by Tom Fedro
For a company just getting started, designing and utilizing an outside-in survey is a robust way to begin. If you don’t have any customers yet, watch the market and your ICP (hopefully your first guess is on target!). The outside-in process is easy to pull together, even on a limited budget. It can be done using your internal resources, and you can turn to reasonably priced outside tools and services such as AWeber, GetResponse and MailChimp.
Ensure the questions you design for your survey are on target to deliver the data that will provide the insights you’re seeking so you can analyze and segment the qualitative and quantitative data. Having an outside person without the same biases as the internal people taking a look at this information makes a big difference. You can certainly do it yourself, and then it comes down to having opted-in email address so that you can be in compliance and bypass spam filters, which can be an issue in itself.
There are a few steps in putting together and utilizing an outbound survey.
Develop the goals for the exercise and identify the insights you want to gain.
Who are the customers or prospects that you’re going to put into the database?
Build your set of questions.
Offer an incentive and deploy; the incentive will help ensure your targets complete the survey.
Once you get that data back, analyze it and segment it on qualitative and quantitative data.
Look for patterns to help you develop your message to deliver the impact that makes the most sense.
Some incentives I’ve seen offered have included a Starbucks card for surveys that shouldn’t be that time-consuming. It should take the respondents a few minutes to fill out your questions, so a $5 or $10 Starbucks card is ideal. Alternatively, you can offer a grand prize, such as a $500 or $1,000 gift card to a randomly-selected participant, plus a $5 Starbucks card for participating. See what works for your particular industry to ensure the widest array of responses.
The expected return rate varies, depending on whether or not they are your customer base; you can expect a 40 percent to 50 percent return in that case. If, however, it’s a cold group where the people don’t know your company, even if you’re asking good questions that provoke responses and offering a substantial incentive for participating, you could be looking at only a 10 percent return.
Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with
what you can do. – John R. Wooden
Once you’ve received the results from your survey process, analyze the qualitative, quantitative and unstructured responses to understand trends, opinions and motivations. Pull together the structured, more quantitative data so you can expertly analyze the statistical information. You’ll uncover patterns that will guide you in creating focus groups, online polls or even telephone interviews to drill deeper into the provided data. Once you have a good base of information, determine what’s most important to prospective buyers and existing customers. Hone your ICP to make it tighter whiles sharpening your messages directed at the buyer personas within those accounts.
If your budget can accommodate the spending, consider analysts with paid subscriptions.
Companies such as Aberdeen Research, Forrester, 451 Research, Gartner and International Data Corporation get into heavy detail around what’s going on in the industry for particular companies and industry leaders. These companies do deep-dive research into their verticals of expertise, such as government, financial, healthcare or education.
Naturally, hiring these firms will cost you, but you’ll be armed with the latest and greatest data when you engage your ICP prospects in pursuit of those million-dollar opportunities. The ability to translate detailed industry data into actionable information for your ICP will generate credibility and shoot your salesperson straight to that coveted trusted-advisor seat. If you can afford to bring in analysts and data providers, you’ll receive a detailed analysis of the industry trends and identify the major players who are exceptionally valuable. If, however, you’re a startup without a brand, with few marketing dollars, that’s probably not an option yet.
Don’t fret. Everybody starts somewhere!
We’ve covered the ideal marketing campaigns and components, but what about the company lacking the cash to implement what I’ve suggested?
A company can compensate for a weak marketing department by leaning on other vital departments. Generally, the burden is going to fall on your salespeople, and great salespeople can compensate for that weakness. People buying from people is the equalizer for underfunded or poor marketing. A professional sales team with the skills to reach key decision makers and influencers to discover the pain, authority and money in a direct way while delivering all the necessary targeted messages and value propositions is going to win business.
Salespeople can develop the skill set to write emails that get responses so that they get meetings or calls with the people that are experiencing the pain and have the authority and the money to spend on a solution. In other words, they will have to know how to find PAM on their own. Those skills will be the difference between a good marketing organization that doesn’t have a solid sales team versus weak marketing with a solid sales team. In complex, high-value selling, I would take the latter every time.
We generate fears while we sit. We overcome them by action. – Henry Link
Solid salespeople are the No.1 compensators for weak marketing, but your customer support team is every bit as necessary. Take the time to show a prospect how responsive your team is in a demonstration or evaluation scenario, and how approachable they are when you’re discussing technical issues. It’s a huge win for the company to have technical people that can interact in a professional and easy to understand way with nontechnical people.
