Outreach failure requires a company wide solution
Process is something that lives depend on in the Military and as business conditions deteriorate companies need more from their sales outreach spend, the following is a quick synopsis of what process-based outreach looks like.
Many companies rely on outreach growth and know that in its current form it is high cost, inefficient and unscalable. As the business market tightens, the costs of salespeople, marketing, and other associated expenses are becoming prohibitive. The solution is not to spend more, but to spend efficiently.
Successful growth through outreach is a highly structured process like project management. Success requires a company-wide approach with input from multiple stakeholders and functions, the days of relying on a salesperson to plan and execute their own GTM actions in isolation are over. Managing their failure, replacement, training, and ramp-up time is inefficient and the only people who benefit from this outdated model are recruiters.
A sale only begins when buyers see value in meeting and talking with you, they are time poor and wary of new sellers. As such, the primary point of failure in outreach is when your pitch fails to cut through with potential customers. If this initial step doesn't succeed, your sales cycle doesn't start, also marketing dollars are spent to align pitch with buyers only to have messaging changed or be watered down by their salespeople and channels.
All inputs to growth need to be captured, challenged and improved not just but the sales team or the marketing team but by line managers and c-level. Funny things happen when you test your pitch to CFOs with your own CFO’s, we did that in one group session with the CFO commenting to the sale teams “you would never get a meeting with me”
When you embrace a highly structured outreach sales model it changes job descriptions, it changes job advertisements, and it will change who you employ. The final transformation to a growth structure is having process where non-sales roles like customer service, field service, administration are aligned with front line sales – they all have market learnings that can be captured and used
The outcome of a structured outreach plan and process is C-level having full visibility and input to every growth action and confidence in the numbers, to be across the detail and be able to talk to the detail, the reasons for success or not and what is being improved.
No individual has a mortgage on the correct outreach structure or solution, it takes a team to build the structure, GrowSure took fourteen years and hundreds of contributors to build the GrowSure outreach structure and software. Being a market leader is not all about product, it includes being in the right place at the right more often than you competitor, that takes your team working collaboratively to build your buyer engagement solution.
The cost of becoming outreach fit is a small fraction compared to the cost of not.
Kip Frame
Entrepreneur In Residence - Mach49
Bain External Advisor - Bain & Company
Advisory Board Member - Defence Employer Partnering Network ADF
Independent Advisor - Westpac Group