fbpx
Categories
Account Monitoring Customer Churn Customer Success Sales Process Total Addressable Market

Trust Gap Within Vertical Markets: Why Your Business Should Care

Most B2B trust studies focus on technology and solutions provided by the selling organization, but this doesn’t reveal what you need to know. Audiences don’t care what your product does. They care whether it will solve their problem effectively. The real B2B trust gap is between perceptions of your business and what you do.

How You Can Close the Trust Gap

More Transparency, Better Buyer Tools, Shorter Buying Timeline - Trust Gap

#1: More Transparency, Better Buyer Tools, Shorter Buying Timeline

Many companies are going all-in on B2B tools.

But the problem is that these tools are often too complicated to use and difficult to explain, which puts off potential buyers.

The bottom line is that buyers want transparency.

So how do you do that? An easy way is simply by being honest about your product. Show the buyer what it can do, how it works, and what it costs. Tell them why they need your product and how it will benefit them in the long run. If they want more details or information, they’ll ask for it — but don’t be afraid to give them everything they need up front to make an informed decision right away.

Another way to simplify things is by creating a demo video that shows exactly how your product works in real-life scenarios — and then put it online so that anyone can see it!

When you’re selling a B2B product, it can be difficult to get prospects to understand the value of what you do.  

Take time before every call to understand who you’re talking with, where they are in their buying process and what they want from your solution. Then tailor your message accordingly — if you’re talking with an executive trying to find ways to increase efficiency in his department, show how your product can help him achieve that goal. If you’re talking with an analyst who wants more information about how your product could improve his department’s processes before deciding, give him details on why your product is suitable for the job.

When potential customers ask questions about how your B2B tool works or what it can do for them, provide specific examples that demonstrate its value based on their unique needs or concerns

Make Customer Proof Work For You - Trust Gap

#2: Make Customer Proof Work For You

It’s no secret that customers are the lifeblood of any business. But when you’re looking to make a sale, it can be tricky to convince a prospect that you’re the one for the job. So many companies have turned to customer evidence: real-world examples of how their products have helped other customers.

Customer evidence gives buyers a sense of what they can expect from you and your product. It also helps them understand how your product or service has worked for others in similar situations—helping them feel more confident about investing with you.

The idea of customer proof is simple: Leverage the power of your customers’ stories to help drive your sales. But what does it mean for your business? And how can you make customer proof work for you?

Here are some tips:

  • Get started with testimonials on your website.
  • Add social proof into buyer journeys with live chat and live chat apps.
  • Make it easy for customers to share their experiences on social media by making buttons available on your site (and encouraging them!).
Practice a Customer-Centric Strategy - Trust Gap

#3: Practice a Customer-Centric Strategy

Customer satisfaction is a core part of your sales strategy.

It’s easy to think of customer service as a separate thing from sales, but the truth is that they’re just two sides of the same coin. And if you want to be successful, you need to make sure that both sides of that coin are always working together in harmony.

When it comes to customer satisfaction, two things matter most: closing the feedback loop and measuring results. When you close the feedback loop for your customers by talking to them about what they need and want, then measuring their happiness with your products and services based on those conversations, you can achieve true customer-centricity.

Treat Them As Advocates, Not Just Customers - Trust Gap

#4: Treat Them As Advocates, Not Just Customers

The sales process can be a little intimidating. It’s not always easy to find the right words, especially when trying to convince someone else that they need what you have.

Fortunately, there are some great resources to help you make the best case for your product.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a new product. What could be better than having customers talk about how much they love the effects after using this product? You could even ask them about their experience if they’ve used other products in the past. This way, you get an idea of how well this product compares with others on the market—and how much it stands out from its competitors!

It’s easy to get caught up in the thought that your customers are great, loyal people who would be happy to recommend you to their friends and family. But the reality is that most of them aren’t ready to do that on their own—they need a little nudge.

As you reshape your sales strategy in the face of the trust gap, look at ways you can actively encourage current customers to become advocates for your company. One way is by asking for testimonials from satisfied customers. In addition to making others aware of your product or service, these testimonials can also help reassure potential customers who are still on the fence about making a purchase decision.

You might also enjoy:

Categories
Account Monitoring Compelling Event Signals Sales Pipeline Sales Process Signal Intelligence Total Addressable Market

Why Should You Not Ignore Your Whitespace?

