Hello Reader,
Week Number 2 of building the Ultimate Sales Plan that gets results.
Welcome to the newsletter if you are new. It’s great to have you as part of my community.
I shared 2 weeks ago that I wanted to create a series of 8 emails that would give you everything you needed to implement and most importantly succeed with a Sales Plan.
Having a clear target is vital and the core basis on which any Sales Plan is achieved but the second core pillar to achieving success is knowing WHO you are aiming to work with.
The 2nd core component of a successful sales plan is ‘Which customer segment are you targeting with your plan’?
Let me use 2 stories to explain why this is so important.
Story Number 1
Within my old software business, we worked way harder than we needed to (for a long time and it was painful trust me ☹️) because we were WAY too generic with who we focused on.
I built the business to just under £1m of software licence sales but it was hard, hard work.
When I started, I didn’t know any different. My team had built this clever software which people loved and our target market was ‘Small Business Owners’.
I thought at the time it was a perfect market. There were 4.8m of these in the UK, and so like many who want to achieve success, my eyes lit up at the size of the market. I used to dream about what would happen if we could get just 1% of this market to become my customers.
Many small business owners loved it, but the problem was that we were too generic. Having ‘Small Businesses’ as a target segment for sales was just too vague. And when you are vague, sales and marketing become a lot harder.
The reality is we just weren’t RELEVANT enough. Whilst many small businesses do have some common challenges, a hairdresser will have DIFFERENT marketing challenges compared to a Car dealer, a web agency or an accountant (our software was a CRM and Email marketing system).
The skill of generating leads and then selling to them is to get inside the mind of your buyer and be able to think like them. When you think like them and really UNDERSTAND the problems, challenges, goals and desires they have then you can work to solve them.
And ultimately this is what sales is. Solving a key problem or desire for someone. These are the only 2 reasons why we buy things.
We either have a problem (or it could be an upcoming problem) or we have a desire (a want). I sometimes also define this as either we want Heaven (the ideal place) or to avoid Hell (the worst place) but in reality, it’s one or both combined of these 2
If you know your buyers and what is causing them problems and can then relate to them in a way they resonate with, your chance of being successful in sales goes up, exponentially.
To put it simply, you get what you pitch for.
You pitch for anyone and you will get anyone. If you pitch for a specific segment then you are more likely to get that specific segment. The bonus is that when you do this, you then become KNOWN as the go-to person and company in that area.
Most companies (like my first one) think the key to success is appealing to everyone. Get business in from anyone. Sell what you have to whoever wants to buy it.
Now part of this is true. I am not for one minute advocating that if someone comes to you and says ‘I want to buy your service’ that you should turn them down. Of course not. Take the money.
But this whole process is about building a plan.
It is about focusing our time and attention on the most effective way to get the optimum result.
It is about knowing your audience and then becoming relevant to them. We want to build a rock-solid plan that we can use to find new business to hit the goals and targets you have. We want to ensure our Sales Plan works!
I guarantee that if you do the following, then you will have the basis for a rock-solid sales plan.
- Define a specific group of people that are common in some way.
- There are countless ways to do this but ideally, these need to be demographic (age, industry etc) or psychographic (common values or habits) characteristics.
- Identify the core problem or set of problems that they struggle to solve.
- What is it that keeps these people awake at night? You can of course focus on common desires or ‘wants’ but remember 7 out of 10 people move from a position of pain and only 3 out of 10 move based on desire. Put simply, as humans we take action quicker when it helps us solve pain!
- Understand the value or financial impact of these problems.
- What happens to them if they don’t solve these issues? What does it mean to them to solve these issues? What are the financial implications if they don’t solve it?
- Get clarity on how many of these people initially have the problem.
- I targeted 4.8m people which is too many but you also don’t want to become so targeted that you only have 5 of these that you can potentially engage with.
- Build a passion and real feeling towards helping this group solve this problem.
