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uh thank you for joining us uh whether you're uh via linkedin live or watching the recording later via youtube uh your time is valuable so i'm gonna get started straight away welcome to how to write a sales plan for 2022 uh and for the first time as i said we're broadcasting via linkedin live so hopefully we will not get any messages from people saying they're struggling to connect uh the technology gods will shine on us and everything will move smoothly if you are a sales person yourself if you're a sales manager a business owner entrepreneur and you know part of your responsibilities for uh in sales are creating a sales plan and delivering against a sales target then this is the right place to be for the next uh 50 minutes to an hour uh please feel free to use the q a function within linkedin live throughout the session and uh if i don't get a chance to answer as i'm going through the deck i promise i will answer you answer any questions after the webinar finishes and equally on linkedin please use the uh comment sorry on youtube please use the comments function uh if you've been to any of our webinars before you will know that this is uh what we describe as a magic wand free zone so we do not have any pixie dust that we can sprinkle on you or your organization that will make sales uh transform overnight there is no substitute in b2b sales for hard work sorry but that's just the way it is in order to manage your expectations we're simply going to walk through some super simple sales uh an example of a super simple sales plan this afternoon and uh there's a few elements a few elements of biggie pardon that we've left out because primarily because of time uh so uh let's get started and what's not included uh typically in a sales plan you're gonna have a review of the previous year and and that's just uh a review of everything from uh not just your sales targets but uh performance uh your structure uh and and how you uh how you measured against the objectives that you set yourself in the previous year you also may well include a swot analysis based on your position your position within the market against the competition etc and you would certainly include some form of budget document in there to make sure that you've planned financially for the year ahead uh vision so most people don't have this most people will not use this in their uh sales plan however uh it's something that we always like to include you know for us it is the the guiding light the the the polk star that we need to follow and without a sales vision uh you know the danger is that people are going to go off in all different directions so uh if you've got a company vision fantastic that's great it's not the same as a sales vision uh your sales vision is basically the the north star as i said that your team are going to follow especially when you're not there you need that north star uh and it's it's where you want to be where your sales division sales unit wants to be and where you want it to be in the next three years uh compelling vision creates hope and without hope your sales people may well give up the the other thing that you may well include in this it would be your sales values again it's not quite the same as your company values uh the division if you like is the destination that your sales plan is is actually leading to and the sales plan is going to be the roadmap that you will follow to reach that vision so uh values where do the values fit in the values are the rules that you've agreed to follow your sales team as a you know as a team we've agreed to follow uh on our uh journey to the vision so it's super important uh and why is it important well if for any uh any reason you're not there and we cannot be there all the time nor should you want to be all the time uh and your sales people uh are faced with making any form of decision they simply should ask themselves two questions number one will this take me closer or further away to my vision uh and the second question would be right is this aligned with our sales values and and if the answer to those both of those questions is yes i promise they will not go far wrong it might not be perfect it might not be the way that you would do it however it won't be far wrong and you know it's part of that uh maturing of your business your sales team that they have to be able to make their own decisions you cannot micromanage people you cannot nanny people forever they've got to be able to make their own decisions and you know the sales guys that are listening to this you know if you're an entrepreneur or a business owner whatever the sales guys that are listening to this will absolutely echo that they don't want to be micromanaged nobody does they don't want to be nannied you know they're adults and we've got to treat them as such so uh start with end in mind uh let's pretend last year's turnover was 1.2 million i've made it around numbers because i'm hopeless at math uh let's pretend it was 1.2 million i would like i would suggest that you break that down into the monthly revenue figures and that should uh cater for uh any uh seasonal differences that you have in your sales uh sales cycle so i i don't know let's pretend you're uh you've got some special offer around about valentine's day and you know february is always a a really amazing month for you you need to take into account all those different trends and [Music] spread it out over the month so our goal is 20 growth uh that's an arbitrary figure i'm not saying that you must choose 20 uh if you are a sas company i would suggest that in certain circumstances 20 it's just not going to be enough you know if you're going for that hockey hockey stick growth curve uh you know your growth is going to be in line with