“58.1% of all companies surveyed stated that the most important goal for 2015 is capturing new accounts” CSO Insights 2015

By developing and executing a territory business your company will experience stronger customer relationships, higher opportunity winning percentages, more balanced sales pipelines, more accurate sales forecasts and higher margins due to less discounting. But it takes time in the territory to realize these benefits – and this speaks to the importance of sales management filling sales territories with the right territory managers, investing in their development and then coaching them to higher levels of productivity. No one can do it alone – but an effective Territory Plan orchestrates all of the resources in the company and directs them to win more business.

“57% of the sale is completed prior to the prospect calling you” CEB 2015

This number varies depending on the survey – but the fact is – if you wait for the prospect to call you – they have made a decision to buy. Now they are either shopping price and / or validating their decision. You are coming in when most of the selling has already been accomplished; someone else has set the bar.

Your sales team needs to be proactive in identifying your “perfect prospect profile” and then put into place a well-orchestrated Territory Action Plan to enable them to proactively reach out and set the criteria to win more business.

Best Practice: Territory Business Management

High performing sales teams manage territories like businesses to build strong sales pipelines, advance their sales opportunities and grow relationships with selected accounts. They have realized through experience that the sales territory is the superset of our sales assets, and that without the proper care and attention, we can put these assets at risk. What is a sales territory? In our work with clients we have seen practically every possible flavor and derivative of “the territory,” including geography-based territories, industry-focused territories, product-focused territories, named-account territories and even territories that consist of one and only one account.

Most effective territory business plans include seven core components, whether the territory is based on geography, industry or named accounts. In situations where strategic account management programs have been deployed named accounts are typically grown through the development and deployment of strategic account plans, a type of business plan for extending and expanding the relationship with an individual account (to be discussed in a future article series). But in the case of the more typical sales territory, the core elements of the territory business plan should include:

• How much do I have to sell (quota)
• Where do I sell (territory)
• What do I sell (solutions)
• Who do I sell it to (the best profile for a viable prospect)
• What should my message be (UNIQUE, compelling business impact messaging)
• What is the best way to create awareness (routes to market)

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY – VIOLENTLY EXECUTE THE PLAN DAILY, WEEKLY AND MONTHLY

The Outcomes of a Territory Action Plan

When the sales territory is managed and developed properly, Your Company can expect to see several predictable outcomes. Effective territory management and planning will typically result in a “target rich” business environment in which the territory manager is selecting and growing existing customers and accounts, as well as advancing and winning targeted sales opportunities.

In an effectively managed territory, we expect to find a portfolio of existing customers that are providing (or will potentially provide) new business opportunities, as well as references and proof statements of the business value that has been created for them through their previous experience with their territory manager and his/her company.

There are several key areas of inspection that can provide significant insight into the overall health and performance of the territory and an effective territory plan, and these include:

• Growth of Strategic/Key Customer Relationships
• Identification and Advancement of Opportunities in the Sales Pipeline
• Development and Closure of Targeted Sales Opportunities
• Accuracy of Sales Forecast
• Increase Margins

Prior to launching Mprove Sales 12 years ago, our team of sales executives held the lead sales positions with several companies, ranging from startups to Fortune 1000 organizations. Mprove’s team of sales executives has led sales teams through the good times and bad, from Y2K through seven recessions – and we have been fortunate enough to make our numbers by the implementation and utilization of practical sales skills. In the last 12 years as a sales recruiter, consultant and trainer we have had the pleasure of working with thousands of sales people focused on technology solutions in six of the seven continents.

There are three key areas where we see significant issues with today’s sales people: Territory / Account Planning and Management to proactively build a solid business pipeline and business, Compelling Business Conversations to clearly quantify and articulate the business impact of the solutions and Effective Negotiations enabling stronger margins through negotiating with regards to business value, not price. In the coming articles we will address Compelling Business Conversations and Effective Negotiations.

In working with teams all over the world I am often asked what is the most critical trait for a successful sales person, and my answer is always the same, “Genuine Curiosity”. Curiosity is like one a Swiss Army Knife with all the attachments. It gets the job done in nearly every situation and is easy to access once you’ve got it in your tool kit. Curiosity helps you in:

1. Building customer relationships. You will notice a different level of respect from your clients because you’re showing an authentic level of interest in them as individuals and their company – and clients like that!
2. Increasing your business acumen. Being curious about your own industry and the industries of your prospects drives you to learn more. As you satisfy your curiosity, you’re augmenting your ability to add value to your customers’ business. Clients want to know you know about their ecosystem: Industry, customer set, products and services plus trends and direction.
3. You emote sincerity, because you are. You ask questions that uncover needs because you are genuinely curious, not because it’s in the training manual and your demeanor is natural and not formulaic.
4. Solving customer problems. It’s a truism that customers are looking for solutions to their problems. It’s only possible to create a meaningful and unique solution is you’re motivated by true curiosity about what’s actually going on and why those problems recur.
5. Negotiating successful contracts. Your ability to understand the positions of the other party are directly dependent upon your ability to feel true curiosity about them. If you’re not curious, you’ll end up arguing about issues that aren’t important.

