There are only five things you need to think through to convert a business capability into revenue:
1. Value proposition
2. Target market
3. Awareness campaigns
4. Demand generation
5. Sales execution: sales process and sales team structure
These items make up the balance of your sales plan for the coming year, which we call a Sales Playbook.
If you have not created a sales playbook for your company, do it now.
It is the role of executive/sales leadership to build the sales playbook (not your salespeople). Once you have your playbook, the job of your salespeople is to EXECUTE against it.
However, if executive leadership cannot articulate the core elements of the go-to-market plan above, your sales team has very little chance of doing it themselves.
Here is a brief summary of the key components of each element that you need to workshop and document for the organization:
Value Proposition
What is your core capability?
How does your core capability enable your customer to achieve their desired business outcome?
What is unique and different about your company that makes you their best option to achieve their desired business outcome given their other options in the market?
Target Market
Identify and describe your IDEAL CUSTOMER profile.
Which firms do you want to approach with your value proposition to replicate your IDEAL CUSTOMER and in what order? Do you segment by company size, industry, business problem, AND geography?
Be specific. Most firms think they can sell to everybody so they refuse to FOCUS (big mistake). You cannot be all things to all companies. Specialize and focus on a specific target market.
Awareness Campaigns
Don’t waste time on branding unless you are a large enterprise. For the rest of us, marketing is a variety of awareness campaigns intended to drive warm leads into the business (best case scenario) or provide a credibility shield (worst case scenario) when you execute on demand generation activities.
Your awareness campaigns will include things like your website, LinkedIn page, Twitter page (if needed), conferences, whitepapers, and speaking engagements.
Demand Generation
Do not rely on social media inbound marketing to grow your business.
You must proactively reach out to your target market to drive demand
It is not easy, but it works — if done effectively.
If you want to grow your firm with any predictability, you must be introducing it to potential prospects each and every day.
Start with a dedicated team doing outbound demand generation and enable them with the proper training and tools (sales team structure).
Sales Execution
Sales Process: Map out the steps to complete a sale for your business. In the absence of a sales process, your sales activities become a series of unrelated events. As a result, they cannot be taught, cannot be improved upon, and cannot be managed.
Learn more about the ITF Sales Playbook framework through our free, downloadable resource.