your scale ratio so it you know it could potentially be much more than 20 percent uh equally you know if you're uh in some way recovering from you know the pandemic the lockdown you know 20 percent might seem too uh it might seem too much of a stretch target my gut tells me that if you've not got twenty percent down my gut tells me that uh it's just not ambitious enough uh uh i i i'm not i'm not trying to criticize anybody but for us you know you've got to be ambitious uh and you should be aiming for that twenty percent growth so twenty percent growth on to uh one point two million is going to take you up to uh 1.44 million so uh bad news uh 2021 had an rpi retail price index in the uk i appreciate people are dialing in from all over the world uh i'm potentially watching this on youtube from all over the world so the uk retail price index is how the uk measures inflation and in 2021 the latest figures i can find is 2.5 percent 2.5 percent of 1.2 million is 36 000 and you've got to add that into your target uh so uh if you don't want to add an inflation uh basically your profit margins are being eroded uh maybe you want to go home and tell your partner that you're going to be working just as hard in 2022 but you're going to take a 2.5 pay cut i i think i get w around the head if i tried that uh you know you've got to be raising your places you've got to be profitable in order to be uh you know in order to have a sustainable business so uh and again i would adjust those values down into uh a a monthly figure now if you are uh you know you as i said your cost to sales are going up your cost of sales will be uh you know a line item that's in your balance sheet if you're a sas company you might not have a cost of sales but you'll have a cost of revenue as a line item uh you know you can't avoid it you know the inflation is inflation uh it's not nice you've got it you've got to take that into account and you've got to add that into your pricing and again please break this down into the monthly figures why do we break it down into monthly figures because it becomes a much uh more achievable target you know to say to somebody to hit one point two three uh uh uh thousand hundred twenty three thousand in uh the month of april is going to be much easier than saying to somebody you're going to have your targets 1.476 million for the year right yeah breaking it down makes it more uh digestible for everybody and on that note your your sales plan if it's your sales plan i would suggest that ultimately is going to fail right the sales plan needs to be owned by everybody the sales plan if you're the business owner if you're the sales manager the fastest and easiest way to demotivate a sales team is to dump your sales plan on them right it's your sales plan it's not theirs therefore they will have no sense of ownership of it they will have no sense they will have no connection to it you know to avoid that you need to get the team as a whole the sales people you know if they're executing on the sales plan they've got to be involved in the formation of that sales plan uh so you know the sales guys that are that are on this webinar listening to this they will absolutely resonate that because we've all in sales had somebody you know typically it's a some anonymous corporate head office dump a a sales plan on us that's got targets on us that you know uh as far as we can perceive have got no relation to reality right you know there's no context around it ever so uh you know where possible get the salespeople you know i would also argue to have marketing people in there as well right you know we we need to get everybody on board this sales plan if you're a sales person and you're writing a sales per uh sales plan for the territory you need to get the sales manager on board for obvious reasons because you need the support of the business to help you execute on that sales plan so the good news if your business is typical up to eighty percent of next year's revenue eighty percent of 2022 revenue will come from 2021 customers and on a 1.2 million turnover that's going to give you 960 000 in terms of revenue for next year now if you if you are not getting 80 in terms of uh that follow-through revenue to the next year right i would encourage you to do whatever you can to increase the recurring revenue that you're getting from your customers whether whether that be introducing new contracts new products or services uh new strategies you know selling somebody one contract for two years is much easier than selling one person to single year contracts right and again that might be uh that might be difficult to get your head around because you're asking people to commit for double the length of time i totally get you know i'm not for one minute saying this is easy but we've got to get some way into your business where you're getting recurring revenue so that every month does not mean every new month doesn't mean that you're starting from scratch and every new year you're starting from scratch so if you've not got recurring revenue from your existing products or services work on that and if needs be change your products or services you know introduce new products or services that will get you recurring revenue so you've got a baseline to work with uh and obviously uh you know if you've got a high churn rate you know in children you know within your sas product or or children within any other type of industry you know your customer churn right you've got to get that sorted there's no point chasing after new business if you've got a revolving door right where the minute customers come in you know they're going out the door uh you know and even if it's even if they leave after six months can we get them to to can we increase that six months to nine months you know what can