Quadrant 2: Customer Retention Strategy for Increased ROI

March 14, 2022December 15, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

Hubspot has shown that customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed by as much as 60% in recent years, making the customers that you do have that much more profitable to your business. As McKinsey notes, if you’ve already spent a sizable amount of time and money to acquire a new customer and they churn early in the process, you’ve lost out on the full potential revenue of that customer. Their study goes on to show that what’s separating top-performing companies from their competitors today is how efficient their customer retention strategies are.

Customer retention is hugely important in today’s business world. Falling under the 2nd and 3rd Quadrants of the Four Quadrants of High Growth model, customer retention is all about encouraging existing customers to buy more一 either of what they’re already buying (Quadrant 2), or related products (Quadrant 3). Optimizing your customer retention strategy can lead to considerable perks.

Many companies tend to take their paying customers for granted, placing most of their marketing budget in Quadrant 1 and favoring customer acquisition over retention. Invesp found that 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition whereas only 18% focus on retention. It’s only when unsatisfied customers churn (and their revenue is halted) that these companies realize how crucial it is to invest in Quadrants 3 and 4. More importantly, they see how important it is to see all the Quadrants as important sources of revenue rather than just the first. In a study by Invesp, 70% of informants reported that it is cheaper to retain than acquire a customer, and indeed, existing customers are both 50% more likely to try new products and 30% more likely to spend more on them than new customers. Customer retention can be a game-changer if you invest in it. Bain & Company found that even a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% ROI. That’s a five-fold return.

Fortunately, there are a series of proven strategies that today’s industry leaders are using to boost customer retention and drive Quadrant 3, all of which will be discussed in the following sections.

Customer Support Strategy

Your target audience in Quadrant 2 already uses your products and is familiar with your brand. In order to promote the likelihood of them ordering more from you down the line, make sure you have excellent customer support. You want to develop their trust in the idea that your company is helpful and easy to work with. That way, they’ll be incentivized to become more involved in your offerings and might even become open to buying other products (i.e., joining Quadrant 3) down the line. If customers are unsatisfied with your company after purchasing from you, they’ll be highly unlikely to order any more from you. Conversely, customers that feel well-connected to you through good customer support will be all the more likely to engage with promotional offers or discounts to buy more.

Remember that, from your customers’ perspective, everyone who works in your company is there to support them一 that includes Marketing, Sales, and everyone else, for that matter.

Also, remember that the best support strategy is to continuously educate your customers on how to use your product better to realize the returns they are looking for.

Customer Journey & the Buying Process

Current customers who have already vetted and approved your company are among the most valuable contacts for marketing campaigns. Make sure to keep your brand at the top of their minds even after they’ve made their initial purchase with you. The best way to do this is through email marketing一 by offering them promotions, discounts, or even premium services as a perk for buying more. Try to send at least one promotional email a month to keep connected with your customers and make sure these campaigns incentivize them to buy more. Update customers on new features that increase ease of use and efficiency and let them know about related products they may be interested in.

The buying process in this Quadrant should be as simplified and easy for the customer as possible. On your end, too, it should be very low-touch and standardized; automate as much as you can and shoot for the majority of your purchases in Quadrant 2 to be completed without the direct involvement of a Sales rep. The operations should resemble a self-serve portal where customers can easily order more of what they want and have those orders fulfilled immediately. Automate pricing, contracts, and order fulfillment to ensure the buyer’s journey stays as seamless as possible.

KPIs & Strategy Sharing

As with any business strategy, the best way to improve your effectiveness is by measuring and analyzing the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). McKinsey found that customer retention success is best measured through customer-oriented metrics, such as website traffic, customer engagement time, response time, and conversion rate. However, other figures matter quite substantially here. The customer experience is important and metrics in customer frustration (perhaps with bugs on the website or with the products), a slow load time, or a poor onboarding experience can all highlight crucial areas that may need improvement.

As these KPIs are analyzed and improvements are made based on them, make sure these valuable sources of information are not limited to just part of the company. Make sure that customer insights are shared across the entire organization, and specifically mutually updated by the Sales, Product, and Marketing teams. Feedback of this type will ensure an overall and constant improvement in customer retention that is propelled by a concerted effort across multiple departments.

Recapping

These days, it’s becoming increasingly more costly and time-consuming to acquire new customers, making it all the more important for companies to tap into the full potential of their existing customers in Quadrants 2 and 3. Quadrant 2 is all about encouraging customers to buy more of what they already use, and the key to maximizing this customer retention can be found through the following steps:

Grow trust in your company through excellent customer support
Simplify and incentive the buying process
Track KPIs and share customer insights across the company

Considering that even a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% ROI, customer retention is a great place to commit resources and boost sales. You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Quadrant 1: High Growth Sales Strategy

March 14, 2022December 7, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

According to Hubspot, customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed in recent years, increasing by as much as 60%. What this means for B2B companies is that it will be crucial, now more than ever, to have an effective Sales strategy that will optimize customer acquisition and drive down costs. Customer acquisition falls within the first Quadrant of the Four Quadrants of High Growth model, which is a highly effective sales strategy that helps B2B companies optimize their Marketing and Sales resources through segmentation to achieve the highest ROI.

Quadrant 1 is all about attracting new customers to the customer base, with a general goal of growing it by 15-20% each year. This is normally where companies throw the most money, especially as compared to the other three Quadrants, and because customer acquisition costs have only gotten higher in recent years, it makes sense to invest in a highly effective strategy that will use these funds as efficiently as possible. In the following sections, we’ll look at the strategies industry leaders are using today to drive growth in Quadrant 1.

