"Who should do what in #sales?"

Alternative title:

"How to drive down the cost of B2B sales without pissing off your prospects"

Ask a stupid question and you get a lot of stupid answers.

(As an aside, Scott Adams’ take on the trope “there are no stupid questions” – is that if there are no stupid questions, what kind of questions do stupid people ask?)

Here’s a few stupid sales questions:

• Which is better, cold calling or social selling?
• Should salespeople do their own prospecting?
• What’s the best way to get a message to a prospect?
• How much research should you do before you contact a prospect?
• How many sales calls should you make in a day?

In fact, they’re such stupid questions (even though sales gurus ask them every day on LinkedIn) that there’s only one intelligent answer to all of them.

That answer is “it depends”.

It depends on what you sell, how much it costs, whether it’s B2B or B2C, which companies you sell to, who you sell to in those companies, how big your company is, what resources you have available and a whole lot more.

Those questions are so generic they are useless (as well as stupid). That also applies to the question I asked in my headline – “Who should do what in sales?” – unless you put in context. So here’s some context for this article.

First of all, it’s about B2B sales. In fact it’s about high value B2B sales. What do I mean by “high value?” Let’s say it’s where winning a new customer is worth at least $250,000. By “worth” I mean the lifetime value of a new customer – that could be a one-off $50k traction or $50k for 5 years.

The people you target in a specific company depends on the size of the company you’re targeting and the size of the sale. A $250,000 sale to an SME is likely to require approval from the owner, CEO or MD while a $250,000 sale to Amazon is likely to be a lunch order that won’t require Jeff Bezos’ signature. Let’s assume that whatever you’re selling is big enough and strategic enough to be signed off by a “C” level executive, or perhaps a SVP in a very large organisation, so you need to aim fairly high.

With that in mind, the first question we need to answer before we can take a stab at “who should do what?” is “what needs to be done?”. So here’s a list of some of the key things we need to do in order to be successful in selling stuff worth $250,000 upwards.

For the purpose of this article, this part and the next one, I’m going to focus on the tasks up to and including the first executive sales meeting with a target prospect. There may be more before then. There’s a LOT after and I’ll discuss them some other time. Here they are:

1.      Decide your ideal customer profile - your ICP.

2.      Identify specific companies that fit your ICP.

3.      Segment and prioritise the target companies.

4.      Decide which people to target – i.e. which positions/roles.

5.      Identify the specific individuals in each company that you’re going to target.

6.      Work out the key priorities for each group of companies.

7.      Work out which aspects of those priorities are important to various roles (e.g. CEOs vs CFOs vs CIOs).

8.      Modify the key priorities by group/role for each companies.

9.      For each individual person in your “A” list targets work out what aspect of the issue they care most about.

10.  Develop messages that will get you meetings with your targets.

11.  Deliver the message & schedule the initial meetings.

12.  Get your online presence in order.

13.  Develop a marketing approach that supports your outreach program.

14.  Prepare for the meetings.

15.  Attend the initial meeting.

16.  Follow up the initial meeting.

Gosh, that’s rather a lot isn’t it? And that’s just to schedule, plan, attend and follow up the first sales meeting. Wow, this sales stuff is complicated. I may have to split this into a few articles. Let’s take them one at a time.

1a. Decide your ideal customer profile - your ICP

If you screw this up none of the rest matters. If you sell ice, Eskimos probably don't fit your ideal client profile.

Someone who tries to sell ice to Eskimos and fails is either a bad salesperson or has been given bad instructions from above. Someone who succeeds in selling ice to Eskimos has either gone to an awful lot of trouble to find a particular kind of ice Eskimos really need and can’t get – or more likely they’re a con man, not a salesperson.

Either way, a good ice salesperson works out who really needs ice before trying to sell it.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have answered my (quite reasonable) question “who is your ideal customer?” by saying “well anyone can buy it” or “anyone with more than 100 employees” or some such.

Because “anyone” isn’t a target market. No matter who you are or how big you are you don’t have the resources, skill or knowledge to target “anyone”. Especially if you’re selling to senior executives.

It takes time, effort and thought to schedule a meeting, even a ten minute one, with a senior executive. Because if they don’t give a monkey's about what you have to offer there’s fat chance of them agreeing to meet you. If by some miracle they do agree to meet you and they don’t really care about what you offer why are you wasting their time and yours?

