Getting More Customers – Using Sales Teams

Sep 21, 2017 Getting More Customers – Using Sales Teams

If you have a product or service that needs a lot of in person interaction to get a sale, then you need a repeatable sales approach and one or more people to carry it out.  Basically you need a process to generate leads, qualify them and convert them into paying customers.  From my own experience things like enterprise software systems need this kind of approach.  In general, something whose benefits are complicated to understand or difficult to implement will need a sales team.  Services like consulting that need to be tailored to the problem at hand, is another example.

Your leads can be generated through advertising, SEO, etc, virtually any channel that we have discussed.  The next step is to meet with the prospective customer to discover more about their buying intentions and explore the prospect’s problem(s) and pain points.  Then you want to understand the implication of these pain points such as lost sales, low productivity, etc.  Next you want to lead your prospect to consider the benefits of addressing the problem.  You want the prospective customer to recognize the value of addressing the problem.  Finally you want to explain how your product or service would solve the problem and capture the benefits of addressing the problem.

Something I learned a long time ago when working with larger companies.  There can often be an imbalance between the benefits to the company and the risk to the person making the decision.  For example, if the person chooses to move to a new software product and it is successful, the decision maker may get a pat on the back from his bosses or a modest bonus.  However if it goes south, the decision maker could lose their job.  Because of this, you need to demonstrate how you are going to control the implementation in such a way that the risk to the decision maker will be minimized or entirely mitigated.  Think about it!  You also need to be sure it is truly a good fit.  So consider using sales teams as part of your marketing strategy and your marketing plan.