Content Strategy

Since Quadrant 1 is largely about attracting new customers to your company, content will be the most important element of a successful high-growth sales strategy. The Marketing and Sales teams should come together to define what marketing content needs to be created to drive prospects through the various levels of prospect awareness, which range from completely unaware to engaged and actively searching. This content should be created with the goal in mind to produce the desired amount of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and so a level of automation is required here to provide prospects with the right content as they engage with entry-level materials. To read more about the Funnel Framework and how prospects progress through their buyer’s journey via content, click here.

Hubspot has outlined the best content strategies we can employ to drive growth in Quadrant 1. Content marketing is quickly emerging as one of the most effective ways to reach new customers. Not only does it alert them to the existence of your company and expertise, but it also offers valuable, free, insights to them that will build their trust in your brand. Within this area, you can provide blogs, content offers such as ebooks or guides, and even videos that will all surface when prospects research their company’s pain points online. To drive results here, search marketing (both paid and organic) can be used to ensure your online presence makes an impact on your Quadrant 1 growth.

Additionally, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to directly reach and engage a customer base. Nurture emails can help convert new subscribers by delivering helpful information and slowly increasing brand awareness, and in later Quadrants, new product information and discounts can increase customer retention.

Sales Strategy

On the Sales end, having a broader, formal strategy is crucial to ensure you meet that goal of increasing the customer base by an annual 15-20%. This is done best by defining the qualification criteria that make a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and then by mapping these criteria into the Sales Operation and Sales Automation system. The automation of this process will ensure that Sales immediately follows up with SQLs, and a thoughtfully-designed compensation program can incentivize agents to drive the Sales Cycle through lulls.

Onboarding & Customer Support Strategy

Once we’ve reached a sale, the customer experience becomes only more important. The goal here is to turn new customers into happy and satisfied ones within 2-3 weeks一 and having a strong onboarding and customer support strategy can help here.

Learning how to use a new product can be tricky, especially for working professionals who may not have much time to dedicate to their understanding of your process. According to Salesforce, a great thing to keep in mind when crafting your onboarding strategy is to keep it simple; streamline your instructional content so that only the most essential items are present during the first steps of the onboarding process. That way, new users won’t be deterred or overwhelmed when interacting with your products for the first time.

Additionally, have an abundance of various materials available to them to reference during and after the process. This can include blog posts, video tutorials, instructionals, or even email sequences delivered over a set period following the purchase. To ensure things are going smoothly, it can be helpful to send out a follow-up email a couple of months down the line, which has the added benefit of delivering customer insights about the onboarding process.

Overall, the process must be as quick and painless as possible for the new customers. At a broader level, it can be helpful for the onboarding team to be organized around facilitating an efficient process for the customer; at the start of the process, outline each key component and assign agents accordingly. This will allow them to complete the onboarding process efficiently and with the highest level of accuracy.

After the onboarding process is complete, make sure that the customer support is there to keep customers happy and loyal to your brand, important needs that fall under Quadrants 2 and 3.

Recapping

Quadrant 1 is all about attracting new prospects to your customer base, and creating a high-growth sales strategy can drive ROI in the face of increasingly expensive customer acquisition costs. Having an optimized content strategy, an automated sales strategy, and a simple, easy-to-use onboarding process can all drive sales Quadrant 1 and prime customers to remain for Quadrants 2-3.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

How Prospect Education Can Drive the Sales Funnel

March 14, 2022November 30, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

The Sales Funnel is a way of defining the process. Prospects will go through when getting educated enough to want to meet with Sales. In the following sections, we’ll be breaking down the three stages of the Sales Funnel that make up the buyer’s journey. Additionally, we’ll highlight which Prospect Education content will be the most helpful to Prospects at each stage. Content is becoming increasingly important in the B2B Marketing world today. Studies have shown that the use of Prospect Education content is now one of the top strategies for 77% of B2B marketers.

Because these stages relate to different levels of engagement and awareness, the content that should be sent out to buyers will differ depending on what is the most relevant to their interest level. What’s important to note here, too, is that actively searching and fully engaged prospects will enter the funnel from the top like everyone else一 but will then progress through the stages very quickly, hence why it’s so helpful for Marketing to nurture Educated Prospects to meet with Sales.

Prospect Education is the best way to drive the Funnel; attracting more prospects to the Top and helping others advance to the Bottom and eventually on to meet with Sales.

Top of Funnel (TOFU)

The Top of Funnel (TOFU) is where your prospects begin their buyer’s journey. Depending on what level of Buyer Readiness each individual prospect is at, the speed at which they progress through the funnel will vary.

Before prospects can reach the TOFU stage, they must first get acquainted in some way with your company. Demand Generation content is broad, less targeted content that’s meant to attract new prospects to your funnel. This type of content should be created to attract the most people possible and to be broadcasted easily to a large population. The emerging strategies Marketers use today are mainly SEO (optimizing access to blogs, podcasts, or other content) and online ads (perhaps on Google, Facebook, or YouTube), which can all attract attention to, or at least spark awareness of, new products.

In engaging with this material, the Prospect is sent to a landing page that describes the asset and if they are interested, they’ll fill out their contact information (typically start with just first name, last name, email, and title). Then, they’ll get added to the top of funnel.

For these unaware Prospects, having online content readily available is the only way for them to find their way into your funnel. Additionally, for Prospects who are already aware of their problem and are close to purchase-ready, letting them find your content is the best way to escalate them quickly through to the Sales level.

Once a prospect is added to the top of funnel, they’ll therefore need quite a bit of education and nurturing before they may graduate to later funnels, and they often repeat the cycle in TOFU a couple of times before progressing.

What prospects need at this stage is lead generation content, which is generally shared with them through email nurturing. This will still be very broad and educational in nature一no need to give them the hard sell just yet. Instead, it will build up trust over time as they slowly start to recognize their problem and realize the power of your solution. Light, easily digestible content like relevant blogs, short quizzes, or engaging infographics can all educate buyers at this level.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

As TOFU prospects engage with the content you send them in their targeted nurture emails (clicking, downloading, etc.), they’ll eventually work their way down the funnel to the middle, at which point the marketing content to be sent to them will become a little more specific and targeted.