So the first and most important question is, who is your ideal customer? How big are they? Where are they located? What industry are they in? What niche are they in? How do they define themselves?

(For example, when I sold ERPs to book publishers some of the big ERP vendors classified them under Media & Entertainment. The CEOs of the book publishers classified themselves as, for example, academic publishers or trade publishers. They didn’t see themselves as TV stations or magazine publishers)

I can’t answer these questions for you - but someone has to. Who? As always, it depends.

1b. Who should identify your ideal customer profile?

This is a key strategic decision. Ideally this should be done by your Sales Director in conjunction with your Marketing Director and other members of your executive team and everyone in your company should understand it and buy into it.

That’s assuming, of course, you have a Sales Director and a Marketing Director. If you’re a small company where the founder does the selling that’s a little more challenging. So the answer is, whoever is developing your sales and marketing strategy.

(I’m not touting for business because I only ever have two or three clients maximum at any one time, but when I help my clients develop their Ideal Customer Profile I usually recommend keeping it as tight as possible – there’s no point targeting more prospects than you can actually handle with the sales resources you have).

2a. Identify specific companies that fit your ICP

OK, you’ve worked out who you’re going to target. Now, how do you work out which companies fit that profile – and who does it? Here’s a real-life example.

When I sold ERP software we decided to target two niches: book publishing and consumer electronics distributors. Why? Because one of our directors was from HarperCollins, two were from Sharpe, we already had developed specialised modules and features for those niches, we understood them really well and we had good reference customers.

We only had two salespeople (me being one of them) and we were competing with much, much bigger companies. We had 15 people, our main competitors were local subsidiaries of US or European companies with tens of thousands of people. We needed a competitive edge. Specializing in those niches gave us that edge.

At that time (1994) there were about 40 book publishers in Australia with turnover more than $10 million and about 30 consumer electronics distributors with turnover above that. But who were they? How did we find them?

Someone had to find them and back then it was me. I didn’t have a marketing department (I was it) or heaps of underlings and I soon discovered that buying lists was useless. When we bought a list of publishers we found:

a)      Two thirds of the companies on the list either weren’t book publishers – it included magazine publishers, printers, newspaper publishers – or were too small for us.

b)     Several major publishers we knew about (because some were our customers) weren’t on the list.

I won’t bore you with how I assembled probably the best list of book publishers and consumer electronics distributors in Australia. It took a long time and a lot of detective work but once I did it helped us sell a lot of ERP systems. You can’t sell to people you don’t know about.

So its no good having an ICP unless you can identify the specific companies that fit the criteria. Of course, with the Internet it’s a lot easier these days but here’s a tip – DON’T buy a list. Or if you do, put in the effort to verify it. You can get reasonable lists these days but I'd still be reluctant to pay for a list of companies. If I did I’d check and double check it before I acted on it.

2b. Who should identify specific companies that fit your ICP?

It depends.

OK, that’s the last time I’ll say that – assume it applies to everything from now on.’

This is a task that can be done by any intelligent person, given the right brief. For instance “go out and identify every company with more than 100 people in these countries/states/whatever in x, y and z niches with turnover above $xxx” or whatever your ICP is.

It’s a very important task but it doesn’t have to be done by a high-level person. It could be done by a University student, outsourced to the Philippines, done by a part time worker – as long as they have a brain, have clear instructions and are given guidance in how to do it and the right tools.

You don’t need to find every single organisation that fits your criteria immediately. Find the top 80% or whatever and keep researching to add to the list. You can’t approach them all at once anyway (trust me on that).

3a. Segment and prioritise the target companies

Depending on how many target companies there are and what sales resources you have available you’ll probably want prioritise your targets into three groups, traditionally but not necessarily called A, B and C. These are high, medium and low importance.

You should also segment them by industry/niche because the things they really, really care about are likely to be impacted by the business they are in.

Referring back to my earlier example, the priorities that book publishers had were different to those of the consumer electronics distributors, even though I was selling them essentially the same ERP (we gave it two niche specific names, Bookmaster for books and Powermaster for consumer electronics but it was the same under the hood).

For example at one stage many book publishers’ highest priority was competing with eBooks while at the same time consumer electronics distributors were focused on the upcoming introduction of GST (like VAT in the UK).

