Sales growth

When existing market areas do not generate enough revenues, the challenges are very often in outdated or wrong customer approach that make a company vulnerable to the problems brought by stringent competitive tendering. I assist businesses to find blind spots in their sales and marketing operations, and to implement actions to accelerate sales growth.

 Besides success in acquiring new customers, sales growth also requires retaining current customers and getting them buy more. This is not so easy in the world of strong competitive tendering:
  • Potential customers are not interested in offered solutions
  • Sales does not get enough leads or the quality of leads is not good enough
  • Interested customers decide to discontinue their purchase projects
  • Competitors are winning the deals too often
  • Profitability of won deals is not satisfactory
  • Current customers start to buy from competitors

You should not look for a specific miracle recipe to solve your all customer problems – they most often give you only temporary relief or partial improvement. But the problems continue to exist, because differentiation from competitors is non-existent or unclear, and the firm has not learnt to avoid tendering in its sales and marketing operations.

 Through clear differentiation and getting rid of competitive tendering, a seller can find a sustainable path to growth and profitability. It is vital to understand the business situation of company´s customer operations and according to that, prioritise the development efforts and put wheels rolling. By utilising iterative approach, success of the activities can be rapidly tested, selection of wrong paths avoided and cost overruns prevented. In the following there are some successful examples about using the approach:
  • Customers got interested in solutions: A seller approached customers with messages emphasising product features. The customers found the products interesting, but the priority of purchasing them was not high. Interest level was considerably increased by linking sales approach to buyer´s current business problems and new growth opportunities.
  • More high-quality leads: It was vital for a company business to get enough prospects in its sales funnel, so that enough deals could be secured. Traditional methods, e.g. personal relationships, ads in industry media and exhibition participation, were not generating sufficient amount of leads with high quality. When coaching customers to change in their business problems was taken as the cornerstone of the customer strategy, potential customers were starting to more and more approach the seller, when facing relevant needs. This was further complemented by systematic activities to nurture customers to make them ready for sales.
  • Less stopped purchases: Company sales efforts that had had a promising start, ended too often due to customers discontinuing the purchase process, either for further internal studies or changed priorities. The company managed to change this and close more deals by helping customers to better identify and plan internal changes required to take its solution. As a consequence it was possible to weaken competitors´ position, as well as to create disincentives for customers to implement new direction with solutions developed in-house.
  • Less lost deals to competitors: A seller eagerly participated in RFPs, but the results were disappointing. The company changed its competitive strategy by approaching potential customers already in the very early phases of a purchase project, even before customers had explicitly recognised the need. Correspondingly, the criteria for participating in purchase projects were tightened: if a buyer contact was not created before the start of the purchase project, participation took place only in cases, where it was possible to affect on purchase criteria. 
  • Better margins in won deals: A company was successful in winning deals, but the margins were not good enough. Significant improvement was achieved through convincing potential customers already in the early phases that the strengths of the seller were vital requirements of purchase decisions. Because of this, the selling firm was able to either totally avoid competitive tendering or make RFP criteria very favourable to its offerings. 
  • Less lost customers: Too many customers of a company either selected one of its competitors as a new vendor or called for a tender with such requirements that made winning the RFP close to impossible for the company. The way-of-working in company´s customer relationships was changed, so that the customers were continuously given new information and insights on topics important to their business. Thus it was very difficult for competitors to get close to company´s customers and earn trusted advisor status, effectively building higher barriers for entry. 

You can discuss more with me about your challenges for generating growth in your existing markets. Please call me, +358 40 559 7010, or send an email, raimo.malila@gmail.com.

 


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Company cases 

By using active outbound marketing efforts, a company was able to book product presentations to its potential customers. The customers were, however, very lukewarm to its offerings: either they did not have a related project ongoing or they were looking for a different type of solution to their problem. The company marketing approach was transformed so that the target was to reach customer business decision-makers already when a customer´s problem was only emerging to be a new initiative. The company was positioned as the though leader in the issues related to the customers´ problem. Gradually, potential customers came to the company to seek  for guidance well in advance before detailed comparison of solution alternatives.
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A company was more and more losing its consumer customers. It was known that this was primarily due to product competitiveness problems, but is was also very clear that the new products cannot be launched soon enough. By analysing customer churn, however, it was possible to identify a set of indicators that were well predicting who was going to leave. By sending these customers messages that were adapted according to their consuming behaviour, it was possible to significantly reduce their churn.
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A significant system vendor noticed that it is impossible to get any meaningful interaction with customers before requests for proposal. This caused that from the vendor point of view, the requests were often emphasising very disadvantageous requirements. When the situation was studied more thoroughly, the customers were seen to rely in their project planning on external consultants - partly because of lacking competences, partly for resource reasons. By identifying the most important consultants that were affecting on the requirements important to the vendor, and by feeding them in favourable information, it was possible to significantly improve vendor success in tendering cases.

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