Part 2 of a 2 part series to prepare you to successfully sell into the oil & gas market in 2014 by building your sales strategy.
Transcript of Session –
Welcome back. I’m still at the API meeting. I’m still in a suit. And now, we’re going to talk about building your sales strategy.
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Everybody does it freaking wrong. Everybody from startups who don’t do it at all to the large corporations who have this template that they make their poor sales guy go through that once it’s done they don’t use it at anything. It’s total waste of time.
Here’s how you do it right. So, first thing is you need to turn your strategy inside out. Your sales strategy most businesses build it around their products, that’s not how you need to build your sales strategy. You need to build your sales strategy through your customers’ eyes, right? Their problems, their language, the issues that your product or solution solves, that’s your sales strategy, number one.
Number two. You need to translate that strategy into a journey for your buyer, right? What does it take to buy your product or service, what hoops do your buyers have to go through, and how can you help facilitate that. So when you tell your story through the buying journey of your clients, you solve half their problems. They look at you as a partner, not as a vendor.
Then, you need to build a future model of your sales funnel. Nobody does this and it’s really important. Who is your dream customer? Put it in your freaking funnel, okay? Go back to the marketing plan figure out how to get in front of the people that have your problem and see the value of your solution and go after it. Build your funnel backwards, put in there who you want to go after and put some realistic dollars and figures in there for what you think you can get and then fill in the rest with your existing clients.
And then also, you need to choose sales tactics that move your buyers. All right, in the oil and gas industry, it’s not money, it’s not cost savings, okay? It’s things like safety, health, environmental, operational efficiency, hitting project start date, that sort of stuff.
And then finally, you need to measure the results and everybody does this in some way, but if you’re not measuring it it doesn’t count and it can’t help you build on it for next year.
And then, my final bit to tell you is keep it simple. I don’t want to see a thirty-page sales strategy. So for most companies and for most sales reps, if each sales rep had a single pager with goals and tactics in there that they could actually follow and you can measure, that’s all you need.
So, I hope all these help. We’re going enjoy the holidays. Hope you enjoy the holidays with your family as well and we’ll see you back in a couple of weeks.
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