- Be driven to engage with this industry. To share ideas and make a difference to them. This is key as later in the plan, we will need to create content for this market segment without any expectation of them buying.
Write down the answers to these 5 questions and send them back to me or better still share this with me on a new ‘Sales Plan Webinar’ series. 2 Webinars run every month focused on helping YOU build the Sales Plan you desire.
People often ask me, how can I do this, where should I start?
Do this.
Look at your current list of customers.
- Who out of this group would you love to clone if you could?
- What is it about this customer (and ideally the main decision maker there) that works so well for you?
- What is it about your service that they love so much?
- What particular problem do you solve for them that they value?
- What do they currently pay, and how much more would they pay?
- What makes your solution so unique to that customer?
There are a range of other questions you should look at but try and identify the common characteristics of this ‘ideal customer’.
Write down 4 to 5 things about them and then try and see if there are any commonalities to this group.
- Are they all within a certain industry?
- Are they all a certain size of company?
- Do they all have a very specific issue which worries them?
- Was the key decision maker there a certain type of person?
When you do this exercise, very often there are common threads which appear.
This may take a little while but it really is worth doing.
This group can then form the basis of our sales plan.
Note – Choosing a group DOES NOT mean we have to stay with this group forever. This is NOT about pigeonholing yourself within a certain space and area forevermore.
It is about finding a perfect customer segment that we can target for the purpose of this plan. It is about finding a segment that can help us achieve the target we set for ourselves in week 1.
If I were running your business or area of business now, and I was asked to build a sales plan, this is what I would do!
I would set the target and I would then spend time identifying which customer segment I was going to focus on in order to achieve that target!
I did it again a few months ago for my own business.
- I looked through the list of people I worked with.
- Who was I a good fit for?
- Who would happily invest and pay my fees?
- Where do I have evidence of companies that I had helped that I could use later in the sales plan process?
When I looked at this group, it was clear that I should focus much of my own ‘Sales Plan’ work on CEOs and Leaders who run high-value Financial and Professional Service companies.
The problems these people face are trying to achieve sales growth and so my LinkedIn (are we connected, if not then let’s connect 🙂) profile and materials now focus on helping them solve that problem.
It doesn’t mean to say I can’t help you if you are not one of those people, we can still work together. But it just means this is where I am FOCUSING in the next 12 months.
That will probably evolve in time. My motto is to build and then expand.
The great worldwide coach Tony Robbins is known for being an incredible inspiring mentor but he started his path to greatness by helping people stop smoking. He built a position then and then expanded.
It worked for him, it’s worked for others and if you apply it, it will work for you.
Before we finish this week’s email, let me evidence this though.
Story Number 2
Green Hat is a company I have worked with since 2018. I have during this time helped Andrew Warring turn his business from a £200k a year company into one that will do over £1.6m this year.
I have loved working with Green Hat so much that a few years ago I became a shareholder in the business and the company’s Chairman.
Through my support and his own brilliant desire to make an impact, Andrew has grown his business 7 fold over the last few years.
Green Hat has a really clear customer segment (Construction Companies turning over between £20-£75m a year) who have a really clear problem (major concerns and risks regarding Health and Safety on their construction sites) and this strategy has allowed it to bring on board lots of new customers who value Green Hat and see them as the solution in this area.
Green Hat are the known specialists in their space. They win business because they have built a strong reputation. They are the go-to company in this area.
Our sales plan for this year is simple. Find more of the potential customers we want to work with and then engage with them.
That plan would be incredibly hard if Green Hat didn’t have a clear customer target for which they solved a problem for.
Andrew will be joining me on one of my Sales Plan Webinars and so have a look at which date you can make and come along.
Let’s build your sales plan into a plan that has muscle and which can achieve results for you and your business.
Now you have a target (week 1) and a customer segment to focus on (week 2) we will focus next week on how you can identify this audience so we can build a plan to work with them!
See you then.
Until then, keep smiling and stay focused on becoming a fly on the wall of the brain of your buyer.
James
