Sales Management
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How to Build a SaaS Sales Funnel
1. What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a sequence of actions, events or stages that a user goes through before purchasing a product or service. Sales funnels are designed to allow marketers to track, record and optimise the sales process to improve results.
2. How to build a SaaS Sales Funnel
Your SaaS sales funnel is an essential part of your Apps success. If you’re offering SaaS apps then creating a repeatable, scalable and trackable sales funnel is one of the important steps that you need to take.
Sounds easy? Then think again. The sales funnel is where many start-ups transitioning into revenue generation struggle, and in many cases fail.
Before starting to build your funnel it’s worth first considering where you are in your app journey.
There’s a new way to deliver sales growth…
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3. The three main stage of SaaS development
Unfortunately, in sales there is never a one size fits all solution, and the starting point for how to build a SaaS sales funnel is dependent on where you are, in the terms of the three main stages of a SaaS business?
Are you at:
Phase 1: the start of the journey whereby the Founder and primary team are still trying to establish product/market fit.
Phase 2: where the founder and primary team members have proven product/market fit and are proving they can implement systems and processes that others can use to sell.
Phase 3, the final hurdle where you have a proven product market fit, you’ve identified and proven the right systems and processes for scaling and you are now ready to scale your sales, focus on client acquisition and build up your MRR.
The strategies you use for building a SaaS sales funnel will vary depending on exactly what you learned in Step 1 above.
So for the purposes of this exercise, I will assume you are at Step 1. If you are still struggling to build a sales funnel at steps 2 and 3 then either you missed something at step 1, or something has changed that has made everything you learned at step 1 stop working.
4. Build a marketing funnel before your sales funnel
With any business it’s important that you provide the optimal conditions for your sales team to be successful. In the SaaS world it’s not enough to have a great website, you need a website that:
a) can be found by your products and services in the major search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo & YouTube
b) can be found by the problems you solve in the major search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo & YouTube
c) can convert web traffic to marketing qualified leads
Many companies ignore this and rush to build an outbound sales team. The fact is that every potential prospect that your outbound Team gets interested will then go to your website to do further research.
Unless the web experience is equal to or greater than the prospects experience with your outbound team they will immediately switch off.
To build a marketing funnel you must create “compelling user first content”. This is content that the user is actively searching for not the content that your sales and marketing team want to push.
You SaaS marketing funnel is an essential part of your Inbound sales strategy. To do this successfully you will need to create high quality content at each stage of the buyer journey as shown below.
The content should subtly tell your brand story and the success you have brought to other users. Turn your early adopters into the Heroes not you.
TOFU – Top of funnel
The first part of your sales funnel otherwise known as TOFU is the awareness stage of the funnel. The prospect is aware of the problems they have and is investigating solutions.
Your website must have content that speaks to these problems and position your company as the Subject Matter Experts. The most popular content here would be:
How to guides
Explainer videos
Blog posts
Lead Magnets
At this stage, the prospect is in research mode, not buying mode and is simply gathering information.
Your prospect may not even be interested in solutions at this stage as they are still trying to accurately self-diagnose their own problems. It’s unlikely that your prospect will want to talk to sales at this stage.
We recommend you use marketing automation to track which articles/pages your prospects enter the site on as this is the problem that is top of mind for them. Knowing this can make it easier for sales to have a relevant conversation with them.
You may also have some success engaging the prospect with chatbots on your site, however many will want to remain anonymous at this stage.
Middle of Funnel
The middle of your sales funnel is when prospects start to evaluate specific solutions based on what they learned in stage 1. Middle of funnel content would include:
Presentations
Demonstrations
Case Studies
In practical terms they will have created some form of shortlist of potential suppliers, and they will then dig deeper into the details of each potential solution.
At this stage the prospect may still not engage with you as they are often simply researching on behalf of other people within their own organisation and their priority is still information gathering.
Bottom of Funnel
By the time your prospect has reached the bottom of your marketing funnel in many cases they have already “bought into” one particular supplier or solution.
They have made their decision largely on their web experience of the brand, your sales messaging and your ability to position yourself not only as a though leader but as a thought leader in that understands their problems.
Bottom of Funnel content would included things like:
Pricing
Comparison tables
Testimonials
Reviews
For simpler lower priced solutions you will find they are now ready to take a trial if you offer a strong Call to Action (CTA), whilst for the more expensive and complex solutions they will now engage with sales.
The image below shows where a simple marketing funnel transitions into a shopping cart and the more complex B2B sale transitions into a lead for sales.
Success lies not in choosing the right model, but building your own model based on data and trial and error.
Most marketing software now tracks user behaviour on your website and may use lead scoring to alert salespeople when the best time to pro-actively reach out to prospects.
From our own experience the timing is nearly always to early and a well-defined lead nurturing programme is equally effective.
In order to do this you should build into your marketing an at least three different lead magnets that will help you turn your web visitors into a subscriber so you can keep in touch.
5. Advertising to fill your Sales Funnel
Many companies successfully fill their sales funnel via advertising. Digital advertising has matured to a level that allows significant tracking and reporting allowing you to within a matter of weeks understand what your Conversion Ratio and CAC will be.
In the first instance we would advocate “Re-targeting Campaigns”. This is simply the process of placing adds in front of people who have already visited your website.
Studies show retargeting is seven times more effective than new campaigns which is why we advocate this as a starting point.
This strategy works extremely well with a strong content marketing campaign. The most popular add channel for B2B would be LinkedIn, however, many companies have also done well with Facebook and Instagram.
Needless to say this would be defined by your audience. Advertising can be used in simple funnels to drive sales and more complex ones to drive new enquiries for sales reps.
More complex sales may need a defined sequence whereby users click on and advert to receive a lead magnet with each lead costing $3.
If you subsequently manage to convert 5% of these new leads you can then attribute $60 per sale from advertising to your CAC.
You can build a trackable sequence or model from any activity not just advertising. For example, events, webinars and telesales allowing you to understand which activities are the most cost effective not only at filling your funnel, but actually converting into orders.
6. How to Build a SaaS Sales Funnel
Your sales funnel will vary depending on your sales strategy. Are you selling your App direct or are you selling through partners? Which channels have you decided to focus on initially?
1. Identify your Perfect Prospect Profile. This is the sales reps version of a marketing persona. It includes everything that a marketing persona would include, plus some additional information that helps sales understand and communicate at a deeper level with the prospect.
2. Build your sales messaging. Part of the product/market fit is understanding what business and or personal problem your product solves.
In our experience the most successful SaaS services are business solutions that solve business problems.
Once you understand how this relates to your own product/service at a deep level you can start to build your sales messaging.
This is the words and nuanced language you have proven that prospects connect with. It’s not enough to know about your own business and solutions, you should know about your customers.
You should know exactly how your solution helps your customer save money, make money and make their life easier.
3. Lead Generation Campaign.
Once you have identified your target prospects and built your sales messaging you will need to start work on a Lead Generation campaign.
There are two main approaches to Lead Generation as follows:
a) Inbound Lead Generation. Inbound lead generation campaigns are where the prospect contacts you first. The may fill out a form on your web page, telephone you or email you. In order to generate inbound sales leads you will need to do some form of content creation, ad campaigns, webinars, referral programmes or SEO.
b) Outbound lead generation. Outbound lead generation campaigns are where you reach out to prospects via telephone, email, direct mail, events or account based marketing. Outbound campaigns invariably means you will have to build an outbound says team which can be expensive.
The majority of SaaS companies use a combination of inbound and outbound, however, they nearly always have an emphasis on one more than the other.
As a very rough guide, SaaS services that are lower cost and targeting SMEs, are marketing led and have a predominantly Inbound focus.
SaaS services that are more expensing and targeting Mid-Market to Enterprise organisations will have a more sales led approach via Account Based Marketing.
7. What are the Stages of a SaaS Sales Funnel?
The stages of your sales funnel are simply a series of steps that your prospects move through to place an order.
These stages can vary greatly and there is no one funnel that you can apply to every app. Even if the stages are the same the method by which you move prospects through the funnel may vary.
Your sales funnel is a great place to start collecting data in order to measure performance and make improvements over time.
In general, prospects should move through the sales funnel as quickly as possible – this is called the sales cycle or pipe speed.
Measuring the speed that prospects move through the cycle allows you to identify blockages in your funnel and areas where prospects slow down.
These “sticking” points are where you should look to make improvements.
8. When do I demo my SaaS product to customers?
The timing of SaaS app demos within the sales process has been the subject of discussion for many companies.
The answer unfortunately to the question is “it depends”. Many companies successfully demo their app at the start of the sales process, however, there are equally many who demo at the start and then have their prospects disappear into the black hole of voice mail and unanswered emails.
In short the cheaper and simpler the solution, then the earlier in the process you can demo and the more expensive and complex the solution the demo should be pushed as far back in the selling process as possible.