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• Correcting sales errors. When a customer buys from somebody else (or doesn’t buy from anyone at all), if you’re not curious about what that happened, you won’t bother to find out why, and therefore can’t learn from your failures.
• Creating solid solutions. Sales people who aren’t curious about what makes people tick and why technology works (or doesn’t) can’t possibly create workable solutions, products or services that people want buy. Curiosity enables you to create unique solutions to their unique issues.

In short, curiosity at the core of every successful business effort. If you don’t have curiosity, you can’t expect to be successful as an entrepreneur, a salesperson or even as an engineer. Period.

You may think arming yourself with facts and data will help you convert prospects into customers, but it’s more important that prospects believe you truly understand their business; the industry, the company, the LOB’s and the Individuals within the organization. This issue comes up time and time again in our interviews with clients, they want their solution provider to understand their business.

This is hardly surprising, since you can’t add value without having a clear picture of the business and the client’s position in it. Once you understand their business you can better understand what their business issue is. The three critical components that drive the sale?

1. Demonstrating that you truly understand what their business issue is, and how it is negative impacting the company’s performance (current state)
2. Knowing what their desired outcome will be, and how that will improve their overall success (future state)
3. Knowing what the prospects “measurement for success” (not yours)

Understanding and clearly articulating these three key decision criteria with your prospect enables the “why buy” and the ROI is strictly “how” they will buy your solution, which is the “what” they will buy.

People buy based on emotion and justify with fact. You may resist this statement. You may want to shout But the truth (truth that will help your business grow) is: Your client rationalizes the purchase base on facts (ROI), but they make decisions based on emotion or feelings (can you eliminate my business problem and meet my measurement for success).

The single biggest motivator in buying is not data, nor is it facts; it’s emotional response. Humans buy when they feel comfortable, when they feel they can trust you, when the process feels natural and reassuring, and when they come to believe that buying will make them feel good.

To succeed in selling, you’ve got to speak to the need your customer feels. There are alot of good reasons, not to mention the entire history of successful selling, to back this up. As you can see from the DDI study bellow ROI analysis is dead last for what the client is looking for, in light of the fact that the ROI analysis almost always slanted to the suppliers point of view.

Of course, people have both logical and emotional buying motives. Some recent consumer surveys show that 20 percent of the decision to make a purchase is logical and 80 percent is emotional. Let me ask you a couple of questions. What is logic? It’s reason supported by facts. What is emotion? It is a feeling that leads us to act and react.

So, what is more important when persuading people, facts or emotion? We don’t mean to imply that customers never want cold, hard facts. Of course they do. You should always have them prepared and available, and you should present them when the time is right. But it is not facts that convince customers to go with your company. It’s emotion, do I feel you can you solve my problem.

Customers need to feel that you really understand their business issue and how it is negatively impacting their organization. They also need to feel that you will deliver their desired outcome and that you will meet their measurement for success. That measurement may not be the traditional business case ROI but what they have established as success. They will then use the ROI facts to “pay for” or rationalize purchasing the solution.

A recent Manpower study revealed that the most difficult position to fill is a Sales Representative and that is especially true in 2017. Why is finding top performing sales talent so tough?

When recruiting the best salespeople, it is all about the details. Your “gut feeling” about an applicant is no guarantee of success. Carefully defining what you want, asking the right questions, and listening critically for the right answers is the key.

The stakes are too high to fill an open sales position with the wrong person. On average it takes three to four months to find the “right” salesperson. It may take another three to six months for the new salesperson to be trained and begin producing. If the salesperson does not perform, it may take another four to six months to identify the problem, document poor performance and get them out the door.

To avoid the common hiring pitfalls, MproveSales thoroughly screens candidates in these key area.

• We use a structured hiring process. Before we start looking for the ideal candidate MproveSales and our client’s define the job requirements, agree on the structured interview questions, decide on assessment tools, and clearly define the interview process until an offer is made.
• Drill down into their sales skills knowledge. Sales people can definitely “talk the talk” and very few resumes come across our desks where the candidates do not boast “I was the number one sales rep” or “I never have missed my number”. Resumes can be embellished, but knowledge of key sales skills areas cannot. Our decades of leading sales organizations have us question their skills; how do they develop a quality pipeline, how strong is their business acumen, how do they frame and conduct negotiations, etc.
• Validate their track record. You are making a huge investment. MproveSales invests a lot of time validating the track record. We have several people interview the person and validate the answers given and with our decades of experience running sales organizations we can easily validate the candidate’s claims.
• Don’t settle. Understand that a key to successful hiring is objectivity. Hiring salespeople on gut feel, the old-fashioned way, doesn’t work. You want to fill the position quickly, but hiring the wrong person will cost you time and money and in the end you’ll find yourself sitting in the interviewer’s chair all over again.
• MproveSales looks for candidates who can sell. The most common mistake we see is companies hiring only those salespeople that have experience with their products and/or industry. It takes a lot longer for someone to learn how to be a good salesperson than it does to learn a product, industry lingo, or a specific industry. Hire someone with a successful sales background. They know how to ask the right questions and they won’t be reticent to get started quickly.

MproveSales can shorten your hiring cycle and more importantly increase the quality of your team. We welcome the opportunity to work with your organization and building the best team for success!

