The goal for any marketer is to focus on efficient and effective marketing campaigns that produce results. For outbound marketers, that means aggregating data well to...
In every market, there are ideal customers. Unfortunately, they’re all different. It’s how you market to differing clientele that sets you apart.
This week on The Corporate Data Show, we interviewed Sean Kester, from SalesLoft, which was founded to help in-house sales professionals be the best they can be in their jobs.
Through the SalesLoft Prospector, companies can target leads by making a list of potential leads and turn their prospective accounts into customer accounts through a touch-flow model. Sean talked about the importance of taking a holistic approach to sales. In order to reach the most potential clients, we need to start building sales organizations, not just sales teams.
Focus on the Organization
Being a sales organization is more of a state of mind than anything else. In a sales organization, the entire team achieves confidence through alignment and collective ownership of revenue goals.
This is bigger than a team: instead of just focusing on sales or marketing, everyone in a sales organization understands what it takes to sell. In a sales organization, marketing tactics are based on data and facts, not gut instinct.
Being a sales organization takes the improvisational salesperson and turns him or her into a scientist. The old model of marketing focuses on leads and commits, but sales is a lot more than just turning leads into clients. A sales organization knows how to equip the front line with effective tools and guidance to support the entire sales team through a defined process through touch-point models.
It also incorporates resources for marketing product and account management so that they have the right insight about what needs to be communicated to help them leverage that data for every interaction through any platform. We should be able to communicate sales goals and processes across the entire organization so that everyone shares the same goals and the whole organization is empowered and made better.
Selling the Ideal Customer
"Identify the customer pain and pair that pain with a market segment and strategy."
Production begins with marketing, and you have to start by trying to figure out who you are selling to. From there, you can start acquiring customers.
Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The ICP will come from marketing, through feedback. Focus on the account, before you try to profile the customer behind the account. Once you’ve identified the ideal account, you can create the ideal persona behind the account. There are champions in marketing, sales, executive level buyers, etc.
By having a holistic view of sales, you can create buyer-centric messaging that resonates with the personas you’ve identified through these profiles. There is no substitution for actual fit, and actual pain. Remember you are dealing with real people with different pains and needs, and your business is not a cure-all for every client.
What angle best meets the needs of your potential customers?
Your product or service could be sold to advertising and marketing companies, but if you pull a list of executives at these companies, you will have a lot of businesses who can’t use your products for a variety of reasons.
Execute
The biggest problem most companies are facing is an inability to execute. Though books like Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue have great insight into certain aspects of sales, you can’t take these books as gospel.
The reality is that sales techniques have changed drastically within the last 5-15 years, and we have to adapt to the changing market.
The idea expressed in the book is that we need to create messaging and templates, send out the templates to get a predictable number of responses, and those responses should turn into potential opportunities. The problem with this model is that you can’t go through just one method of communication to best reach your intended audience.
There are now so many different platforms of communication; you have to figure out which methods of communication resonate best with your potential buyers and meet them where they are. By creating good ICPs for our potential clients, we can pinpoint how to best sell to them.
Conclusion
You can’t fake authenticity. If you send out 1,000 emails in a day, that isn’t going to produce a good return on investment because even though you’re reaching people, you aren’t reaching them in an effective way.
"Sending out countless stock emails will hurt your reputation and leave a bad taste in people’s mouths."
Focus on finding effective ways to communicate to the clients you want to reach in a way that engages them in the conversation. This episode is based on an interview with Sean Kester from SalesLoft.
To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Corporate Data Show.