MOFU prospects make up about 20-30% of your target market and have generally already begun to have conversations with Sales to assess their options. At this point, Marketing’s job is to give them all the information they need to see why your company is their best option. This content will be more specific to your solution in particular and can take on a more aggressive sales approach. Content like buyer guides, case studies, white papers, third-party analyses of your product, and competitor comparisons are all good options for prospects in this range.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Once the prospect has narrowed down their options to a select shortlist and has started looking at pricing, they can be moved to the more Sales-oriented level at the bottom of the funnel. Clicking on the demo/meeting request button will also instigate this. BOFU prospects represent around 3-5% of your target market and are already fully aware of their problem and of their options in resolving it一they just need to find which product is the best fit.

Actively searching prospects will advance to this level quickly if Marketing educates them effectively when they initially reach the TOFU. Otherwise, prospects can reach this level through extensive prospect education during their buyer’s journey.

BOFU engagement will lean more towards the Sales side of Marketing, with the ultimate goal being to book a chat with a Sales rep and sign a deal. Chats about pricing, appointments, and deliverables, and customer testimonials will all be relevant to BOFU prospects at this point.

Recapping

Having the right content in Prospect Education available to Prospects during their buyer’s journeys will help them advance down the Funnel and encourage them to eventually meet with Sales. It’s important to have content available that will meet them where they are in their buyer’s journeys. To read more about this type of Prospect Education, and why it’s so important post-Pandemic, click here.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Educating Prospects: Why It’s Crucial in 2021

March 14, 2022November 23, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

The Pandemic changed how we do business in countless ways, and the business leaders who have thrived post-Pandemic have been those who have adapted their strategies to the new demands of their clients. In any business world, but especially that which we’re seeing today in the wake of the Pandemic, educating prospects is crucial in order to ultimately meet with a Sales rep. In the following sections, we’ll be talking about how buyer behavior has changed due to the Pandemic and how the savviest (and successful) thought leaders in B2B Marketing have adapted their Prospect Education to thrive in today’s new business landscape.

How the Pandemic Changed Buyer Behavior

When the Pandemic hit, the business world was pushed almost completely into the online realm. This reshaped how B2B buyers and sellers interact with each other and business in general. Since much of the buying process went virtual, many buyers shifted their approach to online buying. Reportedly, 68% of B2B buyers now prefer to do most of their product research online—before ever meeting a Sales rep, and even partly as a prerequisite to meeting one.

When Prospects start realizing they have a problem in their business, they’ll go online to research what it may be and how they may solve it. Often, they’ll come across a variety of products and will then research each promising one to narrow down the ones they’d like to talk to a Sales rep about. During this buyer’s journey, they’ll engage with different types of content that they may come across online; blogs, white papers, videos, infographics, and more.

Buyers today are used to finding most of their product information online and independently, meaning that they’ve taken much of the Prospect Education you need them to have about your products into their own hands. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you react to this shift. If you have an abundance of relevant, helpful content out there for them to find in their research, this could actually optimize your Sales process. However, the content they use to make a decision could just as easily be that which they find on your competitor’s site…

What this means for Marketers is that it’s important, now more than ever, to meet Prospects at every stage of their buyer’s journey with relevant, helpful content that will give them the information they need to advance down the Sales Funnel.

The Three Levels of Buyer Readiness

One way we like to classify Prospects is by the stage of buyer readiness they’re at in their buyer’s journey. As Prospects move along the buyer’s journey, they follow a fairly predictable route that begins with them being oblivious to their problem and eventually ends with them realizing their issue and actively searching for solutions. It’s crucial to understand and break down the various levels that each buyer traverses along this journey to target them with the correct content for the stage they’re currently at. In other words, someone who isn’t currently sure of what problem they’re having isn’t going to want to see a case study just yet.

Level 1: Prospects with No Clue

These prospects are oblivious and unengaged, just beginning to feel and take note of a pain point in their business, but they may not know that it’s a problem yet or, if they do, they won’t know how to fix it. They’ve begun some light research into the symptoms of their problem and are starting to understand the various potential options they have to solve it down the line. For those that are clueless, the marketing challenge is immense. You need a way to deliver messages to them, which generally comes from Lead Generation content such as blogs, infographics, or online ads.

Level 2: Exploring Prospects

Exploring Prospects are interested but not yet engaged. They’re fully aware of the problem they’ve been experiencing and are actively seeking to solve it. They’ll be researching all of the products available to them and interacting the most with those whose content is the most informative and relevant to their needs.

At this stage, they should have ample access to relevant and helpful information to learn more about how they may solve their problem. They likely won’t be ready to talk with Sales until they’ve learned enough about the issue and their options to solve it.

Level 3: Actively Searching Prospects

Actively searching and fully engaged prospects are deep in their buying journey and have likely narrowed their list down to a few options that have stood out to them along the way. They’re now searching for the final information that will let them decide on which solution to employ to solve their original problem.

Content at this stage should be targeted for those at this advanced level of buyer readiness, like comparisons between your product and your competitors’ or more in-depth content like case studies and white papers.

It needs to be pointed out that a “Contact Us” form will not cut it here. You must provide them with a way to schedule either a demo or a call with one of your sales reps, on their own and see that the meeting is set on their calendar as confirmation.

Why it is Critical to Educate Prospects

As mentioned above, prospects these days like to complete the majority of their buyer’s journey before they meet with a Sales rep. In fact, a study found that around 70% of B2B buyers both define their needs and locate various solutions before agreeing to meet with reps, meaning that what buyers today want is not to be sold to, but instead to be assisted along their purchasing process with the right information that will supplement what they already know.