This year is almost history and the ONLY that thing that matters now is your ability to finish the 4th quarter strong. Expecting to get better results from the same old behavior will only succeed in perpetuating your current situation. So, how can you crush it in the 4th quarter?

What follows is your end-of-year game plan, five strategies for Finishing the Year Strong!

STRATEGY #1 GET FOCUSED!

It’s time to take off your rose-colored glasses. On average, sales people lose over 27% of their sales to “no decision”. You need to take a serious and realistic view of the opportunities in your sales pipeline and stay focused on those that are truly closeable. Focus on the top opportunities and abandon the rest! Grab a copy of our Opportunity Assessments Checklist to help you get started.

In addition to the checklist ask yourself “What is the risk to my client’s business if they do not buy my product?” and if you can’t answer that question with a persuasive and quantifiable answer, it’s time to move on to the next opportunity.

STRATEGY #2 GET SERIOUS

With time breathing down your neck, you have no choice but to get serious, set crystal-clear goals, raise the bar, and step up your game. Live and work to your potential. The moment you decide to get serious, to raise your standards, and commit to finishing the 4th quarter maxing your quota is the moment everything changes in your life. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

STRATEGY #3 REFUSE TO GIVE UP

Those with the character to do what it takes to finish the year strong don’t allow the indignity of a poor year-to-date performance to keep them down. Every great achievement and comeback in history has been the result of the choices, determinations, and creations of the human will.

Successful sales people acknowledge that their back is against the wall, accept the sins of past performance, analyze opportunities and obstacles, strengthen their resolve, and jump to their feet again. When you are down, or below target, other people will write you off. Do not let them define you – maintain your dignity, commit to finishing the year strong, and refuse to give up.

Strategy #4 DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY OR DO DIFFERENT THINGS

A strong 4th quarter is dependent upon extraordinary execution skills. The better you execute, the better you perform, and the stronger you finish. It’s that simple. Expecting to get better results from the same old behavior will only end in digging a deeper hole. It will NOT get you to a superior level of performance.

Therefore, finishing the year strong necessitates new and better execution skills. In short, things need to change. Do you need to do things differently or should you focus on doing different things? This is a subtle but important distinction, and if you have any chance of closing your execution gaps you must change your strategy.

STRATEGY #5 BE CLEAR AND PRECISE IN YOUR EXECUTION

It’s not the big who eat the small; it’s the fast who eat the slow. It’s the prepared that eat the unprepared. According to CSO Insights, “54% of sales people who call on executives are not prepared.” Invest time in researching your account and clearly understanding their business issues. Most importantly, how you can improve their business outcomes. This will help dramatically improve your time to close!

Let’s also be perfectly clear, you MUST take massive daily action and turn the pursuit of speed into your primary weapon for finishing the year strong. As you work towards the goal of finishing the year strong, you must understand that there will NEVER be a day that will not require dedication, discipline, perseverance, accountability and the opportunity to execute with bold conviction.

As a follow on to Seven Steps to Composing a Compelling Business Mpact Statement, Business Mpact Selling is a philosophy and approach to sales that will provide clients with solutions which truly improve the clients business outcomes, differentiates the unique characteristics of your offering, increase close rates, and provides increased sales margins. Working with thousands of sales professionals with companies across six continents, these organizations have realized an average of a 9% increase in sales margins by following a Business Mpact Selling mindset.

The companies desire to hire sales professionals that possess these skills and experiences and today we will describe the main attributes to look for.

The Business Mpact Selling attributes can be grouped into three areas – Client Engagement, Behaviors & Actions, and Meaningful Outcomes.

Client Engagement

Sales professionals who are steep in the Business Mpact Selling approach:

• Engages with their Clients at the C-Suite and executive level within both the IT and the business stakeholders.
• Demonstrates genuine curiosity about the Client’s business.
• They have great level of knowledge of the Client’s business, their competitors, the industry and their target client profile.
• Demonstrates a good understanding of the current state of people, processes, workflows, and technology as well as desired state or outcomes.
• Are Client-centric and engages in dialogue about the Client’s business and the Client’s measurements of success.

Behaviors & Actions

Business Mpact sellers operate with the following behaviors and actions:

• They take on advisory behaviors by probing, questioning, and getting to the business objectives. They ask questions which are “points of clarification” on information they have researched about client. This helps build credibility.
• They expand the Client’s thinking by bringing new thoughts or concepts, challenging and adding value.
• As a problem solver, they are able to articulate and quantify the business value of the solution or offer.

Meaningful Outcomes

The return on investment of your solutions is quantifiable and, when sold and deployed properly, will contribute towards your client’s overall business goals and objectives:

• Clients will realize the quantifiable business benefits and qualitative improvements due to the efforts of these sales professionals. The solutions are better mapped to the Client’s desired business outcomes.
• Companies will see larger sales opportunities, increased sales margins, and greater strategic relationships.

Business Mpact Selling supports the Client through every aspect of the lifecycle from purchasing and implementation to maintenance and upgrades. Success in the Mpact Selling model is measured not by a product’s performance to specifications, but instead by improved client business outcomes. Mpact Sellers need to have the mindset of sharing equal accountability for delivering the end result. This differs from the approach that many transactional sellers take today; in which benefits realization and improved business outcomes become the client’s problem after the sale.

