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Is your business development engaging?
Take a little time out to reflect on this question, and try to be honest. Would you take a meeting with one of your salespeople? Seriously – would their strategy for getting on your prospects’ calendars get by your assistant? Do you even know what strategies your salespeople are using?
I’ve got no doubt, a few of you are saying, ‘That’s irrelevant Dean; we’ve got it handled - and our SEO and automated marketing is generating lots of leads. I don’t want to break your heart, but most of the calls I get from companies following up on my web activity make me NOT want to take a meeting, despite my interest.
Let me tell you about my experience building and running child-care centres. I would consistently get calls from bankers who would want to meet me to "find out more about my business". I would politely explain that I didn't have spare time to educate them. Instead, if they had called me saying something like, 'We've done analysis on the top 50 child-care clients and identified what best practice is in relation to collection parent payments. I'd love to come out and share some findings with you," my response would have been 'When can you get here?’
So, let me share with you my top four essential tips for making sure your engagement strategies turn those marketing qualified leads into great sales leads and meetings.
The more your reason for engagement is focused on selling, the less likely the prospective customer will want to spend time with your salespeople. If it’s a challenge for you to come up with a customer-focused reason, that’s a great discovery! And, you absolutely need to do something about it!
As a salesman in my mid-forties, it’s really hard for me to say this but, sales has changed! Prospects’ expectations are higher than ever, and if you can’t educate them, challenge their thinking, and show them a pathway for improving their situation, all you are really giving them is a price.
People respond to issues that are relevant to them and their business. The more effectively you can articulate these, the more value you deliver in an initial meeting.
If I was to put you on the spot and challenge you to explain the top 5-7 issues your clients commonly face and how your solution solves them, could you do it? Seriously – get the team together in your next sales meeting and challenge them to do exactly this. In my experience, most teams can’t do it the first time. This is why salespeople revert to self-centred sales behaviours . The more you develop your team’s ability to have valuable discussions about relevant issues, the more motivated people will be to see to them.
Remember my previous story about my time managing the child-care centres? I told it for a reason – when I added a story you could immediately see my point, right? For every issue about which you want to educate a prospect, have a story that captures its essence and enables your prospect to understand its relevance.
As a parting thought, I want you to think about this:
Your salespeople’s motivation to engage in business development calls is correlated to their confidence in the engagement strategies they’ve been given. If you want your people to be doing more business development, it’s up to you to give them to tools to hold valuable conversations.
Imagine how fast your business could be growing when you combine the right business development strategy with the right technology. Download the Six Keys to Small Business Success ebook to grow your small business with the right systems and processes in place.
Dean Mannix is a Founding Director and Principal Consultant at SalesITV – Australia’s leading online sales and customer service training company. He has over 20 years of legal, finance, sales and management experience and is regarded as one of Australia’s leading performance consultants. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
