Tag: business

You can be what they’ve made you into, or you can make your own luck

March 15, 2024

One of my favorite lines from a rock song is “You can be what they’ve made you into, or you can make your own luck,” which was written more than 30 years ago by the under-appreciated songwriter Jules Shear. Many other artists have recorded the song, such as an unforgettable version by Roger McGuinn that has his signature Rickenbacker 12-string chiming all over it. That line, in the last verse of the song, is incredibly powerful. Making your own luck is the story here.

The sales cycle, or the time it takes for a B2B sales organization to close a sales deal, can be extremely lengthy. The more complex the deal, the longer the sales cycle. Contact center outsourcing deals are complex (often involving multiple services, multiple delivery geographies, even many languages), multi-year agreements that can be millions of dollars per year, so the prospect’s CEO often needs to sign off on the deal. They can take more than a year to close. What does a salesperson do while they are shepherding their deal through the sales cycle?

The short answer is to find some new prospects. Outbound activities such as emails and calls can help uncover when a prospect is in the market for products or services, but that is relying on luck to open doors. It was all too common to learn about an RFP or real interest during a call with a prospect or as an offhand comment at a trade show. As I put it to our sales leader, “It was pure luck. I wanted something to help us make our own luck.” Not only make our own luck but help me reach targets who seemed to be allergic to phone calls and cold emails.

Tooting my own horn (it’s my blog, after all 😊), here is an illustration of ‘making our own luck’ in action…

I designed and executed an omni-channel marketing campaign that involved earned media (a published article), targeted advertising (to 100 health insurance plans that the US government deemed worthy to sell Medicare and Medicaid), retargeting to the article, and tightly scripted phone calls.

First, the earned media. My PR firm secured placement of an article about how health insurance plans could identify the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor in their populations. Since my then-employer had an accountability index that did just that, one of our subject matter experts graciously partnered on authoring the article. The publication loved it.

Next up, retargeting. You’ve probably been retargeted and don’t know it. Have you ever done a lot of online research on a product, and then you start seeing them pop up in subsequent browser sessions? Congratulations, you have been retargeted! Retargeting looks at your browsing behavior and serves up what you’ve indicated as an interest. To complete the retargeting, I fed the key words from the article, along with the web domains of the targeted companies, into an amazing tool named Demandbase. Whenever someone from the prospect companies fed a key word into their friendly neighborhood search engine or consumed content with those key words, they were shown the ads that pointed to the article.

The result: 40% of the targeted audience clicked on the article and visited the company’s website for the first time. Although all of the companies had been in the database for at least a year, none of them had taken any action with the company until clicking on the article. And 10 of those companies moved from unknowns to real prospects, adding about $15 million to the pipeline. The sales cycle was significantly shortened. You can make your own luck.

What’s in your playbook?

January 11, 2024

You may have this kind of information in your head, on myriad documents, maybe pieces of paper, but a playbook is your definition of your Go To Market strategy and how to make it repeatable.

Here is what should go into a playbook:

  • Priority offerings: What are the most important services or products that you offer? Do you have any materials such as white papers, case studies, press releases, or analyst report snapshots that the sellers can easily grab and share? Most importantly, can you explain them to a six year old?
  • Personas: Who are you selling to? What levels are they in their organization? What is important to them? What thought leaders do they read? What are the challenges in their roles?
  • Prospect Companies: What kinds of companies would be buying these services or products, and why? Segmentation of what you sell to is a critical first step. Identifying prospect tiers comes next. The tiers determine who in your organization owns the relationship. Tier 1 prospects are usually owned by the salesperson, with marketers adding support. Marketing owns the Tier 2 prospects and keeps them engaged with campaigns, thought leadership pieces, event participation, and more. The last tier is owned by the outbound calling team. More on them later.
  • Target Titles and Campaign Types: Here is where you get into the good stuff. Focus in on your target titles and levels in the organization. Where you go up the food chain is important too. In my experience with outsourcing companies, we rarely called on anyone lower than a Vice President. The reasons are a lower title such as specialist, supervisor, manager, or even director typically has limited if any visibility into company initiatives and is not involved in the outsourcing decision-making process. Making matters more complicated, they may see outsourcing as taking away their job. You’re there to help their function (e.g., customer care, claims processing, revenue cycle management) work better, not to take it away. But be careful to keep people in these roles engaged, because they will likely be your key points of contact once the deal is signed and execution of the program begins.
  • Messaging and Differentiators: What are your top selling stories for each solution? Can these be distilled down into sound bites that a seller can easily quote? What about your differentiators? And be careful with what you think is a differentiator. It may be new to you but not to your prospects. I keep going back to the example of a very young child who suddenly realizes they can wiggle their own toes. At that early stage they don’t realize wiggling toes is something most people can do. But do you do anything different – maybe counterclockwise, or synchronized to the alternating beats of “Stairway to Heaven,” – that is unique to you?
  • Competitive Landscape: Every company has competitors. Run screaming from those who say they don’t. Make sure you know who you are competing against, and what you offer your prospects that makes you better.

Early in my most recent role as VP Marketing at an outsourcing company, they transferred two inbound customer service reps into new roles as outbound appointment setters. You’d think since they both use the phone a lot, that it would be an easy transition, right? Think again. Inbound care people and outbound hunters are two very different animals. An inbound care rep may be uncomfortable with the tenacity needed to secure meetings with prospects, while the outbound hunter would typically lack the empathy needed to understand customer issues. It is a very drastic leap from “thank you for calling Blue Cross, may I have your member number?” to “would you take a meeting with us to see how we can boost your Net Promoter Score?”, so the team needed a lot of direction and context into the prospect-facing side of the house. I sprang into action and created a playbook to help them understand what we were selling, who they were calling and what is important to them, and how they could be successful in their new roles. I used the playbook to help in-house and external resources (when it comes to pipeline, you can never have too many oars in the water) to understand our business, and even shared it with the PR firm. The PR firm loved the selling stories and integrated them into media pitches.

So ask yourself: What’s in your playbook? How often do you update it? Who else can use it?