“Furthermore, our research found that companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from those activities than average players.” - McKinsey & Company

Introduction:

It's hard to argue with the data.

Since 63% of sales professionals refuse to use their CRM, they're dooming themselves to remain amongst the ranks of the "average players."

With that said, here are 9 core elements at the foundation of every data-driven sales campaign! 👊

1. Ideal Avatar

We must avoid wasting time trying to sell to low-value gatekeepers trained to deflect low-value sales drones that sound like every other pushy rep who feature dumps. The Ideal Avatar has the power and authority to solve problems, and you can solve their problems. With that frame, prospecting becomes exciting again! If you don't believe in what you're selling, your prospects will pick up on the incongruity.

2. Prospecting

Whether incoming or outgoing, there are no sales with prospects who become customers. What makes prospecting perceived as painful? Pitching to bad leads in hopes of "tricking" them into being "qualified" is a psychological game that results in lower life-time value from customers that feel pressured into a sale. Using a data-driven approach to sales will demonstrate the value that matters: deep insights into the actual pain-points of their organization without boring "brain-picking" sessions.

3. Value Play

Having developed data that makes you stand out from your competition, you open up your conversation with insights into the common challenges and best practices for prospects that match your Ideal Avatar. Leading with value means providing a product or service demonstrating how you'll solve the problems they care about the most. Discounts don't count towards value: everyone can do that. You're going to leverage Great Sales Research to solve a real problem in a solution-agnostic way to demonstrate authority and credibility.

4. Personalize

The data is clear:

Seventy-one percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And seventy-six percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. -McKinsey & Company

Every time you personalize your approach, your prospects notice.

Customizing your team's CRM to include the most strategic personalization data can be a long and expensive process. Leverage the Great Sales Research Professional plan for $0 / month forever. Use a data-science based approach to building effective sales campaigns dialed into the real needs of your prospective customers.

One useful tactic is to look at the open positions in the departments best served by your offering. Then, strategically, you can leverage that information to focus on problems for which your clients have allocated budgets to solve them as quickly as possible.

5. Campaign

There is an etiquette to campaign that you can frame from first principles. Imagine you're inside your customer's world, busy with their day-to-day, and ask yourself:

What do I get from this sales rep? How does this solve my problem, make my life easier, and give me back my time so that I can work on more strategic problems?

Your prospects only have time to care about their organization. You'll stand out from the drones by focusing on your client's top challenges. You'll develop a strategic month long campaign per prospect that has been shown to earn more meetings. Each meeting we earn is really just an opportunity for your clients to open up with a question-based framework.

6. Meetings

Your clients see countless vendors looking to squeeze them middling offer aggressively pitched at premium prices. You stand out by skipping the fake friend facade. You're a professional, and you're there to solve problems first. Before we can solve their problems, we have to invalidate them as a bad prospect before investing time trying to qualify them as a good prospect.

Strategic use of meeting with a question-based approach uncovers all of the pain points your prospects actually care about. They've heard an infinite amount of feature dumps that the sales drone assumed were important.

Data-driven problem solving like an engineer means finding root causes to actual problems; not wasting precious time during what could be always be the last meeting with a prospect.

Clients can tell if you care about them or if you just see dollar signs and cartoon money bags.

7. Invalidate

Before showing them the solution tailored to the budget uncovered through direct, mature conversations in our meetings, we invalidate bad matches.

You're taking a data-driven approach to problem solving, so that means the numbers are on your side.

Invalidating poor prospects frees up so much valuable time to refine our prospecting efforts.

Finding good prospects require a volume of outreach that leaves your average sales rep bewildered.

8. Illuminate

After invalidating the bad prospects, and showing actual value (which is really just the quick delivery of benefits worth more than the price of the offering), you ask them to make a choice on how they'd like to solve their problem.

They'll agree on all the pain points, and regardless of the vendor they choose, you've shown them the best practices for their industry through a case study, some internal research, a particular book given as a gift to the decision making team (make it a high quality book; not thinly disguised sales material, and from an author that has no connection to your offering), or anything valuable (like tickets to an industry conference).

When you ask your prospect how they'd like to proceed, and they respond that they'd like you to help solve their problems, everyone signs and now we deliver. Big.

9. Deliver

Unlike the majority of average sales professionals, you'll be staying in contact at a consistent cadence. You're thinking like a business owner, like a high-level operator. You worked hard to architect this solution for your new customer, and since you believe so strongly in what you're selling, you cultivate the relationship with that client as a trusted advisor for as long as they're willing to receive your help.

You're not some aggressive caricature of a pushy salesman going for the hard close.

You're a trusted consultant that knows how to help your clients increase Revenue and reduce OpEx.

Data-driven sales process checklist:

Here is a quick checklist to get you started with you website blow. Remember imperfect action beats inaction, get started and keep publishing.

• Model your Ideal Avatar as a high-value decision maker within your target market.

• Success in prospecting means doing 100 reach outs a day, every day, forever.

• Opening your communications with insight and offer real value for free. You'll stand out.

• Personalize your prospecting campaign and sales scripts based on real client challenges.

• Data-driven sales campaigns escalate free personalized value until the prospect asks to buy.

• Meetings are like jobs interviews: they're your opportunity to show deep insight & solve problems.

• Invalidate bad prospects with effective meetings so that you spend more time with real buyers.

• Illuminate their dream outcome with your offering without any focus on you or your features.

• Deliver on the next steps with an execution that sets you apart from lazy players too comfortable.