This article was co-authored with my good friend Randy Byrne, a very experienced Sales and Marketing Executive. We are both interested in organic growth.
Introduction
Does your business suffer from any of these symptoms?
- Sluggish (or no) sales or revenue growth?
- Are products increasingly being commoditized and harder to differentiate from the competition?
- Are sales in China no longer the growth engine for your company?
- Increased competition?
- Margins under pressure?
- Are headcount pressures making it more challenging to add service people to drive growth?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of these symptoms, you are not alone…but there may not be “comfort in numbers.” On the other hand, you probably already realize that maintaining the status quo and hoping the economy improves is not a sustainable – or responsible – way forward if you are a manager and leader in the business.
Since most executives or managers are not the decision-makers for controlling mergers and acquisitions, we will focus on ways to accelerate growth organically (i.e., NOT by acquisition). Also, we focus on profit growth NOT strictly through cost reduction but through customer-facing activities, i.e., sales, marketing, and customer support, even though many companies consider this approach Plan A. To match how responsibilities are currently held in most companies, we will list these “13 Ways” by commercial marketing, sales, and support functions.
Marketing as A Growth Engine
Understand the implications of the change in customer buying processes on your marketing efforts. Many visitors to your website have plans to buy and are researching their purchase, but they are not telling you – and you don’t have their contact details. In addition, typically, only ~2% of the visitors to your website register and provide you with their contact details. That is, 57-70% of a prospective customer’s buying process is completed before the customer is willing to engage with a vendor (according to B2B consultancies such as Sirius Decisions).
- Web optimization tools of many different types exist so you can still get messages to them or more relevant, targeted information – and influence their thinking – even without their contact details.
- Use email marketing or marketing automation to continue to “nurture” medium-term leads to cost-effectively keep your name in front of those prospects who may be in the “consideration” stages of the buying process.
- If your products are in an established market, focus on inbound marketing tactics to drive more people to the top of the funnel; if your products are revolutionary but not well known in the market, or provide a better solution to something that is already well accepted in the market, consider “targeted prospecting” via phone and email with the help of technology tools such as social selling tools.
To do this, you need to have a solid understanding of your target market – developing “personas” can be a big help to your marketing and sales efforts.
Sales
Free up salespeople’s time to focus on their highest value-added activities. How? Perform a time analysis to understand where their time is currently spent – for most B2B field salespeople, it is around 33% on the highest value selling activities, which is not good enough.
- Consider a lower-cost sales function (e.g., Business Development Reps) for internal qualification of leads so that field salespeople can focus on higher-level activities.
- Use relevant KPIs and metrics that properly reflect sales effectiveness. For example, measure forecast accuracy every month—measure the conversion of leads (or, preferably, qualified leads) to orders. Measure the average deal size for all your reps. Measure what % of forecasted deals are won, lost, or dead. Discuss performance individually every month, understand the “why” behind the numbers, and understand differences in results between salespeople.
- Ensure salespeople spend “quality time” with prospects by receiving proactive sales coaching and thorough pre-call planning with their manager, and also receive positive reinforcement and post-call debriefing. Periodically survey customers who did not buy from you to learn how to improve the salespeople’s performance and adherence to your sales process. Consider the need for more training based on what customers want and expect from a field salesperson (most B2B companies focus heavily on product training, but focusing on typical customer problems that your products solve can effectively improve sales performance).
- Consider using relevant sales intelligence tools to enhance your sales team’s productivity. For example, since so many prospects can avoid telephone calls or ignore emails, use email-tracking software to provide your salespeople with “behavioral” information or “digital body language” of the opportunity to understand the prospect’s engagement with you.
Customer Support
- Train your customer-facing support people to become a lead generation team for products and services. Service and support technicians are “trusted advisers” and frequently are asked for their opinions about product and service acquisition plans. Don’t try to convert them to salespeople but incent them to share customer insight.
- Review and update your service offerings and pricing. Understand how each product adds value to the customer and, if the messaging is unclear, then edit it and communicate to all customers. Make sure the customer’s cost reflects the value delivered – make sure you are not leaving money on the table.
- Review your service contract selling process. This inside sales effort should closely mirror the product inside sales effort. Use similar tools, techniques, and, most importantly, KPIs. Measure the contract renewal rate and booking time days before contract expiration. Likewise, measure the warranty to contract conversion rate by product, territory, and customer segment, and how far in advance of warranty expiration the contract is booked.
- Here is a link to an article we posted on Thomas insights.
Combined Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Activities For Growth
If necessity is the mother of invention, then now is an excellent opportunity to put the most creative thinkers from the three customer-facing parts of the business into a room together and challenge them to create new business models, solutions, value propositions, and plans to generate growth. Things to look at include the following:
- Combining products and services into high value-add solutionsLaunching PaaS (product or platform as a service), data as a service, or any of the XaaS possibilities.
- They are identifying obstacles to sales and selling more services than they do today. Look at the contract attachment rate by product, salesperson, geography, and market. Quantify opportunities and find ways to make them happen.
- Brainstorm ways to use the combined resources of the three areas to create new interest to upsell or cross-sell existing customers and raise the average order value.
Conclusion
You can’t cost-reduce your business to greatness, and you can’t be sure that a merger or acquisition will produce the desired long-term results. So, use some of these ideas to create long-term, organic revenue, and profit growth.
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create more organic growth, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.