Insights
Build a sustainable sales plan
Focus investments on Value Creation
Focus investments on Value Creation
Whether you're in start-up mode, scaling up, looking to pivot strategic direction to improve profitability and increase repeat / recurring revenues, its easy to burn cash on SDR teams, digital marketing or new products with limited returns if insufficient time is allocated to a detailed overview of your growth plan
Key considerations when building and executing your growth plan and customer value proposition
Customer
- Ideal customer profile & buyer personas
- Identify stakeholder personas; decision makers, influencers, channel partners - ensure campaigns & content are relevant & aligned
- customer referral programs
Data
- Data-driven forecasting; lead conversion / lag to revenue / churn rate by revenue stream & client, net revenue retention / customer acquisition cost
- Pricing strategies (model, metric, packaging, tiering, T&Cs)
- Pricing reviews per Line of Business: Solution / Service
- Market Research & Business Intelligence
- Clear objectives, measures & metrics, data-driven sales targets, & incentive programs aligned to "profitable growth"
- Sales opportunity qualification - define & assign gates to enable pipeline segmentation (Suspect, Lead, Prospect, Opportunity, Negotiation, Contract) -
- Sales process - purchase order / contract completion feeding a gated busines lifecycle where appropriate for milestone billing or triggering customer onboarding
- Sales Commission Plans, OTE & Accelerators
Team
- Sales leadership,
- Team structure,
- Sales training
- Succession planning
- Sales Governance: CRM training & Pipeline / Data hygiene
Sales Tools
- Account plans (Enterprise/Growth),
- Sales playbooks (AM, SDR, Renewals, Customer Success),
- Sales Enablement tools: Battlecards
- SDR Function: Inbound & Outbound Lead nurture
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Focus investments on Value Creation
Focus investments on Value Creation
Focus investments on Value Creation
Clear value proposition
- Brand awareness: Thought leadership, Brand Ambassadors,
- Customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, Customer concentration, YoY growth, retention
- Do you stand out from crowd?
People & Skills
- High performing Management teams, , Organizational Clarity
- Talent retention, building a Talent pool, effective succession planning
- Identify & Evaluate critical roles - remove or re-position underperformers
- Inhouse Versus Outsourced?
YoY Growth / CAGR
- YoY Sales performance, Sales FTE yield,
- Strong pipeline per line of business, vertical
- Review Sales focus on Account Management versus new Logo and re-balance where needed
- Review budget & resource allocations to customer retention versus customer acquisition
Gross Margin / Net Profit
- Avoid revenue growth "at all costs"
- review your portfolio - be prepared to retire low margin, no-core products & services
- review cost of sales - benchmark supplier pricing, supply terms, vendor rebates, MDF funding
Understand your growth metrics to support decision making:
- Customer Acquisition cost (CAC)
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- Conversion Ratios (pipeline) / Time to Revenue
- Average order values
- Revenue & margin segmentation per customer segment, product, campaign,
R&D / Marketplace trends / Competitor Analysis
- Benchmarking - are you still relevant?
Innovation
- Ensure investments are customer-led?
- Review your customer engagement activities; surveys, advisory boards, vertical ambassadors, feedback forums
- Lead the market, enter new adjacent markets
- Fail small, fail fast, win big
Alternative routes to market
- Channel, Indirect, Alliance & Referral programs
- merger, joint-ventures
- Direct / E-Commerce / Cloud & App marketplaces
Marketing Automation: ARR Growth & Retention.
Additional Information
What?
- Marketing automation simply enables marketing to send automated emails or notifications to new and existing customers,
- in a timely manner that can be fully tracked for behaviours and ROI. Most common tools are Salesforce Pardot or Hubspot.
How?