The reality is that there is a tendency for Entrepreneurs and salespeople to rush to demo their app, hoping the demo will convince the prospect to sign up.
Even if the prospect is qualified and a good fit, a demo without any form of diagnosis of the prospects pain is in danger of losing the prospect.
Your prospect needs to know that you know and that you understand their world. This can only be achieved via intelligent and targeted questioning. If you want to speed the sale up, slow the sale down.
The demo is usually the salespersons greatest point of leverage and if you give it away to soon you will lose the leverage and in all likelihood the prospect.
As a general rule of thumb – push the app demo as far back in your sales process as possible.
Demos cost time and money especially for complex sales where more often than not a bespoke demo is required.
Any bespoke demo must only be delivered to the senior decision makers on the prospects buying team. If appropriate you can even have two demos within the sales process – there are no rules other than if it works do it.
Most sales reps make the mistake of using this part of the sales process to explain the benefits of the product in more detail.
When you’re telling you’re not selling. Use intelligent probing questions to get the prospect to tell you how the solution will solve their business pain.
You should avoid talking about features that you believe to be relevant to them. If you didn’t uncover this in the discovery stage of the sales process it’s inherently risky to introduce anything new further down the process.
For simpler lower priced solutions you will find they are now ready to take a trial, whilst for the more expensive and complex solutions they will now engage with a sales rep.
In order to demonstrate they have undertaken due diligence they will always speak to two or three potential suppliers.
This isn’t necessarily to beat a supplier down on price, but sometimes they need to validate to the wider purchasing group within their organisation why they have a preference.
App trials are also a good way to get users to sign up, however, the conversion ratio of trials to close is usually poor in most SaaS cases.
Depending on the pricing you could offer a managed trial, so they can evaluate your software while you manage them further down the sales process.
During a trial, the prospect can see how the product will work for them in practice. It’s important to time the trial wisely and ensure you have agreed in advance what happens if the trial is successful.
We’ve created the graphic above to try to explain visually how this might work for your organisation.
It’s worth noting in the example, the majority of your CAC will be marketing, whereas in the more complex funnel your costs will include marketing, sales + customer onboarding.
9. SaaS Sales Funnel examples
The sales funnels below are examples. You should NOT replicate these unless they fit with your sales process.
They are designed to be a starting point for those looking to develop a sales funnel.
As you can see from the graphic, there are many alternatives to the stages that go to make up your sales funnel depending on the type of funnel you are creating.
For purely digital funnels you could have:
Lead Magnet Landing page – where prospects arrive after clicking on your advert
Confirmation Page – confirming your free offer, trial or purchase
Upsell page – where prospects have an opportunity to add additional services or upgrade
Checkout page – where prospects pay for the service
Congrats or Thank You page – where you can sign post prospects with the appropriate next steps.
10. SaaS sales funnel metrics
When it comes to metrics we believe these are the common sales operations metrics and KPIs that most people are familiar with. Needless to say these metrics are important and you should be recording and reporting on them.
LTT – Lead to trial conversion
This is the number of leads who have converted to a trial.
DCR – Demo conversion ratio
The number of demos that successfully convert to the next stage in the sales process.
TTS – Trial to sale conversion
This is the number of prospects on the free trial who have converted to paying customers.
LTV – Lifetime Value of the customer
This is the average total value a customer will spend before leaving the service. Ironically this can be more difficult to measure the better your product is because, without customers leaving you will not know how long they stay and their total value to the business.
Churn – Number of customers leaving
Customers will leave and that’s not always a bad thing. If the customers who leave fit your ICP (Ideal Client Profile) then you have a problem. Customers who leave that don’t fit your ICP may be freeing up valuable resource that can be spent on your ICP.
MRR – Monthly recurring revenue
The monthly recurring revenue gives you an overview of your success, however, it’s only an overview and you need to look at the details within the data to gain a more accurate picture.
ARR – Annual recurring revenue
The annual recurring revenue gives a good overview of the business, but like the MRR you should study all the data to obtain a more accurate picture on the health of your venture.
Sales Cycle – The time from initial contact through to a closed order
This is typically short for lower value simpler solutions and longer for complex Enterprise sales. For example a sales to a Tier 1 bank may take 18 months from initial contact to close.
CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost
It’s important to understand how much it costs you to acquire a single customer. In an ideal world you would discover this in the initial phases of the business when you are proving the value proposition. Without this figure it’s impossible to put in the systems and processes to scale the business as you won’t know how much you can spend on the front end marketing and sales.
Negative Churn –
Negative churn is a powerful growth metric which indicates that the revenue from upselling and cross selling existing customers out strips the revenue lost when customers leave.
11. SaaS Proposal submissions
After the final demo, you should never offer to send a proposal.
Proposals cost time and money and if your prospect is interested they will ask you for a proposal.
If your prospect doesn’t ask you for a proposal then it tells you that they aren’t interested in working with you and you need to move back up the sales process to understand where you have gone wrong.
When the sales process stalls it’s rarely because of something you have done wrong at that moment – more often, it’s something you missed earlier on in the sales process.
Make sure you’re confident all the benefits of the software have been clearly explained to them and mapped out against their stated needs.
Where possible, always get your White Knight to help you co-create the proposal and sense check a draft version with them in advance of sending the official copy.
Before sending your proposal you must have a clear understanding of what the next steps are if you win or lose.
Without this you are most likely to spend the next three months chasing ghosts in voice mail.
12. Pricing your SaaS contracts
Many companies provide limited or no pricing at all on their website because they don’t want their competitors to see their pricing, or they think it will scare away potential customers.
You should be proud of your price and the value you bring. Let the competition undercut you and tie up all their resources on unprofitable deals.
People rarely buy the cheapest solution, so allow your prospects to undercut you.
If you’re still anxious about having your pricing on your website then think about how you feel when you are researching a solution you are interested in only to find the pricing page is littered with POA.
If you’re like most people you find this really annoying and quickly move on to the next potential supplier.
Lastly, another advantage of proudly displaying your pricing is that it qualifies out anyone who is not prepared to invest at that level.
This can save you lots of time and resources with prospects who simply have a different budget level.
There are numerous pricing strategies available to you, however, from our experience the only thing that is guaranteed, is that you will change your pricing.
As a basic rule of thumb if your prices are set too high for a short-term contract or paid trial, the prospect may fail to experience the full benefits of the software before the contract comes to an end, and they may decide not to renew.
Where possible you should reward prospects during the trial period for adding information and using the service.
For example, offer a shorter trial and incentivise users if they complete their profile/account set up.
Offer a further free period encourage them to use the product for example if they upload data into the system.
The idea is to “onboard” your new users step by step and make your product as sticky as possible.
If the prospect does want to go ahead you should use contracts with digital signature to speed up the sales process.
Never send contracts in emails or links to digital contracts as these can be easily ignored.
Arrange to get the prospect on the phone and talk through the contract with them. Once they have agreed to everything in the contract simply ask them to sign while you have them on the phone.
This way you retain control of the sales process.
13. Why the sales funnel is so important for SaaS providers
Many businesses have failed after struggling to implement a sales funnel. Marketing and selling SaaS products can be incredibly challenging, and chances are your target customers are already overwhelmed with offers from competing software vendors.
Think about which part of the buyers existing budget you are going to win revenue from. What direct or indirect competitors will you take budget away from?
You may be competing with some of the biggest and most powerful brands in the world that are providing generic solutions to the same problems you solve.
This means you need to offer something distinctive that your customers actually require.
A CB Insights study said 42% of SaaS start-ups fail because they’re offering products their target customers don’t need.
Convincing potential customers your software offers genuine value is essential.
14. Managing prospects expectations
Creating a sales funnel is all about building a journey all the way from web visitor, to subscriber and through demos and trails and ending with the contract being signed.
Your sales funnel should emphasise each of the key stages your prospects will travel through on their way to an agreement being made.
Be open, upfront and share the stages of the process in advance with your prospects.
You should pay close attention to any points of friction that might occur as your prospects travel through your sales pipeline.
This will give you the opportunity to make improvements to your funnel moving forward.
What’s most important is that you record all the data points in your sales funnel.
This will help you make decisions on facts rather than your gut feelings. It can take time for your sales funnel to become fully effective, and you may need to make several refinements before you have a truly optimised sales funnel.
Many customers don’t have a rich understanding of what they need when they first encounter you. Provide solutions not just products by helping prospects make the connection between the two.
What’s also true is users often buy what they want not what they need.
This is why it’s so important to ask targeted questions in order that you can accurately determine what their needs are so you can position your software in the most favourable way.
These questions will also tell you how near or far away they are to making a decision.
15. The Rise of SaaS solutions
It seems like everything in the world is now powered online by SaaS Applications. From Netflix and Amazon Prime to LinkedIn and Microsoft M365 we are now surrounded by SaaS solutions of one description or another.
Financially SaaS makes sense as it avoids heavy capital expenditure up front and de-risks the solution.
After all if it doesn’t work you are typically only ever locked in to a maximum of 12 months. Other advantages of SaaS include the way that it is normally quick to deploy and requires no maintenance on the part of the client.
Upgrades are normally delivered automatically, with clients generally being offered guaranteed levels of service.
Backups and data recovery are usually carried out on behalf of the client, so they can focus on what they do best, safe in the knowledge that everything’s being handled by the software developers themselves.
Lockdown has turbo charged SaaS
Remote working was on the rise even before the pandemic, so the fact that SaaS products allow individuals to work and collaborate from anywhere has only served to embed SaaS even deeper in our every day lives.
There are thousands of new products SaaS products being developed in every country around the world so competition is fierce, however, there is no apparent end to the appetite of consumers and business to SaaS solutions.
A coherent sales funnel could be the difference between your product being a viral success and being forced to return to the drawing board.
The Complete Guide to Channel Planning in Sales Management
What are sales channels?
Sales channels are simply the routes to market you choose to sell your products or services. Channels fall into one of two main categories: indirect channels where you sell via a third party such as Amazon or direct channels whereby you sell direct such as via your own company website.
What are Direct sales channels?
Direct Sales channels are where you sell direct to the consumers of your product or services. In B2B Salesforce.com sells direct to all their consumers throughout the world. They have no partner, reseller or affiliate network. Many people credit the Salesforce business model as the first successful direct sales channel model for a global SaaS brand.
What are the benefits of Direct sales channels?
The benefits of Direct sales channels are they allow vendors to remove the margins associated with distribution partners, and therefore lower their price to consumers. It allows them complete control over their sales process and provides them direct access to their consumers to build relationships and brand loyalty.
What are Indirect sales channels?
Indirect sales channels are channels where you sell through a third party. For example, Amazon is an indirect sales channel for many manufacturers in the B2C world. Microsoft sell licenses through a network of LARS (large account resellers) who sell licenses to commercial businesses. In B2B there has been a trend to move away from selling indirect as brands seek a direct connection with their consumers.
What are the benefits of Indirect sales channels?
An indirect sales channel can provide fast access to consumers who already have a relationship and brand loyalty with your partner or distributor. Indirect sales channels can provide a faster and lower cost access to local markets that would be difficult and expensive for you to reach.
In some cases a Partner network may form an essential part of your distribution and post sale support. The benefits of Direct sales channels are they allow vendors to remove the margins associated with distribution partners, and therefore lower their price to consumers.
It allows them complete control over their sales process and provides them direct access to their consumers to build relationships and brand loyalty.
Examples of Sales Channels
| Direct Sales Channels | Company owned website | Retail Outlets |
Salespeople | Telesales |
| Indirect Sales Channels | Dealers & Distributors | Franchised Stores | Manufacturers Reps | eCommerce & Auction Sites |
What are digital sales channels?
Digital sales channels can be direct and indirect and include selling direct from your own company website, selling indirect via an affiliate programme, selling via Value added resellers, selling via value added resellers.
What is a Channel sales strategy?
Part of Channel planning in Sales Management includes strategy which simply means what approach will you take to sell? This can be very simple or very complex depending on many variables.
For example:
Products/services that need more post sale support such as cars have primarily been sold via Dealer networks. (This is changing)
Products and services that need less support may be sold direct such as video editing software.
Products and services that need customising to meet customer needs may be sold via Value added Resellers such as enterprise software applications.
Products and services that need local distribution may be sold via traditional field sales such Pension Products (IFA’s).
As you would expect there is no one size fits all, however, every manufacturer/producer has the same simple goal – How do I maximise market penetration for the minimum cost?
They also have the same problem – how do I consistently motivate, incentivise and coach my channel to sell more?
How to Choose the right sales channels?
If you do want to reach the right customers in the digital age, you need to choose your channels wisely and find out where your audience is.
Whilst this isn’t the most creative strategy we suggest the following starting point for choosing the right sales channels:
a) What channels are your consumers on?
b) What channels are your competitors on?
In many cases when vendors try to engage on multiple channels they simply dilute their efforts, so it’s wise to limit the number of channels you engage with.
Whilst outsourcing sales to your channel undoubtedly allows you to save from hiring your own direct sales team, every channel as to be supported.
Supporting and enabling your sales channels takes time and money if you want to do it right.
Once you have selected the right channels and become present on them, you should be able to help whenever your consumers are using their favourite platforms.
With this in mind you should research your consumers before choosing which channels you want to use. To create the right channel strategy for your brand, you will also need to decide on the best way to introduce and promote your products and services.
What’s right for one consumer, company and channel won’t always be right for another. For instance, Facebook is typically more suited to the consumer market whereas LinkedIn is more suited for Business to Business.
How does market segmentation affect sales channels?
Market segmentation affects sales channels as you will inevitably have limitations on the budget and resources available.
As an example you may sell via a network of distributors in order to target SME’s but retain the option to sell direct to large Enterprise accounts who want to deal with the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer).
By segmenting the market you can maximise your penetration and minimise your cost of sales.
At the most basic level you should segment your target markets into three groups based on revenue.
Once you have segmented your market depending on the resources you have available you could have the highest revenue producers in group A as Direct sales managed by you the vendor.
Group B could be managed via distributors and group C could be classed as un-managed and in effect they become a self service channel.
Should I choose Multichannel vs Omnichannel?
In most cases if you have a range of sales channels, it’s usually a wise move to unify various teams within your enterprise and create a multichannel strategy.
There can be many benefits of bringing the channels together into a multichannel sales strategy such as, to align or even differentiate pricing, to reduce overheads or maximise profits.
Where Omnichannel differs is when done correctly, the end user has a seamless brand experience across all channels. Rather than focus on the sale the customer journey and loyalty become equally important.
Practical examples of this could be a Live Chat operator checks and shares the stock availability in a store to allow the customer to pay and collect locally.
A successful channel management strategy is likely to see internal and external teams come together to drive more brand engagement, which in turn drives sales.
How do I develop sales channels?
The best way to develop your sales channels is via extensive research and testing. This doesn’t have to be expensive, but it should be thorough.
After you have identified the channels, you should run a series of tests to see which channels perform the best. Only once you have data and facts can you begin to develop your channel sales strategy.
Please note: when testing channels it’s not enough to use lead generation data alone. The sales leads may never convert to sales so you must take into account revenue generated versus COCA (cost of customer acquisition).
Every sales channel should have a growth plan in order to maintain existing sales and provide future growth.
What are the best sales channels for small business?
The best sales channel for small business are web based because they allow them to scale quickly and remove many of the traditional barriers to sales such as geography, travel and people.
A small, well optimised website can compete with much larger international brands.
What are the best sales channels for SaaS?
The best sales channels for SaaS Businesses are to have one direct sales channel via your website and then have two indirect sales channels.
Of the indirect channels the first would be a referral programme and the second would be a partner or affiliate programme.
Please note the channels mentioned above are sales channels and should not be confused with marketing channels which are completely different. For example LinkedIn is a great marketing channel for SaaS however, you cannot sell anything on LinkedIn (currently).
You would need to take the sales leads from LinkedIn and direct them to your website or partners in order to generate a sale.
What are the best sales channels for B2B?
The best sales channels for B2B are direct via salespeople for enterprise sales and web based for products and services aimed at SME’s.
Most businesses need a combination of the above. You should also use partner and affiliate programmes when targeting SME’s to help widen your market penetration.
How do I Build product awareness across various channels?
Channel marketing involves supporting sales teams so that awareness around a product is raised. It also focusses on increasing customer knowledge so potential buyers are ready to interact with members of your sales team and in effect further along the buying process before they talk to sales.
Channel marketing strategies can focus on educating the prospect on the potential problems and implications not just building product awareness.
If a product already has a high profile, your strategy may be centered upon maintaining awareness of what’s great about your product and what makes it different from those offered by your competitors.
How do I use sales channels to Understand consumers?
Todays consumers and customers are arguably more informed than ever. They are able to access all the information they need from wherever they are.
As long as they are connected to the internet, they can source important details about your products and services within just a few touches of their screens.
As part of your research into understanding your consumers you should:
a) research online groups and organisations using tools like LinkedIn groups
b) run test campaigns with new distributors before committing to long contracts
c) Use distributors insights and customer relationships to gather market knowledge
Look for common pain points in online discussions and forums
c) run quick polls to test engagement levels
d) run “test” campaigns to see what messaging works best.
e) run surveys to better understand consumer needs.
f) focus groups
Consumers expect brands to have a rich understanding of their needs, be consistent and enhance their lives.
There are many channels you can use to reach your customers in the modern world, and it seems new ones are appearing all the time. Developing a quality channel planning strategy is essential, but most companies can’t build a strong presence on each one.
How to make the right investments in your channel?
Supporting and incentivising any channel can be expensive, so you will need to budget wisely.
Avoid spreading yourself to thin when you are building a channel marketing strategy – its better to focus on one or two channels and get them optimised before adding channels in that you may not have the time or budget to make profitable.
For example many companies choose to be present on each and every social media network they can think of, but it may be more effective to focus your efforts on the ones that your customers are using the most.
Marketing on any channel can be expensive, so you should start small and test everything before committing to larger advertising spends.
How do I create distinctive Channel campaigns?
The single, most powerful way to engage that vendors can use to engage their channel is to generate new sales leads for them to close and make money from.
Brands should avoid replicating what their competition are doing and be innovative both with their products and the way they present them to the market. Differentiation is key, as simply copying your rivals is unlikely to be successful and places you in the “me to” category where consumers use price as the differentiator.
Furthermore, what’s right for your competitors may not be as effective for you, so it’s always best to build strategies that are specifically aligned to your needs, circumstances and the requirements of your customers.
By all means you can take inspiration from what others have done, but it’s wise to ensure your strategy as a whole is unique to your brand.
It would be unusual to hire an Accountant who is neither qualified nor experienced, so in order for your Channel Sales Planning to be successful you may need to seek out external help.
It may not be possible to achieve what you want to without assistance from outside specialists who know the pitfalls from experience.
Beware of larger Brands
As new entrants to channels and markets making the right decisions at the right time is critical. Often large brands will dangle the potential of large orders in exchange for exclusivity. This may or may not be the right move for your brand. Every decision need to be evaluated on its merits with the wider context in mind.
For example the most common pitfall is where exporters rush to sign up International dealers who immediately “park” the new product or service.
They never intended to sell it but equally they didn’t want anyone else selling it in their territory.
It’s easy to get legal agreements that preclude this sort of thing from happening, however, you will still lose market traction, money and time while the lawyers from each side make money bringing the contracts to an end.
Do you go with the market leader and become a page in their catalogue, or do you go with the disruptive new entrants who are out to make a name for themselves?
It’s no surprise that the most successful multichannel marketing strategies have seen companies working with channel partners who understood their needs, but are also aligned by culture and values.
Social Media Platforms as Channels
Social Media cannot be ignored but equally, you should be very careful choosing any social media as part of your channel sales strategy.
These platforms exist to make money, and they will use any data your company pages, your employees and customers generate to sell to your competitors.
In addition, Channels you don’t own carry an inherent amount of risk.
Millions of Companies built up their presence on Facebook only for them to sell their customer data to their competitors.
Millions of companies built up their presence on Facebook only for them to be locked out and their pages closed.
That’s not to say they were wrong, you can make hay while the sun shines if that’s the best, most efficient route to market.
If you do decide to use Social Media you should partner with a data specialist, so you can get the insights you need to create profitable campaigns and drive your business forward.
They can provide an objective view to help you make the right decisions.
It may not be easy to get everyone on board with your new strategy initially, but they are likely to become more enthusiastic when they can see clear evidence that your methods are working.
Is offline marketing still important?
It’s vital to keep your consumers at the forefront of your mind when creating a multichannel marketing strategy.
Offline marketing remains relevant for many businesses, with some older consumers more likely to encounter your brand in newspapers and magazines rather than online.
Despite the lockdown and increase in hours people are spending online offline should still be considered.
For example advertising at large, televised sports events may fit with some brands.
Multi-channel marketing is focussed upon utilising various digital and traditional channels in order to reach your customers.
Additional channels that you can utilise to target your customers include text messages, social media, email marketing, chat, social media, direct mail, TV, radio, video marketing, podcasts and your website.
Studies suggest that most companies that use strong multi-channel marketing strategies keep around 89% of their customers.
How do I set clear channel sales goals?
To build a successful channel planning strategy, you need to have clearly defined goals in mind. You can only start creating your strategy once you have set your goals or objectives.
Once you have determined your goals, you should create a sales and marketing plan. If the goals and objectives are the destination the sales plan is the roadmap that you follow to reach your goals.
The plan will help you to start deciding which channels, how to engage those channels and which KPIs to track.
Part of this planning requires you to get a firm idea of who your customers are so you can find a way to connect with them, so you will need to carry out substantial research.
Where possible you should be automating your processes using software like marketing automation, email marketing, ad buying programmes and CRM systems, which track the interactions you have with your consumers.
For example marketing software can start creating profiles for customers from the moment they first interact with your brand online.
These profiles are then updated as they continue to interact with salespeople on and offline.
Consistency in Channel Planning in Sales Management?
Many people mock McDonald’s, however, there are many things they do extremely well, and we can learn from. For me, one of the pillars of McDonald’s success has been their consistency.
No matter where you are or who serves you, there is a level of consistency not just in the food, but the whole experience.
Your users experience should remain consistent across every channel. This means your tone of voice, logos, colours and so on should be the same on each channel.
If you don’t have a unified brand experience, this could leave your consumers confused and confused people don’t spend money.
Achieving this level of consistency is difficult when you sell via Indirect channels like partners, distributors or franchisees.
Car manufacturers spend millions annually on marketing and training with their dealer showroom network to try to achieve this type of consistency.
You need to find a way of tracking your results so you can see how well your campaign is working. Analytic software will give you key information on your performance on each channel and give you the insights you need to make changes to your campaign.
Some ideas that you can choose to measure would be:
Net Promoter Score to measure brand loyalty
Repeat purchase scores to measure quality and service
Upsell Ratio to measure sales
How to Write a Sales Plan in 8 Easy Steps (with FREE Template)
In this article we will cover...
1. How to write a Sales Plan
Few businesses manage to meet or exceed their sales goals without a sales plan, or should I say successfully create a Sales Plan and execute it.
Creating a sales plan helps you to establish your sales objectives, and outline the steps you will take to reach them.
A typical sales plan will include information on how the growth will be achieved (this is sometimes referred to as your sales strategies and tactics) and how sales will be measured.
Measuring the sales of your product or service may seem simple, but there are often important indicators and metrics other than revenue that can and should be used to measure the success of the execution of the sales plan.
Your plan may also feature details about target customers and their pain points, the sales process, roles and responsibilities, revenue targets, revenue goals, business goals and a sales and marketing strategy for your products and services.
Hopefully now you have a better understanding of the benefits of a sales plan you will take the next step and grab a free download our template in order that you can start creating a sales plan for your own business.
2. Different types of Sales Plans
Unfortunately, given all the differences between industries, companies and products there is no single plan that can be applied to every business. There are 3 main differences you should be aware of as follows:
1. Customer Base – are you selling to an established customer base where you need to manage existing accounts or are you selling to a greenfield territory where you need to focus on opening new accounts? In reality, it’s often a mixture of the two.
2. Market Movement – is the market stable enough to allow you to repeat what’s delivered your sales numbers in previous years or is the market changing and forcing you to change at the same time?
3. Business Strategy – the sales plan needs to meet or exceed the objectives of the business plan. The plan therefore needs to be aligned with the company mission and overall business strategy. If part of the business strategy is to divest risk from one income stream, the sales plan needs to reflect this.
Sales are the fuel that powers the ship, however it’s the business that decides where the ship is going.
3. Increasing Your Sales Revenues
At times sales can seem very complicated, however, it’s worth remembering there are only three ways to increase sales revenues as follows:
a) Increase sales by selling to accounts aligned with your ideal target customers
b) Increase sales by selling more to current customers
c) Raise your prices
The growth in your Sales plan must reflect at least one of the above, but preferably all three. You must also allow for “churn” as every business no matter how good they are will lose customers over time.
Even if you do nothing wrong customers will go bankrupt, they will be taken over, they will move away and you will lose business.
Reducing customer churn may well be part of your growth strategy. Anything you can do to increase your Customer Lifetime Value is always worthwhile and will stand you in good stead in the future.
4. Preparing for Success
Sales plans are primarily designed to help you achieve more sales. They should include information on what your current situation is, what you are aiming for and what you need to do to make your vision a reality.
Sales plans are like a roadmap your team can follow to achieve success. Without this roadmap they will take longer to achieve their targets as they move slower and possibly even in a different direction.
A more focused and driven team
A key benefit of every sales plan is that it can help make your team members more focused on achieving a specific goal, or series of goals.
Once a sales plan is in place, your team should have a firmer, more coherent idea of what your aims are. They should also have a more specific idea of what steps they personally need to take to achieve them.
Sales plans can also help you prevent a decline in sales over time by keeping your team focused and delivering a constant sense of purpose.
They can also help you make the most of your team’s specific capabilities and assign roles to the most suitable employees.
Creating confidence
Confidence is an important, yet often overlooked part of the sales success in any organisation.
A well written Sales Plan will give confidence and direction to the sales team and once you have a robust sales plan in place, you’re more likely to attract or keep investors and other stakeholders on-side.
The sales plan should also include information on the likely and possible challenges you envisage and how you plan to overcome them.
Clarity and coherence
Sales plans should be straightforward, so they can be easily understood by people outside the sales department.
There is no point filling your sales plan full of sales jargon which some team members may struggle to comprehend.
It’s essential that your sales plan firmly outlines your plans and goals for the period that it covers in an easy-to-read format.
If you would like help creating and implementing your sales plan we offer a full sales consultancy service and would love to talk to you about how we can work alongside your team to drive revenue growth.
5. Frameworks for a sales plan
We’ve put together a framework for your Sales Plan in Microsoft PowerPoint so it can double up as a presentation document. It includes easy to complete sections on:
1. Review – Learning what’s worked and what hasn’t from the previous year is an essential part of any sales plan. This way we can repeat or increase what’s been working and reduce, eliminate or adapt what didn’t work.
It’s also wise to look at your past data when setting targets. Do you have a good track record of hitting your targets? If you have failed to reach your aims in the past, do you know the reasons for this?
By closely assessing your past performance, you can optimise the chances of your latest campaign being a success and avoid setting unrealistic targets.
2. Sales Team – salespeople are a key part of the sales success in any organisation and should always be included in the plan.
In addition to showing past performance you should demonstrate how you plan to support them over the life of the plan by way of training and coaching.
Details of the training should be recorded in each employees PDP (Personal Development Plan) and Coaching should be recorded in individual coaching worksheets.
There may be times where every sales person has similar development needs but at as a minimum the coaching should always be bespoke.
3. Strategy – this is simply a high level statement on how you will approach selling to your market. The details such as goals, priorities and milestones of the strategy will be laid out in the Objectives section of the sales plan.
An example of a Strategy would be the Big Bets or Blockbuster strategy. Imagine if you were running a movie company and you were choosing what movies to invest $100,000,000 in over the next 12 months.
Would you take your $100,000,000 and invest £1 million dollars in 100 films or would you invest £10 million and try to create 10 blockbusters?
Perhaps your strategy is to move your customer base from Mid Market to Enterprise accounts. Your strategy might be to expand your portfolio to meet more of your customers needs and keep the competition out.
Your strategy may be the opposite and you might want to reduce and streamline your portfolio.
Removing choice allows you to focus sales and marketing resources and lower operating costs. We’re great fans of the Blockbuster strategy because we love the focus and simplicity it brings.
We accept there is an increased risk when you focus on fewer options, however, there should be some form of validation in your Blockbuster strategy. Will the next Bond movie be a hit? Well based on previous Bond movies yes.
So the majority (not all) Blockbusters should already be proven revenue streams that you are simply doubling down on.
4. SWOT analysis – thi is where you can document your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to help form and validate your sales strategy. Please remember the SWOT should only refer to your sales strategy.
The SWOT serves as proof that you and your team have undertaken some critical thinking around your sales strategy and have taken the time to think each aspect of the strategy through.
Once you have completed a SWOT analysis you can use the data to form a strategy that minimises the Weaknesses & Threats and maximises the strengths and opportunities.
5. Objectives – Your sales plan must be based around genuinely achievable targets. It will be much harder to get your team to embrace your sales plan if your aims are unrealistic or unreasonable.
It’s fine to be ambitious, but your goals still need to be realistic. Unrealistic or unachievable goals will only serve to demoralise the sales team and lead to them giving up.
Your aims and strategies need to be measurable so you can track the progress that you are making. You must include research that supports your aims, especially if your targets seem particularly ambitious.
Setting growth targets/objectives in the plan
Growth targets in a sales plan can vary wildly. Some sales plans are based on what the company wants to achieve over the next quarter, whilst others have longer-term 12 month goals.
It would be unusual to have a sales plan that was longer than 12 months as markets and customers can change so quickly.
Your sales plan needs to be agile enough to respond to these changes quickly. The best sales plans will feature detailed information on which activities need to take place and what kind of resources need to be used in order to generate success.
A simple method for sales forecasting would be to take the previous years monthly sales figures and then add 20% to each month. This provides a monthly sales target that accounts for any seasonal changes, and after 12 months will have delivered 20% annual growth.
It’s normally best practice to list separate sales objectives for:
product mix
new customers vs existing customers
sales by region
sales by vertical
individual sales reps
Whilst tracking each element may seem overkill, this allows you to quickly adapt your sales plan and implement contingency plans if required. For example, if one vertical is under-performing you may choose to divert resources into other verticals that are more active.
6. Sales Tactics and Techniques – after Strategy and planning comes the tactics. These are quite simply the approaches you will use to deliver the objectives of the sales plan.
Your sales tactics should call out the tasks and activities the sales team will be doing on a daily basis to implement the plan.
Tactics could be as simple as changing the sales messaging to match a new market or retraining customer service teams in up-selling existing accounts.
Perhaps you want your sales team to invest more time on Social media using tools like LinkedIn to identify new prospects or your interested in starting a cold email campaign.
7. Metrics – it’s important to agree on what success looks like how you will measure it before you start any project.
There are lots of great systems and tools available for this, however, you should make a list of tracking methods that you will be using for the duration of your plan.
These can include your selling strategies, techniques used for monitoring and performance metrics.
Where possible:
a) use existing systems and tools like CRMs that are already in place and being used, so you don’t get dragged into a software implementation project.
b) the recording of the measures should not create any additional workload for the salespeople as they are then less likely to complete them.
c) where possible use lead indicators and not lag indicators. Examples of a lead indicator could be the number of qualified new sales leads created and a lag indicator is the monthly revenue.
Whilst the revenue is important if we wait till the end of the month to get the revenue figures and we miss the target it’s too late.
Measuring the lead indicators allows us to take corrective action before the lag indicator is missed.
SaaS companies often track subscriptions to their app which is important but the lead indicator could be as simple as the number of visitors to the website.
You wil need to make a list of tracking methods that you will be using for the duration of your plan. These can include your selling strategies, techniques used for monitoring and performance metrics.
We use Sales Scorecards to record and track KPI’s, however, there are many different methods to track KPI’s from simple spreadsheets to online apps.
8. Budget – sales and selling costs money. Whether it’s a simple Linkedin Sales Navigator subscription or a 6 figure Expo in Las Vegas everything in sales costs money which needs to be budgeted for.
Budgets will vary greatly from one company to another, however you should always attempt to quantify the costs in advance.
Companies that do not have formalised budgets for Sales and work on an ad hoc basis are by nature lower down on the Sales Maturity model.
If you plan to spend a considerable figure during the period, you’ll need to justify this to your stakeholders. The plan should include detailed figures to illustrate where your budget will be going.
If you’re investing in new resources during the period, add an ROI analysis to your sales plan to help justify the investment.
You may also wish to budget for unforeseen costs such as recruitment, should a sales person leave unexpectedly you need to replace them.
If you’re not given the required budget, you may need to make changes to your sales plan, but you don’t necessarily need to scrap it completely.
6. Sales Plan Content
Your sales plan shouldn’t only consist of text. Wherever possible it’s worth have the document professional designed.
If you choose to use a template like ours you need to include your own branding as a minimum. It’s common for lists, tables, graphics, screenshots and charts to be used to convey key information about the company’s aims and the market you serve.
The sales plan should also feature research about what’s currently occurring in your industry This means it’s important to include statistics based on the latest research.
It’s also advisable to research your existing customers and targets market before you start creating your sales plan.
Depending on what sector you’re based in, there may be more demand from one market segment than there was in previous years.
Conversely, groups you were previously targeting may not be as interested in your products and services as they once were. Wherever possible do research so you can back up any positions you have taken.
Remember, your document doesn’t need to be incredibly formal, but it does need to be coherent and easy to comprehend.
7. Encouraging Buy In
Once you have completed your sales plan, you’ll need to present it not only to your team but your stakeholders and relevant managers too.
If you can’t get these on board, your plan is unlikely to be effective. The more convincing your sales plan is, the more enthusiasm you can generate.
The management is also more likely to release your budget if you can present an impressive well-thought-out sales plan.
With this in mind it’s always best to include other people in the creation of the Sales Plan. Getting buy-in from Sales people will be much easier if they helped create the document and senior management are much more likely to allocate budget if they have been included in the whole process.
With this in mind it’s worth asking your salespeople to create mini-plans and forecasts specific to their territory and then rolling these into the master plan.
This is a good way to develop ownership and responsibility within your sales team and provides a good reference point for future coaching.
A well-designed and executed sales plan can take your business to the next level. Just remember to keep it realistic and comprehensible so others ‘buy-in’ to it.
Whether you are a new business, a small business, a mid market or enterprise organisation the benefits of a well written sales plan are high. When done right your sales plan will position you for both short term and long term success.
Often an effective sales plan will play an important part with aligning the sales team’s activities and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals and moving forward.
Free Sales Plan Template
Download a free template so you can start enjoying the benefits of strategic and effective planning.
The free template is available for download as a Microsoft Word document to get you started.
This template is one of over 30 sales tools and templates available in our sales playbook.
Can we work with you?
Klozers provides B2B sales training and coaching throughout the world. Check out your nearest location or book a free consultation here.
10 Reasons Why Sales Training is Important
Here's the short answer
Why Sales Training is Important. Sales Training is important because sales provides revenue which is the lifeblood of business. A well trained sales team will outsell your competitors and build relationships for future business. We would never hire a Lawyer, Accountant or Trades person if they hadn’t been trained and sales is equally important.
Why Sales Training is Important
Salesmanship training can benefit your business in a myriad of ways. Chances are you have a great deal of competition to gain an edge over, and sales training can help with this.
In many cases products and services can appear similar to customers and often when this happens companies try to compete on price.
Rather than try to compete on price in Business to Business sales people still buy from people so it makes more sense to have a well trained sales force than simply keep discounting your selling price.
Regardless of the advances in technology and social selling B2B sales is still a people to people activity and an experienced sales team can help you develop more leads and convert more prospects into customers.
There’s a new way to deliver sales growth…
Don’t buy Sales Training until you’ve watched this video…
1. Return on Investment
Businesses across sectors invest vast sums of money into sales training each year, seeing exceptional returns on their investment.
As an example, when a salesperson learns how to sell without discounting their price, they can use this skill for the rest of their career.
Most companies recover the cost of training between 1 month and 6 months after completion. The time is largely dependent on the profitability and volume which is unique to every business.
2. Changes in your Market.
The internet has and continues to create huge changes in the way people and companies buy which makes the continued upskilling of your salespeople more important than ever.
All markets are dynamic by nature and training is an important part of keeping your salespeople up to date.
Changes in technology, legislation, customer needs, all serve to make you and your business less relevant unless you change with them.
Salespeople form a vital conduit between the customer and the business feeding back these changes to the business.
As a simple example, the use of Social Media in selling has now become a critical sales skill in modern selling.
3. Building Brand Loyalty
Most sales professionals will connect with your customers and clients not only on a business level but a personal level too.
They can help you strengthen your credibility and position you in the eyes of your customers as Thought Leaders in your industry.
Sales Training helps your sales team accurately diagnose the root cause of your customers’ business pains and circumstances before offering solutions that match their requirements perfectly.
The better your customer experience is, the more likely it is that those customers will return to you to purchase more products and services, time and time again.
The vast majority of sales decisions are based on how much trust customers have in a brand and salespeople are an extension of your brand.
4. Business Growth
It’s simply impossible to grow any business unless you grow the people in the business. In it’s simplest terms every business has a strategy to grow.
A large part of that strategy will involve sales and unless your salespeople are trained then they may struggle to execute your strategy.
As an example, part of your growth strategy may be to start selling to larger companies. The sales strategy, tactics and skills required for this can be very different from selling to SMEs.
Quality sales training and coaching can give your team the knowledge that they need execute you growth strategy and take your business to the next level.
Technological advancements mean companies now need to do so much more to engage with their customers than before across multiple platforms.
This means queries need to be met with swift responses and pre-sales support needs to be easily available.
5. Optimise the Customer Experience
If a customer has a bad experience with your brand, there’s a big chance they will let others know about it and in the worst case use social media to tell everyone.
Whilst customer experience (CX) was once exclusively the domain of Account Managers companies have expanded their CX to include the very start of the sales process and the very end in the hope of converting existing customers to high value brand ambassadors.
Whilst more common in B2C more and more B2B companies have developed bespoke programmes to optimise the customers experience journey.
With the lifetime value of B2B deals worth considerably more than B2C ones, it’s no surprise that sales training in this area has become more and more relevant.
One customer’s horror story can quickly go viral and impact on your industry reputation. This is why sales training is important to your sales team to help them communicate quickly and effectively whilst resolving issues as soon as they arise.
Customers are also likely to let others know if they have an incredibly positive experience when dealing with your brand.
This can generate much more interest in your website, products and services. Sales training is important for any brand that wishes to improve and deepen its relationships with its customers.
6. Knowledge is Power
Sales training can also give your team a richer understanding of your products, services and the industry they serve.
The more your sales team know about what you do and what you sell, the more effective they will be when informing others and positioning your brand.
Prospective customers are unlikely to be swayed if the sales rep they’re talking to lacks sufficient knowledge about your company, products and services.
The best sales training tells your team how to sell from within the context of your brand, makes them more knowledgeable about your history and the benefits your products offer to your customers.
In B2B, sales training isn’t just about learning how to answer your prospects questions. What’s much more important is learning the right questions to ask.
The modern sales professional is as much a detective hunting down answers than simply answering the prospects questions.
At the most basic level, have you set a budget aside for this project yet, who else is involved in the purchasing decision, what timeline do you need your solution in place by?
These are all important questions that B2B companies need answers to before even qualifying a sales opportunity.
7. Learning from Mistakes is Expensive
Unfortunately like every other profession and skill in B2B sales mistakes can happen. These mistakes can be painful and expensive.
Sales training and coaching is there to reduce the mistakes and help salespeople learn from them.
One mistake repeated once a month over the course of a year is an expensive way to learn, when an experienced sales trainer and coach could help the sales team avoid the mistakes in advance.
Whilst failure can be costly in sales what’s worse is the often debilitating effect it has on salespeople who don’t understand why the mistakes are happening or what they can do about it.
Most training programmes will help the sales team develop guides on best practice that can be shared to make sure the same mistakes are not being repeated across the organisation.
We’ve developed our own best practice guides over the years and made them available in our Sales Playbook which you can download for free here.
8. Versatility and Flexibility
No two businesses are the same, and even when businesses may appear similar, the needs of the business and the buyers can be hugely different.
Sales training helps sales professionals adapt their approach when working with different types of industries, businesses and buyers.
Sales training improves communication skills in a way that helps your team enhance their relationships when working with people both internally and outside of your company such as those with different DiSC profiles.
Training can also help your team turn unhappy customers into satisfied ones, allowing them to overcome obstacles more effectively. Given the Lifetime value of clients in B2B this is hugely important.
9. Increase Leadership Skills
Sales training can also help you boost leadership skills within your company as it helps people become more effective communicators and teaches them to think more strategically.
In addition to increased knowledge and skills an often overlooked and reason why sales training is important is the increase in personal confidence it provides.
Confidence in B2B sales is crucial part of success given the number and variety of differing scenarios salespeople can find themselves.
From simple 121 discussions in the boardroom through to delivering presentations to large groups of people from a stage, confidence is a key ingredient of the success of every sales person.
Training helps your team to understand your colleagues needs which is an important part of teamwork.
The best sales training courses enable delegates to develop high-quality communications skills that are essential for leadership roles.
10. Building Resilience in your Sales Team
Salespeople who have undergone sales training are more likely to become more resilient in the face of adversity.
Whilst rejections can hinder performance, trained sales professionals can overcome rejection and become more effective at winning customers over.
In sales you will always receive more No’s than Yes’s and to survive, let alone thrive in sales, it’s important to have skills and coping strategies to deal with this.
The excitement and highs of winning big deals inevitably come with the downs of losing large deals.
Whilst it’s important to always reflect after a loss, all to many times salespeople become overly self-critical and take the rejection and loss personally.
This kills confidence and in the worst case forces good people who could be succesful out of the industry, as they never had the support they needed to succeed.
Sales training is an important part of building resilience which will repay many fold when the business is confronted by the inevitable recession, lockdown or other crisis that is sure to come at some stage in the future
In Summary
When you evaluate all 10 points we’ve raised you will see Sales Training is important and an integral part of the growth of any business.
It’s also worth noting the importance of sales and marketing working together and breaking down any silos.
Sales and Leadership is all about taking action and that’s why sales training is so important. In addition Sales Management training is equally important has training a sales reprsentative.
There will always be a million reasons not to invest in training, however, sales are unlikely to improve unless you take action.
If you haven’t invested in sales training recently, it may well be time to take action. Klozers have a wide range of the best sales training programs available for delivery both in person and live online.
5 Easy Ways for Using MS Teams for Sales
There’s a new way to deliver sales growth…
Don’t buy Sales Training until you’ve watched this video…
In this article we will cover...
Using MS Teams for Sales
We’ve previously written about how we use Microsoft OneNote for Sales Management for everything from recording meeting notes through to online sales coaching and training and sales playbooks. We are big fans of OneNote, but what really turbocharges OneNote for us, is the ability to create, store, access and use inside MS Teams.