Many clients concentrate on delivering signal information for specific accounts. It’s incredible how many whitespace possibilities exist in neighboring businesses where you have a slight competitive edge and some expertise. As a result, it’s critical to keep an eye on your whitespace and signal intelligence because new enterprises and businesses are developing. in new geographic areas all the time, and they might provide you with untapped opportunities.

Never let an opportunity pass you by in your whitespace.

Even though professional B2B sales teams and organizations have been undertaking account management for years. the majority of them cannot adequately present critical performance measures related to their whitespace and prospective pipeline from existing accounts. Individual spreadsheets, individual brains, and so on contain the information they require. It’s tucked away in marketing campaigns, upsells, and cross-sell processes that don’t monitor interactions at the sales territory, product offerings, or line of business level.

Most sales evaluations and account summaries don’t consistently record prospective pipeline or whitespace possibilities, much alone client wants and pain points. The first step in building an approach to generate extra income in your major client accounts is to make whitespace possibilities visible and measurable.

Visualizing and identifying your whitespace

Visualizing and identifying your whitespace

Most businesses can find whitespace at three levels: marketing and advertising, development and growth of sales, and account executive possibilities.

Marketing and advertising

Any company selling for a long time is likely to have a pile of leads buried in its archives. While most people believe that old leads are worthless, they may be the fastest path to development. when the good prospects are engaged because they are connections or clients that already know something about your solutions or services.

You may create a dashboard that detects good leads and tracks how long they’ve been neglected to maintain. your finger on the pulse of this business whitespace. You should hold your marketing and sales departments accountable for their follow-ups, inquire why specific prospects are being overlooked, track trends in conversion rates, and set targets based on these data.

Development and growth of sales

Outbound and inbound sales development is the next layer to look at, which is crucial for moving upmarket. introducing account-based marketing, and other things. Outbound prospecting is similar to rifle shooting because vendors are attempting to strike extremely accurate targets. And, despite raising staffing, it may frequently give a greater return on client acquisition costs than marketing. This is due to the high level of personalization and attention that sellers may accomplish, resulting in higher response rates from better-qualified prospects.

A profiling or segment tool that allows you to classify your target audiences by critical features might be pretty valuable. When you look at each seller’s accounts in this way, you’ll see several locations that are ideal for more vigorous follow-up, and you’ll be able to explain why and how they ought to do so.

Account Executive Possibilities

Many accounts appear to be assigned to account executives for excessive time without receiving adequate attention. This is most likely to occur when an opportunity has moved to the late phases of the sales cycle and the rep has developed robust connections with champions. On the other hand, account executives focus on closing agreements rather than lighting up existing accounts to replenish the pipeline towards the mid and end of the quarter.

It’s critical to find whitespace and determine what should be allocated back to sellers and which prospects account executives should pursue more actively during the quarter. This entails pressing your account executives on their territory and encouraging them to look beyond closing sales to meet their current targets to focus on the next quarter.

How do you go about identifying opportunities in your whitespace?

How do you go about identifying opportunities in your whitespace?

Improve the services you provide to your consumers.

One of the best locations to start looking for white space is inside your present consumer offerings. Consider finding where white space may be found in your items. Consider where client needs are being satisfied and where they are not. For example, white space is when your blogging team comes upon a topic that has a lot of interest from your readers but hasn’t been written about before.

After that, you may choose how to innovate: Do you intend to publish a series of pieces on the subject, create subcategories for smaller topics, or create an ebook on the subject?

A distinct audience segment should be targeted.

If you’re having trouble coming up with new ideas for a specific audience, it might be time to adjust your emphasis. Consider reaching out to a different segment of your target market.

Assume you’re the head of an internet marketing agency firm that caters to B2B technology clients. There are enough of them out there, and yours is being lost in the mix. It’s time to look for some whitespace.

You decide to alter your client base to one that targets B2B developers instead of presenting your business as one that caters to B2B technology clients. While you’re still in the technology business, your concentration on a distinct target group helps reach out to a less saturated market.

Inquire about your consumers’ experiences with your offers.

Examine how your products and services fit into your clients’ daily routines. You could come upon some white space you weren’t aware of.

If you work for a chatbot software company, for example, conduct a poll of your clients and ask them to share their experiences. Inquire about how your services integrate into their businesses and websites.

Let’s imagine you’ve discovered that customers prefer utilizing your chatbots to nurture leads on e-commerce sites. That’s an area you overlooked during the first launch, but now that you know, your team can concentrate on creating chatbots more user-friendly for online shopping. Perhaps you could include a feature in the conversation that allows your clients to demo their items and costs.