I won two new consumer electronics customers thanks to the introduction of GST in Australia. It wasn’t a consumer electronics specific issue but it motivated them to upgrade their system - then they chose us because of our focus on their niche. But if I’d tried to use GST to motivate publishers I'd have had Buckley’s – because books were exempt from GST.

(Buckley’s – Aussie slang for bugger all)

3b. Who should segment and prioritise the target companies?

That’s another strategic decision so the answer is simple. Whoever identifies your ICP.

4a. Decide which people to target – i.e. which positions/roles.

OK, you have a group of companies in a particular niche. What is your hierarchy of target executives? In other words, if you could meet with any person in those companies, who would it be?

I normally, but not always, recommend the CEO, depending on the proportionality of what you sell. My rule of thumb is if they have the ultimate authority to sign off on it I want to start there. If in doubt, be like Michelle Obama – go high.

Next, if you can’t get to her or him, who’s next? So, for example, if you want to speak to the CEO and he’s unavailable who’s your next target? The COO, the CFO, the CIO, someone else?

When I approached the biggest health fund in Australia on behalf of a client I targeted the CEO. (The most difficult thing was finding a phone number for them, any number, that wasn’t a call centre. Once I’d worked out how to do that the rest was a doddle). The CEO’s EA told me he was overseas for 4 weeks and asked if the CFO would do. That was my number two target so he did very nicely thank you.

When I was helping a digital agency our hierarchy of targets was CEO, then CMO, then Head of Digital or CIO. We got quite a few of each.

So it’s important to know that if Mary the CEO, is away your next target is Diane the COO,

4b. Who should decide which people to target – i.e. which positions/roles?

Yet another strategic decision - whoever identifies your ICP.

5a. Identify the specific individuals in each company.

OK, now you know which specific companies you’re going to target. Let’s say there’s 100. You know the roles you’re going to target. Let’s say they’re CEO, CFO, CMO – or equivalent - in that order. Who are they? How do you find out. And who does it?

Again this is important but not particularly difficult. It’s important because it can take a lot of work getting a meeting with a senior executive. If the value of winning a new customer is north of $250,000 it’s worth making the effort to do it properly.

But you don’t want to spend a heap of time, money and effort targeting the wrong person so getting the information correct now saves a lot of hassles later. Especially as it can be done comparatively cost effectively at this stage. This is because the people who schedule the appointments and attend them are a lot more expensive than the people doing the research..

5b. Who should identify the specific individuals in each company?

Again this can be outsourced or done by relatively low cost resources, provided they have clear directions, the right tools and half a brain.

My friend John Bedwany, CEO of the Database Dept. provides demand generation and nurturing services for big organisations like IBM, Google, Cisco, Microsoft and so on. He employs young students who work part time as Contact Discovery people and use LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Google and – gasp, horror – the phone to identify who’s who. There also use some pretty good AI tools and companies to help find the right people, including Signalhire and Seamless.ai.

So the answer is usually the same people who identify the target companies.

Summary so far.

This all sounds like a lot of bother. It isn’t. It’s essential. When we get to the next stage we’re going to be targeting specific executives in specific companies with specific messages that are relevant to them righ now so we get to meet them and sell them lots of stuff they really need.

The people who are good at scheduling these meetings aren’t particularly cheap – or shouldn’t be.

It’s a BIG MISTAKE to use low cost, inexperienced SDRs to reach out to senior executives. I know this is a trend but it’s a stupid trend.

Put it this way. If you’re a senior executive, how happy are you when an inexperienced SDR calls you to qualify if you’re important enough and ready to pass on to their big important account executives? Now, multiply that by 2,000 – how happy are you when 2,000 inexperienced SDRs call you but don’t understand you and your business issues because they’re playing the “sales is a numbers game” game?

The people who attend and follow up on those first meetings are even more expensive. So you want them to be effective and you don’t want to waste their time chasing leads that are a dead end.

So yes, we want to drive down the cost of sales and use the lowest priced resources for the right tasks. But the place to use those lower cost resources is before you start reaching out (and some other areas during reaching out that I’ll cover in the next episode).

If you want the first impression a senior executive in a big, strategically important prospect has of you to be a bad impression by all means scrimp on SDRs. But if you want to drive down the cost of sale AND sell stuff – see the next episode.

We'll cover the remaining steps there. If you'd like to be notified when the next episode is ready "like" this article and comment on it and I'll let you know.

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