Winning New Business For Dummies®
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This edition first published 2017
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ISBN 978-1-119-27416-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-28166-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-28169-6 (ebk)
Winning New Business For Dummies introduces the concept of a methodology-driven approach to the science of winning sustainable new business; it ensures that you develop and maintain a constant stream of new business opportunities, along with how to close the deal.
New business is the lifeblood of every company, and in this book you’re guided through the key principles of how to go about securing more than your fair share of new business success.
Having spent many years at the sharp end of winning new business, I wrote this book as a one-stop reference guide to help salespeople, both those with experience as well as those who are new to the role. It’s intended to walk you through the steps and guide you around the pitfalls of what I believe is the world’s greatest profession — winning new business.
This book is intended to be a useful reference guide that you can read from cover to cover if you want to, or you can dip into the relevant chapters when you need a bit of help or inspiration. The book’s easy-access organization means that you can simply and quickly get your hands on information about whatever element of winning new business you’re looking for.
Winning New Business For Dummies isn’t an academic, theoretical book, but one that is written from the heart by a real practitioner who gets his hands dirty in the new business trenches on an everyday basis and aims to share real-life experiences rather than highbrow theory that leaves you wondering what you actually need to do. The watch word in writing this book was practicality. In this book, you discover information presented in an easy-to-digest manner that will improve your customer-facing skills and set you on the right road to deliver real and sustainable new business success by making use of a structured approach to new business.
Some chapters include sidebars (shaded boxes) that expand on the core information in that chapter, should you want to explore a topic in more detail, but you can easily skip these sidebars and still get the information you need to master winning new business. (Along the same lines, feel free to skip anything with the Technical Stuff icon, too.)
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
In writing this book, I made a number of assumptions about the typical reader. I assumed
When you pick up this book, you don’t need to have previous sales experience — in fact, quite the opposite. If you’re brand new to the profession, you can read and quickly act on the information presented here.
This book is intended to give you solid, practical advice on how to actually deliver new business. The working title was “Get Up and Sell Something,” which sums up the approach very well.
Throughout this book, you see these icons used:
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com
and search for “Winning New Business For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the search box. Take a look at the articles in the Cheat Sheet to gain some more understanding on winning new business.
You can find additional information on the winning new business methodology on my website at www.nineteen58.com
, which also contains a number of blog articles that expand on various topics related to winning new business.
Feel free to just dive into the book at any chapter that catches your attention. You don’t need to necessarily read this book from cover to cover before you implement any of the learnings. It’s not linear, so feel free to jump around the content to make it work for you.
Chapter 9 on prospecting effectively and Chapter 19 on qualifying potential business contain the real keys to winning new business success, so they’re as good a place as any to start reading.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Understand the importance of setting a winning new business culture.
Never be at a loss for words; discover how to have something relevant to say.
Find out how important first impressions truly are.
Know that, used carefully, technology can give you a huge advantage.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Beginning with the basics
Surveying the steps
Setting out for success
Handing out rewards
With the possible exception of research and development, you could take away most other functions within a company and still be left with a business that existed to some degree. Try taking away new business, though, and you don’t have anything left that can operate as a business entity.
Winning new business is at the very forefront of every successful company and is a cultural thing. It’s not just the function of a group of new business salespeople acting independently from the rest of the business; winning new business is the fusion of different parts of the organization working together to deliver a winning solution for your clients. The specific role of the new business salesperson is to be the front end, the customer-facing part of this dynamic, building on the great things that back him up.
To introduce a winning new business culture (the topic of this chapter), you need to have a plan. I call it a methodology and refer to it a lot throughout this book. A methodology is essentially a structured approach to achieving an end result, in this case being able to successfully and constantly win new business. Think of it as a road map to guide you to your destination.
The strict definition of new business is to call it the commercial, customer-facing part of your business, the part that liaises directly with potential customers and turns them into real fee-paying clients. Without this function, you don’t really have a business at all. If you operate in a small business, you may not have the luxury of being able to employ a specialist for this role, so you have two choices: You either outsource the role or do it yourself. Not winning new business isn’t an option.
Winning new business is far from what many consider to be “sales,” which has developed a bit of a stigma as a result generally from a lack of understanding and training. Today, winning new business is the fusion of different skill sets brought together into today’s modern and highly respected profession that I, for one, am proud to be a part of. It encompasses not only selling in its traditional form but also understanding the commercial and technical considerations that make up a client-facing solution to a problem. As I identify in Chapters 3, 4, and 9, research plays a vital part in the new business role, and throughout this book, the theme of building relationships with your prospects also keeps coming to the forefront. In addition, technology is one of the key drivers of change in winning new business, and you find out how to use it to your best advantage in Chapter 4.
