FOCUSED

The right products / services

Enhancing a sales & marketing team’s effectiveness is critically underpinned by ensuring that the ‘right’ products and services are promoted to customers and prospects, informed by current and likely future customer preferences and the competitive landscape. Solutions need to be shaped against customer ongoing needs and there needs to be formal feedback loops in place between the  ‘front-line’ and product/service development

Why this is important

Selling the right products and services is critical as a company grows. The heart of this can be defined as ‘The Value Proposition’ ie ‘what do we do for our customers’. This can be at a company (multi-product level) or single product level. As companies scale (often at pace), the clarity of understanding is sometimes lost and sales organisations can drift into selling what’s easiest, quickest, most financially rewarding and/or best understood.

How to Grow Better and Faster

We recommend focusing on three key levers for selling the right products or services:

Value Proposition

Focus on defining a clear Value Proposition through these 7 Questions:

  1. Who are our current customers/customer types?
  2. Who are our future customers (esp if different)?
  3. Who is the buyer(s) and what is their persona (ICP: Ideal customer Profile)?
  4. Who else influences decisions and what is their persona?
  5. What is the customer need that we meet?
  6. How are we different from our competitors?
  7. Is the difference worth paying for?

Undertake this kind of reflective exercise in cross functional teams with all perspectives brought to the table. Re-visit and challenge prior assumptions and keep the answers ‘live’.

Understand concentration and usage

  • Analyse what sells best over time, what sells in particular channels, markets and/or geographies.
  • This kind of insight can shine light on potential opportunities and support resourcing and organisational decisions.

Act on customer feedback

  • Ask yourself, “how do customers see us?” Do they recognise the wide suite of products or services that we offer or would they go somewhere else in pure ignorance of our capability.
  • Additionally, measure what customers think of you. There are multiple ways to do this.
  • Effective methods include Net Promoter Score (NPS) and CSAT surveys and focus groups. Set up internal forums to regularly review the data and insights. Ensure the reviewing panel is a cross functional one and not just sales/commercial

Case Studies

Helping an industrial products company define its value proposition by key target sectors

Our client sells manufactured products to multiple sectors – and hadn’t clearly defined the value proposition for each. We helped create a clearly defined and prioritised list of sectors and then helped shape the Value Proposition for each sector. This led to a series of clear next steps for the organisation to take, including defining a sector-specific range, targeted proposal documents and optimising the qualification criteria for inbound leads.

A more focused and targeted approach to proposals allowed more time to be spent on following up on existing quotes and avoided the risk of quoting everything with very low resulting win rates.