It is critical to educate prospects along their journey so that they have all the information they need to want to book a meeting with Sales. We already know that this is the case with B2C; it’s been shown that consumers are 131% more likely to buy after being exposed to early-stage educational content. Keeping in mind the human behind a B2B decision-maker, we can apply this knowledge to the B2B realm to understand just how important prospect education is. Indeed, a study found that 96% of companies agree that customer education is important, whereas another study showed that 69% of B2B marketers point to relevant content as the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. In short, the more educated prospects are when they meet with a Sales rep, the higher the likelihood that they’ll make the deal. It’s up to marketing to educate prospects so that the leads that Sales receives are all actively searching for solutions and are fully engaged with the product.

In a day of a majority-virtual purchasing process, the products with the most relevant content will win the most meetings with Sales reps and ultimately earn the most closed deals. Since actively searching and fully engaged prospects are the readiest to buy, the only question now is from whom.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

The Four Quadrants Model of High Growth

May 7, 2023November 20, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

The Four Quadrants of High Growth is a highly effective sales strategy that enables B2B companies to optimally deploy their limited marketing and sales resources to maximize revenues. This model divides a company’s total addressable market—first vertically into two halves of customers and non-customers, and then by product into existing products and new ones.

Unlike other segmentation strategies that mostly focus on non-customers and can be difficult to implement, this system ensures that Sellers look at the entire potential market for growth. This includes their existing customers and new markets that they can enter.

https://www.somametrics.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=4484&action=edit — SOMAmetrics Four Quadrants – click to enlarge

We discuss each of these highly targeted strategies in the sections below. The end result is four quadrants representing different levels of risks and relationships:

Quadrant 1: Increase Customer Base

Increase customer base using the Four Funnels Sales Methodology.

Quadrant 2: Increase Usage

Make it simple for existing customers to order more of what they already use.

Quadrant 3: Introduce New Products

Sell to current customers products they are not currently using by upgrading, up-selling, and cross-selling new products.

Quadrant 4: Enter New Markets

Selling new products to new customers. This is the same as entering a new market.

Download this white paper to learn how to sell effectively in all four quadrants!

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Quadrant 2 has the lowest perceived risk from the buyer’s perspective, followed by Quadrant 3. The quadrant with the highest risk is Quadrant 4, since there are no references yet. Quadrant 3 is selling to non-customers who don’t really know the company. What we need to do in terms of marketing and selling is, therefore, quite different from one quadrant to the next.

In Quadrant 2, the seller hardly needs to educate customers on the company or product since they are already very familiar with both. At the other extreme is Quadrant 4. This is a totally different market from the one(s) to which the seller has traditionally sold, and the likelihood that Quadrant 4 buyers have adequate familiarity the company or its products is quite low.

Therefore, using the same approach for all quadrants will not work—marketing and sales efforts will likely be overkill in Quadrants 2 and 3 while insufficient in Quadrants 1 and 4.

We can segment our total addressable market into these quadrants and optimize our messaging, offerings, and resources for each. This is more likely to maximize revenues at the lowest costs possible and maximize our net income.

This approach is one of the foundational strategies of the Predictable Revenue Model; it’s designed to position a company to achieve a consistent High Growth rate.

Strategy Matters

Companies that out-perform their competitors do so primarily because they execute a defined strategy. They don’t try to go after everyone with the same message, product, or offering. They segment first, then tailor everything to fit that segment.

Segmentation makes it easier to isolate the right opportunities for a given company and highlights the right strategies to win those opportunities. Because you have the right message and the right offering for the right customer, you can shorten your sales cycles and increase your closing ratios. Effective B2B marketing naturally leads to effective B2B selling.

This is the essence of strategy – focusing limited resources on the best opportunities in the most optimal way to maximize results.

This strategy makes the segmentation process more intuitive. It also makes execution simpler and more full-proof.

Each Quadrant is Different

We all know that if we really want to sell our products and services, we have to tailor them to our customers’ preferences. We tend to forget this is just as true regarding how we market and sell our products. Our methods must be tailored to the customers’ buying preferences.

Marketing/selling to existing customers is totally different from marketing/selling to non-customers. Even for existing customers, there us tge marketing/selling necessary to get them to order more of what they already purchase. Then, there’s the strategy that gets them to try new products they haven’t used before. We know this is true from our own direct experience as customers.

Sometimes the right strategy is just to automate and make it simple for customers to order whenever they want. Why slow them down by having them talk to a sales rep?

At other times, there is a great need for consultation before sales can happen. Case studies, demos, and references are all a necessary part of reassuring a skeptical buyer that she won’t regret her purchase. Yes, the high-powered consultative sales rep is essential with a new customer buying for the first time. But he would be expensive overkill for a simple reorder of a product a customer has purchased dozens of times before.

The essence of this approach is matching a company’s limited resources to the type of selling opportunities a company has and doing this as an everyday process – increasing sales, while keeping the costs of selling low.

There is only so much you can sell to existing customers. And sooner or later, for one reason or another, you are going to lose some customers. You must acquire new customers not only to continue to grow but also to replace those you lose. That’s what growth in Quadrant 1 is all about. What is the best way to achieve this?
Quadrant 2 is about customers who buy a given product. Your goal is simple — get them to buy more of what they are already buying. How do you get them to do that?
Once you have maximized your revenue from Quadrant 2, the only way you can get more business from existing customers is to get them to buy some of the other products you sell. That is how you get growth in Quadrant 3. What is the best way for you to do that?
And if you are very successful and grow fast, you will eventually saturate a given market segment and can’t sell more there. You will need to find a new market segment where you can continue to expand, which is what Quadrant 4 is about. How do you do that?

