Author: dev_admin

Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 31, 2021
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Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

I’ve always had the mindset of staying ahead of the competition, regardless of the gap in between us. And that’s the exact words I tell entrepreneurs who seek my advice. Because once you’ve established a stable business, that’s all the more you can’t stop.

One of the ways you can accelerate your business growth is by creating a Center of Excellence (COE). It’s a vital component of any organization that wants to realize digital transformation for their company.

Gartner describes effective CoEs as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”

In the context of marketing, concentrating this expertise and resources in the Center of Excellence framework means you can scale your marketing efforts with more effective strategies and efficient processes that give more value to every dollar you spend.

Essentially, a marketing COE would ensure you launch your campaigns at a targeted yet practical level.

Some of the many benefits you get out of a marketing Center of Excellence:

Continued education
The pace of change in marketing is a well-known challenge. Your COE creates consistency in education and learning for marketing teams and the overall organization by tracking and updating best practices.

More efficient use of resources
High-demand capabilities like skills, knowledge, and experiences should be centralized to widen the reach of the capabilities and streamline their access across the organization.

Faster delivery
Eliminating bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities increases the speed of delivery, research, development, and maintenance of critical business processes.

Increased quality of services and product
Standardizing best practices enables uniformity of service and product delivery and quality end-to-end customer experiences.

Cost optimization
You can decrease cost by eliminating inefficient practices that reduce redundancy, maximize reusable assets, and optimize the use of all resources.

Ten success strategies that drive results

Creating a Marketing COE takes a significant investment of aptitude, time, and assets. From defining clear principles to continuously improving processes and allowing room to scale, here are ten strategies you can implement to help establish your own marketing Center of Excellence.

Clear strategic alignment and well-defined vision

Every COE must have a well-defined vision that is core to the organization’s strategy and long-term goals. Your marketing should align not only with your business objectives but also with every work you do.

In order to make your solution adaptable to business changes and how marketing evolves, as well as resilient to issues that arise, you need to define clear rules on how to build your COE. Each step in your process needs to have logging, traceability, accountability, and supports your long-term goals. This sets you off in the right foot and promises longevity in your approach while making sure you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Assigning completely independent and holistic team

COEs are not impacted by day-to-day business of an organization and have the flexibility to innovate. Your marketing Center of Excellence must be independent and armed with the right skills to understand and develop end-to-end technology, products, and services. This includes architects, product managers, people managers, technology researchers, etc., bringing competence and talent to the table.

For instance, a COE around content marketing must bring together a team the creates content for sales, video content, customer service, and research team to create a more effective and efficient content marketing engine. Respecting and engaging the expertise of the different disciplines is key.

Led by trusted leadership

The success of a marketing COE hinges on a visionary leader with an unstirring passion for making an indelible mark in the craft. Creating the vision, mobilizing resources, and keeping momentum ensure that your COE can continue to create an impact. Right leadership will:

Create visibility in the organization and ensuring access to relevant stakeholders
Enable authority and decision-making that balances marketing and operations
Ensure the ability to align with the organization’s changing priorities
Facilitate continuous growth of competence and capability

Understanding customer relationship

An in-depth view of customer needs is critical when setting up a Center of Excellence. Insights on industry trends, regulatory changes, innovations, and disruptions are essential perspectives that drive innovation and let you adapt to changes. In addition, predicting potential challenges and risks that can aid customers and forge stronger relationships is an important component in a marketing COE and the 360-degree view of the business.

Enables effective resource management and stable, monitored establishments

Your marketing COE members must have access to shared resources such as tools, templates, calendars, and the like to function efficiently. At the same time, your organization must create a proactive monitoring routine that everyone adheres to for best practice and consistency. A proactive monitoring routine establishes repeated quality assurance and clear testing process that ensures your initiatives always follow best practices.

Strives for demand management and continuous improvement

Identifying execution gaps and areas that need focus and investments enables resource allocation to get work done and improve pipeline management. The fast-changing marketing environment must be foolproof, so business needs are identified and gaps are made known so a resolution can be immediately implemented for both your business and your customers.

A documentation repository for holding all team artifacts can help your COE members check information and learn as they go. This will help accelerate time-to-market and improve quality that hinges on continuous learning and adaptation. And it leaves a legacy that doesn’t rely on specific talents to function.

Promotes value and risk management and coordination across teams

I noticed when working with bigger companies how many divisions, departments, and teams become siloed in the way they work simply because there’s improper coordination across everyone. There are many solutions that allow companies to gain visibility into how work is impacting top objectives and how each body of work contributes to business objectives and KPIs.

Aligns with well-defined success criteria

Measurements drive behavior, and the correct behavior drives performance. It is critical for the organization to define success KPIs that are demonstrable to justify investments and continuous focus on a marketing COE. A centralized tracking, auditing, and reporting ensures that you are always on track of your activities and sees to it that every marketing initiative, project, and effort drives you to your COE’s goal.

Unlike implementing new technology, or redesigning your website, creating a Center of Excellence for marketing is a game-changing action. Once it’s created, it will also require diligence in its updating and enforcement.

Using these principles to roll out your marketing Center of Excellence allows you to latch on to your business goals with a task force that enables you to do so across all aspects of the business. Each one is a critical element to establishing an effective COE. Building it right with the relevant area of focus is imperative to make sure your COE can help your company solve some of the key challenges around key talent and innovation in the long run.

It might be time for you to build your marketing Center of Excellence. Let’s talk about how you can start today.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Tags center of excellence, marketing, marketing strategies

Digital Marketing

My Insights on Rational and Emotional Skew in Marketing

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 27, 2021
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My Insights on Rational and Emotional Skew in Marketing

As the coronavirus created uncertainty in industries globally, companies must figure out how to ensure business continuity. The default response of every organization when the global outbreak hit is cutting costs, laying off people, and postponing some of the plans to endure the effects of the pandemic.

But to me, from the perspective of a CEO, it also presents an opportunity to grow when the economy rebounds, as it eventually will. There’s a way to come out of the crisis as a winner. In fact, 14% of companies accelerated their growth and increased profitability during the past four recessions.

My advice? Do the same for your business and use this as an opportunity to thrive.

Shifts to expect in marketing

With the global pandemic affecting every country and industry, it was easy to predict that the economic landscape would change. Transitions like this happen all the time, and I always tell business owners I advise that sales and marketing will continuously evolve. You can easily be on top today but down tomorrow, so you need to stay ahead of your competition regardless of how large the gap is between your business and theirs. Here are important shifts that will happen in marketing.

Relationships mean everything

Your products and services must deliver on what you promise to your customers, so they trust you and become loyal. Digital marketing is one of the techniques that businesses of all sizes use to engage and build a relationship with their customers. However, customers won’t follow (and will unlikely unfollow) companies that only promote their brands and only post about making a sale.

Use your reach to build relationships by creating content that solicits emotions, provides benefits, offers promotions or discounts, and educates, so your customers value you more than just a place where they get products or services.

Customers are Watching Their Wallets

Many businesses had to file for bankruptcy during this pandemic. Consumers are watching their wallets for how they spend, especially on non-essentials. This also caused many retrenchments and changes in shifts for daily workers. Tighter budgets made customers more conscious about purchasing.