That white space will assist you in better serving your consumers and enhancing their sales approach.

Look for areas where your organization stands apart.

Assume you’re the head of a software company. You’re trying to locate whitespace since there are so many such businesses on the market. You realized in your business plan that your product or solution is a simple, intuitive platform. That is the feature that distinguishes you from your rivals. That’s what whitespace is.

Many analytics and reporting programs are challenging to set up. Yours takes away the hassle of converting statistics into outcomes. Your organization will be the most user-friendly, allowing even a novice to succeed.

You may also utilize this finding to locate the best-qualified leads. If your company is having trouble finding whitespace, take a look at your business strategy. You could see the system you require to go back on track.

Whitespace may help your business’s branding strategy stand out. Maybe you’re having trouble figuring out where your product belongs in the market. If you can locate a place for creativity, you can utilize it to improve how others see your businesses.

Conclusion

People may have gone from your pleased, successful clients to a nearby vertical. that you’ve considered targeting or have some expertise within new verticals. So, you’ve got an ally in that company now. You may use the fact that whitespace is occurring to your advantage.

In this type of company climate, it’s vital for client service and sales teams to understand their current clients and their issues fully. Regardless, gathering and analyzing that information will pay off.

After all, a solid offense is the best defense. Account planning may be considered a proactive approach to investing in current accounts and relationships. rather than a reactive one to defend the existing client base. To unlock fresh possibilities and growth, deep understanding, a focus on consumers, and the capacity to see the whitespace are necessary.

Sales may develop an analysis around each current client, extending their sales with a deeper grasp of client goals and how the organization can help by bringing. This knowledge out of silos to be gathered and shared. This is how you may see whitespace and exploit it to create upsell and cross-sell chances.

In any sales environment, those sales executives and teams that can analyze, monitor, and communicate prospective pipelines as a performance measure are on the correct route to produce revenue growth.

Categories
Total Addressable Market

Why Identifying Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) Carries a Lot of Weight

When determining your company’s growth potential, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is a valuable measure to recognize and understand.

TAM is the total demand for a product or service across all segments, substitutes or alternatives, and distribution methods. If a company was the only provider of a product or service and there were no alternatives, it represents the entire demand is accessible to them.

In Sales for Life’s SPEAR Selling Strategy, a salesperson may be accountable for their territory by visualizing the TAM. This helps businesses easily understand where gaps and opportunities exist, and they can use Signal Intelligence to select and prioritize the most attractive prospects in their total addressable market.

The seller then proceeds to planning by developing their key-account plans which are executive blueprints for their most important accounts. Sellers would then drive engagement via traditional and modern strategies.

The seller then activates customers by using the trigger Signals they’ve developed to analyze their accounts. Before going on to the reprioritize phase, where the seller would redesign their TAM based on all of the data gathered, they should evaluate the customers’ feedback, also known as purchase intent.

Why is Total Addressable Market So Important for B2B Sellers?

Investors and enterprises must understand the revenue potential of selling their product or service in a specific market. The use of TAM allows the sales and marketing teams to formulate a plan effectively, create targets, and track progress.

To put it another way, every organization must use the total addressable market to determine the value of their product or solution. You can use it to estimate the size of the market. As a result, it assists you in seeing that there is plenty of room to make revenue and expand your organization.

Understanding your TAM gives you these five main advantages:

1. It aids in getting funding and guaranteeing revenue.

Potential investors want to know your business’s potential, so all entrepreneurs should know their total addressable market before going into an investor meeting. Knowing the TAM assists investors in calculating the entire value of a business by objectively estimating market value, penetration, rivals, and timeframe.

2. It allows for financial forecasts and projections. 

Financial models and forecasts frequently use the total addressable market as a baseline. This is critical information for potential investors and current stakeholders in your business to know since it will help you prepare and budget efficiently in the short and long term.

3. It allows for more accurate employee forecasts.

You can determine headcount growth using TAM, financial predictions, and quota. As you create your benchmarks, evaluate promotions for current team members, and budget for spending, it’s critical to forecasting your potential employee demands.

4. It allows you to map out your industry region.

TAM data can also be used to disperse employees strategically across all verticals, including geography, industry, and company size. If you know a substantial amount of your TAM originates from organizations with 100 or more employees, for example, you can devote extra sales representatives to that vertical.

