I meet several entrepreneurs and leaders of small businesses. I find there is one thing that is common across most of them. They tend to throw sales people into the equation to solve their growth issues, whereas what they must be doing is invest in the right sales enabling solutions.
The Role of Sales Enabling Solutions
It is both surprising and frustrating because hiring good salespeople can be pretty expensive and there are several issues to be addressed even before you have sales people reaching out to your potential customers. I classically call this as sales enabling solutions. What are the different kind of sales enabling solutions that you need to think about? I talk about a few in this post. You can also read – Why you cannot sell without a sales process
1) Identify the messaging theme that works for your company & your products/services
What are your products/services offering to your customers? What problem are they solving? What is unique about what you are offering? It takes efforts to cull this out through detailed internal workshops, competitor research and insights from customers that are already working with you.
2) Where do your prospects socialize – How can you reach them?
Can you define your target market very precisely and also identify best possible ways to reach them. The more you can make this sharper, the easier it is to reach them with specific messaging. We also offer solutions in social media marketing. you might want to read more about them
3) How are you making it easy for them to engage with you?
If they are interested in working with you, how will they engage with you? How can you simplify this process of customer on-boarding?. Whether this happens at the website or through a physical sales process, you need to ensure this can happen fast and is easy for the customer.
4) How prepared are you to address their sales objections?
Detailed sales objection handling means that your sales team will be much more prepared when they are meeting with your prospects. Sales objection handling can be at multiple levels, capabilities related, organization level as well as on several softer issues like escalation, risk etc. Hiring new sales guys will never solve these problems, as they will not be able to address common sales objections and you will never proceed in the chase unless you can address customer objections.
5) Why should they trust you?
What are you doing to build trust? Insertions in media, third party posts, award nominations, CSR initiatives, customer meets. Apart from these, within your sphere of work, you can target quality certifications and take several other credibility measures.
Feedback welcome, your views are valuable. We do offer several services in content marketing that help clients create the sales enabling kits
Best,
Atul Dhakappa
Atul is Founder & CEO at Xenia Consulting. He has over 22 years of experience in marketing, across corporates as well as SME,start-ups. Over the last 5 years, he has gained significant expertise and has helped several companies drive growth leveraging digital marketing
YKG
Good post. Well said.