Rapid Innovation Group blog

Designing an effective sales process for a complex B2B sale

Entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products. This deep enthusiasm which they are able to convey is often the driving force behind their company’s first few key sales. A common complaint that then follows is that the initial sales people they hire are unable to close by themselves – the entrepreneur believes he/she has to remain involved in all opportunities. This is obviously not scalable and it highlights the vital importance of an effective and well-codified sales process.

What constitutes an effective sales process?

It should precisely reflect a customer’s buying process, for instance:

• Which individuals (influencers, decision makers and likely blockers) need to be met?


• What do they need to be presented with and what do they need to understand in order to give their approval?


• What is the optimal way to articulate and deliver this information?


• In which order do these individuals need to be approached and what is the best way to engage them?

An effective sales process provides answers to all these questions in the form of a ‘best-practice’ roadmap which is split into discrete and well defined stages, each with:

• A clear objective and unambiguous gateway (to the next stage)


• An information requirement (the key information which needs to be obtained to help you effectively progress)


• A ‘tool-box’ (e.g. FAQs, presentations, business case building structures, email templates) – i.e. codified best practice

How is it created?

A sales process can only be created through direct experience of engaging with your target market, and it is a process of continuous refinement. A different skill-set is needed by the sales-person involved in these initial pioneering sales. They need to continually gather insights around how customers use the product and how it can be most effectively positioned against alternative solutions, and then be able to incorporate these into a freshly re-iterated approach. It is vital to get this process well defined before ramping up a sales team – this is brilliantly explained in an HBR article ‘The Sales Learning Curve’.

The benefits

• Effectiveness and scalability – by developing best-practice and codifying it, best-practice becomes repeatable (by other people)


• De-risking of the hiring process – all the different stages require different capabilities. Once these have been defined, the optimal individuals to execute upon them can be hired and managed

This role of sales-process creation is one of the key things we do for those of our clients at an early stage (i.e. where the CEO is often the sole sales-person). By clearly designing and segmenting the sales process we make their time go much further – we can execute a large percentage of it, and only involve them at stages where their capabilities are required. Also, by taking menial tasks off their hands (e.g. sending agendas, booking in calls) they are able to be positioned much more powerfully with the prospect.

RIG's summer 2012 internship programme opens soon

RIG will be opening applications for its summer 2012 internship programme on 1^st October. Most of RIG’s applicants come from the UK’s top universities, so the fact that they do, although a positive attribute, is not a stand out quality. RIG recruits from some of the best institutions; a successful applicant must therefore demonstrate how they are the best of the best. So what does it take to stand out from the pack?

The Cover Letter

Say something interesting! Anyone can read RIG’s website and repackage that in a letter. Originality captures interest, and showing that you have a bit of personality doesn’t hurt either. The purpose of the cover letter is to give us a bit of narrative about yourself; in a small, dynamic company like RIG, people (and people who can work together) are vital to what we do, so give us a feel for who you actually are and not just who you think we want you to be.

Also, attention to detail cannot be overemphasized. If a cover letter is only a page long, the contents of that page must be tightly held together. Spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and grammar, and misused words do not reflect well upon a candidate. Interns are given a great amount of responsibility from the offset, so the ability to create your own work to a high standard and present it (and check it over!) properly is very important.

The CV

Show us you’re involved! RIG’s employees are DJ’s, jazz pianists, rugby players, iron man competitors, members of the TA … the list goes on. It doesn’t matter so much what you’re interested in, but being involved in something beyond academic activities is valuable. It demonstrates to us that you are able to manage your time between academic and personal pursuits, that you are motivated to do something for yourself, and that you may have something interesting to say. Travelling, tiddlywinks, trampolining, theatre –whatever it is, make sure you’re into something!

RIG is interested in candidates from all degree disciplines, so don’t worry if you’re not studying technology or business - we’ve got backgrounds ranging from chemistry to modern languages to geography and more. Similarly don’t worry about a lack of work experience; that’s the point of an internship!

