Sales Frameworks & Techniques

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Monday Morsel - PMF TL review

Good afternoon all,  I hope everyone’s doing really well and managed to find some down time in the sun over the bank holiday weekend.  If this is your first ‘morsel- email from me - a quick explainer. Roughly monthly I send an email to all the entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to work with - focusing either on a topic I’ve been working on with several of you recently and/or sharing some sector updates and reminders of upcoming support and learning opportunities. Read on for more and as always, if you have any queries, please feel free to reach out, happy to help.   Kyla **SPOTLIGHT ON - PRODUCT MARKET FIT ** For those of you new to this language, good product-market fit is (in very basic terms!) about knowing that there are enough people to pay the right price for your product or service, and how to find them. Establishing product-market fit is essential for your venture and your sales strategy. It is however, an area which many founders struggle to prioritise.  I wanted to share the recent experience of Katherine Kane, an inspiring, focused and talented first-time founder I met  in January: . I wanted to share this because we don’t hear often people’s experiences about their failures and although a hard read, it’s bold and relatable and full of their learning from their experience of not having explored market fit early on.   For today, I’m going to focus on two important first steps in the product market fit journey ** ****business modelling and market validation ** . Once you are live, or ‘in market’, continuing to focus on market fit will help you refine

• product/service
• branding/marketing
• pricing.

For those of you who are more established and/or familiar with this work - A longer overview can be found here. BUSINESS MODELLING.  A tool we often use here at is creating a business model canvas for your venture. Think about a business model canvas like a visual once page business plan - starting with your vision, it will guide you in mapping out your potential customer groups and sales channels.  It will also help you create a visual representation of how your venture operates (or will operate if you’re pre-launch) - and challenge your assumptions. There are many versions of this canvas online but I recommend the one attached from the Institute for Social Enterprise, which comes with a helpful snappy guide and jargon buster.  Note - your beneficiaries/end users may not be the same as your customers. Two examples:  make PJs and loungewear for people living with long term health conditions and/or are in hospital. They make beautiful, hospital grade clothing that enables easy access for medical devices and equipment - that are more comfortable, more personal and more empowering than wearing a hospital gown. They make garments for children and adults. Who do you think their target customers are? Would it be the child, or the adult going into hospital - and/or could it be a concerned parent, a loved one, a carer perhaps? Who else?  ** **reduce digital poverty, improve digital literacy and provide services that enable better connection and wellbeing for older minoritised people in and beyond the Midlands. They aim to reach those who stand most to benefit from their services, those who face the biggest barriers to being online and accessing and using devices that could support their everyday life and wellbeing. Who do you think their target customers are? Would it be the older adults? Or could it be local authority/councils, the integrated care boards? Who else?  **MARKET VALIDATION ** At this stage, you want to make sure there is a genuine need for your product or service, and that you understand how to best sell it. Time to 1) research your target customers and their **needs, desires, motivations and pain points **and 2) engage potential customers. 

1. Research: By understanding what your customers are looking for, and what their budgets and barriers are, you can tailor your product/service, and your sales strategy, to match their expectations. Customer demographics  Power  Attitudes and behaviours  Needs/challenges  Goals/motivations And how you can help.
2. Engagement: remember this is about validating your thinking on customers, rather than full scale launch. Here it’s likely you will begin to test your sales strategy at a manageable scale. Going back to those examples again, a few ideas from me: Wellcool Clothing may have built a simple website and defined a budget for testing targeted online adverts to different customer groups to engage them and get them to sign up for updates about their future launch/products. The conversion from different advertising efforts could help to validate their thinking on potential customer groups. And/or they may have created an MVP of their products and engaged a hospital/care partner, or some of those they engaged through ads - to test their product. This could offer critical feedback on their product as well as building relationships with partners and/or an opportunity to gather positive feedback for future marketing efforts.   Utano Foundation might have first looked to their local council website for data to validate their knowledge of the need for their services (for example Index of Multiple Deprivation or Joint Strategic Needs Assessment data) in the areas they hoped to work. And/or mapped out local NHS/council/Integrated Care Board strategies/agendas on healthy ageing and health equity - to learn who key stakeholders are, what they’re invested in - and about any key local partnerships. From there they might have learned about local events where commissioners are speaking, and attended to hear from them directly (and perhaps meet them), as well as meeting other relevant contacts. And/or they might have reached out to local VSCE support organisations to build their network and learn about how services are procured. 

