Growth Hacking for B2B - Part 2 - Indirect Sales

Growth Hacking for B2B - Part 2 - Indirect Sales

Following my last blog on “growth hacking” I received a few messages on LinkedIn requesting some tactics specifically for indirect sales.

First of all, it is important to state that channel management goes through a major shift, companies are starting to replace the traditional, compliance-based program with a new performance-based program designed to reward all types of partners, business models, and various customer technology consumption preferences. 

According to Forrester, 68% of all deals are not signed through the IT department and technology buyers are bringing in channels directly without asking IT or procurement. So vendors are starting to use an ecosystem that wraps partners around a customer’s need instead of a revenue model. 

So what can we do to create a systemic growth engine through indirect channels?

Here a few examples amongst many possible.

1-    Build your end-customers and partners buyer personas

If the marketing department or the direct sales organisation have not done it yet, the indirect channel department needs to build the buyer persona (end-customers) – this important information will be shared with our partners in order to adapt the go-to-market strategy.

Building such personas help partners to understand the pains, gains and key questions customers face daily.

Of course, the channel department needs to do the same exercise in relation to their partners. Who are the people they need to talk within the channel partners’ organisation – what are their needs, pains etc.

If the former activity will help your partners to sell, the later will help you define a successful partner strategy making sure you are doing the right activities with the right people.

2-    Define the role of partners in your customer journey

In clear, wherein the selling process and product lifecycle your partners bring added value to the customers. Do they have an impact on awareness, product consideration, decision making, delivery or deployment, daily operation, support, loyalty…

Once you have defined the customer journey, then identify where partners play an active role in the customers experience.

Remember that being customer-oriented also means you’re helping your partners reach their customers and enable them to identify opportunities and offer your growth expertise to reach customers.

3-    Execute part of the growth engine for your partners

Like for all of us, and it is also probably true for your partners, the main challenge is generating leads – so how can you help them?

Create a partner section:

• Create a section on your website that talks about them and where your partner’s presences add value – create a link to their website.
• Create videos where partners explain their expertise (not selling) and positioned themselves as subject matter expert.
• Share success stories – add pictures (no stock pictures) make the effort to take real pictures (with smartphones is so easy nowadays).

Encourage your partners to participate in your company blog

• Let them aware of your blog’s calendar and encourage and plan for them to respond to your articles with quality content.
• Create a join-marketing blog on important customer’s issues or needs.

Think outside the box

• Create YouTube videos
• Create Podcast and audio content
• Quora – answer questions regarding your market with your partners  

4-    Build a community around your partner solution which includes your product

Start small by writing blog articles (you and your partner) and see what kind of response they get from the readers. If some of them generated more buzz than others, expand on it and write eBook or white papers. (the key is for your partners to be engaged and create content themselves eventually)

Focus your partner online community on the interests of their target customers. 

You are here to produce buzz and interest and above all engaged customers.  An engaged customer reacts to your product or solution. They participate in its evolution by connecting with peers and conversing with brand representatives. They integrate your product and its values into their daily routine.

The forum is a way for customers to share experiences and best practices.

5- Interact with your Audience – Be real and be Live

With the ever-increasing use of chat-bots ready to answer your every question, there is no shortage of popups when you are browsing online. However,  you can utilize these tools along with real life people to improve your customer experience.

The key is to ensure that your partners’ colleagues embrace speaking directly to your customers as much as possible. Engagement with your customer base will allow you to understand more about their specific needs, request and of course their issues so you can incorporate them into your road map and evolve your product or service to take this into consideration and pivot where required.  

6 – Incorporate LinkedIn in your Hacking strategy

Posting relevant content, sharing information, connecting with people who you see as opportunities or partners who can lead you to new opportunities are paramount as a B2B hack.

Adding in content to your LinkedIn page that followers actively access and share is a key opportunity to build your profile and your perceived value within the network.  

Comment and be part of the groups. Comment on Influencers posts.