we do to to uh retain them for an extra uh even if it was a ten percent of the time what can we do to do that next up talk to your customers so those 20 of your clients will typically generate 80 of your revenue so this revenue that i'm saying is going to come from your existing customers for next year what i'm suggesting is that you go and talk to your customers and you know this is super simple ask them these two questions number one your business is important to me charlie what do i need to do to ensure we don't lose your business next year they've probably never heard a sales guy ask them that question before right and they will tell you what you need to do right and and imagine and don't don't just think of this as don't take their first answer probe you know imagine it's like an onion and every question you ask peels out and peels off a layer of the onion you know you've got to ask really probing questions and and and you know if they just say oh no just do anything you know what you're doing is great you've got you've got to come back at them and say look like great it's good but we want to be better than great i i and that's where the the second question comes in you've got to ask them what could we do next year right what could our company do next year that you would perceive as going above and beyond what is it that we could do next year for your organization that you guys would perceive as going above and beyond and what i'm trying to do here what we're trying to do is we're trying to get a developer a base of what we call raving fans uh if you've not read the book uh raving fans by ken blanchard it's an old book but you know lots of good stuff in there and lots of good ideas in there about client retention and how you can develop a a base of raving fans and they will give you referrals and you know part of your strategy for next year is going to include new client acquisition referrals is part of that strategy so uh next up here's an example of a contact plan make sure that you've got contact plans for this top 20 of your clients you may have more than 20 that you've got a contact plan with uh in in terms of uh you will have segmented them and some of them will be what i would describe as managed some of them will be managed remotely and some of them may be unmanaged for one of a better word so make sure you've got a contact plan for each of those segments within your business and this is a real simple template that you can do this is a template it's a guide it's a starting point it's not a set of rules i'm more than happy to share this however you've got to customize this and make it bespoke to your world and your customer base i've just got some notes here i just want to make sure that i do not miss anything uh i i think i mean forgive me if i mentioned this earlier but if you want a copy of any of the templates that we're using just please drop a message in the q a section on linkedin live or in the comments within the youtube video session so how to increase sales uh there are only four ways to increase sales now i'm sure some people are rolling the rise because they've seen this a million miles before you've seen it million miles before because it's the truth it's the reality you know there's no point looking for this advanced you know super uh magic wand that this pixie dust stuff that this is the harsh reality there are only four ways to increase sales number one raise your prices number two increase the transaction frequency number three increase the average order size number four increase the customers that you sell to i'm just going to talk through each of those individually just to give you just give you some ideas on that so number one raise your prices uh first thing i would suggest that you look at is timing you shouldn't be price gouging you shouldn't be extorting people and you've got to make sure that you're not increasing a price increase just before they're in some form of situation where they're compelled to buy and they feel trapped yes you may get the business uh however you're potentially going to damage that relationship so give people fair warning give them plenty warning to any price increases that you're going to do and you know please do not be shy or reticent about raising prices i go back to my uh what i said at the start of this session uh retail price index has gone up inflation is up the cost of of trading for your business to stay in business the cost of you staying in business has gone up and all without increasing prices you're you're going to erode your margins and it's not sustainable next up add value what can you do to add value something that's low cost to you but perceived as high value to them right think this through with your team right and see what you can do in exchange for that price increase uh next up add service fees now service fees is is a a catch-all for a number of things it could be we want to add postage of package we want to add travel time we want to add whatever it is right but what are the costs that you're potentially eating as a business at the moment you're you're you you're eating them at the moment but you want to be able to start passing some of that on and it doesn't need to be all of it it doesn't need to be all of it it could be that you're only going to be charging uh half the mileage if you know if you've got field sales people if sorry field engineers and you're you're sending them out to to do specific things what can you do to mitigate some of those costs number four segment your customers uh can you change your customers uh charges at legitimately based on volume uh can you raise your price based on on some sort of service level that their increased service level that they're actually using which obviously leads me to the next one uh and again you've