If you aren’t essential, then your products and services will likely be deprioritized. And for that reason, you need to find ways as a business to make your business relevant to their current needs by innovating or repositioning your efforts.

Understand Consumer Paradigm Shift

Creating a target audience is one of the basics of marketing. All business owners I’ve talked to know this as well. So, what’s different now?

Your audience persona has also shifted. Customers are prioritizing health more than anything today. They will choose products and services that minimize risks. And they are also watching their wallets, and they are now prioritizing short-term costs and less on quality or branding.

As a business, you must take a deeper look at what they value most in a brand, the language they connect with the most so that your brand can build a human connection with them.

Consumers focus on home for work and play

Customers today are choosing to stay at home. Despite lockdowns easing and many businesses are opening to restart the economy, the home continues to be the safe space for many.

There was a rise in home cooking and baking, DIY activities, and home improvement during the onset of the pandemic, and they remain popular pastimes today. Innovating a response that makes you a household product or activity amidst these uncertain times is one of the opportunities that you can tap.

Adjusting to new customer habits brought by pandemic

The merits of rational logic and emotional appeals in sales and marketing have been a long debate. Rational logic enumerates product benefits, facts, or statistics, while emotive marketing appeals to consumer’s emotional states, needs, and aspirations. This global outbreak proves to challenge many industries, and the question of rational vs. emotional skew in marketing is being raised.

Emotional marketing can be challenging to do right if you aren’t native to the market you are trying to engage. Several factors can affect the decision-making process—geography, lifestyle, demographics, and so on. If it involves tugging on emotional heartstrings, those factors should be known to make it an effective initiative.

Rational marketing uses facts, data, and statistics. But when faced with choosing between you or your competitors, rational marketing plays a huge part.

That’s because your products not only need to feel good, they must be good.

Use emotional marketing to complement your rational marketing. Appeal to your customer’s desire for a better future and present a proven way toward that better future.

The Four R’s of a sales response

Crisis can be turned into an opportunity, and you can use these four key steps to lead your teams through these turbulent times, using both emotional and rational marketing at your disposal.

Respond

Engage marketing, sales, and service teams fast and stabilize teams, processes, and pipeline plans. Actions demonstrate commitments. This also includes supporting employees and understanding immediate steps that may affect short-term efforts.

Support immediate needs of customers, such as products and pricing
Shift to digital communications and online channels to conquer physical lockdowns
Reprioritize sales, liquidity, and service agreements to cycle money back and retain customers
Equip teams with remote tools to work from anywhere

Reflect

Assess what you’ve planned in the past and what’s in your pipeline to determine the necessary shifts and steps to take next. Review if there are plans that can be moved up to help you towards your immediate short-term goals.

Revisit business plans and other initiatives
Revisit customers and reprioritize needs by segment
Scan competitive landscape for opportunities
Track the pipeline plans and deal with risks

Reimagine

Take your discoveries to transition your current offerings and improve what you currently offer.

Digitize your go-to-market strategies, bring rational and emotional to steer your wheel
Update offerings and prices and make this information act as your rational marketing
Track emerging trends and execute with agility, use it to your advantage when crafting relevant content

Rebound

Take it a step further to accelerate your efforts into rebounding your marketing campaigns. Use it as a springboard to pivot your business and stay ahead of the competition.

Accelerate digital initiatives
Scale e-commerce, digital sales, and inside sales
Personalize customer engagement to build relationships
Deploy agile teams and value-focused stints by balancing rationality and emotion
Set up artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to support efforts
Create a virtual cross-functional team war room to execute rapid responses to identify, prioritize, pilot, and scale long-term initiatives

You want to use these 4 R’s and instill it in your marketing efforts as you use emotional marketing as part of your strategies. There’s no ‘better’ marketing between rational and emotional because both are needed to make your initiatives and efforts work, short-term and long-term.

How are your emotional marketing and rational marketing strategies today? Let’s discuss how you can rebound and use adverse times as an accelerator for your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags digital marketing, emotional marketing, pandemic, rational marketing

Digital Marketing

My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 22, 2021
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My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

A new era of digital marketing is on the rise. Marketing is headed toward being on-demand — not just “always on,” but also always relevant and responsive to the consumer’s desire.

The way I see it, the continued evolution of technology along with customer expectations is fueling on-demand marketing. The more technology evolves to address consumer needs, the more there will be demand for the following:

Instant accessibility and availability
Effective integration of disparate activities in ways that create value
Personalized user experience based on available user data
Easy and convenient interactions with brands and businesses

To achieve this, businesses must mobilize their whole team to deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product use, and marketing. They also need to be familiar with tools for gathering the right data across the consumer decision journey.

Instant Experience

If you’ve been around in marketing for a while, I’m sure you recognize consumers’ desire for more urgency and ubiquity. Because of this, we marketers have gone beyond traditional and digital media to reach our audience. Cases in point:

We found ways to utilize virtualized media, which have become touchpoints with customers who are considering and evaluating products and services.
We take advantage of social media platforms to connect with our audience real-time.
SMS and push notifications are used to alert customers on transactions, promos, etc.

Digital information technologies are essential, as they integrate data on all customer interactions throughout the buyer’s journey. They also provide insights into the best influence pathways for the business and create new personalized experiences for consumers.

All these work together to provide consumers with instant access to products, services, and brands so that their demands are immediately satisfied.

Effective Integration

With the robust programming, data access, and interface opportunities we now have, we’re more equipped to make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver something exceptional. In fact, digital technologies are now capable of integrating disparate sources of information at low cost and at scale for many different domains (think a smartwatch that can track a user’s health data).

The challenge for companies is to look beyond their current interactions with consumers and find effective ways to close the gaps that hamper customers’ digital experiences. This will require businesses to rethink the way they price and deliver their products. How can you effectively integrate disparate activities in ways that create value for your customers?

Precise User Experience

In the coming years, demands for more personalized experiences will intensify. With a single click, consumers can instantly personalize the offers presented to them, using information captured from their interactions online (data footprint).

Even though the privacy, security, and general trust implications are staggering, consumers still willingly provide more data when companies use the information they capture to provide truly helpful feedback, or to offer recommendations, services, and customization tools rather than just push intrusive messaging.

Simplified Interactions

The quest for simplicity has prompted leading companies to provide easy and convenient interactions with their customers. Yet many processes in a buyer’s journey still remain complex and disparate.

To address the demand for simplified interactions, companies must utilize evolving technologies to redesign complex customer experiences. Experiment with approaches that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting.

For instance, use simple gestures to allow customers to personalize their content and user experience. You can also utilize user information to provide secure access to devices and applications, and automatically customize interfaces.

Build Marketing Strategies and Marketers’ Capabilities

Soon enough, or even as early as now, consumers will demand instant and personalized experiences, effective integrations, and simplified interactions. As such, you must prepare your company’s marketing function to effectively navigate on-demand marketing.

Create Interactions Across the Buyer’s Journey

Any company that’s worth their salt is able to define and address their customer interactions across different channels. What we need to think about and create, however, is the entire process of how individuals encounter our brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and interact with it across the buyer’s journey. Marketing and customer research alone cannot give us the whole picture.

