Sales Directors, are you often at loggerheads with your marketing counterparts, being questioned about leads, MQLs, SQLs? Do you wish the conversation would shift to marketing helping you generate pipeline and revenue? If so, Account Based Marketing (ABM) could change your life – but a word of warning – it is not suitable for every organisation.

We are seeing ABM playing a strategic role in delivering growth and innovation here in Australia, but it requires close cooperation of business, sales and marketing leadership. Why? The overall business strategy forms the North Star for any future ABM programs.

This article aims to help you gain a basic understanding of “if” and “how” you and your Sales teams can benefit from ABM.

Sales Directors – how to help your marketers help YOU?

Account Based Marketing is a slightly outdated name for what we now see more accurately described as ABE “Account Based Engagement”.  What’s the difference between ABM/ABE and the traditional B2B marketing approach?

• Traditional B2B is about reaching your total addressable market and generating individual “leads”.
  
• ABM focuses time and resources on a handful accounts with high revenue potential – consistently developing and nurturing relationships with multiple stakeholders across the account – over time. ABM/ABE is about achieving the “Collective yes”.
  

Another major difference lies in the approach: ABM is NOT something marketing “does to sales”. ABM is all about close Sales and Marketing collaboration throughout the process. This is often the biggest hurdle to remove when starting with ABM, as the two organisations sometimes tend to operate in siloes.

ABM enables modern B2B marketers to play a strategic role in delivering revenue growth and innovation but demands a lot more of them – to be successful, marketers need to understand not just the value proposition, but also your sales cycles, processes, points of entry, barriers, and more. This is a great opportunity for Sales to open channels of communications, mentor your marketers and bring them into the fold – believe me, they will enjoy being part of the Pipeline and Revenue generating gang! What can you do to help?  Firstly, start including your marketers in your Account planning, QBRs, some forecast calls, and wherever possible – have them present during conversations with customers and prospects.

Understanding each other’s challenges will make it much easier to align your KPIs and to collaborate. 

ABM – what it is, what it is not

While there are a few interpretations of ABM, the main objective is very clear: Generate revenue & increase footprint in Target Enterprise Accounts, by growing relationships, reputation & trust. After practicing ABM for 7 years here in Australia and New Zealand, my short definition of ABM is as follows:

“Account Based Marketing helps companies that sell complex solutions into Large Enterprise space focus their time & resources on developing relationships & trust in accounts that matter most.”

ABM harnesses deep account and contact insights to design tailored value proposition, treating each account (or an Account cluster) as market of one.

It is a LONG term, coordinated account centric approach to marketing and sales.

As ABM-ers, we are:
1. Focusing on few significant accounts that best resemble our “Ideal Customer Profile”.

2. Enabling Sales to engage, develop relationships and influence the entire decision-making committee.
“Lead” is a dirty word.  In ABM – we are focusing on ALL decisionmakers and influencers in the decision-making committee. Why? The inability to build consensus within the buying committee is likely to be a major obstacle to closing complex deals.

3. Tailoring marketing initiatives around client insights and their strategic objectives.This requires a deep research at an Account and Contact level – what are the strategic goals our solution can help solve at an account and individual level? What are the contacts’ KPIs, drivers and personal preferences? How can we incorporate those in our sales reach out, so that they resonate with the recipient well enough for them to let us build a strong relationship?

4. Marketing & Sales collaborate closely throughout the sales cycle to increase deal velocity and size and the Life-time value of the account. ABM is a team sport, and success is largely dependent on the quality of intel exchange and collaboration and ability to orchestrate initiatives based on the Target Account current needs.

Is ABM a good fit for your organisation?

It is proven that ABM can deliver substantial ROI by building trust, relationships, and reputation in high value accounts. But is it the silver bullet that will work for everyone?

The answer is no – ABM is certainly not a good fit for every organisation. Why? For ABM to deliver ROI, certain criteria must be met:

1.  You are selling complex solutions to Enterprise accounts (high value accounts)
2. Your sales cycles tend to be long and you are engaging and influencing multiple stakeholders (decision making committee).
3. Your deal size (or potential revenue) is large (in ANZ, typically 500k+) to justify the investment.

