In the agency world, many times it’s feast or famine. Digital shops ride a roller coaster of growth: executing work, running out of work, scrambling to drum up new business and so on. While many of us have gotten good at standardizing how we deliver, we may not have operationalized our sales approach as well as we would like, making the ups and downs of sales unpredictable and harrowing.
It’s a common story, one that Tom O’Neill knows well. As Founder/CEO of Parallax and former CEO of the Nerdery, he’s heard from more than 70 shops and also experienced this pain firsthand. This April, Tom will join us at Growth Camp, where sales is sure to be an important part of the conversation. Recognizing how many shops struggle with sales, Tom and David Annis, Parallax’s COO, offer ideas on how to standardize your sales process, uncover your value proposition and focus your pitch on outcomes rather than “speed and feeds.”
4 Steps to Standardize Your Sales Process
Sales is a critical growth driver, but many of us have a hard time putting a process in place and following it. When it comes to process, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be consistent. Follow these four steps to come up with a plan you can commit to:
Identify target customers / market: Who are you going to focus your efforts on?
Define sales qualification criteria: What makes a good prospect? What criteria must a lead meet to warrant your investment of time and resources?
Refine the sales stages & funnel: Define what sales stages and funnels you can consistently deliver on, even if it’s just “Lead,” “Proposal Out’ and “Contract.”
Document your sales process, roles & accountabilities: What steps do you take at each stage? What are the different roles, and who is responsible for what?
Thinking through these four steps can help you to hone your approach and improve efficiencies, while also giving your sales lead(s) and supporting team members clarity and direction.
Map Your Method
You likely have a standard set of deliverables, interactions and artifacts for each of your core services. What does that look like from the customers’ perspective?
Many times, digital shops compete on “speeds and feeds,” things like consistency, duration, features and cost. But it doesn’t have to be this way. People buy solutions to their problems and strategies that produce results. Speaking directly to customers’ needs and desires gives you a clear edge in your pitches and proposals.
“If you can identify the pains and the aspirations, and line up key points in your process that ensure that those things happen, that’s where you find your differentiating value.”
— Tom O’Neill, Founder/CEO of Parallax
Here’s how you get started: For each of your core services, outline the process from your customers’ perspective, thinking through these two questions:
What are the key deliverables, interactions and artifacts that create differentiating value for your business?
What have you developed in your delivery process that helps your customers to avoid common pain points and meet their goals and aspirations?
As David says, customers want to know what makes you special and why they should care—what specific pain point or aspiration are you addressing that your competitors aren’t? What is the repeatable method, deliverable or interaction point that ensures they avoid that pain or meet that goal? Knowing your prospects’ priorities is critical to understanding how your mapped method is valuable to them.
Tom offers an example: Pitching a mobile app to a healthcare company, his team made sure to highlight a simple, yet all-too-common pain point for big corporate organizations: failing to adhere to brand guidelines.
The proposal went something like this, “You may have worked with partners in the past where they put a beautiful design together for you. But in reviewing the product with key stakeholders, you’re told you can’t go live because the design doesn’t meet the brand standards. We know this happens all too often, which is why our design process includes an important step: looping in your brand/marketing teams to ensure guidelines are carefully incorporated into the product development.” Tom’s team then went on to show artifacts from work done for a similar company, offering clear examples of how this paid off for projects past.
In creating empathy for common challenges, you can illustrate your advantages in a clear, memorable way:
Here are some pains that we know that you have
Here are some aspirations that we know that you have
Here’s how our process maps to those pains and aspirations
And here are some artifacts as examples
A Solution-Based Sales Process
Pricing and features are key components to sales, yes, but it’s likely the delivery experience and the outcomes you achieve will carry more weight. As Tom says, many times software companies use an extensive feature list and assumptions as a CYA. When clients are happy with you, they probably aren’t checking delivery line by line against the feature list. Instead, they’re looking at what it was like to work with you, and the outcomes your solution accomplished.
Mapping your method helps make sure that your solution will be what your customer and users need, which is more important than that list of features you outlined in a proposal. Again, Tom and David recommend coming up with a method, mapping it and starting to sell on different value points in that method, instead of features or functionality that you plan to deliver.
In doing so, you shift the mindset from just building what the client said they wanted, to delivering real value. Looping back to standardizing your sales process, focusing your approach on ROI, value and outcomes makes it easier to deliver consistently.
Achieving Better Outcomes
We all know the frustration that comes with wasting time on clients who aren’t a good fit, or losing out on work you want. Both of these challenges often stem from an inconsistent sales process or a murky value proposition. But standardizing your sales process, mapping your method and focusing on solutions, you’ll increase your chances of bringing in more of the work you want—for far less effort.