As you dive into this, everyone in your organization must be on board and gain a shared understanding of the consumers’ journey. You’ll be able to implement your marketing strategies more quickly and effectively if the whole team has a shared sense of engagement.

Analyze Data and Leverage It

To win over on-demand customers, you must understand them, their expectations, and needs. Then reach them with the right message using the best touchpoints. Data is essential to achieve this. In particular, you need data to do the following:

Define and contextualize trends — Having a clear view of the broad trends in your brand, category, and market is essential. If you want to leverage data trends, track what people are looking for, what they’re saying, and doing.

Measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the buyer’s journey — My experience in marketing taught me that it’s important to have a complete, integrated picture of where your budget goes, which interactions actually take place, and what their results are. In the world of on-demand marketing, multiple interactions happen along multiple journeys. Deploy tools that rapidly track each customer contact with your brand and push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of a buyer’s journeys.

Understand how and why individuals move along their customer journeys — Capturing customer data is key if you want to understand them better. You can use their data to personalize their experience with your brand, which is also an effective way to show customers that you care. They expect brands to be good stewards and users of their personal data, and their expectations for what a brand should know only increases. Information about a customer is the thread that keeps all of their brand interactions immediate, valuable, relevant, and easy.

Optimize Your Marketing Team

To navigate on-demand marketing and deliver new experiences to consumers, marketing teams should be equipped with the right skills and ready to work with other functions within the organization.

Changes may have to be introduced in ways that will transform how campaigns and communities are managed, how performance is measured, and how customer support is provided.

On-demand marketing is inevitable. Across the entire buyer’s journey, every touchpoint is a brand experience, and those interactions just keep multiplying with more marketing channels emerging. To effectively navigate and overcome the challenges of on-demand marketing, companies must:

Bring team members from every involved business unit to understand buyer’s journeys, predict where they may lead, and design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands.
Utilize and leverage end-to-end data across trends, performance, and people to invest wisely and create relevant and valuable solutions for customers.
Challenge the delivery process behind every customer touchpoint. Are you making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities? Are your marketing efforts timely and do they meet brand expectations?

Ultimately, staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand marketing goes beyond compliance — it’s also a crucial basis for competitive advantage.

How effective are your on-demand marketing strategies? Let’s talk about how we can make it better.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags digital marketing, marketing, on-demand marketing, personalized marketing, personalized marketing strategies

Digital Marketing

Five Proven Methods to Launch Better Marketing Campaigns

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 20, 2021
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Five Proven Methods to Launch Better Marketing Campaigns

Running marketing campaigns is one of the main ways businesses can communicate with their audience and acquire new leads. But putting together a marketing campaign takes time, effort, organization, and creativity to work. On the other side of the spectrum, one misstep or off-taste engagement can lead to a PR nightmare; and a poorly-timed launch can waste thousands of dollars and time.

There are hundreds of articles online teaching you how to launch marketing campaigns. They tell you about setting objectives and budget, creating a message, drafting a media strategy, and measurement. All those are true, but outside of those steps, there’s a lot more behind the scenes that you should consider to ensure that your efforts aren’t wasted.

I’m sharing proven methods that worked for the many disruptive businesses I’ve built and acquired over the years. They are often forgotten or neglected but can impact your marketing campaigns significantly.

Get the right people to hustle

Have the right team members in every step of your plan. Not one phase should be more important than the other. Your planning, execution, measurement, and all the other stages in launching a campaign deserve experts who will give the best of their abilities for the tasks they need to do.

Don’t skimp on hiring people for roles you think aren’t essential or have little contribution to your efforts. Regardless of what they do, they are the backbone of your marketing initiatives that may or may not improve your campaigns.

I’ve also encountered instances that business owners rely so much on the number of certifications when deciding who to include in any project effort. Certifications are undoubtedly valuable at times, but nothing beats hands-on experience when turning ideas into full-blown marketing campaigns.

Improve the “how” of getting things done

Typically, the marketing campaign follows specific steps one after the other to complete. Each step of a marketing campaign is crucial to contribute to the bigger picture. However, gaps in the process can become a hindrance to launching great campaigns.

This is one of the things I remind business owners constantly. I can’t count the number of times I’ve met and coached entrepreneurs with the same mindset. When you’re a business owner, it all comes down to making money no matter what you say. You think a lot about the return on investment and how fast you can get it so your money can circle back to the company.

I constantly say that the quality of marketing campaigns is not only influenced by how great the strategy or the messaging is. The process of getting there is just as valuable as the carrot and the results you get.

Some familiar scenarios you may have encountered:

Your strategy team have a lot of basic questions because the campaign goal is not clear
This may mean that the company’s objectives weren’t discussed well, or they were not asking the questions to help them better understand. As a result, they produce possibly good strategies, but they aren’t perfect.

In other instances, if they aren’t provided with the right tools and resources to do their work, they may be less informed about finding the best way to market.

Your creative team may be getting the short end of the stick
If you are working within a timeline and a delay happens, it pushes back the rest of the phases. Your creative team, such as copywriters and designers, may end up rushing the work to meet the deadline that could have been better.

Your data are inaccurate
Baselines and benchmarks are the bread and butter of campaigns. It lets you know how well you performed based on historical information or how other companies in the same industry are doing. If you compare your business to another business from a totally different company, then your campaign really won’t work.

If you’re an agency, there’s also the tendency of clients not knowing what they want
Or sometimes, clients want a lot of things at the same time. You need to help them dissect their goals to prioritize. And if you don’t do that, you may end up launching a campaign that they don’t need.

Prioritize the right work and improve team effectiveness

You may have the right people in your team, but are they assigned the right work that complements their abilities? Oftentimes, business owners only look at credentials when hiring. When they involve a team to make campaigns, it’s often the stars within their roles. Sometimes it’s forgotten that marketing is not just technical abilities. Sometimes you need to involve other people to make the whole campaign more effective.

Maybe you have employees that encapsulate the persona of your target market or have bought from a competitor previously when they had the same problem you are trying to solve. Their inputs can be very valuable to your plans.

From a different perspective, if you are running multiple campaigns on top of the regular work that your task force does, they may not be performing and committing their 100%. They may also be delivered just for the sake of delivering because they need to.

Prioritize what they should focus on at a given time, so their attention is not split between five different campaigns, paperwork, and other projects. This also boosts your team effectiveness because you are utilizing the correct people for specific tasks that may require their experience or expertise and getting their dedication 100%.

Personalize and customize marketing processes for greater speed and efficiency

Flawless execution and agility in a complex, fast-paced market are necessary to launch great marketing efforts. When you have personalized and customized marketing processes that make your efforts more efficient, you simplify the whole workflow for everyone.

Imagine marketing automation to help your team do work. You may spend more at the beginning but save a lot of manhours long-term. You can also reduce human errors because tasks are done by technology specifically programmed to fit your needs.

You can benefit from greater speed and efficiency when you have customized marketing processes tailored specifically to how your business functions. This is an investment that is almost always great for organizations, especially those that are growing fast and need to scale accordingly.