Hopefully this is a helpful starter for ten to get you thinking about product market fit - as always, your feedback is warmly welcomed! The main idea is that - before you invest lots of time and funds into refining your product/service - you have built a good understanding that what you’re building is saleable, and have the chance work on the potential pitfalls early on.  If you’re a current award winner and would like to work through a business model canvas, or customer segments template together - just let me know. Very happy to plan into our future support meetings.  UNLTD** EVENTS AND LEARNING **** **  A quick reminder that Unltd’s workshops and events can be found on our . Unless otherwise stated, all are open to current award winners, and those we’ve supported in the last two years. Our safeguarding workshops, and various marketing and branding workshops are now live for signups. The access codes for signing up should be in your inbox from our team, but let me know if you need one re-sent. **The Health Foundation: Tech for Better Care - closes 29th **June   **Zinc: Celebrating Innovation in Healthy Ageing Event - (free, in person, London) 7th June **   **Power to Change: Discovery Fund - opens 1st June, closes 21st **July this one could be worth a look. **The School for Social Enterprise: Contract Readiness Programme (free, online, rolling) ** .   That’s more than enough from me today, all best for now!

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~$ Revenue Line Maturity

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Sales workshop template (May 2020)

Sales Workshop Guidance (May 2020)* * Intro – how to use this document Contents Part 1 – What are you selling?

• Core competence
• Value proposition
• Competition
• Pricing Part 2 – Who are you selling to?
• Routes to market
• Customers
• Customer journey Part 3 – How much do you need to sell?
• Vision Orbit
• Sales targets
• Prioritising revenue streams Part 4 – How do you sell it?
• Sales funnel
• Sales process
• Marketing strategy
• Sales strategy
• Customer retention
• Qualifying leads
• KPIs
• Resources Part** 1: **What are you selling?
• Define core competence Ask the SE:* *What do you have that no-one else has?
• Value proposition There are a few different templates for this – see what works best for the SE
• Steve Leech (full write up in resources if needed) The value proposition should answer the questions: “Why should I buy this product or service?” as well as “Why should I do anything at all”. It is a clear and specific statement about the tangible benefits of an offering and should be stated in terms understood and accepted by the target customer, bearing in mind that this could be different for different customers and even different people within the same organisation. First Sentence: Because we have (skills, experience, knowledge or other attribute) We are able to (provide service, reach more people or other deliverable) This means (benefits the client will value) For (the client) Second (optional) Sentence: Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our service (statement of primary differentiation). Or, “because we… we can… so you get…”
• Brand Ethos: Value proposition canvas (in resources)
• “We help X do Y by doing Z”
• For  ____________ (target customer) who ____________  (statement of the need or opportunity) our (product/service name) is  ____________  (product category) that (statement of benefit) ____________ . v) “People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek, Golden Circle Framework E.g. Apple: “(Why) We believe in challenging the status quo and doing things differently. (How) Our products are beautifully designed and easy to use. (What) We make computers.”  Why: ___________ How: ___________ What: ___________

vi) Some other diagram from the internet!

• Competitor mapping The price and quality of your products and services will be evaluated in light of what your competitors offer. If you think of your products and services as solutions to a customer problem, we can identify three sources of competition:

1. Other products and services that can solve the same problem
2. Internal solutions created by an individual or business in order to solve their own problem
3. Doing nothing because the problem is perceived as relatively unimportant First identify the different competitors to your social enterprise**:** What other products and services solve the same problem as your social enterprise? As well as identifying these products and services, write a short summary of their ‘value proposition’ and (where possible) make a note of their prices. What internal solutions have customers created in order to solve their own problem? In addition to identifying these solutions, make a note of their limitations (for example: high cost or inefficiency) and estimate the cost of using them.

Why might a potential customer choose to do nothing rather than purchase from you, purchase from a competitor or develop an internal solution? There may be other problems that potential customers perceive as more important or they may believe that existing solutions (including your product or service) are undesirable.

