“Nobody’s calling us anymore!”
This realisation will strike a chord with many companies who have grown well after their startup, and order books were always fuller than their ability to respond to the demand. Your clients are no longer early-adopters attracted by the potential of the technology but pragmatic realists, buying because it is proven.
“Has everyone stopped buying, or is it still the COVID effect?”
Maybe, but more likely you are stuck in the Moore’s Chasm.
“What did I do to get in here?” The simple answer is…..nothing, and that’s the problem! Getting over the chasm and staying on the other side takes a significant change in the way you conduct your business with customers who have quite different buying habits. If you continue to sell to people as if they were motivated by potential not the reality, it is easy to slip back into the chasm. Unfortunately the Business Plan that has worked so well so far doesn’t hold any clues - it is simply not built for this eventuality, or for life on the other side.
Like a physical chasm, you will probably need the help of someone on the other side who can send you a lifeline or at least some form of ladder. This is exactly what happened to one of our customers. They found their opportunity pipeline drying up, as they could no longer visit new customers and generate new interest in their technology due to COVID restrictions. Life on the other side represents many changes, one of which is the transition from reactive selling to people interested in your technology, to proactively selling to buyers more interested in the results it brings than the technology itself. When our customer’s sales team continued to sell their technology, and not the benefits, the message fell on stony ground.
Commercial Maturity tool
Having conducted a thorough analysis using our Mbrace Commercial Maturity tool we saw that several of the critical success factors were missing, highest amongst them was the need for a sales strategy based upon market segmentation. This naturally went hand in hand with the need to improve the management of the sales team, and our customer made some significant changes to the team to achieve this.
The output chart here shows the need for improvements to the corporate strategy as well as the sales strategy. In smaller companies these are almost interchangeable such is the impact that the sales strategy has on the success of the company as a whole
We complemented this with some targeted sales skills training to help the team uncover the needs that pragmatic buyers are more reluctant to divulge.
However, you still need to look further ahead than just the chasm, and part of your sales strategy should look at different time horizons, in a proactive way. It’s great to generate the all-important short-term revenue, but you still need to build a pipeline for future revenue. To this end we helped our customer identify opportunities associated with the Energy transition.
All too often customers manage to cross the chasm, only to slip back into it because they haven’t changed the way they manage their sales and develop their markets effectively. If you are interested in learning more about how we can support you through this critical stage, just leave us a message and we will get back to you.