Relationship building, sector experience and industry knowledge are critical to success in any sales role. Many successful work-winning teams have nurtured long standing relationships with clients and prospects, but how do you minimise the risk of that experience and knowledge leaving the business? How do you capture and use information in a way the supports long term planning, team development, and allows the overall business to shape its future?
Minimising risk
No one would argue that relationships aren’t important for success. Engaging early with specifiers and buyers and building a trusted relationship is vital.
As strong as these relationships are though, they are also vulnerable if that relationship is between individuals. People can leave businesses and there’s a risk that all the hard-won knowledge and expertise can migrate to a competitor or simply be lost. As a business it’s important to reduce risk and to ensure that your prospecting activities and market intelligence are owned by the organisation and aren’t the sole property of a few high-profile individuals.
There’s a need for balance. The ideal scenario: building valuable relationships underpinned by intelligence that enables colleagues across the business to develop strong market acumen and build relationships wisely with the right prospects.
Gaining a holistic view of opportunities
In addition to the risk, relying on relationships alone to build awareness will likely mean that opportunities are missed or that you come to them too late. We all understand the importance of engagement before an ITT is published, but how do you gain foresight with buyers where an existing relationship doesn’t exist, where you aren’t known and there’s an incumbent? A more relevant question perhaps, is how you focus your efforts to create and build new worthwhile relationships without visibility of real opportunities coming over the horizon?
Essentially, relying on relationship building alone without gaining underlying intelligence can lead to missed opportunities and time wasted.
Strengthening your team with data
It’s important that everyone in your work-winning team has access to knowledge and market data to enable them to do their job effectively and efficiently. Whilst industry expertise and knowledge can be shared by individuals through team management and mentorship, it is best used alongside clear, accurate data that allows everyone on the team to access knowledge and insight consistently.
Having access to market, prospect and competitor data accelerates the learning process and enables your team to progress, which is better for individual performance and will lead to more successful bids. New starters too are provided with a ‘head start’ and have more control over outcomes. Not only giving them faster access to knowledge but also removing the intense administration of researching new opportunities.
Remote working has reduced the chance to transfer knowledge and expertise between individuals in an office environment. Colleagues no longer benefit from anecdotal examples and prospect conversations they overhear. As such, there is a greater need for employees to gain market insight through defined processes using more readily available data and online tools.
“It can take a long time to build a market, and, during that time, things can pass you by. Having access to Insights accelerates that market knowledge and opportunity awareness from the start. In a short space of time, we were able to identify lots of opportunities at different stages and value bands.”
Matt Jolly, Operations Director, RTN Mental Health Solutions
Influencing stakeholders
Relationships change, and as procurement structures shift, and the political landscape brings about new stakeholders, its vital to make sure you are targeting the right people that are influencing a decision. Talking to existing contacts is important, but if you can identify influencers from data provided within council minutes from discussions pre-procurement and those names are handed straight to you, its both quicker and immediately accessible to everyone on your team. Going into market engagement events with prior knowledge of the competitive landscape and a thorough understanding of the priorities that particular council has, will place you in a much stronger position.
Certainty of forecasting
All businesses rely on accurate forecasting, for planning, growth, resource. By accessing and having ownership over market intelligence and upcoming opportunities, the business as a whole can have more confidence in the nature of opportunities being presented, and the chances of business being won and lost. Risks to winning business, such as strengths of competition, and a thorough understanding of requirements can better inform probabilities. As soon as extensions are discussed, they can be seen right away, so that the business knows to delay forecasts for those renewal contracts.
“We use the data from Insights to formulate our strategic development plans, which is also essential in establishing go/no-go decisions, providing significant savings in bidding activity. Our business development is more laser-sighted and data-oriented, transforming our pipeline from potential to predictable revenue. Frankly, I shudder when thinking back to the days before we used Insights!”
James Heysmond, Business Development Director, Bellrock Group
Understand wallet share
As local authorities strive to find savings, wallet share becomes all the more relevant. Whilst its important to focus on your larger clients, smaller customers where you take a large proportion of their overall spend may identify your services as an area for enhanced scrutiny at renewals. You need to frame your clients not just in terms of high spend, but wallet share, and competitive landscape to identify where you should target best efforts.
Driving growth throughout the business
Market knowledge isn’t just the domain of sales. To achieve success, other departments need accurate knowledge to support business growth. Making that insight and knowledge accessible to colleague can be challenging. Sales and marketing need to work in unison, particularly to make account-based marketing, competitor messaging work. Moreover, marketing being able to influence contacts alongside sales, again re-enforces consistency and provides prospects with a more holistic view of the business than can be represented by one person, again reducing risk and making contacts more ‘sticky’ with the overall business and its wider offering.
Operations can use regional prospect data to map opportunities to support resourcing requirements, as another example.
Anticipating the new revenue opportunities
Public sector organisations sit at the forefront of many challenges affecting our communities. Whether it’s more integrated delivery of services to support digitisation, or looking at how we can tackle carbon emissions. Many public bodies are hungry to see more innovation and want to understand new approaches. Understanding these trends and finding opportunities to provide solutions to meet new demands, can open up new revenue channels for your business: opportunities for expansion, regional growth, portfolio development.
Enabling SMEs to seize opportunities provided by Procurement Act.
The Procurement Act aims to bring more opportunity and clarity for suppliers, in particular SMEs. Whilst suppliers will be provided with greater information, how do they find out the best opportunities available so they can focus their efforts where the best chance of return is, based on requirements, competition and regional factors. This is particularly important to those businesses who don’t have lots of resource and are scarce on time and can’t afford to put forward multiple proposals without a thorough understanding of where they can best gain success.
Great marketing and sales teams, that are winning business, create sound strategies based on insight and sector knowledge, refining their target audience, aligning resources, that ultimately put their best people in front of a client to showcase their expertise and share innovative solutions to buyers who desperately want to deliver successful public services.
Energise your team by providing them with the correct tools to focus their efforts and expertise, enabling them to build meaningful relationships, and to ultimately gain more revenue.
