In this Issue

🎯    Sell-to-Learn Strategy
🐋    Sell Bigger Deals
🙈    Ignore the Competition

🎯  Sell-to-Learn Strategy

Sales is one of the most effective forms of market research. Your customers will tell you what they want to buy, and what they won’t buy.

Companies waste a lot of time investing in “boardroom hypotheses.” They see a great market opportunity and invest in it. But it’s not like Field of Dreams. If you build it, they may not come.

It’s a classic mistake. Leaders want to derisk by perfecting their products and services before exposing them to customers. Rightfully so, they want to put their best foot forward.

Building and investing in isolation, especially right now with customers and markets in a state of flux, can be costly. Not only do you waste time, you burn cash to discover your customers are not interested.

Before you invest in a strategy, prove market demand through sales.

In CoStrategy, we show you how to run sales sprints for market research. Often within 10 to 50 customer interactions, you can validate a market. As the process evolves, you gather insights into customer needs, competitive options, buying cycles, pricing, and how to adapt your products and services to create a competitive advantage.

The philosophy is simple: Your customers guide you on how to serve them, and it starts with direct selling.

🐋  Sell Bigger Deals

One of the most effective ways to grow revenue is to sell bigger deals.

Salespeople will often fight this. They perceive selling smaller deals to smaller companies as easier and more accessible. To combat this pressure, set a floor.

At Central Smith, for instance, we divided customers into four groups:

• Whales: 2 million+ units
• Tuna: 500,000 to 2 million units
• Salmon: 70,000 units
• Goldfish: Less than 70,000 units (or too small to sell)

Central Smith is one of Canada’s largest ice cream manufacturers. If you’ve had ice cream at a Canadian restaurant, chances are you’ve eaten their ice cream.

The minimum size of 70,000 units was based on one day on the production line. Starting and stopping process manufacturing multiple times per day is inefficient. So we set that as the floor.

The sales team struggled with the sizing at first because many of their prospects were “goldfish.” These opportunities were too small to serve efficiently and had to be rejected.

The payoff of fishing for salmon and tuna, with the occasional whale, was a dramatic improvement in sales performance.

By setting criteria for minimum size orders and ideal customers, you naturally shift up market. This leads to better customers, higher margins, and faster revenue growth.

📊  One Stat to Watch

73%

of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, according to a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers.

🙈  Ignore the Competition

Your customers aren’t paying attention to differentiation as much as you are.

Historically, customers didn’t have a lot of choice. They could compare brands apples to apples. Do you want Cheerios or Corn Flakes? Coke or Pepsi? Tide or Cheer? Even in the industrial sector, there were two to five options in any category for customers to evaluate and choose from.

Today, we’re down to micro categorization. There are simply too many options for a customer to evaluate them all.

The challenge for brands is to break through the noise. It doesn’t matter what your competitors are doing. What is your company doing to reach, engage, and serve your customers?

You can build a wildly competitive and differentiated brand, and never once look at your competitors. You achieve that through customer intimacy:

• Focus: Choose a market you can master and grow with.
• Relevance: Adapt your products, services, and operations to meet your customers’ unique needs.
• Consistency: Show up again and again so your customers know your brand, like it, trust it, and choose it first.
• Commitment: Be so good they can’t ignore you.

In a world of endless choice, the companies that commit to customer intimacy stand out because they’re more focused with higher brand relevance.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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