The signs that you are truly hacking demand generation are visible when your customers start seeing you as a trusted advisor. 

7 – Repurpose Great Content

Use LinkedIn groups or Post to re-use some great content you created.

A blog post could be re-purposed into a white-paper. An info-graphic can grow into an article. It’s much easier to re-purpose than to create from scratch. Recycle your content, and always remember to make it easy for your readers to consume.

Let’s wrap it up - for now

Nowadays, building a growth strategy is a must-do for any successful organization. It’s the foundation that helps start-ups build traction and become scale-ups. It’s also becoming the ‘bible’ that helps young companies to scale-ups stay dynamic and create systemic growth.

Large System Integrators or Value-added reseller should learn quickly from these successes and you as Channel Managers could be the catalyst for change within your partners eco-system.

Good luck

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Growth Hacking for B2B businesses - Part 1 - Practical Tactics

Growth Hacking for B2B 

If you are an adept of the “Challenger Sales”, you should appreciate "growth hacking" because the secret sauce of growth hacking is plain and easy: Be a rule breaker.

“Growth hacking” produces great results when there is genuine and strong cooperation between the sales, marketing and development departments.  

I’m not going to delve into the details of growth hacking strategy, per se. Instead, I’m going to give you 6 customer acquisition tactics. (if you want to know more on strategies there is a list of “must-read” at the end) – yes Jeremy… reading! and not just watching YouTube videos.  

Great Content!

Great start-ups are good at storytelling and they know that acquiring customers start by interesting individuals working for these companies who might research the market, your company or your solution.

Tactics 1: Blog hack

With the right content marketing strategy and quality blogs, you are guaranteed to generate higher traffic to your website, increase B2B leads and most importantly, sales. 

These individuals you are targeting must find valuable information that will help to improve your brand recognition and earn the trust of your target buyers.

The greater the content you can provide for your target market, the better your chances of influencing a sale.

One way to do this is to attract external experts writing in your blog – they are many tactics to employ such as asking relevant questions on specialised forums, but my favourite is to ask an “expert” to be interviewed and featured in the company’s blog.

Try to interview a consultant from Gartner of Forester and see the result for yourself!

Tactics 2: Content Upgrade

Once you start to attract a good number of people on your blog start analysing the data to identify the pages on your website that deliver the most organic search traffic, ideally top-of-the-funnel content like top blog articles. You can do this within your analytics platform. 

Filter down on each page using the built-in filter and then select to view the queries for that URL. Now that you know what people are searching for to get to your content, you know what they actually want.

This is important because you can now create a content upgrade, with the purpose of capturing contact information in return for access that relates directly to one of these keywords.

According to my marketing department, we scaled this specific test across around 10 different pages on the website and saw an average increase in conversion rate of over 200%.

Tactics 3: Capturing buyers doing due diligence

Now the intent is to capture the organic traffic that comes to your website with high commercial intent, i.e., the visitor is actively looking to buy, is probably the most valuable traffic you can generate.

In truth, this kind of traffic is often much smaller in numbers than that coming from more informational queries (e.g., “how to do…”).

Outside of capturing people searching specifically for your brand name (if you are lucky enough to have already a recognised brand name), there are a few types of tactics that will often work well to target specific target segments.

Industry-Specific Pages

I am assuming you did your homework and have already defined the target market segments you are going after and the buyer personas within these markets you want to attract.

What you need to do is to match the keywords relating to your product against the market segments you are targeting. Then you analyse them with Google Keyword Planner and prioritise the keywords and start building web pages with content to target each one.

SalesForce is the “king” of industry-specific pages like: “CRM for Financial industry”, “CRM for Healthcare”, “CRM for Retail” etc… They have entirely tailored the content with the relevant keywords, used industry images and include industry-specific testimonials.

The solution is exactly the same – the message and content are utterly specific.

Feature-Specific Pages

These pages are designed to help prospects during their buying journey – once they are interested, they often look for more specific information on features you are providing. 

