Two important facts about sales. One, you need a plan, a strategy, a framework for sales. Two, fundamentals are required and need to be executed as best as possible and always improving.
The industry got lazy in 2020. Anyone that answered a phone was able to close a UC&C order. Not a sale, because no real selling was going on – just order taking. Now that cloud comms growth is in single digits, selling is required.
Sales people have gotten lazy on fundamentals too. They skip steps; hurry to close the deal. Meanwhile, Enterprise sales are slowing down. They take longer because of the macroeconomic environment and that more people are involved in the decision. Every sale is getting harder to bring to ink.
We need to go back to the 4 pillars: Focus/ Target; Positioning/Why?; Messaging/Earn Trust; Where to fish and how.
Number one: WHO BENEFITS THE MOST FROM YOUR SERVICES? The problem with most providers is that they think Everyone is a Customer. Unless you are BT or Orange that is incorrect. Even for those two giants, it isn’t everyone any more. There is a section of the marketplace that you can serve best. There is product-market fit. For that segment of the market, the service delivery results in benefits for the business. Look at your customers to see if any verticals or sizes or other characteristics stick out. What about your top customers is similar?
The second pillar is of course marketing. Positioning is about defining how your company is the best at something that the market cares about. It is part of defining the value proposition. The why you instead of the thousand other SPs that offer UC too. It is about benefits, customer needs, and your unique differentiator. An example of this could be that you are the best at delivering a communications platform to Zoho customers with 10 to 99 employees who achieve a 15% productivity gain from the combination.
Now you may be thinking: that cuts our addressable market to a fraction. The largest US CLEC had 55K customers. 8x8 has 55K global businesses using their services. Zoom has 4,192 customers billing $100K+ in ARR. Think about the next 100 or 1000 customers that you want to acquire; not the next 100,000 or million.
The third pillar is Messaging. What are you saying to prospects and the market? Are you telling stories or pushing out PR? With AI replacing search, SEO won’t be as effective as stories about benefits and outcomes.
What are stories valuable? Our brains are wired for stories. It is how we pass down human history. The use case could be a story about the impact your services had on a customer. If it was a good story, it would be memorable, which makes it repeatable and sticky. Sales Engineers are good at sales because they can map features to benefits and translate the technical to the business need. In telecom we push product; but businesses especially SMB buy solutions, not products. They don’t buy technology but what the tech can do for the business.
The final pillar is Where does the sales team fish? That depends. Start in your network. Look at verticals. Do you have former customers? It needs to be multi-threaded with cold outreach, referrals, networking, and other avenues. There is still money in emails. Social media can work. Obviously, this is more effort than before but that is just what is required now.
Story-telling, Positioning, Targeting. And fishing are the 4 pillars of a sales plan that coupled with executing well on the sales fundaments is the path to success for providers.
Peter Radizeski Biography
Peter Radizeski is a veteran of the US Telecoms Channel based in the Sunshine State of Florida. He has assisted numerous prominent service providers across the United States in growing their businesses by offering guidance on sales training, marketing, channel development, and business strategy. He is a reliable source of knowledge about the telecom industry. His candid and straightforward Channel Playbook Blog is essential reading for industry insiders, and he is a sought-after speaker and moderator at industry events.