by Bill Poole | Apr 23, 2020 | Marketing, Sales
As we have previously written, Buyers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Outcomes. I see a perfect example of this as I look out my window into my driveway. I bought a car to get to the places I need to get to support the outcomes that I need:
- Enjoying our home in the mountains to bike and ski.
- Get to the airport to fly somewhere to visit a client or an occasional trip for fun.
- Sustain day-to-day life at home.
I don’t drive very often, but the car I drive is reliable, it allows me to transport my gear and delivers the outcomes I need. Quite frankly, it is less than impressive for anyone that would consider themselves a car junkie. Sounds like I may be cheap but trust me that the outcomes I need require plenty of investment over and above a car.
The outcomes that your business delivers should be woven throughout the operational as well as the sales and marketing aspects of your business. Let’s focus on sales and marketing given this is your focus if you landed on this blog.
Outcomes are in play at each stage of the process that you have in place to help your ideal prospect to become an ideal client:
- Marketing/Prospecting: Your marketing plan should be targeted to attract businesses that are looking for outcomes that your company can deliver. Remember, Buyers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Outcomes, so product-centric messaging makes it challenging or impossible for the target to understand what outcomes they might get from your product.
- Qualifying: The goal of the qualifying stage of a sales cycle is to determine if the buyer is a good fit for the outcomes that your company can generate and if they have resources to pay for your product or service.
- Discovery: The idea with the discovery stage of the sales cycle is to explore areas of need that your prospects have. Needs for all potential outcomes that you can deliver should be explored.
- Proposing/Recommending: Your proposal should be communicated in terms of the outcomes that your clients will receive if they invest in you.
- Enjoying your services: Your operational team should be focused on maximizing outcomes for your clients. From a sales perspective, you need to gather outcomes — actual, quantifiable metrics — from happy clients when you conduct periodic business reviews. Those metrics should then be used in the other stages of the buying process to help communicate your value.
Having a resource, let’s call it an Outcomes Framework, shared by the sales and marketing team that is updated regularly, and shared centrally between sales and marketing provides many benefits:
- Alignment: Historically, sales and marketing teams are at odds with each other. Sales teams need marketing to communicate properly to prospects in a language they understand (outcomes and value, not product specs). On the other hand, marketing relies on sales to gather outcomes to help them create messaging. Both need each other to be on the same page, and an outcomes framework is a great place to start!
- Effectiveness: Outcomes-based messaging resonates with prospects, so win rates go up when communicating in terms of outcomes.
- Efficiency: Having a centrally-shared resource in place for an entire sales team makes it significantly easier for sales teams to prepare for all calls. Better yet, it can take fewer calls to achieve the same result. How happy would your sales team be if you were able to cut in half the time that sales reps spend preparing for meetings and helping them win more deals?
Leveraging an Outcomes Framework with real-world client success stories can be a game-changer for your revenue generation team.
by Bill Poole | Jun 13, 2019 | Marketing
What you sell and what your clients buy may be two very different things. We think we sell products and services. What our clients really buy is outcomes.
Theodore Levitt, the father of modern marketing put it brilliantly: “People don’t buy drill bits, they buy holes.”
Your prospects don’t want to buy products, they want outcomes. For example, business owners don’t buy color printers, they buy color printouts. If you boil that down even further, they don’t really buy color prints. If they are printing invoices, what they are buying is the ability to collect money faster from their customers. If they are printing marketing material, what they are buying is competitive advantage and business growth. (more…)
by Bill Poole | Jun 6, 2019 | Marketing
Having grown up in Canada, I love maple syrup. I remember Saturday mornings at the sugar farm. Each spring right as the snow was beginning to melt we’d head out into a grove of maple trees.
Each tree had a spigot with a small bucket attached. Sweet sap would drip into the bucket. We’d gather that buckets of sap and bring them the sugar shack.
Straight out of the tree, maple sap tastes like water with a few granules of sugar. When it’s distilled, delicious maple syrup emerges. It takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. It’s no wonder that maple syrup is so valuable—and tastes so good. (more…)
by Bill Poole | May 30, 2019 | Marketing
This week I’ve been creating the website content for the new suite of services our team here at Convergo will roll out this summer (can’t wait to launch this!) It’s got me thinking about what our ideal prospect looks like.
We all have ideal prospects. These are the future clients that are a great fit for your business. They value what you do. They align with your values and culture. They recognize the value you deliver and are willing to pay for it.
We also all have prospects that are not a good fit: They don’t value what you do. They don’t align with your values and culture. Instead of recognizing value, they want to grind you for a lower price. While you may make a little bit of profit on the deal, you’ll lose all and more of it as your employees get frustrated serving a client that is misaligned with your company. Usually, these non-ideal clients end up leaving and are often your most vocal critics.
Idea: What if you told your prospects what types of clients you want to serve?
I think if we were more explicit about who we wanted to serve, good things would naturally happen. Ideal prospects would resonate with your values, vision, and culture. They would say, “Yes! Finally! I’ve been looking for a partner like this!” The non-ideal prospects would be repelled. How helpful would that be?
As I’m writing the content for our new website, I thought it made sense to tell our prospective clients what type of companies we like to work with. The hope is that it will create resonance with our ideal prospects while repelling our poor-fit prospects.
This is a work in process, but I’d love to hear what you think. Here’s my message: (more…)
by Bill Poole | May 2, 2019 | Marketing
With today’s decision makers and influencers scouring the web for information during the buying process, digital marketing has become an undeniably important partner in revenue generation. While I will always be the first to affirm that salespeople create, build, and sustain the relationships that drive business, marketing plays a huge role in supporting them.
Now that the bulk of marketing has shifted to digital channels like search engines and social media, you need to consider what’s tying it all together and linking it to your sales process. This is where marketing automation comes in. (more…)
by Bill Poole | Apr 23, 2019 | Marketing
Recently, I was talking with one of my business partners here at Convergo. He’d talked with a business owner about moving from a tactical to a strategic approach with their marketing. In principal it sounded good. However, when presented with a relatively modest budget compared to current annual sales revenue, all of a sudden strategic marketing didn’t seem so important.
I get it. I’m a recovering sales rep. In 1993, I took a job with Lanier Worldwide, a hard-charging sales organization that at the time only believed a cold call happened when you walked in the door of a business. At the time, we didn’t even use the phone. We carried demo machines in the back of our vans. It was all about cold call, demo, close. Don’t come back to the office until you have demoed at least two machines.
Having come from a rich heritage of intense sales activity combined with drilled in sales skills, I understand the importance of prospecting. (more…)
