Continuing from my last blog…
By “External Customers” I mean customers outside the boundaries of your own organization. In sales this is who you define as your lead/opportunity/customer.
I admit that this area is out of my depth, all I have is the theory about haow to define a market, but I know what you need to use this for, so the requirements are not a problem to define. You need to have a clear aim on what types of customers you will be targeting, what the markets that will supply you with leads are. This is probably not something you do very often and I brought it up because of the importance this step has for the rest of the work.
When working at IKEA I was part of the teams in development of new products. My role was to assist with the forecast information regarding the potential of the new product and gather knowledge about the product so that I could make a plan for how the forecast for the new product and other products in the range will change once we launched.
This was about understanding who our customers are and how they would react (e.g. cannibalization on other products). This was also about understanding what customers we did not have, how the offer potentially would create a new customer base and how we could reach as many potential customers as we could.
I don’t see that B2B sales can be any different. If you have a clear idea of who you are targeting, the rest of the work becomes so much easier.
Usually when I talk to people about the problems they are facing at work I can hear that the client base is so diverse you wonder how they managed to find the deals and if any of the deals made any money. “Selling all we can to everyone…” is not being fair on your organization.
Once you have decided on who your customers are you should write down your assumptions. You have assumed that this group is correct for your company because… (fill in the blank). If you write down your assumptions it will make it easier to see what you might have missed over time.
This customer description needs to be communicated throughout your organization. Everyone needs to be in line with who your customer is. Now there may be parts of your organization that views the customer different e.g. Customer Service, because they deal with another part of the customers organization, but marketing, product development, project teams, production, logistics, and so on, need to have a collective idea of who you talk about when you “the customer”.
“Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” ~ Kevin Stirtz
In the next step you will need to create a Sales Plan in order to reach these customers, so you need to put some real effort into getting this right, because if we get all the other steps right, it will be a waste of time if we don’t target the right customers. The perfect execution of a misdirected plan is not something you would want…
First, let us get look at your internal customers.
//The picture is from my infochart over Lean Sales
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