When you look at it this way, it is apparent that your sales and marketing strategies in each quadrant need to be sufficiently different.

However, it is not just the strategies that need to be different. Systems, processes, assets, and people you use in each quadrant also need to be optimized for that quadrant to achieve the best result in that quadrant. Just as you look for a specialist when you want to see an eye or heart doctor, you also need specialists if you need to grow each sector on a consistent basis. You need people who are experts in each quadrant.

End Goal–Predictable Revenue Growth

If you have one-size-fits-all marketing and sales strategy, you will see mixed results. You want reliable, predictable revenue growth. That is why you have to optimize sales and marketing for each Quadrant.

We discuss these highly targeted strategies in the sections below:T

Q1: Increase Customer Base

Q2: Increase Usage

Q3: Introduce New Products

Q4: Enter New Markets

Schedule a call with us today.

Increasing Your Customer Base (Quadrant 1)

Selling More to Existing Customers (Quadrant 2)

Selling New Products to Existing Customers (Quadrant 3)

Developing New Business (Quadrant 4)

Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development. This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Three Things Sales Enablement should include in BDR Training Packs

March 14, 2022October 22, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

In the increasingly competitive market today, connecting with leads can be challenging for BDRs. Often, the difference between a successful cold call (one that ends in setting an appointment) and an unsuccessful one is as simple as how efficiently the Business Development Rep (BDR) can talk with prospects. Often, BDRs are the first people that prospects will interact with during the purchasing process, meaning that their training must be a top priority for any Sales Enablement program.

Keep in mind that most companies hire junior-level people to work as BDRs, who then have to talk business with people who are necessarily senior-level decision makers. Unfortunately, many BDRs simply don’t have the experience to lead effective conversations with senior-level decision makers and they struggle to engage them enough to want to meet with Sales.

As the first contact between your company and leads, it’s important that BDRs are educated enough on current business topics relevant to your prospects’ industries to have meaningful and efficient conversations with them. Sales Enablement programs can craft BDR training packs that’ll give them the information they need to quickly qualify leads and schedule appointments. The following will cover the three most important types of content Sales Enablement should include in BDR packs.

BDR Training Content #1: Industry Briefs

Industry Briefs give BDRs the information they need to have relevant, insightful conversations with prospects about their industries. Intimate knowledge about the target industry is the first step in crafting compelling reasons as to why the product is relevant and to have meaningful connections with leads.

Industry Briefs in BDR packs should describe the:

Industry at large
Growth Rate
Basis of Competition
Key Challenges

When Sales Enablement gives BDRs this solid, broad basis of information, they will empower them to have interesting and helpful interactions with the leads they connect with. A knowledgeable and well-trained BDR can ultimately foster trust with your company and encourage leads to talk with Sales.

business development representative having sales enablement training meeting

BDR Training Content #2: Persona Profiles

With the industry already in mind, Sales Enablement should also focus BDR training on the specific personas they’ll be reaching out to. That way, BDRs can come from a place of familiarity with a prospect’s industry while also connecting with them on a more personal level. Sales Enablement programs can give BDRs the focused and relevant information on each of the target persona types that will allow them to make more meaningful personal connections with leads, thereby increasing their willingness to talk with Sales.

Persona Profiles in BDR packs should describe the persona’s:

Responsibilities
Goals
Key Concerns

This information, in conjunction with a more broad familiarity with the lead’s industry, will give BDRs the insights to connect more efficiently with leads. In a market where buyers are becoming increasingly difficult to reach (especially over the phone), Sales Enablement’s efforts in this area will boost appointment set rates.

BDR Training Content #3: Discovery Call Guides

With the above background information in place, the next important step for Sales Enablement programs is to equip BDRs with practical, usable strategies to employ when cold calling. Discovery Call Guides can boost the efficacy of BDR training packs by giving BDRs the skills they’ll need to direct conversations, quickly qualify leads, and set up appointments with Sales.

Discovery Call Guides in BDR packs should give them:

Strategies to open calls professionally
Key messaging to use
Opening questions that will quickly qualify leads
Tactics to lead conversations to appointments with Sales
Voicemails to leave if applicable

A recent study found that BDRs who asked 11-14 questions on a call had over 70% success rates, whereas those who had less suffered up to a 30% lower success rate. Having the right training can make a surprising difference in whether or not your BDRs book appointments. Discovery call guides are vital to standardizing and optimizing how BDRs engage leads over the phone.

business development representative training to make discovery calls

Recapping

Effective BDR training packs can empower relatively inexperienced BDRs to stand out in today’s competitive business environment. Quickly making solid and personalized connections with leads over the phone is an important way to set appointments with Sales, and Sales Enablement can dramatically increase BDRs’ effectiveness in this role through optimized BDR training packs. For more information about Sales Enablement and BDR training, click here.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Sales Growth by the Numbers

September 15, 2021August 10, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

Sales Pipeline Value

The value of your sales pipeline is the single most important factor impacting your sales growth rates. Therefore, increasing the value of your sales pipeline increases your company’s sales growth rates — it’s as simple as that.

Before we explain why, let’s take a step back and define what a sales pipeline is and what it does for a company. A company’s sales pipeline provides employees with a representation of their prospects’ progression through the sales process toward making a purchase.

With that said, how can a company determine the value of its sales pipeline?

According to HubSpot, sales pipeline value can be defined as “The total value of every qualified opportunity in your pipeline.” Here, the emphasis is on qualified leads — leads that have the right budget to purchase, the authority to make purchasing decisions, and the motivation to purchase your product or service. Qualified leads are valuable because they are more likely to convert into sales than unqualified leads.

Unqualified leads, on the other hand, lack the key characteristics we highlighted above. This means that they are less likely to work with your sales team and move through your pipeline toward making a purchase.