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Position Analysis Matrix:

Now that you have identified your competitors we would like you to map their relative positions in the market based on price and another key driver of customer value. You will need to select an appropriate driver for customer value for the market that you will compete in. For example the driver might be ‘quality’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘safety’. We suggest you choose a driver that reflects the most important benefit of your product or service (other than price). Imagine that your key driver is ‘convenience’. In this case you would label the right hand side of the x-axis on the matrix below as ‘more convenient’. You label the right hand side of the x-axis as ‘less convenient’. This creates a basis for evaluating the combination of price and value that each competitor is able to offer to customers. Once you have identified the key driver, you should map your competitors onto the matrix. For example using ‘convenience’ as the key driver, you would enter a competitor with a high price but offering high convenience in the top-right quadrant of the matrix.

• Pricing

Cost-based pricing

• Map out products in detail – what is the customer paying for? What are the variable costs?
• Demonstrate variable costs on graph, and show current profit margin
• Show this against fixed costs Competition-based pricing** – use results from competitor mapping**

Customer value-based pricing https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robinchu_first-5-out-of-10-only-pricing-strategiesrobin-ugcPost-6564444065209872384-ndke/ Contrast pricing – if you have a few different packages - Part 2 – Who are you selling to?

• Routes to market The range of methods used by a company to get its goods or services (or unique value proposition) to its customers. A RTM strategy involves all the activities that form part of generating demand for a product or service. Broadly speaking there are three ways to reach a customer: *Leverage assets *e.g. Sell to existing customers through post-sale email mailing lists, mobilising ‘low hanging fruit’ *Create relationship *e.g. Through social media and networking *Rent access to people’s attention *e.g. Paying for advertising Help the SE identify current and potential routes to market. You could use a 2 x 2 matrix such as:

Think about how they are currently reaching customers (is this directly – e.g. through their social media pages – or indirectly – e.g. through a distributor) and if there are any other routes they aren’t using yet (e.g. if they are a brick and mortar shop, could they reach their customers by selling online?) Or another approach…

• Customers
• Perfect Client or Pen Portrait templates
• Are they the budget holder? Do they have the decision-making power/what is the decision making process? Do they have a need for your product/problem to solve? What’s the basis of their decision?
• Consultative selling – finding out the customers problem and providing a solution
• What’s the ideal company? Are they corporates or SMEs?
• Can you segment the market?
• Customer journey
• Bringing together the customer and the routes to market
• Use customer journey framework

Part 3**: How much do you need to sell?** Before you’re able to support the SE with their sales strategy, you need to know how much they actually need to sell. There are a few different approaches to this, depending on how detailed their financial forecast is/what information they already have

• Vision orbit
• Sales targets
• Prioritising multiple income streams: If multiple opportunities, mark out of 10 for each revenue stream** eg:**
• Strength of our market proposition
• Availability of customers
• How easy are they to reach & convert – our confidence/experience, their budget/interest
• Cost of sales – information needed about them, time/travel costs
• Cost of delivery – likely margins, usefulness of customer
• Impact for our social mission

Part 4**: How do you sell it?**

• Sales funnel

What’s the target number of customers?

• Use figures from orbit (if you have this available, or some other document that demonstrates sales targets)
• What’s the target for existing customer renewals, and for new customers?
• What is the breakdown by product? How many** **fans do you have?
• Who will pay again next year? How many may buy additional products? How many can you “upgrade”?
• How many will influence others to buy CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE How many** **prospects do you need?
• Use warm conversion rates How many leads do you need to generate?
• Use cold conversion rates Overall
• Who is responsible at each stage in the funnel?
• How are we going to track as customers go through the funnel? Other examples of sales funnels
• Sales process e.g** Jane** Link to user/customer journey Making customer journey/sales process as easy and quick as possible

Consultative selling – finding out the customers problem and providing a solution  Open question – Listen - Summarise - Repeat or close Advice for shortening sales process/sealing the deal

