Martal
3 Things to Consider When Investing in Sales Growth Strategies
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” – Warren Buffet
Ever make a bad decision based on a low price? If you said “no” then you have an inhuman amount of self-control and have better things to do than read this post. But if you’re like most, you have succumbed to a “too good to be true” offer at least once.
As a sales leader you know how compelling a motivator price can be for prospects. But if you’re being honest with yourself, price is a powerful factor in your decision-making process as well. You must look for solutions that will fit in the budget, please management, generate leads and produce results. You must make some very tough choices as you plan to grow your sales team and meet goals.
But how much could today’s savings cost you tomorrow?
Whenever you start assessing value first then price your mindset changes, your decisions become easier, and you will increase your return on investment faster.
So, what steps do you take to ensure you are getting the best value for the price as you search for ways to increase sales? The equation is simple:
Value = Benefits/Price
The hard part is determining the monetary value of the benefits.
We’re going to break down the three most important things to consider when choosing a business growth strategy, but first, let’s go over the definition.
What is a business growth strategy?
A growth strategy is a plan focused on the expansion of a company’s revenue, size, or structure. The growth strategy can be geared towards a variety of aspects including extending into new regions, growing the customer base, or widening the available products and services
Each department will have its own growth strategy, but in sales, the strategy tends to center on customer acquisition and in particular, lead generation.
Unfortunately, lead generation is well-known for soaking up resources like a dry sponge, which makes choosing the right growth strategy imperative to successfully obtaining new customers.
The 3 Most Important Factors in Choosing a Growth Strategy
1. Time Spent to Implement and Maintain Tasks
Time is one of your most valuable resources. Luckily, in business you can easily put a monetary value on time. Cheaper solutions often require a do-it-yourself approach that needs time intensive activities to achieve desired results.
For example, say you must choose between a pay per click (PPC) campaign managed by a marketing agency or hire an outsourced sales development team. The marketing agency cost $2,000 a month while the support team is $6,000 a month.
At first glance, the marketing agency is a clear winner, and in some cases, that may be the best option, especially if you sell products online to consumers. If you target other businesses with large ticket items though, a PPC campaign will take much more time to manage.
While PPC campaigns have some control over who enters your sales funnel it is up to your team to filter out the good and the bad leads. Now, factor in that 50% of your sales reps’ time is wasted on the wrong prospects. How much is 50% of your team’s salary? Are you getting closer to the $6,000 a month? Have you gone over?
On the other hand, an outsourced sales team would filter out the low intent leads for you, bring you the prospects that are interested, set appointments, and even complete the sale. Not only is this conserving your team’s time, but it also increases your conversion rate and reduces the length of the sales cycle.
(As a side note, leads generated from a PPC campaign can generate a lot of dirty data in your CRM which can cost an extra 6% of your revenue each year.)
The cost of choosing price over value doesn’t stop at employees’ salaries. Costs can also be hidden in the resources needed to supplement the deficiencies of the cheaper option.
2. Resources Required to Achieve Results
*Items sold separately – It’s that bit of fine print at the bottom of almost every toy commercial that ends up costing parents a lot more money than they budgeted. The fun and excitement displayed by overzealous actors could only be experienced with the whole set, and those pieces were sold separately for a darn good reason.
This “items sold separately” approach it’s something to consider when choosing the right products and services to invest in for your sales team. Let’s look back at the marketing agency versus the outsourced sales development team.
If you chose to run a PPC campaign you might need to ask yourself these questions:
- Do I have enough people on my sales team to have at least 7 touch points with each lead?
- Do I have a CRM that can integrate well with the campaign and properly import the leads to ensure the data is clean?
- Can I segment the leads to customize the message based on qualifying factors to and maximize conversion?
- Do I have the software necessary to send out automated email campaign sequences and be compliant with regulations?
- Do I have someone that can set up and manage those campaigns using split tests to find what works and what doesn’t work for nurturing prospects?
- Do I have someone to analyze the incoming data and translate it into ways the sales process can be improved?
These are vital components to any sales funnel and would be necessary to achieving the maximum value from a PPC campaign; however, not much, if any, of these are included in the $2,000 monthly package. If you don’t have all these resources in place already, you could be looking at paying a lot more money. paying an extra $4,000 or more a month.
So, what resources would you need with the outsourced sales development team? Not much. Since the benefits of outsourcing is hiring highly experienced workers at a lower cost these assets are included in the package. The upfront higher price is negated by the value added and savings provided from the experience and tools that the outsourced team provides.
Now you can see the value gain in time and resources is much more than the $4,000 difference in price of the marketing firm and the outsourced sales team.
This brings us to the question of what would stop someone from choosing the latter?
3. Budget Allowed to Execute the Processes
While time and resources are important factors in determining value, it ultimately comes down to the budget. It’s what stops some people from buying a Toyota over a Kia, or in this case, it’s what stops a sales director from choosing an outsourced sales team over a marketing agency.
A budget can seem like a burden but used correctly it will grow as your team grows. Yes, choosing an outsourced sales team might stretch the budget now, but the team is designed to fast track sales growth while market agencies are focused purely on providing leads, whether they are high intent or not. I have often heard marketers say, “There is no such thing as a bad lead.” But I have witnessed leads come from marketing agencies that are truly … bad.
The intent of the service sets these two options apart. Which choice will have the most tangible outcome despite the price? Which will help you achieve your goals more efficiently?
If we factor in the time and resources needed to support a marketing agency’s efforts those costs will quickly outweigh the saving, most likely before the benefits start rolling in. With the outsourced sales team the price is displayed without additional assets needed much more like a turnkey option.
In this case, the marketing agency can be a risky investment.
Takeaways
Purchase decisions are based on emotion then justified by logic. Low prices tug at our heartstrings, and purse strings, because it’s a chance to preserve our resources while achieving some sort of gain. It’s the logic that can save you from the painful experience of time wasted and money lost.
Business purchase decisions do often err on the side of logic thanks to the many decision makers involved, but before you or anyone else allows the price to be a factor consider the value first. Dive deeper into the intent of the product or service. Discuss the time, resources and budget implications and be sure to look at the fine print for items sold separately.
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Your sales team is a pivotal part of your company’s growth. If you are looking for new ways to accelerate your sales team’s B2B lead generation process, then we would love to have a discussion with you to see if we could help.