All of this is to say that high-quality leads are crucial to increasing your company’s sales growth rates. To illustrate this point, let’s crunch the numbers.

Sales Growth by the Numbers

If you improve three key factors by 25% — your average deal size, average closing ratio, and average sales cycle — the result is a 73.6% increase in annual sales. The charts below provide a visual representation of this strategy.

	Current Metrics	Improve by	Improved Metrics
Avg Deal Size ($)	100,000	25%	125,000
Avg Closing Ratio	25%	25%	31.3%
Avg sales velocity (days)	120	25%	90

Impact of Improved Average Deal Size and Closing Ratios
	Current Sales	Improved Sales
Avg # of Monthly Meetings	10	10
Avg Closed Deals/Month	2.50	3
Avg Sales/Month	250,000	390,625
Increase in Sales		140,625
Increase Rate		56.3%

Impact of Sales Cycle Reduction
	Current Sales	Improved Sales
Annual Sales ($)	2,250,000	3,906,250
Increase in Annual Sales ($)		1,656,250
Increase Rate		73.6%

As these charts demonstrate, these relatively small 25% increases add up to a sizable difference in sales growth over time. Ultimately, these charts illustrate that sales growth rates are impacted by a variety of factors, each contributing to the number of closed deals.

However, the keystone to increasing sales growth rates is increasing the number of high-quality leads in your sales pipeline. We’ll go into more depth regarding why this is true in the next section.

High-Quality Leads = Higher Sales Growth Rates

As we discussed above, sales growth rates depend on the number of high-quality leads in your sales pipeline, which means you need more of them to increase your sales growth rate. But how do you attract more high-quality leads without also attracting a ton of unmotivated, low-quality leads?

Never underestimate the impact of your content. Content plays a crucial role in reaching your potential customers — from catching their attention, to directing them to sites where they can learn more about your product, your content acts as the foundation of a more robust sales pipeline.

In part, this is true because buyers today expect to find all the information they need to make an informed purchase through vendors’ websites. Increasingly, buyers prefer using content and self-serve methods to make purchases, rather than speaking with sales reps. With this in mind, your content must provide useful and highly relevant information to your specific target market. This will encourage prospects to see your company as an authoritative resource and to seriously consider making a purchase.

Similarly, because high-quality leads are motivated and have the right budget and authority to make a purchase, they are more likely to close faster, at a higher rate, and at full price. All of these elements add up to a sales growth rate that is significantly higher than one that relies on low-quality leads.

To learn more about the value of high-quality leads and their impact on sales growth rates, download this paper.

Digital Marketing: The New B2B Sales Strategy

May 7, 2021April 20, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

The Digital Transformation

Many marketing experts have discussed the current digital transformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—by now, we all know that while in-person events are suspended, it’s necessary to use digital marketing to reach potential buyers. But a deeper understanding of this transformation reveals that this trend has been accelerating for years and that it will probably continue to shape marketing strategies for the foreseeable future.

Technologies that were once used as simple cost-cutting devices are now becoming more central to revenue growth. In the past, technological transformation would have been spearheaded by CIOs or CTOs. Now, CEOs and executive committees are playing a more active role after recognizing technology as a key revenue driver.

With this in mind, expanding technological capabilities is a matter of necessity for today’s marketers to deliver revenue growth for their company—which brings us to our next point.

The Growth Mandate

In the past, marketers might have been tempted to measure the impact of their strategies using metrics like clicks and email open rates. It can be difficult to measure the return on investment (ROI) of marketing strategies using these metrics, leading to a disconnect between marketing and the value of the business overall.

On the surface, metrics like clicks and open rates might seem important—these are valuable tools to measure your company’s visibility online. However, these metrics are not directly correlated with revenue growth. Even if a million people click on your ads and open your emails, what matters most is how many people take it a step further than that.

This is further compounded by false positives, where anti-virus software clicks on every link you placed in your email to ensure there are no malicious links, thereby creating clicks that were originated by software, not your intended recipient.

This is at the heart of marketers’ new mandate—to drive revenue growth. As a marketer, you must target the people who are more likely to be interested in your company, research it further, and eventually start a conversation with sales. By taking full responsibility for delivering these Conversation Ready Leads (CRLs) to the sales department, marketers can decrease their cost per conversion. By focusing more narrowly on the target market, growth marketers can streamline the sales process as a whole and deliver on their mandate to increase revenue growth.

How to Reach Buyers Online

Let’s consider the facts. First, we know that 77% of B2B buyers reported spending more time researching products online in 2020 before purchasing. We also know that 67% of buyers report relying more on content in 2020 to inform purchasing decisions than they did in the past. Finally, we know that today’s buyers are over 70% of the way through the decision-making process before contacting a sales representative, on average.

Taken together, these statistics illustrate the increasing importance of content in the buyer’s journey. For the majority of their journey, buyers rely entirely on your content to help them determine whether your product is right for their company or not.

This begs the question: what do buyers want to see in your content as they are researching solutions online? One key element buyers look for is a strong understanding of their individual industry—76% of today’s buyers expect more personalized attention from providers based on their specific needs. They want to know that vendors understand what they need and can deliver specialized solutions.

Storytelling is another crucial element of content creation. You want your content to draw readers in, intrigue them, and make them want to know more about your product by the end of it. This is why well-written and well-designed content is key to increasing conversion rates. But it takes a significant amount of skill and experience to create this level of high-quality content—which comes at a high price.

The Cost of Compelling Content

Experienced marketers are well-aware of the costs of generating content in-house. To create the amount of content you need to feed your marketing campaigns, you have to hire three full-time employees. This includes a senior writer, a junior writer, and a designer—and that’s the bare minimum.

Marketing budgets are already stretched thin as marketers try to deliver revenue growth in the era of the digital buyer. Wouldn’t it be great if you could focus your in-house team’s efforts on generating demand and delivering CRLs to sales while still receiving all the content you need to reach buyers online?