In the next series, we will spend time on how to hire the right person that possesses the fundamental skills of Business Mpact Selling.

Seven Strategies to Accelerate Revenue Growth

In its most basic form, Sales Transformation is ensuring you have equipped your sales team with the best skills, tools and sales infrastructure to enable successful and profitable sales campaigns.

According to Wikipedia, sales transformation is a form of change management—realigning how assets and people are used to restructure a sales organization. We build on this with a business strategy that focuses on reshaping a sales organization to boost revenue generation.

There are countless resources out there on how to execute a sales transformation initiative, but often the suggestions in these guides are too broad. Sales transformation strategies need to be company specific, not based on a weak universal game plan. At MProve Sales, we tap into our deep sales performance expertise with seven practical actions to direct your sales transformation strategy and results.

The critical need is to transform a sales force from pushing product to building customer loyalty…and turning a nice profit in the process, begins with these seven strategies:

1. Understand your prospects’ and client’s business challenges – Research and understand your customers’ biggest challenges; the state of their industry, company and key stakeholders. Plan how to make them realize that you can help with stories and case studies that prove your value.
2. Ease the customer experience – Align your resources with what matters most to customers. Get the roles, reporting relationships and metrics right. Create a “happy to help culture.” Make yourself easy to do business with.
3. Train and coach for skills which meet customer needs and build loyalty. Assess the skills needed from top to bottom. Then build the skills that are lacking and reinforce the ones that already exist. Coach in the moment to ensure these skills are honed.
4. Implement changes to your CRM solution. Slow and steady wins the race. The most significant issue I have seen with CRM implementations is that the requirement for input from the sales teams is so onerous it becomes a liability, not an asset to the sales team. Minimize the information you require in the system and always be conscious of “is what we’re asking for helping or hindering our sales people in their quest for revenue”. For a strong commitment, you want to get them engaged and part of the process, not be an afterthought.
5. Design compensation to promote behaviors that support your business goals. To raise productivity and control costs, it’s essential that everyone in the sales organization focus on attaining well-defined business goals and growth targets. The compensation system should be designed in a way that directs people to deliver on specific goals, whether that is penetrating new markets, winning new customers, cross-selling to existing customers or improving the profitability of each deal through higher pricing.
6. Equip the back office to allow sales representatives to invest their time in selling. Many solutions providers have a secret weapon—the back office, which can take on most of the lead qualification, proposal development, pricing approval, contract management and billing management—adding back 20% to 30% of more productive time to a sales representative’s day.
7. Sales talent is a major, and missing, driver for a transformation strategy. Talent is a nearly universal challenge for sales organizations, with only 16% of sales leaders saying they are confident that they have the talent they need to succeed in the future. Sales organizations are struggling with who to hire, how to find them and how to develop and support them. CSO Insights 2018

Growing multi-product and solutions businesses over a sustained period will not happen overnight by tweaking the sales model around the edges, but rather by addressing complexity in a comprehensive fashion. Sales organizations need to develop simpler, disciplined sales models that can work in one segment after another. The seven strategies described here will serve to guide executives and sales leaders toward that end, positioning them to generate profitable growth while capitalizing on the changing nature of customer demands.

If you’re responsible for revenue at a SaaS, online subscription, or membership organization, this is for you. With 15+ years of experience in the online subscription space, I’ve built a tried and true framework for achieving organizational health for online recurring revenue businesses.

If the following 5,000 or so words resonate with you, there’s a link at the bottom to request a free 60-minute strategy call with me.

Treat this article as a litmus test: how does your business stack up to what a healthy, thriving, wildly profitable subscription company looks like?

It might seem obvious to start by picking on Sales.

After all, sales takes a lot of heat when things aren’t looking so good. They are often the squeaky wheel in an organization, and my job is to help provide the grease.

But I often find that Marketing, Customer Success, and Product all need a little grease too, to make the subscription flywheel spin in perpetual motion. Product is the linchpin of the flywheel. But that flywheel won’t turn a single revolution without tight collaboration with the revenue generating arms of the business: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success.

The degree to which Product successfully communicates with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success (as they are all inextricably connected) directly affects sales & expansion revenue – and therefore organizational health.

A SaaS, subscription, or membership company that can communicate well internally and work toward a common goal can scale faster, more effectively, and more profitably than one with siloed departments with ever-increasing levels of resentment for one another. That’s obvious, right? Not so fast.

Take quick stock of the degree to which your Leadership would agree with the following:

• Everyone in the organization understands the vision/goal(s) of the business and are rowing in the same direction
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are documented, implemented, and refined in every area of the business
• Cross-departmental communication is strong & departments are strategically aligned
• An intentional company culture is being cultivated & employees demonstrate a strong cultural fit
• Customer Success thrives at onboarding, retention, aiding in expansion revenue, engagement tracking, community curation, customer service, and off-boarding

Would each member of your Leadership team provide the same answers to these questions?