Gain the right visibility to deliver consistent brand experiences

There’s value in both having very select platforms to market and to being everywhere you can. Regardless of which you choose, when you meet the right audience and gain the right visibility you need at the right time in their decision-making progress, then you can deliver consistent brand experiences.

Marketing and advertising efforts are not just about inserting yourself before a purchase decision. It’s also the top of mind when they decide to purchase, no matter how far back they saw your campaign.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it. Marketing campaigns are not just about the most excellent strategy or the best campaign offer. It’s not just about who has the most enormous budget or the best channel to promote. It includes every aspect involved in it—the teams, the effort, the processes to get there.

How does your company launch marketing campaigns? Let’s talk about how to make it even better.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags campaign strategy, digital marketing, marketing campaigns

Digital Marketing

How I Find a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Marketing Strategies

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 16, 2021
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How I Find a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Marketing Strategies

Today’s business environment is very competitive. It’s now a lot easier and cheaper to start a business, especially with technology making every step a lot faster and more efficient. A good example is online commerce. Even brick and mortar companies had transitioned to making online sales, especially when the COVID-19 pandemic caused several businesses to file bankruptcy, and many of those operating were hanging by a thread. This causes several industries to become saturated and even more challenging to stand out from the crowd if you aren’t a household name.

The challenge is to resist becoming like every other business in the same industry. One way to do that is to set your business apart from everyone else— by finding a competitive advantage. Many business owners know the importance of competitive advantage. Still, when I talk to them to discuss the long-term such as decades from now, I’m usually met with questioning eyes or vague answers.

It’s a lot more than just tactical advantages to win now and keeping the business afloat. What you want is a superior, favorable, long-term position over competitors that uses assets, attributes, or abilities that are difficult to duplicate or exceed. It has to be long-term, or it can easily be overturned, replicated, or lose its value over time.

The most basic level includes three key types of sustainable competitive advantage:

Cost advantage: business competes on being the low-cost provider that can consistently build brand loyalty.
Value advantage: business has a differentiated offering perceived to be of superior value.
Focus advantage: a specific market niche with a tailored offering explicitly designed for that market segment.

However, most small businesses don’t have the buying capacity to compete on prices effectively and are not big enough to be al things to all customers in a market. To successfully compete, developing a sustainable competitive advantage based on providing superior value to a specific niche makes the most sense.

Now to help determine a sustainable competitive advantage, here are the things I look at:

Who are your customers?

Before diving deep into what a business’ competitive advantages are, the first thing I look it its customers.

Spray and pray doesn’t work. You need to discover who your customers are, how they perceive you, and how to segment them based on the features and benefits that they care about. The keyword is they, as in your clients. The underlying question is “what market am I trying to reach, and what specific segment am I trying to cater to?”

Examine the customer journey and the customer decision-making process. What makes them abandon their cart? What encourages them to proceed to a transaction? How were you able to upsell or cross-sell? This is also when you should assess how your audience interacts with your content at different touchpoints. What types of newsletters do they want to see? What sorts of promotions make them excited? How do they interact with your engagement campaigns?

Establish a value proposition that grabs their attention but also keeps that attention. It won’t matter if you piqued their interest if it doesn’t translate to the conversion you want.

Who are your competition?

You may know your business entirely, but knowing who the players are in the same field can make it easy to get ahead of them. You don’t see big household names and big brands stopping their marketing efforts. Coca-Cola for example, leads the market shares but continues to innovate and advertise, despite everyone knowing who they are.

As a business owner, you should also be able to predict your competitors’ responses to the actions and decisions you make. If you put out a 5% off, will they counter with a 10% off? If you share a post about ten benefits they’ll get when they buy your product, will they share a similar post, only with twelve benefits? If you put your item on the shelf of big retailers, what would they do next? If you release a new product line, what will they do next? Being able to predict their responses keeps you prepared. It makes sure that you have thought through your decisions and know how to adapt if the situation doesn’t go in your favor.

In the same way, when your customers act, how will you respond? Remember when KFC ran out of chicken in the UK? Several companies used that opportunity to market themselves, using the shortage to their advantage. How will you act on those kinds of opportunities?

Who are you?

It may come across as unnecessary to assess who you are. You know your business well even when you sleep. You can talk about your products all day and pride yourself in building them from scratch. And it’s that exact reason that you need to do this.

All the businesses I’ve owned and managed throughout the past years were a product of my efforts. The challenges I went through, the hurdles crossed, the big and small wins, all of it. But I have come to realize that it’s also that reason that I need to be more critical about assessing my businesses. I may have become too familiar that I forget to look at it from a fresh perspective, from a different angle, or simply even from the eyes of my customers.

Analyze your business position by assessing your essential competencies and weaknesses, core competencies, digital presence, customer lifetime value, conversion analysis. Where do you excel? Where do you need to improve? How do your customers perceive the business based on these factors?

Answering these guide questions lets you determine the targets of your marketing strategy. Overall, it also influence the sustainable competitive advantage that puts your business to the top. Addressing these concerns, identifying problems, and planning next steps can help you solidify your standing to your customers and your position in the industry.

Putting it all together

In this stage, it’s essential to make sure to challenge your initial assumptions. Put on the hat that contradicts all your ideas. Typically, I play the devil’s advocate when planning this with clients. I ask a ton of questions. I challenge every idea. I grill their logic and rationale. In the end, it narrows down the strategies that can be implemented, finetunes the details, and addresses any gaps that may not have been immediately noticed.

Your strategy should be agile so you can adjust to market shifts and demands. The keyword is strategic and not tactical. Think long-term, think how it can change and adapt based on internal and external factors within and outside the industry you’re in.

Once done, this is the time I help businesses come up with convergent viewpoints to stay ahead of the competition. Bringing together what you’ve analyzed so far, along with challenges and realizations you’ve observed, will be the determining factor of your marketing strategy. How you position your brand can make or break your business.

Predicting what happens in the next decade is extremely important once you’ve determined your sustainable competitive advantage because your competitors will also think about how they can take market shares from you and get your loyal customers. If you don’t adapt and stay ahead, then it won’t take long before someone else is ahead and your competitive advantage has been countered.

With the number of businesses I’ve built and acquired over the years, these strategies are proven and tested formulas to create a legacy that disrupts and sustains.

Want to find your business’ sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s discuss how we can turn your business into a disruptive one.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags competition, competitive advantage, digital marketing

Digital Marketing

Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Post author By dev_admin
Post date October 14, 2021
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Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Modern entrepreneurs, myself included, have grown to realize the value of having omnichannel presence for their business. Making this move is essential to compete in the modern retail landscape and to create a sustainable business model that meets the needs of customers.

When you successfully integrate online and offline sales channels to create a cohesive customer experience across different touchpoints, your business becomes optimized for growth. You’ll also be in a better position to overcome unforeseen commerce crises, such as black swan events like a global pandemic.

Now when I say “omnichannel,” I’m not just referring to the practice of selling in multiple channels (which is what you should definitely be doing). It’s also about meeting customers in their platform of choice and making sure that you deliver a consistent brand experience.

Managing different facets of your business across every touchpoint can be challenging. It requires a holistic approach to sales channels, marketing and advertising, operations, and shipping and fulfillment — the pillars that make up the omnichannel success.