Fortunately, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario—with a subscription-based service to take care of creative content production, marketers can focus more of their efforts on more strategic functions. This is exactly what the Creative Content River™ does.

SOMAmetrics’ Creative Content River™ delivers all the creative content you need while saving you 55% to 58% of the cost of full-time employees. With content creation increasing in both importance and cost in the era of the digital buyer, the Creative Content River™ can increase your conversion rate and help you maximize your company’s growth.

To learn more about generating creative content as a subscription, download this white paper.

The Importance of Performing Regular Sales Diagnoses

July 2, 2021February 9, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

Too often sales teams jump to quick, ineffective solutions when they see a drop in sales performance. By doing so, they fail to address the root cause of the problem.

When quotas aren’t being met and sales performance is dropping, one typical response is to blame the salespeople. However, the truth is that performance issues can arise from a myriad of sources, including management and process issues.

The effective solution to fixing sales performance issues is to diagnose the problem before you prescribe a fix. To address drawbacks with sales performance, companies need a clear understanding of the issues they are currency facing.

An accurate sales diagnosis examines the current state of sales and any associated challenges. Sales diagnostics can identify hard-to-find issues, allowing companies to address hidden issues at the source and concentrate their efforts on areas that actually need work.

Diagnosing Sales Performance Issues

When analyzing the health of your sales team, there are several factors to take into account. Some key components include revenue metrics (everything from revenue to order sizes to product popularity) and competitive position (what does your company do well, and where do your competitors typically win).

Companies should then take a look at their internal structure. Salespeople are motivated by reward structures, for example, so it’s important to take note of how they are compensated for better performances. If an adequate reward structure is lacking, this may contribute to low morale and decreased motivation.

Pricing is another important metric. Salespeople need to know more than simply how much the product costs. By knowing which parts are negotiable and which are not, leaders can recognize opportunities to offer discounts and therefore boost sales.

When diagnosing sales performance issues, companies also need to make sure the right KPIs are tracked, visible, and managed. Some important metrics include number of proposals, average deal size, and sales cycle length. Tracking these KPIs is an important step toward uncovering where sales teams are falling behind.

By collecting and analyzing this information, sales leaders can discover roadblocks and ensure their diagnostics will account for all contributing factors. They can then develop actionable recommendations to correct issues they discovered, thereby eliminating bottlenecks and increasing revenue.

On the other hand, if the right components and metrics aren’t tracked, leaders will have a hard time finding the source of sales performance issues and will struggle to improve sales performance.

Why Regular Sales Diagnoses are Needed

A sales diagnosis should not be a one-time examination of your team’s performance; rather, sales diagnoses should be an ongoing, regular process to ensure the continual improvement of the sales team’s performance.

After performing a sales diagnosis, leaders are able to find the source of their most pressing issues and chart a course for the future. However, after making these necessary adjustments, it’s important to continue to perform regular sales diagnosis to ensure everything is working as it should, and that the desired goals are being met on a continual basis.

This is why it’s vital that leaders set measurable goals and establish clear expectations. In future sales diagnoses, leaders can track their progress and compare with their previous expectations to see if the team is on the right track.

If a team’s goals are not met, or sales performance has not improved as much as leaders had hoped, ongoing sales diagnoses allow leaders to continually adjust their course of action and make corrections, ensuring that the sales organization keeps driving revenue growth.

Download the Sales Diagnosis Checklist and get started today.

Use Intelligent Sales Data to Grow Sales

July 2, 2021January 20, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

In today’s world, data is a vital element of any successful sales team—but B2B businesses should be smart about the metrics they track. Keep in mind, the goal of collecting sales data is to grow sales. It’s easy to get carried away collecting too much information, which can overwhelm a sales team.

Overloading people with data can be just as useless as giving them none. Not only does it waste time, but it also shifts the focus to the data itself rather than what the data was supposed to enable—getting more business.

It’s common for businesses to invest in collecting all the data they can, without a clear plan for harnessing that data to substantiate decisions. While claims of being “data-driven” may have increased in recent years, according to Gartner, the reality is that only 54% of marketing decisions are being driven by analytics. This means that a significant amount of valuable resources are currently being wasted on unnecessary data collection.

This problem is only accelerating during the era of COVID-19 as more of the sales process is conducted online. According to a study from McKinsey, today’s sales leaders consider digital channels to be twice as important as they once were. With more data generated by these online interactions, it may be tempting to collect more and more data.

On the other hand, the goal of intelligent sales data is to encourage a prospect to do business with a sales rep. To accomplish this, intelligent sales data focuses on collecting data that enables a sales rep to be more relevant and useful to a prospect. With the right amount of data from the right sources, companies can implement this strategy to grow sales.

Intelligent Sales Data in Practice

Today, sales can no longer be driven entirely by intuition and a vague sense of the customer’s needs. This might have worked in the past, but as nearly 90% of sales today are conducted online, data is more readily available than ever before. Businesses need to use this influx of data effectively to ensure that they reach the right buyers online.

Intelligent sales data focus on the target market and nothing else. To put this into practice, a successful data-driven sales team will track all prospect interactions to inform the sales process. With data on what works for their target market—in terms of where prospects originated, how sales reps reached out, what transpired, and why—sales teams can make better-informed decisions in the future.

Sales should only reach out to leads that fit certain criteria. By the time a new lead is sent to sales, it should have already accumulated a sufficient score as a result of significant marketing activity. It should also be the right kind of lead in terms of the role and persona. The role, level of activity, where the lead first originated, and how long it took to convert are all the pisces of information that lead into intelligent sales data. This is how intelligent sales data increases the effectiveness of the sales department—by targeting leads that are more likely to result in sales, the sales team can reduce the amount of time wasted on unproductive leads.