One more theme that’s prevalent throughout this book is qualifying prospects. You discover that you shouldn’t chase every potential opportunity but carefully select the ones to target based on real quantifiable data, and you find out what to look for and where to look for it. (See Chapters 9 and 19 for details.)
In the following sections, I introduce some of the fundamentals of winning new business: getting a handle on your solution, the key elements of the process, the importance of the role, and its basis in science.
Before you can go through the elements of winning new business (see the next section), you need to go through some initial stages to gain an in-depth understanding of what you’re working with:
Understanding what you have: You need to take the time to understand the product or service that your company wants you to sell. Don’t just assume that you know what it is; take the time to talk to colleagues in different parts of the company to get their views on what the product or service is and how they see it delivering benefits.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in coming up with unique selling propositions. Start with what you have, and add value to it by talking to the people who work with it every day. They know better than most what key things to focus on. Discuss with existing clients how they make use of your solution, and use that information as the basis of presenting your solution to your prospects.
If you have a technical product or service, make sure you take the time to understand, at a least at a good overview level, what it does and how it does it.
When you understand the product or service that you’re working with (see the preceding section), you can then turn your attention to the six key elements of winning new business:
Handling objections: Dealing with objections is the bread and butter of the winning new business job; you’ll be doing it all day every day. Check out Chapters 7 and 10 for more on handling objections.
An objection may not be presented to you in such an obvious form, but by objection I mean the need for you to cover and address any and all aspects of the proposed solution as it fits with your prospect’s business and addresses his needs.
Tracking: Typically, you’ll have many prospects on the go at any one time, and you can’t risk having to remember every detail of every deal that you’re working on. You also need to produce reports and sales forecasts, so you need a system to be able to track progress, keeping you on course for success. Generally, you’ll use a CRM (customer relationship management) system here. I discuss the basics of tracking prospects in Chapter 19 and cover CRM systems in Chapters 9 and 21.
The more you use a good CRM system, the more you’ll benefit from it, both in winning new business and in planning and forecasting roles. If your CRM isn’t delivering benefits, then the first place to look is at your own use of it. Are you recording everything every day? There’s really no excuse for not doing so.
Measuring: How do you know whether your sales efforts are on track and whether you’re going to meet your targets? A wet finger in the air is one option, but these days you have somewhat more sophisticated methods, using metrics based on real activity as recorded by your CRM system. Check out Chapter 22 for more on metrics.
Take the time to understand the metrics and how they relate to you and your activities. They’re not based on some random set of measurements but on real data that you yourself are recording as you go about your daily tasks. It’s not about big brother checking up on you; it’s about using science to help you be effective in your winning new business role.
Winning new business provides the momentum for business to continue, for solutions to be implemented, and for a business’s economic viability. Keep in mind the importance of your role when colleagues from other functions of the company put you under pressure, and remind them that their role is to support your efforts first and foremost. Without you, they wouldn’t have a job in the first place.
Implementing a new business process isn’t as simple as going out to hire a new business salesperson and hoping for the best. Although I’d argue that new business sales is the most important role in any company — yes, really — the responsibility of driving the company forward doesn’t lie only with new business sales; support from all other functions is essential. It’s important not to lose focus on the reason for the company being in business, which is delivering profit for the stakeholders.
There’s been a long debate about whether sales is a science or an art form, and in my mind there’s no doubt that winning new business is a science because its success can be pre-determined by following a set of well-defined processes, a methodology.
Don’t be tempted to plow your own furrow in terms of determining how to approach a sale because you won’t “know better,” no matter how much you try to convince yourself. Success comes from following a replicable process or methodology, doing things for a reason rather than reacting to shifting events.
You’ll be truly successful in a new business career only if you follow a structured approach or methodology that sets out the required action steps and guides you past the noise and toward consistent success. This is one of the cornerstones of winning new business and fundamental to the teachings throughout this book.
You need to understand your product or service, understand your target audience, and know how to connect with them. There’s no shortcut to success, and you have to put in the hard work to achieve the rewards.
Winning new business isn’t going to happen on its own. You need to plan your approach and then take the necessary action to make it happen. A plan without action is worse than no plan at all. In Chapter 15, I discuss the importance of taking action today.
Winning new business is about developing an approach that delivers a constant stream of new business success, not just a one-off project win. You need to plan for referrals from your newly won clients at just the right moment, you need to understand and act on the importance of managing your pipeline, and you need to know and understand the importance of the metrics that I outline in Chapter 22.