• List out the main features
• For each feature – explain the problem it solves or the benefits it brings (very important)
• Use the relevant keywords that people are searching for
• For each principal feature – build a page packed with the relevant keywords
• Not only this will help buyers to get more technical information but also help us to be better ranked in search engines for keywords specific to the features of your product.

 Tactic 4: Co-branding with Partners

If you have a channel or technical partners, then create a co-branded piece of content promoting both brands and it will dramatically increase the overall reach of the content as well as leads generated.-          

•     Make a list of partners targeting similar audiences and complimentary to you
•     Work on content together
•     Create a landing page on each website
•     Share out leads

Tactic 5: Answer Quora Questions

Generate qualified referral traffic through to your website by answering relevant questions on Quora.com. This is a long-term play – but can pay big -time.

Use a SEO tool and do a search on Quora for relevant questions.

Answer the questions that make sense to your business and remember not to sell too much – promote yourself as subject matter expert. You can use links to your website but be careful Quora moderator can remove your answer in no time. Preferably use links to testimonials.

Tactic 6: Republish Content to Medium

Boost your traffic by tapping into Medium’s referral engine and give your existing content a second life.

Medium is pretty amazing. You can duplicate your content on Medium and add canonical tag (your SEO will appreciate that) so that you do not have to worry about content duplication.

Truthfully, there is very little to lose in doing this. Medium's referral engine can get a lot of readers on your content, so I'd recommend taking some of your content that you think will be most suited to Medium and importing it.

There you are… 6 practical tips for growth hacking.



Of course, growth hacking is much more than this and includes many more activities. Honestly, growth hacking is so vast that I am learning new tricks every day.

Nonetheless, I hope I gave you a flavour of what can be done with growth hacking for B2B businesses.

Good hunt.

Some must-read:

-          The Growth Handbook, Andrew Chen & Intercom-team

-          100 Days of Growth, Sujan Patel

-          Lean Analytics, Alistair Croll

-          Lean Marketing for Startups, Sean Ellis

-          Don’t make me think, door Steve Krug

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What is Account Based Selling

What is Account Based Selling

So John, what is Account-Based Selling (ABS)?

(a following blog from “Selling Disruptive Technology”)… 

First, let me tell you that ABS is not for everyone.

#1. Know when not to do ABS

It is clear that ABS requires more work on the seller’s part, including a high degree of personalization, and takes longer.

ABS works best for strategic/complex sales that require multiple levels of buy-in.

ABS is not beneficial for low value/high transaction sales.

If you’re selling into enterprises, where more buy-in is required to purchase your product or services, this model works well.

#2. Research target accounts

For ABS to work – do your home-work, select the target markets your solutions would fit best.

• Talk to your sales stars. What customer profile spends the most? What customer profile is happiest with your product or services? What customer size buys your solution most frequently?
• Use your CRM and reports on past win by industry. Uncover the top 2-3 top industries/markets that buy your solution.
• Talk with your CEO and executives. What is their vision for the company? What problems do we fix and who would benefit?

List the markets and the companies within these markets - be sure to add in revenue, employee size, and location to your target list and whittle down to 10 to 20 accounts to maintain focus and make it easy to measure execution.

#3. Identify target persona and define messages

In large companies, it is nearly impossible to deal with only one contact.

Sellers must engage at different levels and within different departments. This can mean that they could engage with 10 people in a single account.

• Select the type of persona you need to contact and define:
• What do they do? what problems do they have? what success looks like for them?
• Where do they prefer to get market information from?
• For each persona (for example CISO, CIO, DevOps director etc…) – define the specific benefits that your solutions would bring to these important people.
• Create a specific value proposition for each persona. For example, a CISO could be more interested in saving cost, when a DevOp director could prefer to reduce dev time. Whatever the benefits make sure they are clearly defined and test them with your colleagues and existing customers.
• Now it is time to create a specific elevator speech for each persona that you and your SDR will use when reaching people within your target companies.
• If you are a senior professional, you will probably also design battle cards which include specific answers to specific objections.