got to do this gently everything's going to be done gently because you've got to make sure that you're protecting your base your good customer base so talked about service levels could be you're going to change things on response times demand etc and next up take control take control what do i mean by that often as salespeople and i'm going to include myself here we're just the wrong people to be having that conversation about money right we're just not good at that because we're trying to protect the relationship or whatever so sometimes it's much better if you take control of the pricing and you just uh send the dicta out soon uh team the price the new price is now this right we are not accepting any orders lower than this dollar figure amount so take control from your sales people and a lot of sales people are quite grateful for for that scenario to happen so you know if that's appropriate for you uh just you know take control uh and and but you know work with them you know feel like they're part of the process you've got to make them include these guys in your processing there at last up stage that increases so uh let's let's pretend that for 2022 we need to get a 20 price increase uh 20 is obviously for a price increase i would uh suggest maybe quite a lot so rather than introduce a 20 price increase what can you do to stage those increases throughout the year so you know if you go to your customers and say look we've got to increase our prices because you know our overheads have gone up you know power's gone up uh whatever else has gone up uh we don't want to be forced into doing it however what we're going to do is we're going to increase it in stages so be 10 for the first six months of 2022 and another 10 for the second six months so uh you know trying and twenty percent you know in reality it's probably going to be more like one and a half percent and one and a half percent a total of three percent it's not going to be 20 but you know still the the i think there's definitely a a a relationship factor a benefit to the relationship i should say by introducing st price increases in stages now you absolutely must tell your customers that these price increases are coming because if you don't tell them in advance what they're going to be thinking is oh my god every six months i get a price increase but if you say if you tell them in advance and they're expecting it it's usually uh easier for them to uh you know to basically take that on board so next up uh increase the transaction frequency how do we get them to buy more often uh and you know the the there may be uh here's here's some ideas in fact that we can do about that so it's the usual things you know like what are the special offers that we can do uh what are deals on future sales that we can do so can we do a deal we're there we're getting them to buy future sales you know uh increase that uh uh revenue by that way uh loyalty rewards programs you know take the concept of of a a a costa or a starbucks loyalty program and work out how you can then apply that to your manufacturing business or your sas business those loyalty and rewards programs work you've just got to work out how to actually apply it to your business there's nothing wrong with a strategy it's not exclusive to business to consumer it will work in b2b you've just got to work out how to apply it in your world and then obviously uh cross selling and upselling are you know the the most common ways that you're going to get the increase the frequency of sales next up my personal favorite increase the average order size how do we go about that so bundling uh how do i explain bundling so microsoft teams microsoft teams which you know i'm not sure i believe it's the fastest selling microsoft product ever microsoft teams is actually most people aren't aware of this but teams is actually just an interface interface that is built on sharepoint uh onedrive for business and microsoft exchange so by bundling those three products and and package them packaging them under the the team's banner right microsoft you know i've just had phenomenal success with microsoft teams uh closers uh just following the same thing we're launching a new product in 2022 called funnel sprint what is funnel sprint funnel sprint is actually a combination of an inbound uh lead generation program and an outbound lead generation program those are two training courses that we've provided and we you know we're currently providing uh individually and we're putting the two together by and you know obviously then it's going to increase the average order size from their own perspective so what new products and services can you introduce that are going to be you know of a higher value uh and again yeah you've in many cases your products and services may well be coming obsolete because the world is moving at such a fast pace do not be frightened to change do not be frightened to introduce new things there are lots of great examples of companies who have uh introduced new products and services and went on to be phenomenally successful the example i always use close to my heart as suzuki i'm sure everybody on the call has heard of suzuki uh what most people are not aware of that suzuki the origins of suzuki where they were a silk loom producer they actually manufactured the looms that the silk weavers in japan would use and around about uh the turn of the 20th century the early 1900s uh you know the the leadership team in suzuki were not convinced of the future of the silk loom industry so they went uh they realized that they had a an asset in terms of the skill set of their employees so they looked at what they they could what other products that they thought were going to be successful we're going to start to become more popular they could actually start