Another missed sales forecast. Your product just isn’t selling as expected, frustration is building, and there's plenty of blame to go around. You pull together the Sales and Marketing teams for a brainstorming session but all you get are shrugged shoulders, pointed fingers and crossed arms.
Before committing to another campaign or changing your pricing, take a closer look at where sales are stalling and what might help. Here are three creative techniques to break the logjam and kickstart product sales.
First, check for leaks in your funnel. Hopefully you have a structured lead generation process and monitor your success at each stage of the marketing/sales funnel. Review your metrics to understand what is being lost at each stage. Is your audience big enough? Are they requesting information or a demo? Do they disappear off the face of the earth once the lead goes to Sales? Does the sales cycle drag on, and on, and on . . .? Knowing where things are going wrong will help focus your remedial actions. If you don’t have this data you better start collecting it fast!
Look beyond email opens, clicks and downloads. Those activities can help explain how people engage with your marketing, but you also need to understand lead quality, conversion rates, time spent at each stage and reasons for lost deals.
Talk to the people handling those opportunities. A prospect who disappears after a demonstration presents a different problem from one who wants to proceed but can’t secure budget approval. Customer feedback and sales notes can help explain patterns that the numbers alone won’t reveal.
Knowing where things are going wrong will help focus your next steps. If you don’t have the data, start with a few consistent measures and a shared way to record why opportunities move forward—or don’t.
Hopefully your Sales and Marketing teams agree on the major target markets for your product. If they don't, start here.
Then, instead of re-hashing familiar debates around value propositions, marketing campaigns and sales tactics for each segment, pull out an imaginary magic wand. Hand it to the Sales team and give them 3 wishes that would help their success for each segment.
Wishes must be things that can be controlled, typically related to the 4 Ps (product, price, promotion, place/distribution channel). Perhaps prospects need a simpler entry-level offer, stronger evidence of results or a better way to evaluate the product before committing.
While Sales is explaining its wishes, everyone else listens. Ask questions to understand the problem before debating the solution.
At the end of this exercise you’ll have a matrix of your target markets each with 3 wishes for things you probably haven’t seriously tried before. Work together to evaluate the degree of difficulty of making each wish come true relative to its revenue impact. Slowly you’ll see a plan forming with prioritized actions by segment. If you’re lucky, some wishes may help across multiple segments. There’s no guarantee you can make any of the wishes a reality but at least you’ve listened to the feedback from your Sales team and can assess the effort and investment required to goose your revenues.
Up to now, you may have been segmenting your market by industry, company size, or other familiar grouping. If that approach isn't producing results, try looking at your market differently. One way is to identify leading indicators (events, purchases, behaviours, etc.) that point to a more urgent need for your product. Personal injury lawyers chase ambulances. What are the ambulances for your product?
Look back at the circumstances of the customers you’ve already won to get some clues. What was happening when they began searching for a solution? Did they suffer an outage beforehand? Did they recently relocate? Did they just acquire another company? Is the executive decision-maker new to the company and looking to make a mark?
Segmenting your market differently will suggest new ways to promote your product (now that you have new segments, you may want to pull out that magic wand again).
There’s no guarantee that all this will work, but these exercises may reveal changes worth making. They may also expose a more fundamental problem with your offering, target market or competitive position.
Choose a manageable number of actions, agree on what success would look like and give each test an appropriate timeframe. Review what you learn before committing more resources. The next step might be to expand an approach, adjust the offering, leave a segment or stop pursuing an opportunity.
A missed forecast deserves a clear diagnosis. The aim is to give your team enough evidence to decide where its next investment has the best chance of producing results.
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This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.