Are you an looking for New Revenue for your IT Business here's how

Let's Run a Sales campaign to win the ￡1m New Business that is within your Grasp

Where are those New Clients?

OK so let’s assume that you have started to develop a ‘New Business Culture’. Where do we go next, we need a plan, a campaign. We need to decide what we are looking to achieve, so we need to do some maths.

Let’s say we want to achieve ￡250,000 of NEWLY contracted business from New Accounts over the next 12 months, this being entirely incremental to our existing business. Our target is that this is made up from additional subscription-based recurring revenue (the most valuable).

So we have a look at our existing customers and work out their current average spend and their average size regarding the number of users. Having done this work, we realise that it would also be good to look to increase this average. We can see that we have a lot of small clients who are no longer profitable so we would like to strengthen this average by using our more targeted approach. So if we can win five new customers of 100 users with an average ￡50,000 annual contract Value, we can achieve TARGET.

(The Average spend on ICT across Europe, of a 30 seat company 50k euro, 100 seats 228k euro, 500 seat 1.22m Euro)

We now need to decide whom we are going to sell too, again let’s look at our existing customers to see which industry sectors we have the most domain knowledge. Let’s assume that we have some clients from the retail sector and we have a good understanding of what they look for so will run a campaign against retailers.

So we now need to get a list of retailers within our geography which have around the 100 users. Building the list is a combination of buying some data and research using some or all of the resources that are available to you. I would think that you need a list of no more than 300 (your marketing universe), enter these into your CRM system such that we can use the information.

Now speak to your existing customers and build a couple of case studies and get some testimonials. Build an industry-specific section on your website.

You are now in a position to start your activity; there are lots of ways to do this I am a fan of Email and even Direct mail, but that does not suit everyone. You do however need to find a reason to talk. I would look for the companies on LinkedIn and follow them so that I get visibility of their activity, also follow them on Twitter to see what interests them. There is a staggering amount of articles written about social media; I have my views but not enough space to cover it. If we follow the prospecting rules of thirds, we will have 200 prospects but which 200?

You need to speak to your prospects, how you get that conversation is down to you my advice would be to pick up the phone. If you do the Social Media stuff properly, then you will get some incoming calls, but it would be a surprise if you get enough regardless of what the experts would like you to believe.

We have 200 prospects; it is fair to assume that 100 of these will be looking for something within our period, so we are looking for a conversation with 5% of these, should be possible?

 You then need to keep it rolling on, and you will get more customers next year with less effort as the groundwork, and pipeline of opportunities we have built. 

‘Sales is a process not an Event.'

You will see from this that to put this together correctly takes time and a considerable effort, but when you look after the new clients for three years because of the recurring nature of the business this is a ￡1,000,000 campaign. What does that add to the exit value of your business! These figures do not include any additional wallet share you should win over next the three years.