Your prospect will appreciate seeing your team put on their technical hats and go toe to toe with their own top technical people on the other side of the table. That’s a big plus for a company to win in business, even if their marketing department’s a few steps behind where they need to be. It’s a well-known adage that people buy from people they like — but they have to know you first!
If you don’t give up on something you truly believe in, you will find a way. – Roy T. Bennett
For a lean company that’s chasing big prospects, there isn’t an ideal number of people you need in your marketing department. It’s more about making it happen economically with the most comprehensive marketing program for the least amount of money. People are the most expensive line item on your P&L, so I suggest a small, efficient crew to spread your message across the entire spectrum of communication channels (from social media to your website to webinars and advertisements) focus on delivering all those components efficiently as opposed to hiring another body. You must always be looking at the return on investment for every application, and that goes for people too. Do you need that many people? Can you do it with less?
While skilled salespeople often make up for lack of marketing, you must still identify your biggest weakness and train your existing resources to eliminate or mitigate that weakness. If you can afford to hire the talent, look at outsourcing (where it makes sense) to develop a stronger marketing department without spending a whole lot of money.
Is marketing the place to shave when you’re looking to save money?
Depending on where you stand with cash flow, take a hard look at your marketing programs under the financial microscope to determine where you stand. How many people are responding to a particular program you’re rolling out? How many people will attend the trade show where you might spend 10 thousand or 20 thousand dollars to exhibit? Evaluate carefully where your marketing cash is going. The marketing department can always take a look at their spending, and it can be an excellent place to save money. Every part of the company from accounting to customer service has to be evaluated from a financial perspective, and marketing is no exception. Everything that marketing is doing must be assessed for return on investment.
Trying is winning in the moment. – Dan
Waldschmidt
Outsourcing seems to be the way of the future.
Many marketing programs can be outsourced quite easily. Some organizations are stepping up to focus on doing sales and marketing for particular companies in particular markets and verticals. They’ve created a scenario where they get a percentage of the transaction or pay for performance. This trend is going to continue, and we’ll start seeing smaller and smaller splinters of company activities that can be outsourced. The gig economy is expanding toward this segment.
With business trending this way, it’s a great opportunity on both sides of the coin for the vendor with the product and the R&D investment behind it to be able to pay based on performance. It’s a great model for the sales team that knows how good they are and understands what it takes for a successful product to be sold. With many applications being increasingly cloud-based these days, you can remotely run much of a corporation.
Beyond the personas and statistics and metrics and content, marketing is ultimately tasked with creating a positive vision of success so the prospect will purchase. Sales then builds on the initial concept and helps the prospect see that vision and grasp how it will eliminate the pain they are currently experiencing. Make it easy for the prospect to use your messaging internally to sell your product and service behind the closed doors of their company where no marketing resource or salesperson is permitted.
Your materials, once placed in the hand of your internal champion(s), should be able to close the deal. When you’re looking at million-dollar-plus transactions, often committees or specific influencers who could be in multiple divisions and various levels of authority are the ones who make the decisions. The vision they have of your business and solution is critical to a positive outcome, especially for that internal champion, so make it an image of success and beauty, one where they can see their pain vaporized by your solution.
Write a compelling story of what your prospect can envision when you solve their pain. Create a vision that they can buy. Perhaps they’re losing millions of dollars due to X, Y and Z, and your product will eliminate that loss. Be clear on how it works, what it takes, and project their return on investment. Make that as simple and straightforward as possible and be able to deliver on it. Your messaging needs to reinforce the vision continually with credible facts and reference materials.
Case study: Halliburton
Oil Rig Tough
Halliburton is a multinational company celebrating a century in service to the energy industry as one of the largest oilfield service providers in the world. The company has hundreds of subsidiaries with operations in 70 countries around the globe. About 55,000 people were employed there at the time of our engagement. Halliburton needed ruggedized computers and software that could be used in their mobile seismic monitoring system and were easily transportable from oil rig to oil rig in a large aluminum fabricated carrying case.
The idea was to take what used to require a massive tractor-trailer’s worth of equipment and shrink it down to fit into a briefcase for easy transport in the rough-and-tumble environment of an operating oil rig platform. Achieving success on this project would eliminate a significant pain — the expense of the equipment on that tractor-trailer and the massive crew of personnel required to operate it — and eliminate the time it took to confirm logistics for its deployment. IBM was the incumbent, and with an enormous contract already in place, they naturally had a tremendous presence at Halliburton.
The authority was the VP of Field Operations who also confirmed that money was budgeted and immediately ready to be spent on the project. A group of technical advisors and evaluators were involved in doing much of the testing of the systems. This is the situation we walked into and PAM was definitely in the building (or in this case, on the oil rig).