• Where is the company now? Where do they want to be? What’s keeping them from getting there? (Current state vs. future state + known blockers)
• Why is the company in business? (What’s the True North?)
• What is the organizational decision making hierarchy and process?
• How does the organization respond to failure?
• How is the company’s culture defined and embedded into the fabric of the organization?
• What are the most glaring surface level organizational problems? Deeply ingrained systemic problems?
• What are the organizational KPIs and who is responsible for each?
• What are the company’s core competencies?
• How are expectations set and met (exceeded!) throughout the customer journey?
• How is product pricing being tested on an ongoing basis?
• How is expansion revenue being monitored and maximized?
• How is individual and departmental accountability tracked and measured?

Throughout any engagement with a subscription based business, I take a holistic approach to organizational health. Leadership, strategy, operations, finances, and people are the lens through which I see the following 4 core areas of focus in a subscription business:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Customer Success
4. Product

Marketing:

*My primary goal for SMB (small & midsized businesses): build a robust email list of qualified prospects from which to strategically nurture (via email, re-targeting campaigns, influencer relationships, content) based on each prospect’s stage of awareness. Then, successfully hand off sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to Sales at the appropriate time.

• Your subscription can’t appeal to and please everyone – narrow the playing field by pinpointing exactly who your most ideal customers are. Start by creating ICPs (ideal customer profiles)/customer personas based on current subscribers who could be classified as Power Users. Power Users have the highest cLTV (customer lifetime value) and are the most loyal product evangelists. What was their buying journey? What objections did they present? Which outsiders influenced their purchase decisions?
• Create an Influencer Map based on who influences the purchase decisions of each segment of the company’s target prospects. This can be as simple as coming up with a list of bloggers, podcasters, industry celebrities, social media accounts, etc. that your ICPs are engaged with and trust.
  • What relationship exists between each influencer and the company?
  • What does a fully leveraged influencer partnership look like and what will it take to get there with each influencer?
• It’s key to properly segment prospects and create Influencer Maps and marketing campaigns for each ICP. Segmentation and hyper-personalization for each ICP will amplify your marketing efforts, increase the percentage of qualified inbound leads, shorten the sales cycle, and increase retention. A prospect who fits one of your ICPs should see your marketing and say, “Wow, they really get me!”.
• Identify marketing channels chock-full of power user lookalikes and strategically use influencer partnerships, content marketing, and social media, to amplify reach and credibility with ICP segments.
• Create a hyper-personalized campaign that includes multi-channel touch points, delivered at an appropriate cadence, for each ICP.
• Relentlessly plan, deploy, and assess tests to determine the most viable lead generation channels for the company: set campaign goals, campaign parameters (budget, timeline, platform, etc.), decide how results will be assessed, and run it. Rinse and repeat.
• Key elements to a successful lead generation campaign:
  • Present a compelling offer & corresponding CTA(call to action) to prospects in exchange for their email address. This offer is called a lead magnet and can come in the form of a white paper, list, webinar, quiz, assessment, and more.
  • The offer should serve as a pain killer by solving an immediate/urgent problem for the prospect as well as speak to how your solution will fulfill their foundational desires, e.g. peace of mind, success, recognition, etc.
  • The lead magnet offer must be directly relevant to the company’s core offering and match the prospect’s stage of awareness (more on stages of awarenesses in the next section).
  • Start setting appropriate expectations from the first marketing touch: what outcomes can your customers truly achieve through your offering? My philosophy is underpromise, overdeliver + delight = Power Users
  • Include testimonials from Power Users and/or other social proof.
• Create SOPs for top of funnel (email list building) efforts for ease of implementation, consistency, and transferability to other staff.
• Utilize an appropriate tech stack for planning, implementation, and assessment of marketing campaigns, ideally one that integrates with Sales’ CRM.
• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for Marketing: CAC (customer acquisition cost), CAC:LTV ratio (how much did it cost the company to acquire a new subscriber as compared to the amount they spent with the company over their tenure as a subscriber), conversion rates & timelines for every stage of the marketing funnel. Proper attribution of leads is also necessary for improving decision making for future marketing campaigns.
• Marketing must clearly and consistently communicate with:
  • Sales to determine the parameters and definition of a sales qualified lead as well as how & when to hand-off prospects to SDRs (sales development reps) or sales reps.
  • Product to have an in depth understand of the product, feature roadmap, etc.
  • Customer Success to best understand the customer journey of Power Users so they can reverse engineer their efforts to attract more of those subscribers and set them on that same path.

Sales:

At its core, I believe that sales is problem solving. B2B sales teams must be able to effectively diagnose and frame business problems to a buying committee, and then present creative solutions to solve that problem. They must be able to quickly and effectively become fluent in prospects’ industries; tease out problems, objections, and key stakeholders; then design a solution to bridge those gaps and present it at the right time, to the right people.

The most successful salespeople do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it. They are relentless in their pursuit of excellence and exceeding customers’ expectations.

For Sales to be successful, fluid communication with Marketing, Customer Success, and Product is absolutely necessary, as is proper technology (CRM software, etc.), implementation, and adoption amongst sales staff.

Comprehensive discovery is key to a successful selling relationship. Seek first to understand, then, and only then, to be understood. Incisive and thoughtful questioning is the foundation from which to build the case of how your solution can deliver the outcomes your future subscriber needs and expects.