If your sales approach is largely transactional and you do not see a need to develop strong, long-term relationships in the organisations you are selling into, ABM is most likely not the right fit for you. In fact, using ABM in a transactional sales environment is a waste of time, effort, and resources.

Measuring success – how do we know it is working?

Since Marketing and Sales KPIs are aligned at the start of the ABM process, it is incredibly easy to measure success. As the picture below illustrates, we track the number of total opportunities, pipeline and revenue generated from ABM target accounts.

As you know, working with large Enterprise accounts with long term sales cycles (for example: a software platform solution for FSI vertical, with deal value between $3 and 15 million, with average sales cycle of 20 months), results will not appear overnight. We recommend setting up also interim KPIs related to improving relationships with key decision makers. You can measure increase in engagement, quality of relationships, penetration into new BUs etc.  

3 key takeaways:

1. Your overall business strategy is the North star of your ABM – if ABM is the right fit for your organisation, it provides a substantial opportunity to deliver revenue from high value accounts.
2. Marketing and Sales collaboration is crucial to the success of ABM.
3. Forget “leads”, revenue is the result of strong relationships and trust. ABM enables Sales to effectively engage and develop relationships with key stakeholders across the entire decision-making committee.

Hopefully this article has brought some clarity and basic understanding of ABM and whether you and your teams can benefit from it. ABM is a long term, coordinated account centric approach to marketing and sales, not a tactic, campaign or a sales method.

The post ABM – The Zero Waste Strategy For Revenue Growth appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Unfortunately, they still mean different things to different people. And they have been misused for too long.

“The greatest inhibitor to sales effectiveness is the seller’s inability to communicate a VALUE message.” — SiriusDecisions

To me, a value proposition is a means to communicate succinctly to a Prospect or to a Buyer what’s in it for them when they deal with us.

A value proposition is a means to communicate succinctly to a Prospect or to a Buyer what’s in it for them when they deal with us.

It should be that simple, but organizations have tied themselves into knots coming up with ones that work for them.

What’s worse, too many organizations are still inward-looking and product-focused when they should be customer-centric, i.e. they should “do everything with the customer in mind”, as Jeff Bezos put it for his company Amazon.

So, to me (and to Jeff, I guess) the only value proposition that counts is the one that engages your customers.

The only value proposition that counts is the one that engages your customer.

Why is that important?

Because if you get it wrong it can have horrible consequences for your business. One of my pet grievances is when marketers put up a value proposition that is completely focused on the wrong thing: on their organization.

Not only does it wreak havoc with how prospects view your website, but your sales people will start using it in their prospecting and customer interactions, too.

Here are some actual real-life examples of what I am talking about:

This is a cold email that landed in my in-tray and didn’t get caught by the spam filter

“Dear Peter,

Greetings from (name withheld)! I am reaching out to introduce (name withheld). We are a cross channel ad management and optimization platform. Our advanced algorithmic solutions automate & optimize your digital marketing process to give you a better ROAS. We have deep integration into various digital channels and analytics into a unified dash board. This equips you to easily manage and optimise all your social marketing campaigns. Attached is an introductory deck which showcases our product features. I would love to get on a quick 10-minute introductory call to discuss how our automation platform can add value to your digital marketing efforts. 

How does anytime this week look for you? Let me know when I can set up the call.

Best,

(name withheld), Product Manager”

Did you notice how many sentences above start with “Our”, with “I” or with “We”? What is this email about? Is it about the company and its products, or is it about what they can do for their customers?

So, I say that any value proposition that begins with “I” or “We” leads you down the wrong path because it leads yo to talking about yourself, not what’s in it for your customers.

Here is an example from the ABOUT US page of a vendor website:

“(name withheld) is a fully managed IT services company that focuses its time and energy on developing, maintaining, and supporting technology systems for growing businesses, implementing ERP systems and custom application development. 

(name withheld) has distinguished themselves by working for and with leading companies and service organizations acquiring vast experience with, and on, a wide range of complex, mission-critical and high-volume information systems platforms and roll outs for high profile organizations.”

How customer-centric is this information? What value does it convey?

So, have a look at your own business. On your company website does the ABOUT US page talk about you, or about what you do for your customers?

Check how your sales reps and SDRs: How do they introduce your organization every day?

Does your ABOUT US web page talk about you? How do your sales reps and SDRs introduce your organization?