to build so they moved into engines uh motorcycles cars so you know from from a silk loom to you know a a moto gp you know world winning uh last year it was it was they were the world champions and motorcycles and gp racing so you know that's just a fantastic story of how people can and companies can reinvent themselves if suzuki if a corporation like suzuki can do it if companies like intel can do it you know that move from uh you know semiconductors into processors if they can do it then you know you know as small organizations like most of us on this webinar if those big organizations can do it we can do it and again and the last one there is cross-selling and up-selling is important so uh last one and number four uh increase the number of customers you sell to which is probably the most uh i i don't know the most popular way to increase sales uh in in the coming years we want to get more companies to sell to totally get it and that makes perfect sense so how we're going to do this uh let's look at what worked previously let's follow the data look at the crm go to your crm and download the list of all your new businesses last year all the new accounts that you won in the previous year 2021 and look at the the source of the lead so did that lead come from your website did that lead come from uh cold call uh uh a webinar where did those leads come from right and those strategies that you know are working you know which of those strategies can we double down on for 2022. now some of them are not going to be you're always going to get a different roi on the different sales channels you use but you know there's some evidence there proof that you can go to your sales team look we got uh uh 23 new accounts via our uh website last year like what can we do to promote the website what can we do to increase the visibility of the website we got 43 people from webinars last year sales guys what can we do to actually get more people onto the webinars what content can we plan for the next webinars so that they stay popular so look at what work what's worked in 20 20 21 and then replicate that you know parts of that maybe not all of it because it's not all going to be effective necessarily and look to do that in 2022. next up it's inbound plus outbound now a lot of companies have got a uh a tendency to focus on one or the other uh technology companies for example tend to focus on the inbound but not the outbound sas companies tend to focus on the outbound but not the inbound uh it's not an old you know you don't need to choose what they should be is completely uh aligned and your inbound and your outbound should be connected to each other if you're not sure what inbound or outbound is inbound would typically be uh well as it sounds what are the ways that leads come into our business so those typically would tend to have been marketing uh driven and what i mean by that is they would be leads from say your website uh you know anything inbound anything that makes the what what we say is anything that makes the phone ring or outlook ping so it's something that's been done by marketing outbound is the sales is typically been done by sales so you know in 2021 you know because of the lockdowns and everything it's typically going to be things like you know cold calls social selling those sorts of things uh you know online networking you know those sorts of things now uh conversation for another day and we will be running a webinar on this but if you've got a sales and marketing department i would strongly suggest you scrap it right sales and marketing that business model was from years ago uh you will have much more be much more productive you will move forward much quicker and faster right if you put sales and marketing together and call it growth call it revenue call whatever you want but put the two together right don't have them two separate departments because it's just it's just nonsensical you can have different kpis different objectives nothing is aligned your perfect prospect profile for a a marketeer is different to the sales guy is different to the onboarding team you've got to put the two together call it we call it growth call it revenue but make sure that you put the two together and lastly is it focused so there are literally a million and one things as salespeople as marketeers that we can do uh under the guise of uh selling lead generation uh you know marketing there are a hundred one different activities if you try and do i'm if you try and do everything all you're going to do is you're going to spread yourself thin you will spread yourself thin and the results are just not going to be as powerful as they could be you know as an example for us we use one channel for inbound it's called google there's a hundred and forty thousand searches per second as long as we get that right we know we're going to get leads we're going to get inbound leads now how difficult is it to you know how big a mountain is google to climb it's huge however you know the uh the more time we spend on google the better we get on google you know we've already got i think 120 odd pages on uh articles on page one first uh selected keywords so we we pretty much know what we're doing and we've got that uh cookie cutter process now so we know what we're doing but we only know what we're doing because we've invested a lot of time and we've focused on google 140 000 searches per second i believe it's something like 90 uh i think it's not 98 of the search market so bing much as i love microsoft bing's just not it's just not big enough yahoo's not big enough uh it's just you know get on to google get on to page one of google outbound we only use linkedin 720 million exact level business decision makers why would i go anywhere else why would i go anywhere else until i've