As the old adage goes, nothing happens until someone sells something. Let’s dive in on how to sell subscriptions.

The following represents the broad strokes of what a healthy sales department looks like at a subscription-based organization. This serves as an overview of what I help implement during a consulting/coaching/fractional engagement:

Goal: create repeatable, scalable processes to move prospects seamlessly through the stages of awareness towards a purchase decision as efficiently as possible.

This entire document is written primarily with the SMB sector in mind, though subscription organizations with sales teams need structure and strategy to sell to enterprise level clients. Enterprise level sales organizations also require highly targeted outbound efforts which are not covered below, though I am happy to discuss on an individual basis. Most of the strategies below can be applied with varying levels of automation, absent a dedicated sales team and/or for lower tier clients.

• With few exceptions, when prospects first find out about a product through the marketing department’s efforts, they are not ready or able to make the right purchase decision. The solution: a multi-channel lead nurture campaign that meets a prospect in the appropriate stage of awareness and moves them toward certain predetermined engagement milestones so they can be classified as an SQL (sales qualified lead) or disqualified from the funnel. SQLs are successfully handed off to SDRs for further vetting, or directly to sales account representatives.
• SDRs take additional, predetermined steps to qualify or disqualify a lead before handing off to a sales rep.
• Throughout the lead nurture process, the company promotes the most valuable aspects of their offering, testimonials from current subscribers, compelling statistics (social proof), and corresponding calls to action that take the prospect to the next step on the customer journey and therefore, closer to a purchase decision. -Foundational desires (peace of mind, respect, elevated social status, etc.) should be used as sales anchors.
• The most valuable aspects of the company’s offering should be presented as they relate to the outcomes the prospective customer can expect to receive/achieve once they subscribe.
• Managing appropriate expectations is critical throughout all stages of awareness. Underpromise, overdeliver, and then delight customers. Overpromising in marketing campaigns and underdelivering with new customers is inexcusable for companies that rely on a recurring revenue and is a significant contributor to sub 90 day churn rates.
• Social media retargeting campaigns coupled with an email lead nurture sequence, on-site live chats, and direct contact from a sales rep is a common multi-channel mix for the SMB market. It’s imperative that retargeting ads and messaging from the sales rep match the messaging of the email nurture sequence.
• Tune into the prospect’s stage of awareness as they receive an email lead nurture sequence, retargeting ads, and contact from sales reps.

How I define stages of awareness (adapted from Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers):

Unaware

A person who fits a company’s ICP but is not aware that the company exists or the problem it can help them solve.

Solution Aware

The prospect is aware they have a problem and that the company exists. The prospect might download a lead magnet at this stage as they move toward active consideration of possible solutions to their problem. Marketing should move a prospect from Unaware —> Solution Aware —> Product Aware or from Solution Aware —> Product Aware before passing the prospect on to a sales rep (or an SDR).

Product Aware

The prospect is now actively considering the available options to solve their problem and could be considered a lead. They are receiving a carefully planned lead nurture campaign. A lead is moving toward Most Aware when they are engaging with your nurture campaign (opening emails, clicking links in emails or retargeting ads, visiting the company’s website, downloading additional content marketing assets, chatting with a rep via on site chat, talking to a rep on the phone or via text, and/or responding to emails from sales). Leads should be transferred from SDRs to sales reps at this stage. Unqualified prospects should be disqualified from being a “lead” at this stage and put on a long term lead nurture campaign.

Most Aware

(High intent to purchase) – The prospect is now a hot lead, ready to pay for the solution they believe will best solve their problem and are showing clear buying signals for the product – those signals should mirror the actions that current Power Users took when they were considering making a purchase. Through the nurture campaign, the lead should have been told the story of why the company’s offering will solve their problem (backed up with social proof) and then asked for action (free trial, attend a webinar, purchase offering, get on the phone with sales, etc.).

• The overarching goal of a nurture campaign is to move the most qualified prospects to Most Aware as quickly as possible, customize the deal as necessary/applicable, then close the deal. Simultaneously, the campaign should move unqualified leads out of the sales pipeline as quickly as possible.
• Throughout the nurture campaign the most useful features of the offering must be explained in a way that conveys a clear benefit to the prospect (while setting proper expectations for outcomes/results), and again, speaks to the prospect’s foundational desires. All claims of outcomes/results should be substantiated with social proof (case studies, testimonials, relevant statistics).
• Objections should be seamlessly managed throughout the lead nurture process, with common objections being strategically handled through social proof in an automated lead nurture campaign before the prospect brings up their objection(s) to the sales rep. When further objections surface, skilled sales staff should be able to launch a mini-discovery process to astutely uncover and address the root objection and move the lead forward in the sales process. Alternatively, at this stage, sales staff should be able to quickly disqualify a lead and refer them to a better suited solution when appropriate.
• Sales reps should guide the lead throughout the buying process, and the lead should know exactly what happens at each stage of the buying process before it happens. There should be no surprises unless they are hugely positive and for the express purpose of delighting the lead.
• The Head of Sales must create and refine repeatable, scalable sales processes and ensure that the entire sales team is implementing those processes with precision and great attention to detail. This includes full implementation of a CRM tool that best suits the company’s needs.