1. Identify Your Sales Channels

Sales channels are the platforms where consumers interface with your brand. That could be through ads, website forms or chatbot, e-commerce sites, social media, or offline channels (eg. retail and pop-up stores).

When I develop an omnichannel sales strategy, the first thing I do is identify the channels where my customers are present. Then I figure out the best ways to market through those channels so I can set my business up to gain more traffic, sales, and loyal customers.

My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me firsthand that putting all your efforts in one sales channel at the expense of others isn’t wise. This can cause problems for your business when that channel suddenly becomes unavailable. However, that being said, spreading yourself thin over every possible sales channel in an effort to diversify is also not the best solution.

Instead, train yourself to choose the right sales channels for your business — this is the foundation of a strong omnichannel strategy. With the right mix of channels, you can expand your customer reach, increase awareness for your brand and offers, and ultimately, increase your revenue.

To make sure that you’re choosing the right sales channels, you need to know who your target customers are. Analyze the data you have from your existing channels (eg. your website, online store, and social media pages) and look for common factors among your audience. These could be details like the time and day when they engage or buy more, which platforms your audience spends a lot of their time and money on, and what products or services they purchase most often.

1. Develop and Implement Marketing and Advertising Strategies

Marketing and advertising play an important role in driving brand awareness and sales to your business. In fact, 87% of shoppers now begin their product searches online. This consumer behavior is something you can leverage for your business.

Omnichannel success is more attainable when you deliver what your target audience needs at their current stage in the buyer journey, and you meet them in the right touchpoints. You can achieve this through strategic marketing and advertising.

One of the most valuable things I learned from my business is that I need to make an effort to create a specific marketing and advertising strategy for each sales channel I have. So this is the same advice I’ll share with you. Be purposeful and intentional in what you deliver, as our goal is to meet the specific needs of the consumers we’re targeting.

Take note that the more marketing channels you have, the more complex your campaign management and budget allocation can become. You also have to consider the ever-changing algorithms of the platforms you use. That’s why it’s important to have a dedicated marketing and advertising team, and to invest in the right tools that will help you reach your goals.

2. Optimize Your Operations

An accurate, reliable, and connected operational process is key to an efficient, end-to-end omnichannel approach. Your product catalog data and inventory should always be aligned, and each sales channel must reflect these accurately, along with the shipping information (turnaround time and cost).

If you want to have efficient and optimized operations, you need to automate your systems, integrate your processes, and create a streamlined workflow for your business.

Invest in software solutions that allow integration and give you complete visibility over multichannel inventory. Take it from one entrepreneur to another — it really makes your business easier to manage.

For instance, using a listings solution, you can automate your product publishing to new sales channels, optimize the product content you show for each channel, and unify order management. With an inventory and order management system, you can manage complex workflows around order routing, inventory, shipments, and procurement, as well as support third-party logistics solution integrations.

3. Strengthen Your Shipping and Fulfillment Capabilities

To complete your customers’ experience and succeed in your omnichannel efforts, ensure that your entire operations is able to properly support every step of the buying process, including shipping and fulfillment.

If you think that shipping logistics are challenging, you’re not alone. One study revealed that 53% of retailers identified shipping and order logistics as a significant challenge.

If you’re leaning towards providing in-house shipping and fulfillment, make your work easier by using a shipping software that provides customers with delivery options and takes care of calculating shipping costs. There are also third-party logistics solutions available for outsourcing which handle everything from inventory management, warehousing, and fulfillment.

Other omnichannel strategies worth looking into are:

Creating an excellent mobile experience for your customers
- More than 50% of all internet traffic comes from mobile
- 50% of eCommerce revenue is from mobile users
- 57% of consumers say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed website on mobile
Providing self-service options for your customers — Organizations realize the advantages of automated customer self-service, so they’re now investing in virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels.

As you plan for and navigate the omnichannel sphere, always keep in mind that your goal is to deliver a satisfying customer experience. Remember, a seamless and convenient customer journey leads to conversion.

Expanding to new channels drives growth for your business, but to ensure that you manage them all well and gain ROI from each one, you need a comprehensive plan that addresses each omnichannel pillar. The four tips I shared with you will help you create a unified channel strategy that meets the needs of your customers at the right time and place.

Always be Prepared

Let’s talk about how we can use omnichannel to bring even more success to your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags marketing, omnichannel, sales

Sales

Strategies I Apply to Maximize Networking

Post author By dev_admin
Post date September 30, 2021
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Strategies I Apply to Maximize Networking

Networking is a powerful tool because it gives you private information, access to various skill sets, and power. A broad, deep, and diverse network give you more opportunities in your lifetime. Because salespeople must constantly meet new people and connect disparate groups together, it gives power and influence once you earn it. The richness and reach and the diversity and breadth are what networking is all about.

But networking is not just in trade shows, events, or industry conferences. It can be anywhere— while getting your coffee, waiting in the lobby of a hotel, even inside an elevator on your way to another client. But only great salespeople can convert casual, coincidental, or impromptu conversations into sales conversions. It takes tactical and strategic moves and a lot of preparation and practice to nail down transitioning from small talk about sports and weather to clients signing purchase orders and engagement letters.

There are five phases we go through whenever we meet people. What we do in these five phases determines how we maximize networking for sales. I want to share the strategies I apply to get the most out of every networking opportunity using expert moves that transition you from the first phase to the last.

Preparation

When we think of networking, we immediately know that the first move is talking to someone. But what’s more unfamiliar is how crucial the “how” is when we talk to someone.

Think of it this way. If you’re attending a 2-hour industry event of a hundred people, and you are sure that five out of that hundred is the person you are looking for to make a sale, what steps do you take to make it easy to identify them within those two hours?

You might check if there’s an attendee list available for you to peruse so you can review names and job titles. Maybe you’ll also see if there’s an event hashtag where you can stalk people who post, hoping to find the sales leads you need. You’ll get familiar with their face, and then it’s easy to look for them face-to-face.

But it’s not all the time that you can prepare for networking. You have to be ready at all times, in all places, while being persuasive, influential, and powerful. How do you find the exact person you’re looking for, especially if it isn’t a scheduled event?

The five phases below teach you how to do that, even without preparation.

First phase: The Small Talk

When you’re in an event with the intention of networking, the best way to meet people is to simply walk up to them and make small talk. It’s easy to introduce yourself, ask them how they are, or talk about the weather or sports. But keep in mind that small talk is the window where you can design the exact conversation you want to have. Remind yourself if you’re in the event to have fun or to work, because if it’s the latter, this first step is essential.

How I do it is by starting with a simple question. “Hi, I’m Jeev. How are you?”

Naturally, they will reply to answer your question and ask it back. When they do, I can lead the conversation where I want it to be. The formula is to use one or more of the following:

Say you find your work fun
Say you are a positive person
Say you are busy

These three strategies are more likely to generate the conversation you want to have. Instead of saying “I’m feeling great,” I can make it more insightful with something along the lines of “I’m feeling great, I’m working on three interesting projects right now, and I’m having fun.” It prompts the second phase of this networking strategy where your prospect asks, “So what do you do?”