maximized you know the the the the benefits and and the potential opportunity on linkedin so uh yes i'm not for one minute saying that you shouldn't be on facebook you shouldn't be on instagram you know once you've maximized certain channels and you're really really good and you're getting the maxima roi by all means look at those other channels and but if you're not right you've got to get that laser focused so you're absolutely getting the best you can out of those two channels uh next up is planning you know there's different ways that you know we can do this planning uh this was the slide that i showed you earlier our target is 1.46 remember we want to start with the end in mind so there's our monthly target so how do we turn this into some form of uh plan that we can then follow so you've got a number of options here planning by account so list drop a list of your top customers that you you know remember we said 80 revenue is going to come from next year's accounts so drop a list of your accounts by and mark out what they purchased in january uh 2020 uh whatever the previous year was 2021 so i'm just conscious people might be watching this video uh on youtube a few years later uh you know figure out what people were sold the previous year and then you can then work out well what do i do what are they going to sell this year now the the first option an example a on the screen there is where you're adding another account so you add one more account and that one account is going to account is going to deliver 115k in revenue which will bump you up from the 500 to the 615. so that the other way to do is to add in the uh the actual increase in revenue to each of the accounts so you're you're selling you know you sold 10 widgets to united federation last january and you're going to be selling 12 widgets to them this january now the reality is that it's never going to work out as neat and as exact as that where you can just give them an extra 20 of uh you know of your sales target because the sales guys are going to say but united federation you know they're contracting you know they're closing a couple of facilities uh and that account you know we're going to be lucky to to to keep that same level i totally understand that but equally the the sales guys might say look wayne enterprises they're opening up some new locations we may get 14 widgets into them in january next year so you talk to your team and spread it out over those uh your different accounts and you know it may well be that you you've got a mixture of the both so you've got a mixture of a new account that you're adding and you've increased sales to existing accounts which would be the the optimum and and what we're gonna what we would suggest next you could uh plan this via service you know the service of the products that you're selling so uh you you sold 12 widgets last year you're going to say 10 widgets last you're going to save 12 again so you're managing it you're segmenting it by the service and again you may well be doing this where you're uh a combination of adding new accounts or a big part a new service to you your product stack and you're increasing sales to your existing stack another option is planning by territory where you uh you split your territory up and uh it could be by country it could be by region but you're spreading that out on a monthly basis uh via the different regions now most of you guys are probably going to end up with a plan that is going to uh it's going to be a combination of planning by account uh planning by service and planning by territory and you probably include in there planning by salesperson planning by the individual reps you're going to end up with a matrix i've not put a matrix in here because it tends to over complicate things and the more complicated it is it's much more difficult to execute but i absolutely accept that for many of you on this webinar you're gonna need more than one uh way to slice and dice your sales plan if you can you know if you can use all four different ways then fantastic uh if not you know i keep going back to this the more simplistic your plan is the more likely it is to be executed and the more likely you are to be successful so the sales plan is the what you know what is our targets right and that's super important but the how how do we then reach those targets is equally important and uh a couple of things i would suggest you think about you know number one is we've got to make ourselves uh we've got to under identify the activities what are the activities that drive those revenues so uh again that could be uh well it will be a combination of inbound and outbound activities once you've identified what those inbound and outbound activities are you've got to make yourself accountable you know if you're not accountable your sales plan is just a wish list so you've got to make yourself accountable uh and you know if you're a salesperson uh you know can you imagine what your boss would say if you ring your boss up and said here's my sales plan for 2022. it's really important that it has hit these targets these are the activities i've chosen i've identified that will contribute to any tigers could you please make sure that i do this on a consistent basis so every week i want you to check in with me and make sure that i did this amount of calls i did this amount of customer visits i did what whatever those activities are your boss is going to think my god what a refreshing attitude your boss is going to absolutely love that and they will say yeah i'm i'm happy to help you and and they will do whatever they can to help you and uh you know equally you know if you're bo if you're the sales manager if you're the the business owners you've got to hold yourself accountable to actually supporting the team and making