This is one of the most important things I’ve learnt this year so far….

When was the last time you asked yourself what business problems you are actually solving for your customers?
This sounds obvious but if you really take some time to think about this (or even better ask your customers) you might just uncover some different or additional reasons that you weren’t expecting. Believe it or not, it’s not all about price!

Take my business, for example, we’re a business to business lead generation and appointment setting agency in its simplest form, or a ‘sales support agency’ as we like to call it – as we do far more than set appointments. One could say that we make outbound prospecting calls for our customers to prevent then having to do this difficult task themselves and just be content that we’re solving a problem for them. However, to me, that wasn’t enough. So in 2018, we’ve been talking to more customers and prospects than ever before to understand exactly what challenges we’re solving for them or what value we’re actually to their business.

Here are 4 of the most common reason people outsource to VST:

Certainty:

We give certainty to our customers that the difficult task of cold calling and researching prospects is actually being done consistently, professionally and cost-effectively. As opposed to relying on their own in-house teams or BDM’s to who quite frankly would rather do anything else except cold call.

Momentum:

Once certainly of prospecting has been created it begins to build momentum to our customer’s pipelines which then begins to create a more realistic and predictable new business sales forecast.

In our experience, what generally happens is that when a salesperson lands a large deal his/her prospecting comes to a grinding halt until the deal is won. Only then can prospecting recommence which may be too late in many occasions. The prospecting needs to be constant to create the momentum and only the most organised and disciplined salespeople can juggle this and their day job whilst closing large deals.

Trust:

This challenge is an easy one to describe but a difficult one to execute. If a company outsources anything to a third party, that third party needs to be able to demonstrate that when they are wearing their client’s hat (i.e. delivering their product, running their kitchens or making their calls as we do) that they can do it as good or preferably better and more efficiently than the customer can themselves. The acidity must be carried out without ever compromising your client’s reputation or brand. Representing your client is a huge privilege that can never be taken for granted. If you want to see how we do this for large and small clients, contact me or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll show you around our office.

Flexibility:

Proving a flexible solution for your customers is becoming more important by the day as more uncertainty around the high street, Brexit, globalisation, exchange rates, extreme weather, seasonal peaks and troughs and a host of other reasons become the norm. Companies need flexibility but we as the provider cannot reduce the quality of what we do whilst talking this particular pain away. Herein lays the real challenge you are solving.

So, once you understand your value to your customers and your challenge, it’s time to package all of this learning to create a succinct statement or sentence that describes what you do, the challenges you solve or the value you add. Try this, it’s really quite difficult. This isn’t an elevator pitch it’s more than that, it’s a headline grabber than people should respond with: ”ok, so how do you do that?”. This could be in a bar, in an airport queue or a corridor or indeed a real elevator!

Here’s mine, hope you like it. Hopefully, it sums up the headache we solve for our fantastic clients.
“We hire more salespeople so you don’t have to…”

Thanks for reading this, please share if it’s made you think a little about what you ‘actually’ do for your customers.

Have a great week and despite it being the dreaded summer holidays ‘where nothing happens’ this is the very best time to be prospecting as there are more temporary gatekeepers in position during the school holidays making your life easier to get through to your required decision maker…and your decision maker doesn’t go away for 7 weeks either so do keep trying. You might not always get a decision during the holidays but you’re still likely to get the appointment you need first. Another quick tip: try calling before 8.30 am as people tend to start earlier and leave earlier to spend more time with their children during the holidays.

Have a productive week.

Cheers,
Andrew