Second phase: Sales Trailer

In movies, aside from your favorite actors, you get hooked when you watch the trailer. It’s a short sneak peek at what you can expect from the entire movie. It makes you curious, and it teases you on what it’s about or what happens next. The same logic applies to networking. Your sales trailer is your answer to the question, “what do you do?” This is the part where you need to stand out and breakthrough.

As salespeople, we shouldn’t answer this with a sentence that immediately ends the conversation. It should be the complete opposite. It must be interesting enough that they want to know more.

Say something that piques curiosity
Say what you do that is benefit-oriented
Say what you’re looking for

Instead of saying “I work in marketing” or “I am a salesman,” you can give a little bit of an edge to transition you to the third gear. “I run a company called Project Sales, and we help companies optimize their online presence for more organic traffic that generates qualified leads.” It can also be “I’m the sales director for a marketing automation company, and I’m looking to make the next industry disruption for the most interesting marketing tech company I can find.”

Third phase: Differentiator

The question I want them to ask next is, “what does that mean?” The goal is for my sales trailer to be like a movie trailer. I make them want to know more.

This third phase is now your time to share exactly what sets you apart from similar products or services. You tell them a little more about what you do and shift the conversation next to qualifying if they are the person you’re looking for among the lot.

Say what makes you unique
Say what your competitors or the general industry are doing wrong (without namedropping)
Say how you think your product or services can create a valuable impact

In other instances, I want them to ask, “what are you looking for?” because if they are curious, it transitions me immediately to the fourth phase, the qualifying stage.

Fourth phase: Qualifier

If you’re at an event with a limited duration, then you want to talk to the right people, so you find the five among the hundred who attended. This is when I ask impact questions that let me know if they are the people I need to network with to close a deal. Questions such as “How do you think about sales right now in your company?” or “how do you find the current marketing automation industry?” will lead me to determine if they are the kinds of people who would influence the decision of purchasing my products or hiring me for my services.

If you hear about “I’m not into sales, I’m a programmer” or “I don’t think about those kinds of things.” Then you know they’re not the person you’re looking for, and you shouldn’t be getting into a full-blown conversation with this person. This should trigger your exit strategy.

During small talk, I usually insert in the conversation that “I’m actually here for work and would love to meet many different people. I’m sure you’re the same way.”

This insert creates the door to my exit strategy.

I can stay in the conversation for a little bit to wrap up, then transition to “It was great chatting with you. As I mentioned earlier, I’m looking to meet a lot of people today, I’m sure you’re the same way, and I don’t want to keep you.” Then bid my polite goodbye and move to the next conversation and start again on the first phase.

The fifth phase: Exchange

If you find the needle among the haystack, the common mindset is to stay as long as possible in that conversation to make the sale. Wrong.

What I do in this phase is another exit move but turning it into something more actionable. “I do believe we have a lot to talk about! How about I get your business card, and I’ll send you an email first thing tomorrow to schedule a call or a meeting with you to discuss this further?”

Once I get that business card, this is followed by “It was great meeting you, but as I mentioned earlier, I’m here to meet many people. I’ll shoot you an email tomorrow and we can definitely get back where we left off.”

If you found one person among the five people you need to find, you still have four more and need to continue to network until you find that person. You don’t stay with them because it’s almost impossible that you can close a deal on the spot without ironing out all the details, and those take time. You’re in the event to network, and the more you move along from conversation to conversation, the more likely you are to find the right person you’re looking for.

These networking strategies take practice and expert moves to master. The key is to prepare your answer for each phase so you’re not put on the spot, and you can transition to each stage and each conversation smoothly and efficiently.

Sounds interesting? Let’s talk about how we can put these strategies into action for your business.

GET IN TOUCH NOW

About Jeev

Tags networking, networking strategies, sales

Sales

Why I Believe Selling Should Come First and How I Do It

Post author By dev_admin
Post date September 27, 2021
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Why I Believe Selling Should Come First and How I Do It

As salespeople, most of our time is dedicated to talking to clients and closing deals. But aside from that, we have internal stakeholders to manage, administrative tasks to do, emails and messages to respond to, travel time to consider in-between pitches, among many other functions that are part of our role.

We have many responsibilities in our hands, but among all that, our role is still primarily about selling. And to become productive and efficient with how we use our time, tasks that are associated with that should always come first— talking to clients, preparing for pitches, measuring progress against goals, and so on. In addition, we should also plot for the continuous development of our knowledge, skill, and discipline.

The key to becoming a high-performing salesperson is to plan the work so we can work the plan. And that’s exactly how I practice my craft to keep myself in the direction I want to go without overworking myself. I want to share the weekly habit that helps me manage my time better as a salesperson.

Each Sunday, I set aside 15 minutes to establish my priorities and plan how my upcoming week will go. What I do is:

Plot my working time for the week; usually, 7:00 am to 7:00 pm.
Schedule my priorities within the timeframe allotted. This includes meetings that I need to attend or activities that I can’t postpone.
Block times for selling tasks, such as prospecting or attending client pitches throughout the week.
Identify three things that I have to get done each day, usually something fast that I can already get out of the way instead of postponing.
Identify a specific knowledge, skill, and discipline I will develop for the week. I think about things I can do to progress on each pillar, such as reading or keeping myself in check to apply certain strategies during my pitches.
Assess what tasks I have to say “no” to. Prioritize what I can and figure out tasks that don’t really need my attention to proceed.

I use this time to design my ideal week, and at the end, I track how I performed against the standard I set. This allows me to stay on target, become more productive, and make measurable progress week by week.

Here’s how I prioritize:

Selling

All tasks directly related to selling are prioritized and are added first in my week’s schedule. I set aside time blocks for activities that involve pitching to clients and getting more prospects—calling potential customers, sending cold emails, networking online and offline, attending client calls and meetings, responding to client questions, preparing for presentations, and so on.

Self-development

Self-development includes activities related to improving myself. Preparing for skills, I’ll use to sell, practicing my selling and presentation, getting feedback from the team to address any gaps and improve the chances of closing the deal. These are extremely important items that may often be disregarded. But keep in mind, if you aren’t practicing with each other, you’re practicing with your customers. And we shouldn’t do that.

This is also when I can improve my knowledge, skill, and discipline. Activities such as reading a new book on networking, getting myself to ask more impactful questions for the week, or telling myself to start every meeting with a purpose-benefit-check strategy belong as a second priority. As I highlighted in previous posts, our knowledge, skill, and discipline should be continuously evolving and need to be nurtured throughout my career. It should make time for it, and not if only I have the spare time.

Communication

The third priority is all about communication. Following up with client requests, writing proposals to send during my Selling schedule, or capturing stories I need for my presentation. This is also my time to get in touch with customers and go above and beyond by asking for their feedback and how else I can help them.

I also can’t avoid important internal emails, so I insert them in this schedule to set aside the time to respond to any pressing issues I need to address or take action.

Internal

I allocate my fourth priority for any important internal activities that I need to attend. This includes meetings, one-on-one discussions with my team, town halls, quarterly evaluations, updates to stakeholders, and other internal activities and updates.

