbers, a well-developed playbook and a clear view of the type of salespeople you need to hire, you have every chance of success.

Oh, and one more thing; you’ll need some patience and understanding, too. Because (sorry) you’re far more likely to get it wrong before you get it right!

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO

A very wise person once said, ‘Honesty is the soul of business.’ And it’s reflecting on that honesty, at every stage in your strategy, that will lead to long-term success. You can apply the same logic to customer conversions. We’ve seen every business model out there, strategies propelled forward by sheer hope alone, while others prepare for the worst, so any wins, however small, smash all expectations.

When it comes to achieving goals, an in-depth look at how much of your pipeline converts into sales will arm you with the knowledge you need to plan, giving you a clear indication of what can be achieved when you break down the numbers.

Work backwards to go forwards.

How many new customers do you need to onboard a month? It can really help to work backwards. If it’s 10 new customers, do you know, typically, how many leads you need to bring in to achieve that? How many must convert to proposals, and from there, what’s your average win-rate? With a little working out, it’s easy to see where the gaps are.

And if you’re honest, do you consistently invest enough in your best-performing channels to regularly hit the number of leads you need to win those 10 new customers you’re shooting for? If you run seasonal campaigns that affect the number of leads in specific months, or your calendar has industry-wide buying trends, the answers may surprise you.

Setting achievable goals based on track record.

Many businesses have this ideal target figure for new business, but a few key considerations will affect how realistic achieving this will be for them. Firstly, have you ever achieved this before? If yes, what were the contributing factors to your success? If you regularly acquire 50% of your new business target, you need to look at what you need to do differently now to achieve your sales goal.

Data really does tell a story. Therefore, accurate data reporting and a proficient CRM system are essential to understanding historical patterns and any limiting factors in your business that might impact your typical conversion rates. Armed with this knowledge, you have a much greater understanding and visibility of your sales environment and any gaps you need to address.

Meaningful planning that delivers ROI.

We work with our clients to create a cash flow forecast, which leverages the aforementioned data insights and shows how an investment in their outsourced sales function will deliver over a 2-year period, showing expected (and realistic) ROI and timeframes. We know from experience that a consistent programme of activity will deliver results, some quick wins, but they will also be those prospects that will come to fruition months from now. In a quick-win culture, 2 years can seem like an eternity, but actually, it’s a virtuous circle, whereby the investment you make today will pay dividends far beyond the life of your campaign.

Honesty is a two-way street, so we’re always completely transparent about ROI and our projections. If you need a faster return on investment than our forecast predicts, it’s important to think carefully before investing in outsourced sales as campaigns do not deliver miracles and require time to deliver results.

If you’d like to have an honest conversation about your sales goals and how our outsourced sales experts can help you achieve them, get in touch, call 0333 250 3217 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

High-growth businesses have a few key common denominators. They’re usually born out of a great idea their core team really believe in and rally behind. Their growth often outpaces their recruitment and resources, so every team member could find themselves playing outside their comfort zone in those whirlwind early months. The ultimate ambition is simply exponential growth; the sky is the limit. And speaking of limitations, there comes the point in every startup’s growth trajectory where the curve begins to level off. So, what do you when this happens?

It’s at this point that businesses start to look at their sales and marketing machine. What worked when they were starting out, won’t be the secret to levelling up. An ad hoc and reactive approach to building brand and acquiring new business isn’t a solid strategy for success. Most companies seeking to grow do accept this to be true. But what’s the value of an outsourced sales agency over building an in-house team? Why not bring in a Head of Sales and let them handle it? In our blog, Outsourced vs Hiring In-House – The Debate Continues, we take an in-depth look at both sides of the debate and the practical considerations that most businesses will face when making this decision.

In our experience, it comes down to this; your most valuable commodity is time. Time to focus on your business strategy; time to focus on your product roadmap and value propositions and time to focus on the future and your vision. The overarching benefit of outsourcing sales to an expert partner is what you gain back, along with the reassurance that your sales strategy and delivery is in experienced hands with a track record of delivering results.

We’ve looked at the common constraining factors that limit growth and how outsourced sales can help.

Limited in-house resource and skills

Sales are vital to every organisation’s future, but it also takes dedication, consistency and experience to see results. This is where an outsourced sales partner can help you step up your game overnight. Building an in-house sales function is fraught with challenges from developing your onboarding process to retaining your best talent. The time investment required to create and cultivate a high-performance sales culture is significant, and that’s alongside day-to-day management and process development. An outsourced sales partner has already built that high-performing sales professional function, with experts motivated and able to start delivering value to your business almost immediately.

No time to dedicate to new business

Building a pipeline is essential to future sales success, but it’s challenging to generate leads without dedicated sales resource. If your existing team focuses on high-value immediate opportunities, they may be overlooking valuable opportunities that are yet to buy and require nurturing through the sales funnel. And without any sales expertise, even those precious opportunities may be challenging to get over the line. An outsourced sales expert can help you design a strategy that takes in the complete sales cycle and aligns with your growth strategy, helping you build pipeline, capitalise on the low-hanging fruit and free up headspace to concentrate on the exceptional opportunities.

Limited brand recognition

Breaking into new markets and building awareness in your target audience can be challenging for new brands. An outsourced partner can help. They can work with you to develop messaging that will resonate with your audience. Their sales experts will be skilled in communicating the key aspects of a business’s service and benefits, building rapport with your desired key decision-makers and nurturing relationships from cold prospect to engaged customer. This consistent activity will help establish your brand.

Lack of market insight

Research and insight are invaluable to any new organisation, but it’s tough to justify a research budget if you’re at the investment stage. A sales campaign can be a valuable accelerator to gather live feedback from your target audience, especially if you’re a disruptor in the market. It allows you to get closer to your prospects’ challenges, enabling you to refine your offer to better suit their needs. An outsourced sales partner will give you access to call recordings and valuable data insights that will provide you with greater visibility of your market.

Why Air?

We deliver a unique experience for every client who works with us, regardless of their size, product or industry. We get to know our client’s business, their goals, their market and especially their nuances! From here, we build a bespoke strategy that reflects all the above, considering their product value and sales cycle. We then create a plan that includes campaign content and messaging aligned to their brand, we train and immerse our team in the campaign’s goals and work with the client to clearly define the target market.

Could you benefit from using an experienced outsourced sales team? Whether you require a completely outsourced service or additional sales support for your existing team, get in touch, call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk