Understanding your solution

Before you can go through the elements of winning new business (see the next section), you need to go through some initial stages to gain an in-depth understanding of what you’re working with:

• Understanding what you have: You need to take the time to understand the product or service that your company wants you to sell. Don’t just assume that you know what it is; take the time to talk to colleagues in different parts of the company to get their views on what the product or service is and how they see it delivering benefits.

  Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in coming up with unique selling propositions. Start with what you have, and add value to it by talking to the people who work with it every day. They know better than most what key things to focus on. Discuss with existing clients how they make use of your solution, and use that information as the basis of presenting your solution to your prospects.

  If you have a technical product or service, make sure you take the time to understand, at a least at a good overview level, what it does and how it does it.

• Understanding how it fits: After you understand what you have, then you need to understand how it fits into your target prospect’s environment. Without this information, you stand zero chance of being able to sell it successfully.
• Understanding what it delivers: What are the key benefits of your solution? By now, that should be obvious to you, but you also need to dig a little deeper to understand some of the finer points and some of the less obvious benefits that can make your solution different from competitive offerings, therefore giving you some additional advantages in selling it. Any form of differentiation is well worth investigating.

Examining the elements of winning new business

When you understand the product or service that you’re working with (see the preceding section), you can then turn your attention to the six key elements of winning new business:

• Prospecting: Prospecting is the early stages of winning new business, where you seek to fill the pipeline with potential clients and then set about the task of finding out as much as you can about them and their needs. A successful new business salesperson is always prospecting and always seeking out new opportunities; it becomes second nature. I talk about prospecting in Chapters 4, 9, and 23.
• Qualifying: If there’s one true secret ingredient to making a successful new business salesperson, qualifying is it. When you qualify, you ensure that your prospect has a real need for your solution, the authority to buy it, and the necessary budget available to pay for it. See Chapters 9, 15, and 19 for details.

• Handling objections: Dealing with objections is the bread and butter of the winning new business job; you’ll be doing it all day every day. Check out Chapters 7 and 10 for more on handling objections.

  An objection may not be presented to you in such an obvious form, but by objection I mean the need for you to cover and address any and all aspects of the proposed solution as it fits with your prospect’s business and addresses his needs.

• Tracking: Typically, you’ll have many prospects on the go at any one time, and you can’t risk having to remember every detail of every deal that you’re working on. You also need to produce reports and sales forecasts, so you need a system to be able to track progress, keeping you on course for success. Generally, you’ll use a CRM (customer relationship management) system here. I discuss the basics of tracking prospects in Chapter 19 and cover CRM systems in Chapters 9 and 21.

  The more you use a good CRM system, the more you’ll benefit from it, both in winning new business and in planning and forecasting roles. If your CRM isn’t delivering benefits, then the first place to look is at your own use of it. Are you recording everything every day? There’s really no excuse for not doing so.

• Measuring: How do you know whether your sales efforts are on track and whether you’re going to meet your targets? A wet finger in the air is one option, but these days you have somewhat more sophisticated methods, using metrics based on real activity as recorded by your CRM system. Check out Chapter 22 for more on metrics.

  Take the time to understand the metrics and how they relate to you and your activities. They’re not based on some random set of measurements but on real data that you yourself are recording as you go about your daily tasks. It’s not about big brother checking up on you; it’s about using science to help you be effective in your winning new business role.

• Winning the deal: This is where the real winning new business buzz comes from. Little else compares to the elation of closing a deal. It’s the culmination of everything that you’re working toward, and this book is focused on helping you get there more often. I don’t designate a specific chapter on winning the deal; it’s not as easy as that. Winning the deal is the end game in the new business sales role, and this book aims to take you through the entire process instead of trying to teach you old-school closing techniques that, frankly, have no role in the 21st century.

Knowing that new business is a company’s heartbeat

Winning new business provides the momentum for business to continue, for solutions to be implemented, and for a business’s economic viability. Keep in mind the importance of your role when colleagues from other functions of the company put you under pressure, and remind them that their role is to support your efforts first and foremost. Without you, they wouldn’t have a job in the first place.

Without winning new business, you simply don’t have a business. Winning new business is fundamental to company planning. If there was a need to remove functions from a company for any reason, then new business sales would be exempt from that list.

Implementing a new business process isn’t as simple as going out to hire a new business salesperson and hoping for the best. Although I’d argue that new business sales is the most important role in any company — yes, really — the responsibility of driving the company forward doesn’t lie only with new business sales; support from all other functions is essential. It’s important not to lose focus on the reason for the company being in business, which is delivering profit for the stakeholders.

Without a successfully thought-out and implemented new business strategy, your company won’t be around long enough to make a difference. To maximize the chances of success, your company needs to adopt a new business–led approach to everything that it does. There is, however, a massive difference between having a new business–led approach and setting out to win at all costs, which I explore in Chapter 14.

Seeing new business as a science

There’s been a long debate about whether sales is a science or an art form, and in my mind there’s no doubt that winning new business is a science because its success can be pre-determined by following a set of well-defined processes, a methodology.

New business sales isn’t about reacting to gut instinct, although you do need to recognize instinct as an important human emotion as part of the sales process. If you follow a tried and tested methodology with a solution that does its job properly, then your new business success will follow.

Don’t be tempted to plow your own furrow in terms of determining how to approach a sale because you won’t “know better,” no matter how much you try to convince yourself. Success comes from following a replicable process or methodology, doing things for a reason rather than reacting to shifting events.

You need team effort when winning new business because you can’t be expected to know every detail about your solution, do all your own research and data entry, and run a number of sales campaigns. So knowing when to delegate tasks is an attribute that you need to develop. Find out more about getting everyone involved later in this chapter.

Involving everyone

Successful sales-led companies have a sales-led mentality where everyone in the business has a stake in its success, regardless of the actual job he performs. Everyone has exposure, in business or personal circumstances, to potential customers. Being sales led or sales aware simply means that your staff are encouraged, and rewarded, for feeding opportunities into the sales process.

The sales process doesn’t involve only the new business salesperson. You also need researchers, administration people, and sales support people to be able to focus sufficient time and effort into the customer-facing part of their roles. New business salespeople need to drive the support processes and will need to be given the authority to make this happen in the most efficient and effective way.

Company management needs to be responsive to requests for support in performing these other key functions. Don’t hold back on this because the new business salesperson’s time is his most important asset, and he needs to be able to delegate important but non-core tasks, sure in the knowledge that they’ll be done effectively.

Without exception, every member of staff also needs to know and understand the basics of your product or service and be able to give a simple overview of what the company provides because you never know who they’ll come into contact with. Big leads often come from humble beginnings, and when this happens you need to reward whoever was the instigator. Reward can be, but doesn’t need to be, in financial terms, and often public recognition of their valuable role may be sufficient. (I discuss rewarding success in more detail later in this chapter.)

Your staff all need to know how to recognize a potential prospect and know how to feed this information into the sales process as simply as possible. This must not, however, involve new business salespeople being dumped upon; you need to have a simple process of capturing information that can be fed into the sales process with minimum direct time impact on either the information provider or receiver. Often, providing a simple lead form to fill in with all the necessary information may be sufficient, including some rudimentary qualification questions to try to minimize any waste of sales time chasing shadows.

Getting everyone involved in understanding the importance of the sales process and having an idea of what these “people in suits” do can be the difference between successful cooperation and losing potential opportunities. I took on a sales and marketing director role in a below-the-line creative agency some years ago and discovered that the majority of the staff had no vision of what the company did outside of their narrow job view. I spent some time talking to staff and explained what my role was in helping to make sure they had sufficient work to keep them busy and any ways that could help. I encouraged them to express ideas and operated an open-door policy. This resulted in more cohesion within the business because everyone at least knew what we were trying to achieve, and it gave people a route for expressing ideas. I also made sure to give feedback on any suggestions and especially on any potential leads fed in. Of course, it met with resistance from some old-timers who “knew better,” but for the majority it proved to be a valuable exercise in getting everyone to feel involved in the company’s success. In truth, no real new business ever came as a direct result of staff engagement, but it at least got people pulling in the right direction.

Establishing success criteria

Success in terms of a winning new business role is easy to define in absolute terms: Either you hit your sales revenue targets or you don’t. The bigger picture of success goes beyond that, however. Only by looking at the wider picture do you gain an understanding of how successful and sustainable your new business efforts really are. Typically, you need to also measure the following:

• Market position: Although this may ultimately be the responsibility of marketing (see Chapter 6 for details on marketing matters), new business sales has a massive input to the success growth of your marketing reputation and position. You need to carefully consider how you measure market position because it’s too easy to fall into the trap of spending all your time on measurement and statistics rather than getting the job done. The point, however, is that over time your market position should be improving, which in turn will lead to a better sales environment to operate in.

• Pipeline value: This is one of the key metrics that I cover in Chapter 22 and is fundamental in understanding how successful your sales efforts are, both for the current period and into the future. A great current period and poor future quarters position, for example, doesn’t equate to success and is an indicator of problems on the horizon.

• Successful clients: Sales at any cost isn’t a sign of success and will be short lived. You need to ensure that your new business sales efforts do in fact lead to satisfied clients, who in turn can offer pre-sales support to future prospects.
• Referrals: These can provide a valuable source of future prospects who are predisposed to buy from you, and new business salespeople should be encouraged to generate a referral stream. I cover this in detail in Chapter 11.

Taking time to get up to speed

Simply appointing a new business salesperson doesn’t equate to instant results or instant additional revenue; it takes time to get up to speed, however good a person you employ or however good a new business salesperson you are.

A common mistake is not taking new business sales seriously enough, or in fact doing anything about it, until it’s really too late to make a difference. As a new business consultant, I’ve been called in too late on a number of occasions and have needed to tell prospective clients that we can do the impossible as a matter of routine but that miracles take a little longer!

Planning ahead is the key. Know your numbers, and understand the dynamics of your market. This will show you when you need to invest in new business or make some outsourcing decisions, but leave it too late at your peril.

Building your pipeline takes time. Identifying and qualifying prospects takes time, especially if you’re going to do it correctly, which you simply must, or it will come back and bite you later. See Chapter 9 for information on prospecting and Chapter 19 for information on qualifying. Both of these topics are fundamental to success in winning new business, so I refer to them throughout this book.

Don’t be tempted to compromise long-term success by throwing everything at short-term sales wins at any cost. That generally equates to a recipe for disaster and not a sustainable new business strategy.

Balancing risk versus reward

Being paid a rewarding salary, often with a well-structured commission plan, is the traditional way of rewarding salespeople. When putting together a commission plan, or accepting one as a new business salesperson, it’s important to strike the right balance between risk and reward. I cover risk and reward in a deal basis in Chapter 11, but the same basic principles apply to the rewarding of sales success. You need salespeople to be hungry for success but to close the right deals for the right reasons, not chasing wrong deals just to hit a target.

You need to make sure that both the new business salesperson and the company have an equal stake in delivering new business success. This really is a vital component in structuring a compensation plan. Get the balance wrong, and problems will arise further down the line, I guarantee it. A new business salesperson needs to feel like he’s more than hired help. Having some form of stake in the success of the business is important — maybe stock options or nonfinancial benefits are the key — whatever the key is, you need to find it out and use it to motivate sales behavior.

With a new salesperson, the first few months are vital for pipeline building, and, as I cover earlier in this chapter, early sales success can be hoped for but not planned for. If the salesperson is being rewarded via a commission plan, bear this in mind.

I’ve seen many situations where companies try to pay a minimum wage and expect a new business salesperson to make a living wage by securing commission. I don’t agree with this approach because I believe it both encourages the wrong sales behavior and also devalues the role of the new business salesperson. If you’re going to pay peanuts, then expect to recruit monkeys.

Motivating new business behavior

Traditionally, sales managers were taught to motivate sales staff through money in the form of commission. Today, thankfully, this is much less the case, and although commission and salary have an important role to play, they’re not paramount.

To drive the right new business sales behavior, use these three areas:

• Responsibility: Agree on a sales budget — with agree being the operative word — instead of enforcing a set of unachievable numbers, and delegate to the new business salesperson the task of delivering them. Ask for a structured plan showing how the numbers are to be achieved. Giving ownership of the plan is the key to having it accepted. The principle is the same to structuring a deal, as I outline in Chapters 10 and 11.
• Accountability: When the budget numbers are set in stone, it becomes a contract between the new business salesperson and the company, and being held accountable for delivering a budget is a big motivator for good new business salespeople. It’s the closest some of them will get to running their own business; owning the numbers is key.
• Authority: If you’re going to delegate responsibility and accountability, you must complete the set and delegate the authority to direct resources to support the sales effort.

Two other key factors to consider: Don’t keep chopping and changing the objectives — after they’re agreed on, leave them alone — and have a structured plan with monthly or quarterly goals and rewards instead of leaving everything to happen in the final month. (Hint: It won’t!)

Managing a house account

A house account is when the “new” part of new business sales drops off after a client has worked with you for some time. The key factor from a salesperson’s viewpoint is that the sales from that client cease to count toward targets and commission plans.

You need to carefully manage house accounts because you need to ensure that sales retain a sense of client ownership, not least because they have the relationship. Often the answer is to include an element of account management as part of a new business salesperson’s goals, and that is part of what the salary covers. Make sure the “rules” are clear and known in advance. Don’t drop it as a bombshell and expect no adverse reaction. You’ve been warned!

Doing the right thing

In those circumstances where an element of doubt surrounds something like a commission payment, then do the right thing by the new business salesperson. Don’t let a small issue become a big one that risks taking away focus and commitment. You need your new business sales team to always be 100 percent focused and committed. Resolve problems and move on quickly, but never cut and run.