The application is what gets you through the door to an interview, so make sure you don’t sell yourself short. Applications for internships will close on 1^st December. For more details contact jessica@rapidinnovation.co.uk. 

An insight into doing mergers/acquisitions as a startup

In January 2008, Fourth Hospitality acquired ABS Ltd. We asked Tony O’Shaughnessy, founder of ABS, to tell us more about the two companies joining. 

“ABS and Fourth Hospitality had known each other for years and we’d always talked to each other about working together in partnership.

"ABS offered a trading platform and it was a natural fit to the marketplace that Fourth Hospitality was working in.

"The great thing about the two companies was that there was minimal overlap in what we both offered to our customers. When Fourth approached us about the acquisition, it made strategic sense from a product point of view.

"It also made sense for the ABS shareholders because we had been going for 19 years and it gave us the opportunity to do two things: to scale up the business and to allow the shareholders to realise and to capitalise on their holdings. These were the key reasons why the proposition could fly.”

 

Podcast: Is market leadership within your grasp?

Last week I recorded a podcast for OpenView Partners' LabCast series, entitled Is Market Leadership Within Your Grasp?

Every company dreams of gaining leadership in their respective markets but choosing the best market to attack in no easy task. The podcast is a discussion of the strategies that early and expansion stage companies can use to put themselves in the best position to attain marketing leadership and bury the competition.

Click to go to OpenView's site and listen to the full podcast and view the transcript.

Key stakeholders in a partnership process

In Strategic Selling, Rob Miller and Stephen Heiman define a 'complex sale' as one in which "several people must give their approval before the sale can take place."

These people play roles in the buying process such as guiding the seller and providing information ('Coach/Influencer'), screen possible suppliers and make recommendations ('Technical Buyer'), make judgments about the impact of your product or service on their job performance ('User Buyer'), and give final approval to buy ('Economic Buyer').

In some of my recent work with startups trying to sell through partnerships it struck me that there are roles in the partnership process that are comparable but different in important ways. By selling through partnerships, I mean convincing another organisation to use its resources to sell your product or service to its customers, and sharing the revenue in some way.

For instance, if your product is an email marketing tool for small businesses you may want to sign up a network of resellers to distribute it to their existing network of customers rather than trying to sell to each small business individually.

Signing off a partnership typically does not involve any money changing hands, so there's no 'Economic Buyer' whose budget you need to access. Similarly, there's no 'User Buyer', because the partner is not the one who will use your product.

However, there will be 'Technical Buyers', who will assess whether your product or service actually works, whether it fits in with the rest of the portfolio, and whether your company fits the right profile for their company to work with. There will also be a 'Coach/Influencer' role, to guide you through your potential partner's organisation and politics. It is typically the Coach/Influencer role that you initially have to convince that the partnership opportunity is worth exploring.

In place of the 'User Buyer' I suggest that an important role in any partnership discussion is Sales. It will be the sales team that is responsible for answering questions such as:

• Which customers will we target first?


• How will we engage them?


• How will the sales team be incentivised for selling your product or service?


• What support will they need from marketing and who will provide it?

In place of the 'Economic Buyer' I suggest the key equivalent is the 'Project Lead', who will typically be an executive in your potential partner's organisation, responsible for answering questions such as:

• What is the commercial model for the partnership?


• Who will be involved in overseeing the ongoing success of the partnership?


• What are the key metrics for the success of the partnership?


• At what point will the partnership be re-evaluated?

The roles may overlap and some individuals may play several roles during your negotation.

To summarise, there are four key roles that you need to involve before you can feel comfortable signing up a new partner for your business:

• Project Lead - for commercials, metrics, and management


• Sales - for targets, sales strategy, incentive plans, and marketing support


• Technical - for product assessment, compatibility, and legals


• Coach/Influencer - for validating market size and value proposition, and helping you navigate the rest of the organisation

How listening to jazz helps you communicate your ideas

Last month, I was on a jazz course in France. I’m a pianist – I can play rhythm and accompany a singer, but soloing has always eluded me. Jazz solos seem so complex and dynamic – where to start?? How to play something meaningful (or even just pleasant)?? I felt like I was looking at the top of the mountain without a clue of how to get there.