Sales executives that I deal with tell me that prospects now decide in the first few seconds of a cold call whether they are interested, or not. Once they have lost interest it is VERY difficult to get their interest back. So we only have a few seconds to make a positive impression and to capture the imagination of our prospects.

We have to make our value proposition immediately engage our customers and prospects.

We have to make our value proposition immediately engage our Customers and our Prospects.

So, how customer-focused in your value proposition? How do you get yours right?

It’s easy: just consider everything you do from your customers’ perspective and convey clearly what’s in it for them.

The post How Customer-Centric Is Your Value Proposition? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

This conclusion, while seemingly obvious, in actuality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sure price can be a factor, but remember each business owner has unique qualities and therefore price is just one factor on which they can compete.

So why do most businesses only have price to compete on?

1. They’ve failed to identify their unique selling proposition (USP).

As a business, it’s crucial that you identify your USP – however, this is one element in business that is most frequently overlooked.

A strong USP makes it far easier to market your business and essentially reduces the impact the price has on client acquisition. Clients won’t mind paying a little bit more if they believe they’re purchasing a unique product or service that actually offers more.

So how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

First, you need to determine what it is you offer that other businesses don’t – and why this is the case. A useful way to identify this is by working out which clients you achieve the best results for, and how they are different to your other clients.

Then you need to craft a unified message that stands out from the crowd. Your message should focus on explaining the actual benefit of what your business has to offer, rather than merely stating your functional skill.

For instance, I could call myself a sales and marketing strategist, which is my functional skill, however, I would then be trying to compete in a crowded market against all the other sales and marketing specialists. It also doesn’t truly encapsulate the benefits of what I do. I do so much more than sales and marketing strategy. I help organizations obtain Rapid Growth – a benefit many sales and marketing strategists do not – so I call myself “The Rapid Growth Guy.” You need to think deeper about what you provide; what makes you unique and different.

A while back I worked with a language school that struggled to obtain $50-$80 per hour for private language tuition. It was a very competitive market and many new entrants where willing to cut their prices to the bone to obtain market penetration. The owner’s primary concern was focusing on how to compete with these new entrants; I on the other hand focused on how to avoid the battle all together. Within the first hour of my analysis I recognised that there was one market they catered to where they provided a whole lot of additional unique services that offered the client immense value. For these unique clients they not only educated them on language, but also helped them learn about obtaining guanxi (the Chinese way of building relationships) and the differences in Chinese ecommerce, as well as assisting them with accent reduction. The answer was clear: instead of focusing on private language tuition for $50-$80 per hour, they needed to concentrate on helping executives and their families during the process of being relocated to China, teaching them the skills required to aid their success. This very simple change to the USP stepped an organization from $50-$80 per hour, to an organization that charged $30,000 per client acquisition for the promise of providing their employers with a more successful “total China experience.”

Many businesses fail to separate themselves from the pack, and in the process they become a “me too” business. If you’re doing the same thing as everyone else and cannot identify your USP, then you only have price to compete on. This is not the path for you!

2. They haven’t identified their target market and their marketing strategy is evidence of this.

It’s important that you identify which customer group you offer the most value to – and it’s this target market that you need to reach via your marketing efforts.

Many businesses fail to achieve this. Instead, they attempt to “try to speak to everyone.” Due to the nonspecific nature of the message, these businesses end up “speaking to no one” instead.

Rather than engaging in a blanket approach to marketing, you need to identify which target market will most appreciate your USP and where you can find them.

So how do you do this?

·         Determine which clients you get the best results for – what are their characteristics?

·         Identify the best ways to connect with those particular clients.

·         Tailor packages to suit your “ideal” customer – these packages should focus on your USP.

One of my recent clients was working in the saturated market of auto-responders. As most saturated markets are, this market was highly educated and highly price sensitive. Within just a few hours of working with his USP, it was decided that his true value wasn’t offering auto-responders to a pre-educated market, but instead offering client re-engagement to niches where “auto-responders” was a foreign word.

This resulted in a more informative sales process, as he had to now specify the benefits of his service. However, when it came to price, he could name it. This turned a product sold in a pre-established market for $1,200 into an $11,000 monthly recurring product overnight – and he subsequently acquired three new clients in just two weeks.