sure that they reach their targets making sure that they actually deliver on the activities and sometimes right you're going to have to have some maybe uncomfortable conversations when people aren't doing those activities and but that's why you business owners get paid the big bucks right you've got to be prepared to have those uncomfortable conversations with the sales guys because us sales guys you know us sales guys are a bit like uh we're quite easily distracted you know shiny objects appearing you know on on the periphery uh can quite easily distract us and take us down another path we've got to stick to that sales plan we've got to be held accountable to what's delivering uh what we've agreed to do in the sales plan and lastly uh for everybody business owners entrepreneurs sales people we've got to enjoy the process as much as the results potentially even more than the results what do i mean by that in sales you will always get more no's than yeses so if our if our psyche if our belief system is wired to success you know and and winning is only when we get an order that's great on the the one time out return that you're gonna get the order the other nine times out of ten where you get rejected when you get ghosted when you get basically told where to go like you're going to get completely demoralized and you're going to give up so enjoy the process and as long as you've got the numbers make sure you're making a note of the numbers follow the numbers you can just say okay so you know uh every uh 53 calls i make i get uh i i i get somebody who agrees to a meeting right out of every meeting every three meetings i get an order as long as you've got that data there when you get to number 41 and you're causing more you can say look i just need to keep going i just need to follow my process and i will get there so make sure that you're tracking the data you're tracking those uh the the process that you're following and you're getting you just do not put your emotional hook hanging your emotional hook on winning all the time so uh starting point if you've not done this you know we say this to everybody uh you've got to look at your ideal client profile you've got to if you if it was two or three years since you've done this it's changed lockdown's changed everything go in and refresh your ideal client profile your ideal client profile is the perfect customer the perfect organization that you would sell to if you're not sure who that should be go back to your crm look at the top i don't know the top five six seven customers in 2021 and then look at the commonality you know within those customers and use them as the basis to complete this ideal client profile if you do not have an ideal client profile you are trying to sell to everybody and when you try and sell to everybody you end up selling to nobody you've got to be laser focused like the sniper not not like the shotgun so to speak so next up is the perfect prospect profile perfect prospect profile is different to the ideal client profile and that your ideal client profile is based on your target organization that's the companies that you're targeting and the perfect prospect profile are the people within that organization that are involved in buying your products and services they are part of the customer decision making unit uh your your customers decision making unit uh i should say uh the the latest data uh that i read last week i believe there's a minimum of six and a maximum of 16 people involved in the purchasing process for an enterprise sale so you you should have a minimum of three perfect prospect profiles and i know that's hard work but it's absolutely well worth the while uh a simple example from us is we would have a prospect profile for a ceo we'd have a prospect profile for a vp of sales and we'd have a prospect profile for an hvp of hr those are the three people that are uh from our experience and tend to be more involved in the uh purchasing of our products and services so so for us we've got uh three uh and we've got more than three because uh different client profiles uh a sas profile can be slightly different to a manufacturing company etc so uh and again if anybody wants a copy of these templates uh you're more than welcome to uh drop a note in the comments on youtube or in the q a section on linkedin so once we've got this seminar who are targeting what are the strategies for 2021 so the the latest from smart insight so this is super up to date account based marketing 46 video marketing uh influencer marketing now in influencer marketing a lot of people that immediately jump to instagram and and you know that world of business to consumer that's obviously relevant however business to business has influenced our marketing as we er as well so a simple example of that we have a client who has got a a business and they do salary sacrifice for electric vehicles if you're not familiar with what celery sacrifices for electric vehicles uh go to live electric i think it's dot com love electric all one word uh because i could i could not explain it myself but uh basically there's a tax benefit to the way that you purchase a car uh so that you would actually save some money uh so uh my point is as a business to business uh organization they're targeting other businesses uh however my influences in in their world would be accountants because accountants are paid to advise companies on how to save money so right you know if they can develop a a a channel via uh influencers accountants and their their circumstance that would actually help them uh introduce them to these their customers that's going to be a great move for them uh ai artificial intelligence that's becoming more and more relevant retargeting is for people who for example have been in your website and what