With so many people now using MS Teams from home Teams has gone from a Business product to a household brand that everyone can use. Unlike its competitors that lack the Enterprise level of security, MS Teams has multilayered security allowing users to configure Teams to bring sales prospects, customers and employees all together. In some cases that might not be appropriate, however, in many cases we help our clients configure Teams so they have:
- Using the Public Access feature to deliver Live Events & Sales Webinars for Lead Generation
- Using Group Access to position your business as an Industry thought leader
- External Company access for Sales Prospects to take them through a Complex Sales Process
- In house access where Teams for Managing Sales Opportunities, for example, collaborating on Tenders
- In House access where Teams is used as the “host platform” for a Learning Management System based on OneNote, MS Forms, Planner, Yammer, Stream, To Do, Calendar and My Analytics or even third party apps like Moodle.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these scenarios and see why using MS Teams for sales makes so much sense.
1. Public Access for Live Events using MS Teams for Sales
Every business needs new customers and the Live Events feature inside Teams allows you to create and run events open to the public as part of your Lead Generation Programme. Over the years we have found that many Salespeople struggle to pick up the telephone and make sales calls.
Some even struggle to send emails and LinkedIn connection requests because they are introverts and don’t want to face the possible rejection that comes in sales. We’ve found that create FREE high-value Events are a great way to overcome this because most Salespeople are much happier calling or emailing a FREE invitation. The reality is Events are a great way to position your business, raise awareness and start conversations with prospects.
If you’re struggling with ideas on what High-Value event you could deliver think about what’s relevant and what’s current. Are there changes in Legislation surrounding your industry? Are their new trends in your industry?
If you’re still unsure look up your Industry News site and run a Live Event on the topic they are headlining with. If you don’t know anything about the topic find the expert source that the News article referenced and interview them for the Live event using questions from the attendees.
ENABLING THE LIVE EVENTS FUNCTIONS INSIDE MS TEAMS
If you are planning on using MS Teams for Sales, the Public Access feature may not be available or switched on in your companies current MS Teams platform. If Public Access is not available then you will require a user with Admin Rights to switch this feature on from inside the Teams Admin Centre. Once Inside the Admin Centre you should look for the Meetings section and from there the Live Events policies. Please check the video for easy to follow directions.
The notes not only help us remember what was said and what next steps need to be taken they are great for referring back to when we send a “Thank you for meeting me email” with a summary of the notes and if we need to create a proposal or presentation later in the sales process.
If you are in the Admin Centre it’s worthwhile using the additional features in Teams to customise your Meeting Invitations:
Your Company Logo
Your Legal T’s and C’s
Your Support Contact for the Event
Your Company strapline in the Footer
These are then displayed whenever a recipient opens their Meeting Invite.
We should point out we’re not a Tech Channel so here are the links to Microsofts’ own guide to making these changes.
Getting started with Microsoft Teams Live Events
Setting up Live Events in MS Teams
Once you have Live Events configured you can create your own Event from inside teams by clicking on Calendar and then use the drop-down menu to access the live events option.
From here you can then add the Meeting Title and all the details. Next, simply copy the link and insert it into your emails or lead generation campaigns.
2. Group Access for Sales using MS Teams
Whereas Public Access in MS Teams is a great platform for Live events, we recently configured Teams for a client who wanted a Channel to communicate with a specific industry that was going through huge changes with the Pandemic and needed a platform to talk to them.
They invited over 350 customers and 450 prospects into Teams and are delivering weekly updates to an entire industry. They are now seen as thought leaders in the industry and it’s a great way to start conversations that lead to relationships that lead to sales.
You can use the same strategy and use MS Teams to create a platform so that you can talk to your industry.
You could deliver updates on new laws and regulations, industry trends and insights, interview industry thought leaders and invite your customers to talk about their businesses and experiences.
We would, however, warn against overtly selling in these types of communications as the minute the audience believes they are being sold to, they will start to drop out and the Channel will wither.
3. Company Access for Sales Prospects inside MS Teams
In B2B Sales it’s increasingly difficult to reach all the decision-makers in the Sales Process. In many cases they send a “Scout” to find information not available on your website and do all they can to keep Salespeople at a distance throughout the buying process.
What these buyers want is information and in most cases a quote or proposal and when they have it they immediately cease all contact. This can be a huge waste of time and money for the selling organisation as tenders become more and more complicated, needing multiple people in the way of bid teams to respond. If you’re not sure if this is happening to you simply check back through your CRM and you’ll see that many deals stall immediately after the prospect receives the pricing and information they need.
There is no easy way around this however what’s working for our clients is offering limited information up-front and then holding back until the other Decision Makers engage. They do this by re-framing the sales opportunity as a project and using Teams as the “Project Management Portal” to gather the needs of all the “stakeholders”.
This brings the buyers out and allows a controlled release of the information in exchange for engagement. This doesn’t work on every deal however it very quickly “smokes” out the genuine buyers from those just using the Salespeople for pricing.
An additional benefit of this approach is the Sales Team can invite Pre-Sales, operations, delivery teams and aftercare teams to the Teams Channel in the solution forming phase of the sale which can provide a richer sales experience for the customer. This is a great point of differentiation and whilst no sales strategy works every time it’s low cost and easy to try.
Lastly this strategy shouldn’t be applied across the board unless every sales opportunity is large and comes with a bespoke solution. We only implement this for deals above £10k, but you can choose where to set the bar.
4. Inhouse Access for Using Teams on Bids & Tenders
The most common use for MS Teams is the call and video conferencing functions, however, there is much more functionality that can help Sales Teams sell more. MS Teams makes Sales Teams more productive, more focussed and delivers a better user experience which in turn increases productivity.
There are numerous advantages with Teams such as the chat function, which allows us to stay connected without cluttering up our Outlook Inbox. Whether it’s Yammer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or any of the other O365 products, they can all be accessed and worked on from inside the Teams environment.
If you have bid teams responding to tenders the Bid documents can be created, stored and developed within the Teams environment and Tender Teams can collaborate and even edit the same document simultaneously.
In many cases the Bid creation process can run down to the deadline and when multiple authors are involved which can create time delays as each contributes and updates potentially separate copies of the one document. The Multi author allows uses inside Teams to make edits and additions live and see the document develop as their work colleagues contribute in real time.
Whether it’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any of the other O365 products, they can all be accessed and worked on from inside Microsoft Teams.
5. Teams as a Learning Management System
Many companies now acknowledge the tangible benefits of training, coaching and developing their people. Sales Training and Coaching itself has changed and improved over the years, whereas in the past training was in most cases was one-off event, they are now almost always part of a bespoke sales training programme. In order to deliver these programmes software companies have developed SaaS models where companies can create bespoke learning programmes.
There are numerous Learning Management Systems on the market each with some great functionality, however, Microsoft Teams has for most companies all the functionality they will ever need from an (LMS). Furthermore, the beauty of using MS Teams as an LMS is both compelling and simple:
- You are already paying for it with your 0365 Licence
- Your people are already working inside the O365 suite every hour of every day so that’s a great place for learning.
Although there is no one standard in terms of the functionality of an LMS, for most companies an LMS has the capability to, create, document, record, measure, store and deliver training programmes. In practical terms this means:
Create. Document, Record. You can create learning content in OneNote, MS Wiki, MS Paint, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, Stream, MS Whiteboard, Excel, Publisher.
Measure. You can test and measure learning using all of the above and MS Planner and MS Forms.
Store. You can store all your content in either One Drive or SharePoint.
Deliver. You can deliver all your training and coaching using MS Teams and acknowledge achievements via MS Praise.
In addition to the suite of O365 tools there are many additional third-party applications available from inside MS Teams to both enhance and compliment your existing applications. For example, you can connect to
CRM systems – MS Dynamics CRM, Salesforce CRM, NImble, Zoho or iGlobe CRM.
Productivity – Asana, Trello, Jira & Stormflow.
Communications – Survey Monkey, Mail Chimp, Mail Clerk & Text Bot.
There are hundreds of other applications available and the number of these apps including Moodle which is a stand alone LMS that can be connected into your Teams Channel.
We’ve also written on the benefits of using OneNote for Sales Management and Coaching which are an important part of any LMS. We rally like the combined functionality of MS Teams and OneNote as a Coaching platform to help develop Salespeople.
You can break down your Training into competencies and deliver bespoke sessions on specifics like sales prospecting, pipeline management sales closing techniques all from inside your own Sales Playbooks in OneNote. We use our Sales Playbooks with every client and the combination of creating and using OneNote for the Playbook, and delivering them through Teams is really powerful.
6. Recommended Reading
If you would like to discover some of the free templates that we use inside teams then check out our B2B Sales Tools.
Top 9 Hacks Using OneNote for Sales Management
In this article we will cover...
Sales Teams with Sales Playbooks are 33% MORE likely to be high performers with win rates exceeding 50%
Followers of our blog here will know we are big fans of the suite of work tools contained in Microsoft Office. As the marketing says they truly do bring Enterprise-Class tools to Mid Market and SME’s. We wanted to share some practical tips on how we and our clients use OneNote for Sales Management to save time and drive productivity.