- Prospect Nurture: Marketing campaign and SDR Outbound Comms
- Automated SDR prospecting comms
- Automated email work flows triggered by prospect behaviours. E.g. Website submissions
- Post-purchase: Supporting Account Management and Customer Success to maximise RPU and counter churn
- Onboarding cycles by customer type
- Customer Nurture
- Up and X-sell in both managed & unmanaged customer base
- Tail Accounts: automated brand & MSP comms to drive CSAT and RPU
- Timely customer service comms
- Newsletters
- Renewals Optimisation: Automated comms simplifying process, driving up/x-sell & reducing churn
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Strategy
- Launch targeted & automated onboarding, nurture & renewal customer communication workflows
- Maximize RPU with predicted “next best action” campaign activity at each journey stage, leveraging
- Enhanced brand,
- new services Launch,
- new Tech partnerships
- Up/cross-sell of ARR/MSP Portfolio – mapping to key verticals
Initial Steps: Segmentation:
- Data analysis to inform customer segments within CRM
- Customers onboarded into segments – guiding messaging & level of automation versus in-person engagement value
- Nurture: Automated up or x-sell campaigns
Win-back
- Tactical re-engagement campaigns targeting
- Fully terminated customers
- Lost agreements
- Lost bids
Renewals
- Existing ARR Renewals / up/cross sell <120 days
- Identification of customer churn type patterns.
- Launch counter termination tactical campaigns
- Review existing customer portal – scope for further PP Automation?
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Goals)
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Goals
- To increase cross-selling / upselling via increasing awareness of evolving MSP portfolio & ARR cyber/cloud solutions
- To develop an engaging customer experience program “post purchase”
- To reduce customer churn, increase customer lifetime value (LTV) and contract tenure across entire portfolio
Launch Activities: Onboarding
- Welcome cycle: Tailored emails & customer landing pages
- ARR / MSP Services: Demo’s & Service-overlay engagement
- Portal registration
- Expert Guidance:
- Customer Success Support
- ARR cross-sell
Nurture
- Customer segment development
- cross-sell / up-sell matrix
- Chase Repeat revenues that are Non-ARR
- Launch Newsletter: New brand / Case Studies /New Services
Renewals
- <120/90/60/30 day workflow outlined
- Build “countering termination” playbook
- Launch weekly comms: Pre/post payment
- Review future automation options for self-service renewal & recommended packages
Win-back
- Re-engagement comms with offers for
- Terminated customers
- Terminated agreements
- Lost bids
Corporate Governance
Post-purchase customer journey: ARR Growth drivers. (Strategy)
Corporate Governance
Corporate Governance can be misconstrued as an area of best practice limited to large private and PLC.
The adoption of a formal Board structure, associated best practices, and regular performance reviews is the secret to survival!
- Corporatization:
- Supporting founders/leadership of fast growing start-up & scale-up in adoption of best practices
- Globalization:
- Consolidation of multi-region businesses, adoption of central processes,
- 3-5 year strategy;
- Vision, OKRs, R&D,
- Growth forecasting,
- Roadmaps
- milestone budgeting
- Budget Process:
- Integrated Sales & marketing planning,
- KPI's,
- Sensitivity Analysis,
- Management Cadence;
- establishing strategic objectives / OKRs,
- cascading to Management for further application across all departments
- whilst adopting a regular performance review versus agreed measures and metrics
- Adopt Best Practices:
- Cash Management & Conversion
- Customer feedback,
- Employee retention,
- cost controls,
- margin retention
- Financial Reporting / Forecasting / Board Pack:
- P&L, Cash, Sales Performance,
- Updated forecast,
- Key KPI Summary,
- Risks & Opps,
- R&D / Roadmaps,
- HR & People Update
- Board: Chair / NED & Stakeholder Management
- Build an effective Board,
- leverage their skills, personal networks and expertise to build value
Culture eats Strategy for breakfast....
Are you ready to build & deploy cultural improvement programs that reduced attrition, enhance diversity and inclusion, and support environmental, social, and corporate governance initiatives?
- Executive Global & Regional "All Hands"
- Executive "listening groups" & bHeard Survey
- Management 360 Feedback
- Talent Acquisition / Recruitment
- Talent Retention, nurture & acquisition
- 121 Personal Development, Mentorships, Career Progression
- Wellbeing, Diversity & Inclusion, ESG
- Values & Behaviours: cultural improvement programs
- Sales & Sales Development Academies
- Technical Services Academy
- Talent & HR Playbooks
- Global onboarding
- Support, train & empower - career pathways
- reward & celebrate success