happens is that uh the next time they're on facebook linkedin or anywhere on the internet they may see an advert for that particular product or service i believe that retargeting adverts have got a seven times higher conversion rate than cold pay-per-click ads so you know again that might be something that that you should be doing as part of your inbound process and personalization uh absolutely personalization is huge uh and inbound marketing uh personally one of one of our favorites so moving on there's the different strategies uh content why is content important content is like uh if our sales team were soldiers content is the guns that we give the soldiers uh you know without any any any form of uh weapons our sales people are going to be less effective these are the weapons that we need to give our sales people uh research uh you know the up-to-date research obviously uh white papers e-books uh webinars case studies uh b2b publications etc so we've got to arm our sales people with the right tools we've got to give them the right tools to help them uh get interest and once they've got interest from prospects we've got to give them the right tools to convert that interest to a paying customer uh if you've not got this content i'm not suggesting that you need to do all of it but you need to be building a library of this content that you your sales people can use so we've talked about the strategies we've talked about the the different content uh here's where the the rubber hits the road so to speak uh this is our own sales plan we split we split everything into what we call the high value areas of sales and and that's finding closing growing and development so if you can just focus your your all your energy on finding more prospects closing more prospects and growing existing accounts it's almost impossible not to sell more now in sales that again there are so many different distractions uh it's so easy to to just spin your wheels and end up going nowhere focus on finding closing and growing and developing what is development development is you know we've got to keep growing ourselves we've got to create uh we've got to be the thought leaders in our industry people are not going to come to us if if it's like we're reading a call center script with the greatest respect to people in call centers right and b2b they want to talk to thought leaders they want to talk to industry experts they want insight and we've got to spend time consistently right to actually make sure that we're on top of our game and when people come to us they're going you know oh my gosh you know i didn't know that oh my gosh like you know i wish the sales person worked for me wow you know this sales person really knows the industry giving back is obviously you know uh we're a great believer and you've got to give back to uh society your community you know emerson's law of compensation if you want more give more uh and and obviously personal development you know the uh the the the more that you can grow as a human being it's inextricably linked with sales so finding closing growing uh there's just there's the examples that we do and this is real this isn't made up for a webinar these are the real things that we do in a daily weekly monthly basis a content development you know part of our inbound program webinars sales campaigns now obviously each of those if you drill down there's going to be metrics so for content it's our metric is p1p3 so uh what that means is uh sorry pcp1 uh we will not create any content that does not get onto page one of google and position within the top three positions if we can if we don't believe it's not going to get there we're not going to try and do that and why do we want that because there's 140 000 searches per second and as long as we can get our our face if you like in front of some of those searchers we know we're going to get enough traffic to the website and some of that traffic is going to convert you know cro there that's the conversion rate optimization 77 marketing qualified leads and uh that was for the month of i think that was october i've not we've not ran the november figures yet that was uh so and 3.1 percent and that's 77 out of all the traffic is the conversion ratio and the problem so you once you've got those activities identified put some uh data some uh add some meat to the bone so to speak so that you can actually measure it and then it's about uh going out and implementing that on a daily weekly uh monthly basis those are the activities that you that you're going to have to uh do consistently i don't believe it's in the on the website yet or on linkedin yet we're going to be running a session on uh in january another webinar called how to manage your sales activity which is directly aligned to this uh it's one of our most popular blog posts uh and uh we'd love you to come along to that but that will give you more detail on actually how to then uh implement and execute this uh so that's it i'm gonna be respectful of your time and finish a couple of minutes early uh one of the best tips i was ever told in sales uh never have a meeting a customer meeting run over and if it finishes early nobody will ever complain so i'm going to give you 10 minutes back to your lunch time thank you so much again if you're watching via linkedin please drop a drop your details in the q a section if you would like a copy of the templates if you're uh watching this subsequently on youtube please drop a note in the comments uh and uh on youtube please subscribe and it gives a thumbs up that would be brilliant uh thank you so much uh you know i i do know that there are certain people who are coming to seem to come to every single webinar i do see the names i'm super grateful uh thank you so much for your time and have a great sales day