Sales must clearly and consistently communicate with:

• Marketing, to determine the parameters and definition of a sales qualified lead (SQLs) and how & when to hand-off prospects to SDRs or sales reps.
• Product, to have an in depth understand of the product, feature roadmap, etc.
• Customer Success, to best understand the ongoing customer journey of power users so they can best identify those leads with the highest LTV potential, anticipate objections, and shorten the sales cycle.

Customer Success

Customer Success systems are the means by which companies help their customers achieve the success the company advertised and play a central role in maximizing cLTV.

Companies start setting expectations of what outcomes their prospects can expect from their solution with the first marketing touch. Sales teams skillfully craft a tailored solution based on the specific outcomes the prospect identifies. Now it’s time for Customer Success to pave the way for new subscribers to achieve those outcomes and feel successful as fast as possible.

Proper expectation setting, creating a culture of feedback, effective onboarding, using customer service tools, keeping tabs on customer engagement, and proper off-boarding are foundational to Customer Success.

**Harvard Business Review tells us that it costs between 5 and 25 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Customer Success should be a top priority in a recurring revenue organization. **

Creating SOPs for every piece of the customer success puzzle for maximum efficiency, scalability, and team member onboarding is imperative.

Customer Success must set up automated processes throughout customer onboarding and ongoing management to truly deliver on the promises made to new customers at scale.

Customer Success KPIs for online subscription based businesses: cLTV, CRC (customer retention cost), churn rate (and/or retention rate), ARR(annual recurring revenue), MRR(monthly recurring revenue), ARPU(average revenue per user), and upsell percentage.

1. Creating a culture of feedback

The overarching theme of ongoing customer success is to create a culture where feedback is not only accepted, but carefully considered and when appropriate, acted upon. The company must set the expectation during the onboarding process that helpful staff members are just an email, online chat, PM, or a phone call away to help remove roadblocks to a customer’s success. Reinforce that attitude through online community interactions, retargeting ads, and on a one-on-one basis.

Customers of recurring revenue businesses make the decision to “buy” every single renewal period and must continuously derive value from the product. It’s important to remind subscribers how amazing the product and the company are and of the success the customer is achieving.

Surveying current customers one to two times per year is absolutely necessary. This furthers the culture of feedback and will undoubtedly unearth useful information that will improve organizational decision making. Survey different segments of subscribers based on their engagement level with the product. Ask Power Users different questions than segments who are least engaged. More on the tech required for proper customer segmentation and hyper-personalized engagement tracking in the Engagement Tracking section below.

2. Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of taking a brand new subscriber, beginning at sign up, on the fastest path to value recognition, and over time nudging them along the path to becoming a Power User. Onboarding is a key fixture of a long term retention strategy.

The onboarding experience should mirror the messaging a prospect received during the lead nurture campaign and promises made by Sales. In other words, the expectations set during marketing & lead nurture should be met and exceeded once the prospect buys: underpromise, overdeliver. Do that by explaining how the new customer can fully benefit from each and every aspect advertised about the product in an intuitive way through a combination of email, on-site feature tours, in-app messaging, videos, in-app pop-ups, and more.

The effectiveness of onboarding should be measured and tested, just like marketing campaigns.

Customize the onboarding process if possible/necessary by allowing new customers to self-select their top priorities & desired outcomes with the product. Marketing should have explained the “what” and “why” of the product’s features, the onboarding process should explain the “how” to use each feature and receive its full benefit/outcome.

Since the goal of onboarding is to take a brand new customer on the fastest path to value recognition, and over time nudge them along the path to become a Power User, you need to know what steps current Power Users have taken in the past to achieve power user status, and strategically send new customers on that same journey.

3. Engagement Tracking

Engagement tracking simply means understanding and keeping tabs on how customers are interacting (or not!) with the product and then taking appropriate action to either bring a disengaged subscriber back into participation and value recognition, or conversely, to offer the most engaged subscribers relevant, useful, upsells to maximize their cLTV.

The path to maximizing profitability in a recurring revenue based business is not just acquiring new customer, but keeping track of who is most and least engaged, and then doing something about it.

Get the technology necessary in place to accurately tag and segment customers based on engagement, usage, or however a company measures value recognition. [Intercom] is one of the top tools available for hyper-personalized onboarding, engagement tracking, user segmentation, and in-app messaging. They allow online companies to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Once a tracking tool is in place, a process document that explains in detail what actions need to be taken based on engagement tracking information should be created and implemented.

If a customer success team doesn’t have visibility into engagement metrics and SOPs for how to interpret and take action on that data, there is no clear path to maximizing cLTV.

There are 2 primary scenarios to prepare for in this particular SOP: how to bring disengaged subscribers back into active participation and value recognition, and second, how to offer appropriate upsells to the most engaged subscribers (Power Users).

Relentlessly track engagement metrics and the results of re-engagement and upsell campaigns. If we take Harvard Business Review’s retention stats seriously (that it costs 5 to 25 times as much to bring on a new customer as it does to retain an existing one), subscription organizations should be paying an order of magnitude more attention and care to engagement metrics than marketing metrics.

Those subscriber segments that are most engaged should be offered appropriate upsell opportunities for tangential products or services, for example: a higher tier subscription with more benefits, access to a mastermind, a tangential product, a cross-sell offer that results in an affiliate fee for the company, etc.