Now I know what you’re thinking: is he ripping these people off? In truth NO, because without his additional education, which costs him more to provide, they would have never discovered auto-responder technology and failed to obtain what has now become a substantial return on investment.

3. They don’t know how to sell.

Sales systemization is essential – however, many businesses simply don’t understand how to sell their products or services.

Your business could have a fantastic offering, but if your sales process isn’t refined then it becomes harder than necessary to turn customer interest into actual sales. Many businesses wrongly believe that their products or services will sell themselves, and therefore fail to take the time to implement a proper sales process.

Training is important; sales staff need to understand that sales is a system, and they need to learn how to use these systems to best sell your product or service. Your staff need to know:

·         What to say when a customer calls.

·         How to generate greater interest from email enquiries.

·         How to discuss what your business does at networking events, thereby engaging listeners and evoking questions.

·         How to gain client interest in your USP.

·         How to turn interest into sales.

Each one of the above processes should be systemized and eventually scripted. It’s important that your sales staff follows a tried and tested process that you know has the ability to deliver the best results. Oh, and if you don’t have sales staff, then as the owner of the business it is even more vital for you.

The disconnection in your sales process can be anything from talking about price before introducing enough value, to choosing the wrong method of communication.

I had a client a few years ago that provided writing services to businesses. When a client sent through an email enquiry, he would respond with a question, and after a few emails he’d send through a price. He found that either before or as soon as the price was mentioned, the client would disappear, never to email again. He decided it must be people that couldn’t afford him, and therefore talking to people like this was a waste of his time. To detour these time wasters he put his price on his website. Soon after the enquiries stopped coming and he decided that he was correct; people just didn’t have the money to pay. Only there was one problem: with no enquiries he would soon go broke. After working with him for a very short time, two things became clear:

1.       He was trying to communicate with people that were trying to outsource writing via email – the exact thing that they probably hated and were trying to avoid.

2.       That the price on the website wasn’t a deterrent to people that didn’t have money, it was a deterrent to all enquirers. Truth is, he was expensive and if he couldn’t explain why before price was mentioned, no one would pay it.

Turning his business around was easy. All we did was remove the price from his website, switched the focus of any return email to an enquirer from responding with answers/price to obtaining a phone conversation, and introduced a step-by-step sales call process. His very next sales call resulted in him landing a $40,000 project in just 40 minutes, and just seven weeks later he had closed deals totaling $80,000.

Many businesses fail to implement sales systemization. Without it, price becomes the only factor they can compete on.

Price shouldn’t be the only thing you’re competing on!

It shouldn’t be, but it is for many. While it does work for some select businesses, it simply isn’t sustainable for many.

If you rely too much on price in order to remain competitive, it’s time to change the way you view your business, your marketing strategy and your sales process.

Price is no longer the only factor you have to compete on!

Publisher notes – originally published at https://matthewpollard.com on August 4, 2015.

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A lot has changed in the 25-plus years I have spent in the technology channel. New technologies, partner business models, shifting demographics, expanding communication vehicles, and most recently, new technology buyers with different psychologies, behaviors, and journeys have created a whirlwind of change for vendors, distributors, and partners alike.

The one constant is the complexity of finding, recruiting, and managing thousands of partners globally, each with their own unique set of business practices, target markets, value proposition, and culture. We estimate that there are over 600,000 partners worldwide when you include broader technology channels such as IT, telecom, print, pro A/V, etc. This doesn’t include the millions of companies that are converging into the tech services space from far and wide.

Channel partners know that to be successful, they need to carve out a niche — whether that be by line of business, by industry (and, increasingly, by subindustry), by size of customer, geographically, technologically, and by business model. These six vectors are not mutually exclusive, and buyers of technology are looking for a match across all of them.

Partner programs are going through a major change, as the number of nontransacting partners entering the market far outweighs traditional resale-type partners. Selling through the channel is rapidly changing to selling to and with partners.

Cutting through all these changes and finding the ideal partner profile can be a daunting task. The channel is highly diverse and incredibly decentralized. As someone who previously cofounded a company with the aim of bringing them together, I can assure you it isn’t easy!

Most vendors make the mistake of focusing too much on their own communication vehicles inside their domain. Partners continuously point this out to vendors in their advisory councils and repeatedly mark communication and collaboration as top inhibitors to selling more.