Plus, as we have shown in the Four Quadrants Model of High Growth, existing customers have proven to be an excellent source of revenue. Intelligent sales data should incorporate patterns established by current customers, which helps drive revenues.

With the right information from several tools—including marketing automation, sales automation, and accounting automation—intelligent data can transform the sales department and increase revenues. It is critica, however, to first determine what kind of information is needed, then build our systems to gather the necessary data, and then use reports and dashboards to inform what is working and what’s not.

SOMAmetrics is a revenue-focused marketing agency, delivering high-quality leads that close faster and at a higher rate. Our proven process identifies the best targets, defines the most compelling messaging, and runs highly targeted, digital campaigns—for about 35% of what it costs clients to do internally.

Let us know if you need any assistance in designing your intelligent sales data system.

Align Sales and Marketing for High Growth

July 2, 2021December 8, 2020 by Eskinder Assefa

In the new B2B sales paradigm, marketing and sales must be numerically aligned to facilitate a high revenue growth rate.

Too often, marketing strategies are implemented without defining the specific revenue goals they aim to achieve. Valuable time, energy, and resources are wasted when marketing is not aligned with sales—in fact, 60% of respondents to a 2020 LinkedIn survey agree that misalignment could damage financial performance.

Especially as more of the buying process is completed online before sales reps get involved, misalignment could have increasingly disastrous consequences for the revenue growth of a company going forward. Fortunately, a strong alignment can help a company generate 209% more revenue from marketing.

Sales and Marketing: Better Together

Sellers must be aware that 75% of sales should come from leads generated by marketing. This number makes intuitive sense—revenue-driven marketers know that the point of marketing is to generate and nurture leads that will result in sales.

With greater alignment between sales and marketing, both teams are better equipped for the sales process, which results in increased revenues. Marketing will have a greater understanding of which leads to nurture, which to pass along to sales, and which sources and content are the best for their purposes. Plus, sales will increase their understanding of each lead, which will improve sales outcomes.

Bear in mind that the journey of today’s buyer is complex—buyers are increasingly looking for sellers that will provide customized solutions for their individual needs. For this reason, it is increasingly important for sales and marketing to be in conversation with one another to establish a shared understanding of the needs of each customer.

How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment

As discussed in depth in the Four Funnels Framework, all revenues start in marketing and end in sales. But the planning starts with sales.

First, a company must define its revenue goals. From there, the company can work backward to determine how many inbound and outbound leads will be required to reach those goals. By rooting the marketing strategy in revenue outcomes, the company can align sales and marketing in pursuit of a shared goal: revenue growth. With both teams equally responsible for facilitating revenue growth, the alignment between sales and marketing increases—and so does revenue.

It’s not enough for sales and marketing to operate in separate silos anymore—in the new B2B sales process, sales and marketing must work closely together to maximize revenue growth.

Download the white paper that shows you how to tightly align Sales and Marketing for High Growth.

B2B Buyers Expect Seamless Digital Sales in 2021

January 15, 2021November 24, 2020 by Eskinder Assefa

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing measures, traditional face-to-face sales have come to a temporary halt. B2B buyers and sellers alike are now forced to use digital routes instead.

B2B Buyers and Sellers Prefer the New Digital Reality

What was originally a crisis response has now become the new normal, with many B2B decision-makers praising the effectiveness and convenience of digital sales. In fact, a McKinsey survey found that 70-80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote digital interactions or self-service. Additionally, B2B decision-makers globally have reported that online and remote selling is as effective as in-person engagement—or even more so.

Furthermore, B2B buyers who were originally hesitant to make big purchases online have become used to the idea. In fact, according to McKinsey, 70% of B2B decision-makers are now “open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000.” Before the pandemic, the prevailing wisdom was that e-commerce was mainly for smaller-ticket items—but this has clearly changed.

B2B sellers praise the effectiveness of digital sales, and B2B buyers love the convenience of digital self-service routes. As a result, the general consensus is that digital sales are here to stay, even after the pandemic is over. In fact, only about 20% of B2B buyers say they hope to return to in-person sales, even in sectors where field-sales models have traditionally dominated (such as pharma and medical products).

The Challenges of Digital Sales for B2B Sellers

While digital selling is exceptional when it works as it should, it’s incredibly frustrating for buyers when it doesn’t. For B2B sellers, building seamless digital buying experiences remains a challenge. 45% of US customers still find B2B buying online more complicated than buying offline.

In fact, many companies still lag behind in the digital transformation. Because the transition into digital sales was so abrupt, companies have struggled to make the switch. Digital sales

encompass a myriad of skills, tools, and processes that many companies didn’t already possess.

Only a third of buyers indicate that most of their existing vendors are well-prepared to support them in a virtual environment. Additionally, almost 80% of buyers have abandoned purchases because of poor website navigation, irrelevant search results, or unclear product information.

The pressure is on for these companies to catch up. In today’s world, buyers can easily switch suppliers to one that has already optimized their digital experience.

Optimizing Digital Sales is Essential

The rise of digital sales is raising customer expectations at a breakneck pace. 76% of customers now report that it’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere, switching from vendor to vendor until they find an online experience that matches their expectations.

If a buyer has a less-than-pleasant experience on a seller’s website, they can easily switch vendors. In fact, 57% of customers have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better digital experience.

Additionally, the demand for a seamless digital sales experience is so strong that 56% of B2B customers say they would “pay more for a better experience.”

In all, it’s clear that B2B buyers are increasingly demanding effective digital sales routes—and they will switch vendors and pay increasing prices until they find the experience they’re looking for. Therefore it is vital that B2B sellers optimize their digital sales routes and focus on their buyers’ digital experience. Companies that lag on the digital transformation risk losing existing customers and will struggle to find new ones.