TARGETING YOUR MOST VALUABLE OPPORTUNITIES
Many B2B sales and marketing organisations have an unfortunate habit of wasting huge amounts of time and energy pursuing "prospects" that are unlikely to ever become valuable customers, often because there is no common company-wide consensus about which opportunities everybody should be prioritising.
Allowing your organisation to treat every inbound opportunity equally - or encouraging them to respond to every RFP you receive - is a gross misuse of valuable resources.
That's why systematically defining, identifying and proactively targeting your most valuable opportunities is an essential foundation for any successful value selling initiative. These opportunities must satisfy three essential criteria: they must have the potential to buy a solution that that you are offering, they must be willing to buy from your organisation, and the effort required to win their business must be worth it.
This requires that everybody in your marketing and sales organisation shares the same common perspective regarding the high-impact business problems you are particularly good at solving, the high-value potential customer organisations and business sponsors that are likely to suffer from these problems (and are prepared to do something about them), and the high-impact trigger events that are likely to cause these potential customers to recognise that they are likely to have to take action.
This targeting process is inevitably an iterative exercise - the more you learn, the more you realise you would like to know. But the sooner you get going, the sooner you start learning - and even a modest improvement in the clarity of your targeting can have a transformational impact on the alignment and effectiveness of your sales, marketing and business development activities...
HIGH-VALUE BUSINESS PROBLEMS
At any point in time, your target customers will inevitably have a large number of frustrating problems - issues they would like to address but can probably learn to live with. They will have a smaller number of genuinely important problems: they know they have to deal with them at some point. But they will have even fewer truly critical problems - and these are the high-value problems that inevitably demand urgent action (and are most likely to result in sales).
Irritating problems cause enquiries. Important problems result in serious evaluations. But only critical problems (or important problems that are tied to a high-priority corporate objective) will inevitably drive change. Our value selling system® will equip your sales people to recognise, target, qualify and respond to high-value problems - and avoid low-priority wild goose chases.
HIGH-VALUE TARGET ORGANISATIONS
Traditional market segmentation - using demographic indicators such as size, sector and location - may allow you to define the boundaries of your target markets, but these factors have very little bearing on whether any organisation is actually likely to buy from you. Structural and behavioural factors (such as the way the company is organised, the systems they have implemented and their appetite for innovation) are consistently far more reliable indicators of long-term potential.
Our Ideal Customer Profile framework is designed to enable your marketers and sales people to identify and agree the common characteristics of your most valuable target organisations, and to apply those insights when implementing your marketing and sales pipeline building activities and when qualifying the potential of individual sales opportunities.
HIGH-VALUE BUSINESS SPONSORS
Research by the CEB (now part of Gartner) revealed that the typical high-value B2B purchase decision now involves an average of 6.8 stakeholders - a number that is expected to keep rising. But within that group there are a smaller number of particularly influential individuals - the CEB refer to them as "mobilizers" but you could also think of them as change agents or power sponsors.
These people have significant influence over the decision-making process, and are the most important roles to target when you are reaching out to organisations in an attempt to initiate a buying dialogue. They are also, of course, of vital significance throughout the value selling process because of their ability to persuade their colleagues in the stakeholder community of the need to take action, and their talent for driving consensus around their preferred option.
HIGH-IMPACT TRIGGER EVENTS
Identifying and targeting your most valuable problems, organisations and business sponsors can help to establish where your long-term market development energies should be focused. But the factors that determine whether any account is likely to become a short-term opportunity are situational and related to either internal or external changes in circumstance and trigger events.
One of the most common internal trigger events is the appointment of a new senior executive with responsibility for the function that has the issue. Others include significant new corporate initiatives or challenges with existing projects. External trigger events include significant changes in the balance of market power, new legislation or regulation. Our value selling system® will equip your sales people to monitor, identify and proactively react to these catalysts for change.
IN CONCLUSION
Aligning your marketing, business development and sales organisations and activities around a common agreement about what an ideal opportunity looks like has a profound impact on sales, marketing and business development effectiveness. By targeting the right problems, organisations, business sponsors and trigger events you stand a far better change of engaging in the prospect's buying journey while you still have the chance to influence it. And these principles will also allow your sales people to more accurately qualify which opportunities they should be prioritising and which ones they should be disengaging from. Take the next step.
EXPERTS IN APPLYING VALUE-BASED SELLING TO COMPLEX B2B SALES
Our value selling system® has the potential to empower every member of your sales organisation - from your most recent recruit to your most experienced veteran - to make the connection between the critical business issues of their customers and the strategic business value of your solution...
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR DISTINCTIVELY DIFFERENT APPROACH TO VALUE-BASED SELLING, CONTACT US TODAY
