Sales teams have always had their work cut out for them. But in a competitive economy, where the differentiators between organizations are getting slimmer, the challenges that sales teams face for new customer acquisition increase exponentially.
Further, in an increasingly noisy marketplace, standing out from your competitors is becoming a major challenge for organizations. Only those who succeed in grabbing the attention of prospects with messages that stand out and resonate with decision makers have a chance of turning them into paying customers.
Rather than wasting time and energy in blanket messages, Revana believes that sales leaders need to establish a system to sell to the right customer, at the right time, and over the right channel. This three-pronged strategy is the basis of Revana’s recipe to develop a streamlined system to acquire new customers, grow revenue, and retain existing customers. These are the five basic steps that we believe will set the stage for new customer acquisition among B2B companies:
- Gather customer intelligence: Data provides extremely important information that governs decisions. Organizations have mountains of customer information and forward-thinking businesses are making the most out of this data and extracting actionable insights out of the data. Companies need to determine who the most successful customers are and what qualities and characteristics these customers have in common; for example, whether they’re in the same industry or vertical, and who the decision maker within the firm is.
- Organize internal acquisition-planning meetings: Such meetings will be instrumental to determine how insights from customer intelligence analytics match to the current sales process. It also gives business leaders the opportunity to deeply examine the entire customer acquisition strategy. These meetings should include representatives from different departments who look at the acquisition strategy of each sales team, including how they find prospects, how they determine which titles are most valuable to go after in different industries, how they get through to decision makers, and how they determine the preferred communication method of these decision makers.
- Build your strategy around your ideal customer profile: Customer intelligence should give business leaders a good profile of the company’s ideal customers. This will allow firms to start formulating a strategy that focuses on capturing these customers. The strategy should also outline the steps that should be taken to pursue high-value customers. Attention should also be paid to developing a strategy to align sales, marketing, and service teams.
- Make the most of your CRM: It’s important not to restrict your CRM to information fields that were traditionally being collected. Instead, be open to adding fields to capture information that’s relevant to your new sales process, for example company size, number of employees, and industry vertical. Rather than using freeform fields, we recommend using drop-down menus to increase data consistency and make it easy to analyze.
- Share your knowledge: After building a foundation of intelligence about your ideal customer, including how and when to target them, make sure that everyone on the sales team is using this strategy and applying the information in their sales efforts…and automate these practices wherever possible.