Tracking

My fifth priority is all about tracking, such as updating the CRM, assessing my progress, measuring my progress against goals, planning my next steps, identifying baselines, and coming up with benchmarks. Everything that has to do with measurement and tracking progress is my fifth priority.

Everything else

All other tasks that don’t fit to the five priorities above are of last importance. These are items that are less important or likely not to have a significant impact if canceled or postponed for a couple of days—for example, administrative tasks such as organizing my files or updating my personal documents and reports.

We attend a lot of meetings and calls and respond to many client communications throughout our day that we tend to overschedule. That can hamper your productivity and affect your relationships with both internal and external stakeholders. It’s also important to allot ten to fifteen minutes of time in-between meetings to digest meeting discussions and action points and help you prepare for your next meeting.

Developing the habit of being clear about capabilities you are working on, tracking them, and scheduling time to work on them is very important as a salesperson. The three pillars of selling— knowledge, skill, and discipline— will only matter if you continue improving them and learning new things. Once you are able to put them in your schedule as part of the plan instead of “when you have time,” the easier it is to become a habit and help you become a high-performing salesperson.

About Jeev

Tags planning, sales tips, selling

Sales

Preparing to Make a Sale: The Competitive Talking Points I Use

Post author By dev_admin
Post date September 22, 2021
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Preparing to Make a Sale: The Competitive Talking Points I Use

Part of the sales process preparation phase is getting ready to talk about the competition. I discovered that this is practically an unavoidable topic when I’m having initial conversations with potential customers. As salespeople, it’s our job to be ready for this type of conversation at a moment’s notice.

So how do you prepare to talk about your competitors? You need to have talking points for each one of them.

Over the years, I’ve observed that a lot of salespeople are unprepared to talk about the competition. They either attempt to avoid it or talk about their competitors at such a high level that they fail to provide the key differentiators the customers are looking for. Worse still, there are salespeople who resort to disparaging the competition.

If we don’t prepare competitive talking points, we fail to draw a clear distinction between the solution we offer and what our competitors offer.

The Competitive Talking Points Outline

I wanted to be able to talk about the competition with my customers, so I learned and mastered the Competitive Talking Points Framework. It’s designed to leverage your knowledge of the competitors, and to enable you to deliver it with skill and discipline. Every company creates a competitive analysis, and it’s something that we as salespeople should be familiar with.

Here’s a good outline to follow when you’re creating your competitive talking points:

Recognize your competitor’s strengths. You can also cite specific examples.
Provide key insights on what makes you different from your competitor (eg. what your solution focuses on compared to theirs).
Invite the customer to evaluate their needs.
Share the solution that you offer. If it’s not what the customer needs, give them valuable advice on the solution they should pursue.

Now let’s put this framework into action so we can deliver high-value competitive talking points:

“Company XYZ is one of the best in the industry when it comes to traditional and out-of-home advertising.

Where we are different is that we focus on helping B2B and technology companies with their digital marketing by offering consultative services and creating strategies and campaigns around our clients’ specific goals.

As you think about your current needs, if you lean more towards traditional advertising, you should definitely be talking to the folks at Company XYZ.

But if you’re looking to explore more ways how your business can grow through digital marketing, then we sure hope that you consider us.”

The Competitive Talking Points Framework

Now let’s unpack the three principles that make up the Competitive Talking Points Framework, and I’ll share with you how to practice each one of them. First, let’s look at the aspect of Discipline.

Do not disparage the competition
You should never find yourself doing this, as it’s unnecessary and it’s simply not a good practice. It’s always better to take the high road. I learned that it’s important to stay vigilant on this, as it’s possible to get caught off guard by a comment that implies you’re better than your competition. If we’re not ready to answer that, we might say something that comes off as criticism of our competition.

Being ready at a moment’s notice to talk about the competition allows us to elevate the conversation and stay above the fray.

Take control of the situation
When we prepare ourselves for a conversation about our competition, we avoid becoming reactive. Rather, we’re able to take control of the situation.

Determine if the competitor is a better fit within that moment
We can use this opportunity to qualify or disqualify a potential customer by determining whether the competition is indeed a better fit. While this would be bad news, we’ll be better off finding out now than wasting more time with a buyer who’s just going to go to the competition.

Now let’s look at the Knowledge facet of the framework — what you should learn before facing a customer.

The competitive landscape
The framework requires us to have a solid understanding of our company’s competitive landscape and where each competitor plays.

Your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
We also need to know what our competitors are good at and where they need improvement. However, you’ll notice that in our example above, the weaknesses are not mentioned. Rather, we focused on the competitor’s strengths.

Why? This goes back to mindset. As salespeople, we should want our customers to make the best decision, and they can only do that when they’re objective.

Sometimes, our competitors are simply a better fit for their needs. Our job is to figure that out fast, so we don’t waste any time. The Competitive Talking Points Framework allows us to close or let go of a deal faster when we share what we know about how the competition might solve a customer’s challenge. Then we can draw a key distinction between our approach and our competitor’s, all while remaining positive and consultative.

The framework helps us build trust quickly because we’re simply stating the relative positioning of the competition and letting the customer decide what’s important to them.

Lastly, let’s examine the Skills required to use this critical framework.

Listen to the customer’s needs and concerns
Start by listening. You must listen closely to what the customer is saying, where their needs are greatest, and what their concerns are.

Ask the right questions
You should also know how to ask the right questions so you can:
Test assumptions
Discover other needs
Determine priorities
Understand the role of other possible stakeholders

Once we have listened and asked the right questions, we’re more able to, at a moment’s notice, use the framework to focus our capabilities on the things that matter most to the customer, and differentiate those capabilities against the competitor’s strengths.

Mastering the Competitive Talking Points Framework takes tons of skill and practice because you need to be able to do it in real time. It’s part of the preparation phase of the sales process because you can know the framework in advance, and then use your skill and discipline to take charge of that conversation.

What the Framework Does

The Competitive Talking Points Framework allows us to build trust, credibility, and confidence by demonstrating to each customer that we not only know the competitive landscape, but that we respect our competition as well. And that we can speak intelligently and concisely about each competitor in a way that’s focused on the customer’s needs.

Going on Offense

Once you’ve learned and practiced your competitive talking points, the expert move is to go on offense. Rather than wait for the customer to bring up a competitor, why not lead?

Are you throwing an unnecessary wrench into your sales process by doing this? Quite the opposite, actually. As salespeople, we should assume that our customers are also evaluating our competitors. And we should take the lead in bringing them into the conversation.

How might this look in practice? Let’s take our example from earlier:

“Based on what you have shared with me, I got the impression that you are more familiar with traditional advertising.

You may have heard of Company XYZ, as they are one of the best traditional and out-of-home advertising agencies.

As you think about your current needs, if you lean more towards traditional advertising, you should definitely be talking to the folks at Company XYZ.

But if you’re looking to explore more ways how your business can grow through digital marketing, then we sure hope that you consider us.”

May I know where digital marketing is on your priority list?”

What Going on Offense Does

Going on offense is an expert move. So what does it do for us?

Demonstrates our proactiveness
We are demonstrating that we’re unafraid of the competitor by bringing them into the conversation proactively.
Shows our care for our customer’s needs
If you’ll notice in our example above, even though we went on offense by bringing up our competitor, we also showed genuine care about tackling our customer’s real needs.
Builds trust
By taking the lead in talking about our competitors, we are building trust in the process. With expert moves like this, we become a trusted advisor.