5. It enables you to hold the company accountable. 

To estimate growth measures, businesses should look at their total addressable market. What is the state of the company? Is your TAM increasing, and is your firm expanding to keep up with the market? In an ideal world, these should be proportional, or business growth should outpace TAM increase. If it isn’t, it’s time to rethink your strategies.

When you calculate your total addressable market correctly, you’ll have a higher chance of making a sale. This is accomplished not only by recognizing the growth potential of your product or service but also by allocating the greatest amount of resources to the market segments with the greatest potential for your company.

How to Calculate Your TAM

Calculating the TAM can be challenging, especially when many of your competitors in the industry are privately held and secretive about sales numbers. This can be calculated in one of these three ways:

1.Value theory, which predicts how the price of your offering will influence buyer behavior.

The value theory approach of determining the TAM is based on a lot more speculation and assumption. Thus the results are a little murkier but still relevant.

Calculate your total addressable market using value theory by estimating your product’s value to specific consumers and determining if you can adequately acquire that value through pricing.

2. Top-down approach, which uses industry research to predict the size of the TAM

Top-down TAM assessments are frequently based on previous data from market research firms. However, to draw precise conclusions about specific markets, the larger research conducted by these companies often needs to be complemented or modified by further evaluations, such as phone or email surveys conducted by third-party consultants.

3. Bottom-up approach, which utilizes data and information from your company’s early sales

The bottom-up TAM approach will offer you more accurate data, in part because it allows you to include any significant elements from the start, such as total addressable market expansion due to your entry into the market.

You arrive at this figure by extrapolating from your current pricing and use statistics. Take that figure and multiply it by the size of your target market’s consumer base.

You can determine your target market by researching the types of clients you believe will purchase your product.

5 Things You Need to Ask Yourself 

We discussed how a company might oversimplify its TAM calculation and arrive at the incorrect result. It takes a little more effort than a few phrases to get an accurate picture of your total addressable market size. Let’s look at five questions to ask yourself to guarantee that the figures you come up with are as precise as possible.

1. Who is your target market?

It’s not often that your product’s target market comprises everyone. Case in point: Even though all organizations need IT services (or whatever product you’re offering), to be successful, you need to narrow down your TAM more precisely. The only way to acquire an accurate estimate of how much that market is worth is to know exactly who will buy your product.

Remember that your TAM will be greater than your target market. Your prospect account’s organizational size and budget need to be considered, for instance. This means that they’re not in the target market, but they’re in the TAM.

2. What industries are you able to sell to?

If you have a B2B product, failing to account for all of the industries that might be interested in your offering will result in a significant underestimation of your TAM. Often, a product is created with a single sector in mind, and the makers seldom consider how much broader the appeal could be. This has a negative impact on total addressable market calculations as well as business.

3. What is the current state of competition?

This is significant for several reasons. Your total addressable market is based on the assumption that you have a monopoly. Hence it isn’t included in the calculations. Identifying who else is in the neighborhood, on the other hand, will assist you in gathering data for the computations if necessary. It’ll also help you understand how to read the TAM. 

4. What are your different types of customers?

The size of the market isn’t the end of market research. You’ll also want to know who will be buying your product. What is the maximum amount they are willing to pay? What factors influence such willingness? Taking a close look at your buyer personas can provide you with a wealth of information to expand your business in these days of big data.

Depending on the formula you choose, knowing what value your target consumers place on the types of items and services you’ll be delivering can be crucial for evaluating TAM.

5. What does market growth look like over the long term?

Market growth refers to an increase in demand for a product or service on the market. It’s critical to spend some time evaluating the growth prospects of your market. Even if you can’t forecast the future, you can utilize growth trends to get a sense of where your TAM is going. Year-over-year industry sales, number of customers, and kind and size of purchases per client are some indicators you can analyze to assess your market’s growth.

Conclusion

Identifying your company’s TAM is the initial step in determining market revenue prospects. It also has ancillary benefits, such as:

  • Defining your product’s evolution and roadmap
  • Evaluating a product’s market fit
  • Attracting potential investors
  • Keeping you updated with your competitors

Your sales and marketing teams have a significant impact on the growth of target accounts. Accurately defining the TAM boosts your sales opportunities, but it will also allow these teams to work together to produce income.

Here at PipelineSignals, we don’t just monitor your existing and target accounts for sales opportunities and identify risk. We also map out your Total Addressable Market, making sure you’re not missing out on any opportunities for sales and pipeline creation and growth.