Over the last year, our clients have been telling us how hard it has been to grow sales across a wide range of markets. Tight budgets have meant there’s much greater pressure on price, and winning new contracts is harder than ever.
When sales wins are hard to find, it’s frustrating if you feel like all the effort and resource you’re investing isn’t paying off. It’s essential that you focus your energy on the right parts of your sales process, or your energy will be wasted – but how do you know where to focus your efforts?
We regularly work with clients on this issue to help them improve their sales execution and drive growth for their business. There’s no ‘silver bullet’ here – different skills, processes and tools are needed for each stage in the pipeline.
Adding Customers to the Top of the Funnel
In the early stages of the pipeline, when you’re trying to add customers to the top of the funnel, it’s all about building awareness with the right customers at the right time. Are you clear on which customers you should be targeting, and when to target them? When clients are struggling to drive growth, we will typically analyse their current customer base against their potential market and identify ‘fresh pastures’ to target – outlining prospects who are likely to be well suited to our client’s solutions.
Converting Leads into Sales
In the middle of the funnel as the objective shifts towards converting your leads into sales, the focus moves onto understanding your customer’s needs and providing them with a proposition that meets those needs. It’s essential that sales teams are collecting high quality data about each lead to allow productive reviews of both the wins and the losses. It can be difficult for under-pressure sales teams to clearly understand why they’re losing out on sales in this part of the pipeline. We often provide a more independent view, with prospects being more open and honest with our teams to give the true reasons for their decision-making.
Purchasing and Aftersales
As customers make their purchasing decisions, it’s clearly essential that they have a positive buying experience. But the sales work is not done. The easiest sales are usually from existing customers, and it’s crucial that there is a clear process in place to ensure that current customers receive a consistently good service, and that sales and BD teams are exploring opportunities for how to extend or broaden the relationship. We frequently conduct research with current customers to provide a clear picture on what our clients need to do to retain those customers, and identify any opportunities to grow the account.
Throughout the pipeline, implementing the right tools and processes to make sure all these steps are happening can be the difference between rapid growth and losing key customers to your competitors.
Sales Excellence with White Space Strategy
White Space offer a comprehensive Sales Excellence programme that can ensure your sales process is built for success. We blend a range of methodologies – including data analysis, expert interviews, broad market research and deep sales experience – to give you a tailored strategy for growing your sales.
A typical Sales Excellence programme is likely to include:
- Understanding your end-to-end sales process
- Identifying which areas have the most potential to improve conversion
- Outlining ‘best practice’ – taking inspiration from the best performers in your industry as well as successful approaches in adjacent markets
- Developing a blueprint for your sales process to ensure it’s set up for success
Interested in exploring this further? Get in touch!
White Space Strategy offer bespoke strategy support across the B2B landscape. We regularly address this topic for our clients, investigating the nuances in their specific industries.
If you’re interested in discussing the points in the post in more detail, reach out to us to set up a conversation.