New customer acquisition in a subscription business is certainly of high importance, but retention is mission critical. If new subscribers are jumping ship early on, either Marketing & Sales are bringing in the wrong subscribers, Customer Success is asleep on the job, or the Product is subpar. Fix your leaky bucket.

4. Community

A carefully curated online community can be one of the most effective retention strategies to employ for an online recurring revenue business.

Often on a membership website, members join for the content, but end up sticking around because of the community. Some type of group interaction in the form of an online discussion forum or Facebook Group can be the differentiator between a membership site where people show up, consume the content, and churn before the 90 day mark, versus those who stay for many months or even years because of the value and relationships they are receiving from that group interaction.

SaaS and subscription based businesses can also enjoy the benefits of an online community. Granted, an online community is not valuable and appropriate in every scenario, but that’s often the exception rather than the rule.

At the outset, running an online community requires a great deal of intentionality, time, and cultivation. Starting a community is not a decision that should be taken lightly, but when done well, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

To begin, cast a vision for what a successful community would look given the company’s type of customers + offering, and work backwards to create a strategy for bringing that vision to life. What platform would be best to use? What kinds of discussions would happen there? How will participants get the most value from it? What does a “successful” community look like in this niche?

As with every part of running a recurring revenue business, proper expectation setting from the outset is necessary. Marketing campaigns should reflect the community accurately. Hopefully that means a kind, welcoming, helpful bunch of people who are invested in each other’s success. Then, during the onboarding process, make sure the community’s rules and guidelines are agreed upon by the new group member before they can interact with others.

On an ongoing basis, its Customer Success’ responsibility to enforce those rules (through contributors & moderators) and cultivate a community that reflects the vision cast for it from the beginning.

5. Customer Service

Customer service generally boils down to problem solving with current customers. As with every other area of customer success, dedicated staff members should “own” the customer service department.

Using a purpose built tool for support tickets and the overall customer service experience is hugely important with regard to systems, processes, automation, and delegation. SMBs relying on an email account or spreadsheet to manage support tickets is insufficient, unscalable, and unprofessional.

Whenever speaking with a customer, reps must have empathy, show kindness, apologize when necessary, and be solution oriented. The “voice” and tone of customer service reps should reflect the overall company persona.

Reps should have dedicated SOPs for handling common problems, following up, and feedback loops, as well as clear directives on when and how to escalate a support ticket.

When customer are upset, treat that as an opportunity to delight them – think How to Win Friends & Influence People! If that subscriber’s experience is so overwhelmingly positive when they approach customer service for help, research shows that they will actually be a happier customer than before they had the problem.

6. Off-boarding

Often overlooked, proper off-boarding of subscribers is essential for recurring revenue businesses to best understand the customer journey. Companies must understand the reasons their subscribers leave, identify off-ramps, and make adjustments in every relevant area of the revenue funnel (Marketing, Sales, Customer Success/retention) to lower churn.

The decision for a customer to cancel should be very difficult, whereas the process to do so should be simple and straightforward. The exit should not be under heavy guard or hard to find. An automated exit survey should be in place and Customer Success should be in charge of instigating action based on those replies.

Subscribers should be given the option to downgrade or pause their account, asked why they’re cancelling on one screen and given a corresponding “fix” offer on the next in an attempt to “save” the customer. If you have the staff for it, a manned chat bot embedded in cancellation related pages can be an effective tool to aid retention and better understand customers.

Product (content for memberships & subscriptions; physical product for sub boxes; software for SaaS)

Bottom line: Set accurate expectations – beginning with the very first marketing touch – of what customers can expect to get when they’re learning about the company’s product or service and what it has to offer. If prospects are told exactly what to expect and they indicate they’re good with that, (by making the purchase…) the relationship is off to a great start!

Underpromise, overdeliver + delight = Power Users.

Miscommunication about product functionality, delivery dates, feature roadmaps, upcoming content, etc. is the source of much internal consternation in any online recurring revenue business. The Head of Product should take great pains to communicate effectively with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to ensure consistent messaging on an ongoing basis.

Bridging communication gaps between Product and all other departments is foundational to a successful recurring revenue business. Creating & successfully implementing SOPs for how this will be handled is key for each of my consulting engagements.

I believe in value-based pricing, which can take many forms. I help my clients determine key value metrics and develop appropriate pricing strategies and ways to test them. Pricing & upsell strategy should be an ever-evolving practice in a recurring revenue business and tested constantly.

Wrapping Up

Running a scalable subscription-based company is tough. It’s inherently more complex than the single-sale ownership model and requires a unique toolkit. If you’re firing on all cylinders and have already implemented everything above, good on you! – pass this to a friend who needs a nudge in the right direction.

My consulting methodology is a holistic approach that produces measurable results and creates a foundation from which to scale an online recurring revenue business.

Seventeen years of sales experience, consulting work in a variety of industries, and a relentless pursuit to continuously improve my business skills has given me a knack for incisively identifying problems and designing effective solutions for my clients.

Request a free 60-minute strategy call now and set your subscription company on a path to scaling, profitability, and organizational health!