If you sell SaaS or tech B2B, you will likely be managing a complex sales pipeline of prospects somewhere on their way to becoming a customer. To help you close more sales, we have outlined our tried and tested deadline-driven sales conversion formula. We use it to help clients close sales before their quarter or year-end. Check it out below and feel free to give it a try in your business.
What you will need to get started:
Work with your sales team to collate your prospect intel, colour coding each according to the chances of the sale closing this FY.
The key:
Red could be a recent lead, a post-demo prospect with challenging requirements or a complex decision-making process.
Here there is interest, but the movement is slow.
There is a strong interest, with the sale likely before the end of the financial year.
In the same place, note the expected revenue figure per prospect, highlighting assigning a high, medium, or low revenue tag to each account.
Complete your segmentation by separating your pipeline into the six created matrix boxes (see below).
Once you have 6-priority groups, you are ready for targeting. We use a different targeting plan for each segment of the pipeline matrix (except for Groups 2 & 4).
If you are looking for optimal results, segment the accounts even further, looking for similarities to help to support targeting communication.
Quite likely to close this quarter – Potential for high-value sale
Collectively, the accounts within this section have the potential to make or break your revenue targets. In our experience, account-based marketing (ABM) techniques achieve the best results, planning communication one-to-one or one-to-few.
Sales and marketing should build resources and customer success stories to overcome the reservations of every prospect in this group. Evaluate each group individually to achieve the best result possible.
The types of content we would recommend sending include:
These resources must be specific to each potential customer. Consider having a senior leader, CEO/founder reach out to make contact to show how much you value their business.
Very likely to close this quarter – Potential for high-value sale
Reach out to this group in an attempt to cement their decision. This could be an opportunity for your sales team to request final signatures on contracts. Not quite at this stage? Talk them through the sign-up process, and speed up the process when they decide to go ahead.
It’s unlikely you will need to create new resources for this group as you can reuse materials and content your marketing team already has.
Suggestions for outreach:
Quite likely to close this quarter – Possibly a low-value sale
Break down these accounts by barriers to entry and have resources tackling those barriers. e.g. prospects that are hesitant about moving from a different system/concerned about the level of support required in changing products. Send a personalised email with a resource relating to how you support and onboard new customers, with a link to all of your support SLAs. If you have time, follow up with a quick call to discuss this further with them.
Very likely to close this quarter – Possibly a low-value sale
You can adopt the same approach as priority group 2(see above).
Less likely to close this quarter – Potential for high-value sale
These potential customers have strong potential for bringing in high revenue in the longer term. You should further segment this group based on any additional information gained to understand which segments may be worth further action this quarter.
Tactics we’ve used:
Less likely to close this quarter – Possibly a low-value sale
Work with marketing to set up automated monthly check-ins to retain interest where possible. You can use a CRM to track open and click rates of emails and set follow up actions. Share a range of topical content and guides, as well as invitations to virtual meetings or online webinars.
If you are a growth-focused organisation this is the way your sales and marketing teams should be operating. Much of the activity or content suggested will already exist within your company but may need slightly adjusting to suit your targeting. If your organisation has a big project focus for Q4 that doesn’t relate to these activities and you’re worried about how your teams will manage, consider if that project is revenue focused? If it is, how can you use that and build it into your own segmented follow up to win more business from priority groups?
We’ve got over a decade of experience working within businesses just like yours, delivering projects and activities that we’ve called out here.
If you implement any of the work we suggest, we’d love to hear how it’s gone, so let us know. Alternatively, get in touch and we help deliver this for you.
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