The magic behind finding, recruiting and nourishing a top performing channel boils down to three simple questions about partners:

1. What do they read?
2. Where do they go?
3. Who do they follow?

If you were able to ask all 600,000 global technology service companies (with an average of eight people at each) these three questions, you would learn that there are 56 channel-facing magazines around the world, 150-plus trade shows, numerous vendor and distributor communities, over a dozen associations and peer groups, and countless thought leaders who blog, run social media groups, host webinars and podcasts, and participate widely across the media and show landscape.

Understanding influence across this massive ecosystem is important for vendors. Some partners rank visibility and community involvement highest on their criteria for partnership, even higher than product, pricing, or margin potential.

The SMB (small- and medium-sized business) channel, which makes up over 90% of these firms, is significantly influenced inside its own chosen communities. For example, if you were to look at the MSP (managed services provider) market, you would find 31 distinct communities that highly influence the 50,000 MSPs globally. Targeting these 31 communities is a manageable and, for many vendors, profitable market.

With Google and numerous ratings sites at their fingertips, why do partners choose communities?

During this time of growing electronic ubiquity, the need for trusted and expert sources of information has increased significantly. The amount of competitive choices for products and services, combined with vast information on the internet and endless buzz through social media, has created a scenario where cutting through the white noise has become one of the most important skills.

Communities offer a smaller group of like-minded people (perhaps even competitors) who share similar experiences and challenges, have the ability to collaborate, and help improve decision making. The feeling of belonging is strong, as well as the affinity of membership. There is a feeling that communities are more democratic, as they are built by the membership, and participation is encouraged and celebrated.

Who Starts These Communities?

How Do These Communities Interact With Their Followers?

A dizzying array of new marketing vehicles have popped up in recent years. Traditional media such as magazines and events are very important in communicating to a community, but new media allows innovative ways to extend and enhance the message. From webinars, podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, tweets and LinkedIn and Facebook groups to virtual trade shows, community groups are using as many as 30 different marketing vehicles to drive collaboration within the group.

The challenge with these marketing vehicles is different than in the past. The main inhibitor to effective marketing used to be money; today, it is effective content and delivery. Many of the vehicles I mentioned above are free or cost very little compared with traditional media. Keeping content fresh, relevant, and abundant takes dedicated resourcing and should stretch beyond the marketing department.

Media savvy executives who can keynote an event, tweet about it offstage, promote the message through a podcast, do a media interview, and then write a blog about it later on represent the new model for the future. Messaging that would have required triple-checking through legal a few years ago needs to be sent out just in time and delivered consistently.

Be visible every day.

Community members have very effective personal spam filters. Anything that doesn’t add value to the community will be rejected and have a negative result for the vendor behind it. Selling to a community will be ignored and likely get you kicked out.

Beyond the human requirements of personal interaction and belonging, communities provide tangible benefits to all involved. Unfiltered information based on common experience will always trump random white papers and case studies posted on the internet. The give/get relationships within a community inspire openness and, in most of the communities I have seen, a level of bluntness that is refreshing.

Key Advantages Of Communities

What Is The Future Of Communities — And Why Now?

As information overload continues to flood the channel, communities will continue to form and grow, adding value to members. For example, we have grown from 10,000 software firms a decade ago to now over 175,000. I predict that this number will hit 1 million by 2028. What happens when a big chunk of these firms decide they need a channel?

Specialization will continue to expand as well, driving more need for these groups and subgroups. There is an upper limit to the size of a community where the point of diminishing returns kicks in, the point where coordination of the group and the generality of messaging outweigh the benefits listed above.

Smart communities will organize subgroups before the fringe members go off and launch a competing community. The permutations and combinations of geographic, technology, industry, line-of-business, solution, and business model specializations are endless.

Are you saying I should join thousands of communities?

No. Without some level of focus, you would stretch your organization too thin and not add value anywhere. For every firm I have worked with at Forrester, there are a manageable number of communities full of their ideal partners.

The future of the channel account manager will transition to community managers in order to support the diverse partner ecosystem. With millions of potential partners flooding into the marketplace, those that can find, recruit, manage, and nourish partners at scale will determine future winners and losers.

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