In amongst Office 365 is Microsofts digital notebook OneNote which is undoubtedly one of our favourites. It did take some time to understand and learn how to use it and we’re pretty sure that we are still nowhere near using the product to it’s maximum.
Since becoming converts we’ve added the Onetastic Addin which gives us additional functionality and a huge range of Macros that simply supercharge OneNote for Sales Management.
With that said, if you can add any tips that will help us and other OneNote Users then please do so in the comments section at the bottom of this post. So here are the top 9 hacks
1. Note-taking for Sales Meetings
Everyone knows the importance of taking accurate notes during a Sales Meeting with prospects and customers, however, we always found it difficult to remember the questions and steps that we needed to follow in our Sales Process.
In addition to capturing the usual meeting details like attendee names and telephone numbers, we wanted to capture details like the Buyers Primary Sensory Dominance and their Personal DiSC style. All together it was just too much information for us to remember so we created a simple template in OneNote based on a Word Document we’d been using.
In addition to capturing those details we included a visual prompt to help us remember the most important questions and finally, the very last question captures any Next Steps that are agreed. We record these “next steps” using the Outlook Tasks integration inside OneNote which automatically adds this to Task in Outlook.
Most Salespeople may prefer to keep these types of notes inside their CRM and there’s a great article here on how to integrate OneNote with Microsoft Dynamics 365. For Salesforce users you can set up an integration with OneNote via Zapier Integrations here.
You can design your own page for Meeting or Project Notes and save it as a template for easy access every time you need it.
Lastly, it’s possible to use the audio recording function in OneNote to record meetings however we would not recommend this in a Sales Meeting.
PROS OF ONENOTE FOR SALES MEETINGS
We prefer using OneNote because it allows us to take notes freehand and despite our poor attempts at handwriting we can always use the convert to text feature if needed to tidy things up.
In addition to being able to write freehand with the Microsoft pen we also try to use visual note-taking techniques that we know from our sales training is proven to aid memory retention and focus. Everyone is different but we prefer writing notes rather than typing them in a meeting.
The notes not only help us remember what was said and what next steps need to be taken they are great for referring back to when we send a “Thank you for meeting me email” with a summary of the notes and if we need to create a proposal or presentation later in the sales process.
CONS OF ONE NOTE FOR SALES MEETINGS
We suspect the biggest negative will be that unless you are using Dynamics CRM or Salesforce then OneNote may not integrate with your own CRM. That said, I am sure you would be able to cut and paste the notes over into another CRM.
2. Sales Coaching Notes
Coaching Salespeople is arguably more powerful than sales training when it’s done well. One of the key foundations of Sales Coaching is keeping accurate notes for both the coach and the coachee to refer back to. As you would expect this should be cloud-based and is one of the easiest things you can set up.
- Create a Section in OneNote for each Sales Rep that you are coaching. You may be rightly concerned about privacy here as it’s not normal to have sales coaching notes which should be private available for other team members to view. This is easily solved by setting password protection on each section.
- Create a new page inside OneNote and then use a Template for your coaching process. We use the GROW sales coaching model however you can use any model you choose. In our situation where we mostly provide online Sales Coaching we part complete the notes during the coaching session and then finish them immediately at the end of the calls.
Immediately after each sales coaching session, we email a summary of any action points to the coachee so they know what commitments they have made before the next session.
As with the Sales Meeting Notes template, you can design your own page around your sales coaching process and save it as a template for easy access when the next coaching session is due.
3. Sales Performance Reviews
If you’re using OneNote for Sales Management it can easily help you review the individual performance of your Sales Team. Again OneNote Make this easy by using the sections function with password protection.
This can easily be included as an extra page inside the Sales Reps section next to their Sales Coaching notes or if the Coaching is being provided by someone other than the manager then you can either set up a different notebook or a different section within the same notebook.
We typically use Sales Scorecards as a way to measure individual sales performance and this can be recorded inside OneNote or in a separate application with only the actual meeting notes being recorded in OneNote.
Again the main benefits are the ease of use and access for both employees and managers in addition to the security and privacy that OneNote provides.
4. Sales Training with OneNote
Historically Sales Training was conducted via 1 or 2-day events with participants receiving a training manual. With the advent of more Online Sales Training OneNote is a great repository to Store your sales training content. It’s easy to set Sections as Learning Modules and Pages as the Individual lessons. Inside the Lessons or pages, you can add Video, Audio or text-based content with quizzes and questions for each student.
Unlike traditional Sales Training which forces all students to learn at the same pace, OneNote allows us to create Self-paced learning modules which delivers much better learning results. In order to check students are meeting or exceeding learning goals, we integrate surveys and questions using the Microsoft Forms application for each student.
It’s also possible to create individual sales training sessions where you can assign learning content for individual Sales Reps allowing you to provide a more targeted learning approach. OneNote allows you to track and measure learning, and provide feedback on an individual basis to students.
Once you have created your Sales Training Lessons as a page in OneNote simply save the page as a Template and you can then insert this into any Sales Reps personal training when required.
A secondary training application if you’re using OneNote for Sales Management is the ability to use the full functionality to create onboarding programmes for new Sales Team members. The main benefit of using OneNote in this case would be the ability to record and document so many different types of styles of content in one location for easy access.
Once you’ve created your Notebook you can easily share Notebooks with colleagues online.
5. Using OneNote as CRM
Whilst we wouldn’t recommend using OneNote as a CRM application it can be. You can download a Sales Template from Auscomp which is based on the Kanban or card-based system, and whilst it doesn’t have the full functionality of a regular CRM, it works well for those who want to keep everything inside OneNote.
What’s much more useful in our opinion is to use OneNote for what we would describe as “sales projects”. For us, these are typically large engagements that require some form of customisation and project management. These projects usually require multiple meetings with multiple decision-makers and additional support from contacts on our side.
In our case, we use OneNote inside a SharePoint site within the MS Teams environment that we create for client projects. Teams serves as a great comms platform and we use OneNote for the Note taking and sharing.
For Sales Opportunities that are not yet Customers but still require lots of notes and a degree of project planning, we use OneNote with sections added for Emails – Linked to Outlook Inbox. This allows us to forward emails relating to the opportunity from inside Outlook.
Contacts Linked to the Contacts in Outlook. This allows us to add contact details from Outlook that we need to share with our internal team working on the project.
Meetings linked to the Calendar function in Outlook. This allows us to insert future meetings from Outlook that may require some internal planning.
6. OneNote To-Do List Template
There are numerous free To Do templates inside OneNote which you can use or you can create your own which we have. We created a To-Do section with pages inside that are linked to the Tasks section in Outlook.
From Outlook we can send all Tasks to this page where we add them to a Prioritised To-Do Dashboard before assigning an owner, deadline and categorisation. This allows our whole team to have a single view of the current Workflow whilst still allowing users to work on the original Tasks that were sent from Outlook.
The four sections in the main dashboard with examples of Tasks we use are:
CRISIS: URGENT / IMPORTANT
PRODUCTIVITY: NOT URGENT / IMPORTANT
DISTRACTION: URGENT / NOT IMPORTANT
WASTE: NOT URGENT / NOT IMPORTANT
7. Journaling with OneNote.
Daily Journaling is a powerful tool that helps Salespeople become more productive, set goals, learn through reflection and serves as a great all round personal development tool.
Most importantly journaling helps with Cognitive Processing and improves overall mental well being. In fact many people say that journaling changes their life.
Although not always popular every personal development guru recommends keeping a daily journal. Journals come in many forms and what’s most important is choosing the format that works for you.
The best journal we’ve come across is by the Sales Journal company however we have developed our own shorter journal which takes between 5 and 10 minutes to complete every morning which seems to work better for Salespeople.
8. Sales Team Meeting Agenda
Lastly the easiest and most common task for using OneNote for Sales Management is for note taking during a Weekly or Monthly Sales Team Meeting. As with every other task using OneNote for Sales Management we create a simple Agenda template which we can recreate every meeting with One click.
In addition to Note Taking we recommend recording every meeting in order that you obviously have a record of the meeting, but additionally, when members of the Sales Team are absent on holiday or sick there is a recording they can easily access to get ensure they don’t miss anything.
9. Sales Playbooks
We’ve definitely saved the best to last here because OneNote is just an amazing tool for creating, delivering and building Sales Playbooks. Whilst many playbooks are still static documents OneNote provides a live document that can be consistently accessed and updated by as many or as few people as you want.
All of the Tools and templates we’ve highlighted in this post can reside inside your OneNote Sales Playbook which makes the user experience even better.
Our OneNote Sales Playbooks are hosted inside MS Teams where we have dedicated Teams for each of our clients and each Team as their own customised playbook.
In fact when you combine MS Teams, OneNote, MS Forms, you have everything you need to create your own Learning Management System and given the cost of some of the LMS platforms this is a great way for smaller and mid market companies to enter the LMS & Sales Enablement world at a much lower price point.
10. Recommended Reading
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