Your tech sales strategy may be effective on home ground, but if you plan on scaling up to a new market then you will doubtless need to rethink. Doing business in a new country throws up all kinds of new barriers to jump, including, but not limited to, the obvious stumbling block of language. There are several stages required to build a tech sales strategy, and a sales assessment from an outsourced sales agency will assist in shortening that onboard process and save you on your most valuable asset — time.
Why? Time is something you don’t have to spare as you race to a new market, and put your product or service ahead of the competition. Time costs money, and costly errors are to be avoided, so it’s a good idea to lower or limit your risk and increase speed by availing of the services of an outsourced sales agency that has been there and done that.
Involve everyone from the beginning, because everyone is involved in perfecting a tech sales strategy. Our sales assessment process brings all the key marketing and sales players together, One mind, one goal.
Understand why you lose deals as well as winning them. Know the bottlenecks and how to overcome them. Clarify, together as a team, your strengths, messaging, brand image and streamline the inbound and outbound processes inside out before you upscale.
Building a tech sales strategy is all about setting reachable goals. Then you can work from the top down to reach those goals. “This is what we want and this is how we are going to do it”. The “what we want'' is easy enough, as long as it’s reasonably attainable. Getting some expertise from an outside source is a good way to gain another perspective and may throw up ideas or point to issues that you hadn’t thought of or couldn’t see. Work out how much you want to make and how many closed deals is that going to take. How many follow-up meetings need to be confirmed from how many initial meetings? That takes you right back to sales qualified leads (SQLs) and how well your B2B lead generation works. Let’s head back to the beginning.
Look at your own product or service and ask who is the end-user? Your target prospect might be the person in charge of the budget, but are they going to be the one who actually uses your product? Probably not. This is when you need to remember the difference between B2C and B2B lead generation and marketing. You need those SQLs, as a one-size-fits-all marketing approach is not going to work.
Likely, you will need to contact and build relationships with several names within the organization of your target companies. Clarify those two key names: Who will be using your product or service and who will be the one to make the final purchasing decision. Determining this sort of information seems obvious but is often missed with blind wide-net approaches. It is necessary to have a no less than great lead generation and marketing team who will cover off on all points, and quickly, create a good marketing strategy and ready to pass the baton of SQLs to the international sales representatives.
A reputable outsourced sales agency will provide you with a ready to market business lead generation services team comprised of four roles:
Remember that localized, specialized lead generation is already marketing and selling in your vertical. They know what they are doing, in the local language, and grasp the local culture and all the nuances of how to do business in that market. They already have qualified buyer networks and they can do it faster.
You’re likely solution-selling a service or tech product. Providing a solution that the customer needs (even if they don’t yet realize they need it). Pitching that solution and attracting the right consumers of your brand is one the first and most important steps of scaling up and building a tech sales strategy. Aim to make use of all good leads and get it right. Your existing sales pitch works well at home, but this time you need to formulate it differently for your new foreign market.
We’re not just talking about the pitfalls of Google translate. Slogans and advertising may not translate, or the translation may have a double-meaning. Even the biggest names have made the mistake of forgetting that brand taglines don’t always travel.
Formulate your pitch, try running past some industry experts and ask for opinions before you unleash it on a new market and risk getting egg on your face. It might take time, but not as much as fixing a damaged reputation.
Now you are armed with a new tech sales strategy and are ready to scale up into new territory. Keep fine-tuning the process, keep testing, keep on checking the metrics. It’s never a finished job and should always be in process. Selling to clients internationally is a process, a structure, but remember also the importance of the methodology of selecting the right people for the right job.
Our CEO Rick Pizzoli, recently defined the two terms:
“Sales process and sales methodology are different and both are required for success. Sales Process is the structure you set up for your team, such as a multi-channel outbound approach for lead generation, delivering 100 touch points per day, clear reporting and management of KPIs. Tools leveraged in your data stack, content selected per vertical and persona. If taking deals through to revenue, the process tracks steps such as need capture, proposal, demos, trials, agreements, closing, payment.
"Sales methodology is selecting the right people for the right job, providing training (sales, product, business benefits, operations), and establishing methods and tactics used during lead generation through to the closing of the opportunity. It's about preparing the team so that they are effective while working through the process. At Sales Force Europe we’ve built 100s of lead generation and outsourced sales teams. Process without methodology, or the reverse, is bound to fail. It’s a journey where you must plan well upfront, deploy, listen to market feedback, review results, and improve on the fly. No one gets it right upfront and we’ve certainly made our mistakes."
When scaling up, building a tech sales strategy that works, and clearly defining your sales process and sales methodology, you give yourself and your business the best chance of success for your journey!