#4. Engage continuously 

Now that you have your targets accounts and persona – you know their pains – you have defined the benefits your solution brings and you have developed a specific value proposition for each of them – it is time to reach out.

Enter “value Acceleration”

CRM organizes the sales process, it doesn't necessarily accelerate the sales process. 

A proper sales acceleration increases the velocity of the sales process.

-        It is about responding quickly to online leads

-        It is about cold calling the right way – the warm way!

-        It is about automating customised email campaigns

-        It is about information sharing with the community

-        It is about nurturing prospects and keep them informed

Value acceleration is a mix of software solution, a strong understanding of customers needs, accurate marketing cadence, aggressive but knowledgeable outreach campaigns.

#5. Monitor and measure activities

Nowadays with tools such as Hubspot and Outreach, it is easier to detect the more effective messages, and analyse which communications channel get the best result.

With engagement occurring across multiple contacts, someone within a target account will surface as your champion and this is where the sale process moves from Sales Development to Qualified account.

Clearly, we are still at the beginning of the sales process but nonetheless we reached an important stage where we finally speak directly to a targeted individual and this is where the fun starts.

This is where you want to use the best sales methodology for the early stage of the sales cycle – Challenger sales or SPIN for example….

This modest blog only scratches the surface but I hope it gives you a good introduction to the power of ABS.

John… good hunt

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Selling Disruptive Technology - Is there a better way to sell?

Selling Disruptive Technology

I would like to thank John (I hope life is great in San Diego) for asking me to write a few lines on provocative-based selling…

There is nothing new about the debate on sales methodology and what’s right for your company, however, there has been an uptake in the belief that disruptive technology start-ups need to adopt Challenger Sales methodology.

Even though I have sold disruptive techno most of my life and used the Challenger Sales with great effectiveness, I still love the “solution-selling” methodology and its principles can be very useful at the back end of the sales process.

In fact, I am a great believer that you can even be more successful when picking appropriate bits from different methodologies and applying them at the right stage of your sales process.

Provocative at the front-end of the sales process

Under the conventional solution-selling method that has prevailed since the 1980s, salespeople are trained to align a solution with an acknowledged customer needs and demonstrate why it is better than the competitions. 

When selling disruptive technology, customers might not know they have a need for your solution and, therefore, the vendor has nothing to align it with.

Introducing the “Challenger Sales” methodology; the vendor identified a process that is critical for its customers, develop a compelling point of view on how it is broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor is offering.

Once you have identified a high-impact issue, one of the most difficult aspect of this methodology is to develop a provocation stance to help your customers recognize the issue.

In my experience, not many salespeople are capable of doing it on their own, therefore the marketing, sales and development teams must work together to put a strong business case behind our provocative stance.

Once we have the provocation stance, the proof for it and the solution to fix the issue – then we can present it to the right ears.  Start by convincing your customer’s internal sponsor, agree on the business case figures and move up the ladder.

Consultative at the back-end of the sales process

Now that you have displaced the traditional players, the “solution selling” principles can be useful at this stage.

Once you create the business case with your sponsor, educate the relevant stakeholders of the benefits, savings and ROI, then you enter the closing stage where your negotiations skills will be put to the test.

If you want to sharpen your negotiations skills – have a look at the books written by Roger Dawson.

https://www.rdawson.com/

Conclusion

Should every sales call your company pays from now on be a provocative one? 

Probably not, unless you are a start-up focused on one offering and one target market. 

Provocation-based sales cycles—though much quicker than solution sales cycles—are resource-intensive, so only a few can be run in parallel;

In fact, in my experience, provocative-based sales work very well when you follow an account-based selling strategy.

What??? (John added) An account-based selling strategy? What is this?

Well… I guess, John, this will be the subject of my next blog post.

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Selling Artificial Intelligence - the gap between POC and reality?

Selling Artificial Intelligence - the gap between POC and reality?