Are you integrating risk into your sales process by mentioning a competitor? Maybe. But remember this: the credibility we gain by focusing on the customer’s real needs far outweighs the risk of bringing competitors into the conversation. So, we should not be afraid to be proactive on this topic.

Always be Prepared

You never know when your competitors might come up in your sales conversations, or when you might need to take the lead in talking about them. It’s always best to be prepared by having a clear understanding of your competitive landscape and by mastering the Competitive Talking Points Framework.

Let’s talk about how we can put these competitive talking points into action for your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

Tags competition, sales

Sales

How I Filter My Target Market to Sell Better

Post author By dev_admin
Post date September 19, 2021
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How I Filter My Target Market to Sell Better

I have built many different disruptive online businesses over the course of several years. I put in long hours of research, market study, strategy, and finetuning for each company I built.

One thing I realized in doing so is how important filtering my target market is to sell better. Because at the end of the day, regardless of how much time you allotted in development or how much of a killer your product or service is, it isn’t worth anything if no one pays for it.

Introducing my offering to people is a lot more than the number of reach and impression I get. It will only matter if I’m reaching the right people.

Pains and gains are a big factor in doing this. The Vitamins and Painkillers Sales Tool is a great start to becoming a high-performing salesperson. Narrowing my target market makes it easier for me to tighten my messaging. Suppose I try to communicate with multiple audiences, in that case, it will dilute the message because the language I use and the angle I take may not apply to all. For example, how you talk to the Products lead will be very different from talking to the Chief Operating Officer. Their problems and priorities are different from one another.

Refining your filters by challenging

It’s easy to say that my target markets are Fortune 500 companies or CXOs. But there’s a lot more to know what kind of profile I want to sell to. You want to refine your filters by challenging your filters until you can’t challenge them anymore.

Pick apart your logic or bounce it off someone you trust to help you dissect your target audience further. Instead of letting yourself think that your target market are just technology companies, you narrow it down further so you know exactly how you should communicate with your intended prospect.

You can’t be lazy when filtering your target market. And many salespeople and entrepreneurs get this wrong and get them into trouble.

Don’t let others simply tell you that you did right, instead make it your purpose to do it the right way the first time before you run into missed opportunities and failed pitches because you didn’t.

Filtering my target lets me think about the tiniest details that can get me closer to my goals. Some questions I typically ask myself include:

What pain am I helping them solve?
Who am I going to talk to within the target company?
How long will it take to engage them?
How easy will it be to find prospects that fit who I am looking for?
Who are my competitors?
How do I position my services against these competitors?

Taking the time to filter my targets gives me two immediate benefits: one because it forces me to think through who my actual targets are— people who are living the problem, not just near the problem. It prevents me from wandering off pitching to the wrong people who won’t be affecting the decision-making process. It helps me think concretely about the ultimate pains and gains they can get and makes the whole process faster. Second, it allows me to test my messaging to the same people. When you think of the specific pains you want to eliminate for them or the gains you want to help with for a group of people, it allows you to tighten your messaging. Instead of testing different messaging to different people with different needs and not making sense to any of them, this is the chance to make the messaging more concrete, telling them exactly what they need to hear.

“All things to all people” is one of the biggest mistakes made by salespeople and businessmen. Instead of sending generic details about my services and hope it’s what someone needs, I gain the ability to let them see the value I can do for them better.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, says, “Cast a narrow net and really concentrate on serving those customers… Once you’ve monopolized your own, small market, you can gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets”. And that’s exactly what filtering your target is about.

Selling to customer type

Another common sales territory is through customer type. Say you are selling software that uses artificial intelligence to determine when machines can break down. The pain eliminated by your service is removing the guesswork of finding out when. For gains, you make the processes more efficient and help companies ensure uptime.

Here’s how you may be able to filter it:

Filter based on the type of business you want to first sell to.
The industry you may want to tap first is likely companies that rely on machines for their sales. Such as manufacturing companies who will incur losses when production halts.
Filter based on manufacturers running on high volumes.
Companies that produce high volumes require high uptime reliability.
Filter based on high uptime need and high volume.
This can be Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) such as food and beverage companies.
Filter based on the team responsible for those requirements.
In this scenario, this will be the operations or the production department.
Filter based on the people responsible within those teams.
Within the operations or productions department, there will be the reliability or quality assurance responsible in making sure the manufacturing process is uninterrupted.
Filter based on specific people who feel the pain of downtime caused by unanticipated failures.
These can be the people who are responsible in checking those machines regularly.

Filtering targets when selling to established companies

When filtering based on specific companies, you usually stretch your reach too wide. Suppose I were to market to established companies. In that case, I want to focus on the very people who can influence a decision. For example, if I were to sell a payroll service software and want to target a big manufacturing company, here’s how my filtering can look like:

Filter specific to the team involved.
This can be the human resource division of the company.
Filter to the specific team.
With thousands of employees, the company likely has a specific the department in charge of payroll.
Filter to the specific unit.
Who are the people involved in payroll services who may need this software?
Filter to the specific group.
There may be a task force responsible for handling payroll for the different levels of the company.
Filter to the specific person.
Who am I going to call and sell to? The payroll director or manager.

Filtering targets when selling yourself

Selling yourself is another common thing we all need to do in sales. But when you’re looking for a place to get hired, you filter out opportunities just as much as when you are selling products or services to others.

You know the role you want to go for, maybe a marketing manager or a sales lead. You know why you’re a great fit in the role because you’re a great communicator or a great manager. Your experience and interest are in the technology industry. You want to stay within the general location of New York because you don’t want to transfer to another region. And you want to be in the big league by targeting to join Facebook or Google.

Filtering your targets when selling yourself can go more than that, and here are examples:

Filter companies with a specific pain or gain that you can help on.
Are you the type who gets constant feedback about your communication skills and bridging teams to create harmony? Then it makes sense to look for companies who have this challenge that hinder them from expanding their portfolio.
Filter based on which department you want to join.
If you want to be the marketing manager then it likely belongs to the operations or sale and marketing team. By this point, you still don’t know who to talk to, and that’s what you need.
Filter based on the specific unit under that department.
That may be under the sales team or the marketing operations team.
Filter based on the exact role.
This may include the sales director or the marketing lead who currently feels the pain of miscommunications and the HR manager who wants to gain credibility by hiring a great marketing manager. From this, you can engage with them in the proper messaging, pain or gain to build your case for hiring.

Takeaways

Filtering your targets lets you become more specific in how you engage with your prospects. The more specific you are, the tighter and more concrete your messaging is, because you can show the exact value you can give to them by helping them eliminate pains or reach gains.

If you fail, then it may be a message problem, in which case you can tweak it to be more concrete. Or it can also be a product-market fit problem, where the industry may just not be ready for you yet. That’s when you can pivot to a different set of targets to filter, craft your message, and try again because another industry may benefit from it.

Not sure how to move forward? Let’s talk about how you can do the same for your business.

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About Jeev

Tags filtering target market, sales, sales tips, target market

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