• Be blunt upfront about the timeline – get them to articulate what needs to happen for them and what steps need to be taken and write all of this in the follow up email.
• Be up front about the process – “we know from experience that this process can take up to 2 years but that you will sign up eventually – what can we do to make it as painless for us both? How can I help you to get this signed off and avoid my nagging?!”
• If things are dragging on, try to get a no so you can move on.
• Ask why people didn’t buy and find your top 3 reasons so you can be prepared to answer to these
• Use customer journey mapping to map customer emotions along the way
• Maybe just need to accept that it’s a long sales process so need to spend less time on each prospect and more time getting more leads into the pipeline. “If you’ve got enough meetings, who cares how long it takes?” (Steve). Keep costs low throughout the process and keep nagging. If you don’t have a problem getting meetings then you can afford to be direct from the start.
• Standard job board practice is to offer first 10 jobs cheaply and then charge more (this is from Tim, who used to work in a HR dept and might have some good insight – I can put you in touch)
• Think about what more you can offer to the HR dept – how can you make their lives easier?
• Qualification – how much do they really want it? How can you have the initial qualification question to find the real reason for buying?
• What are you selling? What will buying from you really mean to the company? What are they paying for?
• Marketing strategy (Unaware à Prospect):
• How are you going to generate these leads?
• How do you reach your potential customers?
• Which media do you currently use and what will you use?
• What campaigns will you run?
• How will you measure their success?
• What are your more successful competitors doing? Link to Migrateful campaign plan
• Sales strategy (Prospect à Fan à Prospect again):
• How do you turn prospects to customers? What’s the process? Meetings? Calls? Follow up? Who’s responsible?
• How do you ensure customers buy again? What’s the process?
• Customer retention What do we mean by CRM?
• A business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate and manage the needs of our current and potential customers
• Comprehensive approach providing seamless integration of every area of our business that touches the customer (marketing, sales, delivery) and the integration of people, process & technology
• Shifts the perspective from solely acquisition of new customers to retention & closer working with existing customers Why does it matter? Repeat business / might provide opportunities for upselling providing foundation of trust has been established Generate leads Maintain good reputation – get testimonials / impact data Get insight to develop our service offer Allows us to deliver better service / easier operating relationship Withstand cutbacks in client budgets Reduce spend on marketing

Where is the venture on this scale? **Peripheral  ** Isolated incidences of CRM usage Limited approach to information sharing  CRM system mainly used to manage contacts Some interoperability between systems but still a number of cultural issues in terms of a lack of a willingness for schools/departments to share info Tactical multiple incidences of CRM usage Informs service delivery and improvement Use of CRM system across a number of departments/business unites  Some integration with other institutional systems Strategic Institution-wide use of CRM across all business units Informs strategic management of relationships Fully integrated with other institutional systems.

• Qualifying leads Qualification Criteria** (when considering customers) eg:**
• Is the money worth it?
• How closely does this align with your mission? Values?
• How much will it take to deliver? Opportunity cost
• Do you have the right skills/contacts to deliver?
• What will this lead to in future?
• KPIs
• Resources

Staff Who is responsible for sales in your organisation? Need to know if it’s not working – is it because the revenue model is wrong, or execution is poor?

• What/who holds them to account? What are their targets?
• What’s their process for securing sales? What are the intermediate metrics they track?
• How well are they performing?
• How clear are they on who they are targeting & why?
• Skills
• Time
• Motivation - particularly of SE - NLP

Materials Proposal documents

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Downloadable Resources

• [BANTS Sales Qualifier](/sales/assets/BANTS Sales Qualifier.xlsx) Excel
• [Business Development Pipeline Template with narrative](/sales/assets/Business Development Pipeline Template_with narrative.xlsx) Excel
• [MyCognition Sales Qualifier](/sales/assets/MyCognition Sales Qualifier.xlsx) Excel
• [Sales Conversations and Techniques](/sales/assets/Sales Conversations and Techniques.pptx) PowerPoint
• [Sales and Grants Pipeline Template](/sales/assets/Sales and Grants Pipeline Template.xlsx) Excel
• [The Sales Cycle Qualifying Clients](/sales/assets/The Sales Cycle - Qualifying Clients.xlsx) Excel
• [The Sales Cycle Qualifying Leads](/sales/assets/The Sales Cycle - Qualifying Leads.xlsx) Excel
• [~$Basis of Decision Making](/sales/assets/~$ Basis of Decision Making.doc) Word
• [~$Value Proposition](/sales/assets/~$ Value Proposition.doc) Word