As a great fan of Isaac Asimov, I have always had a great interest in anything touching robotics and AI and when one of my former employers asked me for advice on closing an AI deal, I decided to create this blog.

AI is much more than just a technology to help robots and it seems that AI has countless potential applications in all industries, all around us.

Process improvement

Taking a specific industry like finance, which is one of my favourite markets, AI helps in many ways:

• Helping to provide faster and better selection for a credit decision.
• Reducing investment risk by analysing portfolio and leveraging risk issues
• Detecting money laundering by spotting suspicious activities and cutting the cost of investigations.
•  Providing smart chatbots to help customers and reducing call centres workload.
• Automating these myriads of high-frequency repetitive tasks. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), is of the five emerging technologies that JP Morgan Chase uses to enhance the cash management process.

It is clear that AI will have a significant impact on reshaping the business environment in the financial industry.

Can Citizen Data Scientists Help

However, despite 65% (Forbes) of executives expecting positive change from AI, only 30% of them have taken steps to implement AI in their companies.

Furthermore, a recent CIO article stated that while most IT leaders are aware of AI's potential, most organizations still lack the ability to effectively tackle adoption.  

In my opinion, one way to speed up the democratisation of AI would be, in parallel to appeal to Data Scientist, to approach the “citizen data scientist” and enable them to take their data, run it and apply it against different machine learning and deep learning models…to actually get information out the other end. 

Data scientists and their “citizen” counterparts working in tandem in order to get to a quick proof-of-concept (POC) and get more funding and move forward.

However, it seems that many of the AI POCs are struggling to transform into production and real projects.

Improving the chance of POCs success

Having done many POCs in my career, I could maybe apply some of my experience and discuss what can be done to improve the rate of transforming AI POCs into real projects.

1-   Even though POC are often carried out on rather simple algorithms using immediately available data, it is important that all parties consider right from the start the company environment, existing workflows, security and data privacy challenges.

It is clear that AI is a disruptive technology and the project will have a considerable impact on the company’s existing workflows. Ignoring how the AI project will eventually integrate within the working environment might be a rather costly mistake.     

2-   In light of the first point, it would be sensible to select for the first POC a solution that solves a rather simple process which could limit the working environment challenges and create a positive momentum within the organisations.

3-   For the AI POC to move to production, the organisation would need the skills to deploy it to scale and have a structure to support it. Planning and agreeing on a clear RACI chart and resource plan at the beginning would avoid a potential disheartened rejection when the management realises too late the cost and effort to deploy and run the solution.

4-   Specifically, for AI project, it seems that the availability of the data when going live is crucial. Therefore, working with data scientist to get access to real-world data (as opposed to manipulated samples) should reduce the gap between “real world” requirements and POC data set.

5-   If, as recommended in phase 1, we did our homework and understood from the start how the company is going to deliver the required data, we could work with the IT department to plan the integration of the solution within the company’s technical environment.

   

6-   For any project to succeed, you need to have a C-level champion within the organisation who understand the long-term benefit of the solution and be ready to fight for its survival with peers.   

Conclusion

First, a clear relation with the business function is necessary to better understand the business environment and technical challenges to integrating the solution within the corporate IT environment.

Secondly, funding of AI projects often come from the business functions budget so having a champion at C-level enable the project to be real and protected from others business requirements.

Third, a clear planning around access to data and integration to other sources enable to scale the project.

And lastly, given that AI solutions are often disruptive, read the "challenger sales" book (Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson) many times and apply the concepts to your sales process.

----------------- For the people who do not have time to read -------------------

Abstract to the Challenger  Sales

• Challenging customers’ thinking. Develop a deep understanding of your customer, and learn to push their thinking.
• Know their market. Teach your customer something new about competing within their market.
• Re-framing. Learn to re-frame the way a customer thinks about your category of solution.
• Control the conversation. Learn to stay in control of the sales conversation, and when to gently apply pressure.
• All products and services. The Challenger Sales Methodology will work for most industries, but for the complex large scale business sale, it’s even more vital

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