The winning new business role is literally the lifeblood of a company (as I explain earlier in this chapter), but sometimes outside or uninformed observers see it as an expensive role to have someone good dedicated to. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth; a good new business salesperson can make your company successful and is just as important as good research and development people who create your product or service in the first place. Don’t be tempted to skimp on your new business efforts as this is a surefire way to failure.
Note also that winning new business is a company-wide activity, and although the specific responsibility may be with a named person, that doesn’t excuse the rest of the company from looking out for opportunities to feed into the process. In this section, I explore that idea and other keys to success in more detail.
Successful sales-led companies have a sales-led mentality where everyone in the business has a stake in its success, regardless of the actual job he performs. Everyone has exposure, in business or personal circumstances, to potential customers. Being sales led or sales aware simply means that your staff are encouraged, and rewarded, for feeding opportunities into the sales process.
The sales process doesn’t involve only the new business salesperson. You also need researchers, administration people, and sales support people to be able to focus sufficient time and effort into the customer-facing part of their roles. New business salespeople need to drive the support processes and will need to be given the authority to make this happen in the most efficient and effective way.
Without exception, every member of staff also needs to know and understand the basics of your product or service and be able to give a simple overview of what the company provides because you never know who they’ll come into contact with. Big leads often come from humble beginnings, and when this happens you need to reward whoever was the instigator. Reward can be, but doesn’t need to be, in financial terms, and often public recognition of their valuable role may be sufficient. (I discuss rewarding success in more detail later in this chapter.)
Success in terms of a winning new business role is easy to define in absolute terms: Either you hit your sales revenue targets or you don’t. The bigger picture of success goes beyond that, however. Only by looking at the wider picture do you gain an understanding of how successful and sustainable your new business efforts really are. Typically, you need to also measure the following:
Pipeline value: This is one of the key metrics that I cover in Chapter 22 and is fundamental in understanding how successful your sales efforts are, both for the current period and into the future. A great current period and poor future quarters position, for example, doesn’t equate to success and is an indicator of problems on the horizon.
Simply appointing a new business salesperson doesn’t equate to instant results or instant additional revenue; it takes time to get up to speed, however good a person you employ or however good a new business salesperson you are.
A common mistake is not taking new business sales seriously enough, or in fact doing anything about it, until it’s really too late to make a difference. As a new business consultant, I’ve been called in too late on a number of occasions and have needed to tell prospective clients that we can do the impossible as a matter of routine but that miracles take a little longer!
Planning ahead is the key. Know your numbers, and understand the dynamics of your market. This will show you when you need to invest in new business or make some outsourcing decisions, but leave it too late at your peril.
New business success needs to be both recognized and rewarded, as you find out in this section. New business salespeople thrive on winning and being seen by colleagues and peers as winners. Play to this in the way that you recognize and reward success.
Being paid a rewarding salary, often with a well-structured commission plan, is the traditional way of rewarding salespeople. When putting together a commission plan, or accepting one as a new business salesperson, it’s important to strike the right balance between risk and reward. I cover risk and reward in a deal basis in Chapter 11, but the same basic principles apply to the rewarding of sales success. You need salespeople to be hungry for success but to close the right deals for the right reasons, not chasing wrong deals just to hit a target.
With a new salesperson, the first few months are vital for pipeline building, and, as I cover earlier in this chapter, early sales success can be hoped for but not planned for. If the salesperson is being rewarded via a commission plan, bear this in mind.
Traditionally, sales managers were taught to motivate sales staff through money in the form of commission. Today, thankfully, this is much less the case, and although commission and salary have an important role to play, they’re not paramount.
To drive the right new business sales behavior, use these three areas:
A house account is when the “new” part of new business sales drops off after a client has worked with you for some time. The key factor from a salesperson’s viewpoint is that the sales from that client cease to count toward targets and commission plans.
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Knowing your subject and being an expert
Considering things from your prospect’s point of view
Developing your own style and tone of voice
Taking care of nonverbal communication
So you’ve got an opportunity to speak to your prospect about the solution that you need to convince him is the perfect fit. You may meet face to face, or more likely, at the beginning of a sale you may just talk on the phone — the setting doesn’t really matter. At every point in the sales cycle, you need to be ready to take advantage of opportunities to present your solution. When they arise, you need to be armed with something relevant to say. You don’t want to waste time or risk being perceived as a time waster by talking about irrelevances.
Business cultures differ around the world, and of course you need to be sensitive to customs so you don’t offend anyone, but when the time is right to discuss business, get right on with it — don’t beat around the bush. Time is a rare commodity, and to get some of your prospect’s time is a privilege that you need to turn to your advantage. This chapter explains the basics of saying something relevant as you try to win new business: knowing your subject and audience, properly using tone of voice, and understanding the power of silence.