Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Start Narrow and Then Broaden

If you are in sales and building your team and pipe ground-up, it is better you take a narrowed approach in terms of what services you are planning to offer, which geographies and customer segments to focus on, and then broaden your reach depending on how things are progressing. 

Pick up one service offering where you think your organization has a differentiator, one geography and one customer segment. Now put in a plan for 8 to 12 weeks, in terms of number of leads you want to generate, problems you can solve for your prospects using your service, your differentiating pitch, pricing models etc..

Now enhance your plan frequently based on your learning, maybe you have to change your pitch, add in a different dimension to your pitch, change your target prospects (example instead of focusing on CIO, you may have to focus on CMO), developing new questions for your first call,  change/enhance your differentiator so you don't fall in the same mind bucket as the prospect has put your competitors in. This one is not hard as long as you consciously try to consolidate your understanding of the market and align your plan accordingly.

Once you have established your offering in a geography and for a particular customer segment, you can start thinking of adding more services or expanding on your customer segments or even geography for that matter.