5 Stages for CEO Adaptation for Sales Pipeline Survival
During the current crisis, your organization’s quick ability to adapt to the new reality will determine if it survives, strives, or closes its doors. Don’t make the mistake of losing time and hoping that your dried-up pipeline will somehow come back if you just do more of what made you successful before the crisis.
If finding sales now seems to be the hardest task, this transformation checklist will help bring the change. It takes 4-6 months, however, at the other end of it, your business will be ready to withstand any crisis and its pipeline will return.
In times of significant changes, businesses make major adjustments to adapt and it’s a must for yours too. Here are the 5 most critical stages of adaptation you need to implement to find and keep revenue coming:
- Get Marketing and Business Development costs under control. Reduce reliance on the most expensive lead gen sources such as trade shows and salespeople to decrease cost of lead generation and client acquisition. Virtual live sale events & online sales meetings managed as a multi-channel campaign in COVID-19 economy become viable replacements of trade shows. Multi-channel marketing campaigns with appropriate automation replaces multiple outbound sales reps at a fraction of the cost.
- Personalize outreach to become relevant. Segment your market and content by persona. Start with your top 2-3 personas and invest into detailed prospect intelligence while building a comprehensive list of target accounts and contacts.
- Create engaging content for each persona. Content is critical for selling because it educates prospects about how their needs can be met with your solutions. Customize customer success stories, video testimonials, flyers, sell sheets, white papers, landing pages to demonstrate specific value to each persona.
- Automate pipeline and build Sales and Marketing Engine. Put an appropriate level of automation in place (a tech stack to track the prospects, serve the content, perform follow-ups and retargeting). Architect an appropriate tech stack or invest in an integrated marketing platform to support your business goals and marketing & sales activities.
- Deploy & continuously optimize multi-channel campaigns. A single channel will not help you reach all key contacts, just as mass mailing alone will not bring in qualified prospects. Some prospects will be reachable on email, some on LinkedIn, others only by the phone. There is no one size fits all. When you start the campaign across all these and other channels, watch every touch, analyze, optimize, seek to improve engagement and outcome. Optimize on each channel to ensure maximum reach and conversion.
We can tell you from the experience that if you develop a consistent analytics-driven process that starts with deep understanding of your market and buyer personas, build a detailed and expansive list, and automate/ optimize multi-channel outreach – you will get leads and sales.