I sat with the piano tutor – the fantastic Zoe Rahman – and she showed me how putting together simple phrases – working from a basic theme and using repetition – is more engaging, giving the listener a narrative that links it all together and guides the journey.

As I was thinking about this later that evening, it occurred to me how many parallels there are between jazz in general and communication in business. Here are my top 4:

1. It's important to have a clear and compelling central theme, reiterating it in different ways


2. It’s easy to lose your audience when you get technical: the technical bits should always link back to the narrative so that they feel relevant


3. The best jazz players are great listeners. They don’t play a fixed message on autopilot – they’re highly responsive and, as a result, what they play is crafted to the moment


4. The value of ‘space between the notes’ – how silence can frame a message and make it more powerful. (I’ll be doing it right when I no longer need to be told “don’t play so much!”)

What does this mean, for example, in a sales presentation?  Well, if you’re going to use Powerpoint slides, make sure there’s a strong story running throughout. The story should be clear and flow well enough that you can deliver it without looking at the slides, which should be uncluttered and favour graphics over text. When you present, don’t offload on the audience and don’t be afraid of pauses – they give more weight to what comes next.

If you want to hear what this sounds like in music, listen to this beautiful track, Do It The Hard Way, by Chet Baker. Pay attention especially to his vocal solo – it’s the perfect illustration. It's also on the album Chet Baker Sings.

"One of the biggest challenges was finding out how big could our business could be"

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Carlos Mendes, Co-founder and Product Manager of WeListen. WeListen offers an enterprise innovation management software tool, InnovationCast, which companies can use to drive innovation within their operation from the idea to the final product.

I asked to him to tell me more about the reasons for founding WeListen, developing InnovationCast and any challenges that they experienced during the start-up phase.

“Four of us co-founded WeListen several years ago. We were already colleagues so we had professional experience but we were looking for an opportunity to do something different. The basic idea was to join forces and start up a company together. We started as a project-based company and, at one point, we began working with Mota-Engil to help them organise their collaboration infrastructure.

"During that engagement, António Meireles, who was in charge of Innovation Management at Mota-Engil, came to us with the challenge to devise something better that would improve the way employees collaborated within the company and to support innovation management. The initial idea was to take a solution from the market and add some customisation to ensure that it was a good fit between the needs of the company and the existing product. In the end, we could not find any one solution available that could address all their needs such as:

• How can we support all of our innovation management process within the company? 


• How can we turn our ideas into value? 


• How do we engage our people to drive innovation?

"This lack of an existing solution for all these aspects drove us to produce InnovationCast. We created a solution for this from scratch. InnovationCast is not only a way to enable innovation from within a company. Our aim is to allow companies to innovate at a sustained rate. Not only does it allow a company’s internal workforce to provide innovative ideas, but it also allows external suppliers and buyers to help address any challenges.

"One of the biggest challenges for us, and this may be shared by other start-ups, was finding out how big could our business could be. Sometimes you get customers to provide solutions to but it is not always easy to keep the company going on a sustained basis. Since we started as a project-based company, we were working with clients that had different projects and problems to address.

"We had projects coming in, which was good for us, but we had difficulty focusing on a particular area. From the beginning, we always had the idea of creating a product based on social technology. We didn’t know what that product would be. On the one hand, working on different projects for different companies was good because we were finding out as a company what was possible for us to do. On the other hand, it can be difficult to choose what you want to do as a start-up that has a clear focus area.

"We had so many ideas that it was easy to want to do it all, but obviously we had to put our mast in the ground. As a startup, you need to understand what you want to do and what real assets you have to build a business.”