So, how did we win this deal?
Navigation of the technical team and the internal politics was crucial. We developed relationships with key technical evaluators and learned what their individual wins were and how to deliver those wins with our product. Whether it was a demonstration of G-shock capabilities, heat and cold resistance or drop tests, we made it happen. We showed them our demonstration systems they could use to rough up, beat up, and test out our offering in their labs, illustrating that our product was far superior to IBM when it came to that environment.
We spent much of our time with the evaluators when demonstrating how our systems worked. We provided complete access to our hardware, as well as to our engineers who built the systems. We showed specifically how our solution would operate in their harsh environment. Lastly, we ensured they were very comfortable with how we had designed the systems to exceed their specifications in the field.
Our bet was with the evaluators — those engineers whose reputations and jobs were on the line with the decision to choose us. We had relationships with the executives where IBM had placed their bet, but it seemed clear the decision would happen with the low to mid-level engineers who owned the project and its results. We, therefore, chose to spend our time with the people with dirty fingers who had to carry our product around. We also used a lot of reference-account selling, such as people at NASA (our product was going up in a space shuttle). We also called in references from some other oil companies that were already using our solutions.
Our process enabled us to make great friends and build relationships with the people who were going to be telling those executives precisely what kind of system they wanted. In the end, we were right, and our friends in the engineering group recommended our solution for a significant win. Our strategy won the day, delivering us a long-term agreement worth several million dollars in new revenue.
Lessons learned
We leveraged our strengths and references to lock this client in for a long-term win which helped solidify our presence in the energy marketplace — and it was gigantic. Once the deal came down, using the Domino Effect, we were able to move quickly into other major energy providers. Halliburton was so well-known that it made the sales cycle shorter and the deal size even more significant, and that allowed us to grow that section of the business by three times in the next 18 months. This case study illustrates a tremendous win and more proof of the effectiveness of the Domino Effect.
The marketing department’s primary goal is to develop the ICP and provide specific metrics that will show the potential pain points in the accounts that your particular solution can eliminate.
Resources of a well-armed marketing department:
basic materials
access to data providers
website
video
ROI calculators
paid-for leads
webinars
trade shows
marketing automation component
CRM component
CHAPTER 4
THE ROLE OF SALES
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. – Bruce Lee
→The different types of sales personalities↓
Let’s face it — nothing happens in business without somebody making a sale. While every aspect of your business team is critical, it’s ultimately your sales team that makes or breaks your business. I’ve alluded to the Maverick earlier in the book, but now it’s time to dive a bit deeper to explain the different types of salespeople. It’s important to understand the different sales types and see how the Maverick fits in.
One of the books I recommend reading is The Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon and Brett Adamson. It’s one of the most widely-read books regarding sales today. The authors describe five seller profiles based on their interviews with more than 6,000 sales reps across 90 companies. They rate them in order of effectiveness as follows.
1. The relationship builder
This sales professional focuses on developing strong personal and professional relationships with her prospects. She’s generous with her time, and strives to meet every customer need, and she works hard to resolve tensions in the relations.
&nb
sp; 2. The reactive problem solver
According to the authors and their research, these salespeople are highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up to ensure that any service issues related to the implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly. If not, they’re all over it.
3. The hard worker
These salespeople show up early and stay late; they always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anybody else on the team.
4. The lone wolf
These salespeople are genuinely self-confident rule breakers and what you might call the cowboys of the sales force. They do things their way or not at all.
5. The top performer is called a Challenger.
The Challenger uses a deep understanding of the customer’s business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. He’s not afraid to share even potentially controversial views, and is assertive with both customers and internally with his bosses.
Now meet the Maverick.
The Maverick is the best sales performer in the marketplace as this salesperson combines the attributes of the two most successful sales types (according to Dixon and Adamson), namely the lone wolf and the Challenger.
A Maverick is an unorthodox or independent-minded person. She’s highly curious, extremely adept when thinking on his feet, and tends to develop exceptionally insightful questions. An unconventional person may seem a bit dangerous when you look at the team structure of most sales organizations, but the most effective and successful salespeople tend to be independent and self-motivated individuals.
The Maverick is a highly engaging, likable individual who knows how to ask the right questions of the prospect in the discovery process to qualify efficiently and to close good profitable business. He’s a risk taker, and she tends to act boldly to stand out in the crowd and apart from the competition. The Mavericks will take the PAM sales process to the highest levels. They possess superior industry knowledge and communication skills that allow them to reach the coveted trusted advisor status in a short period.