1. Read this first
1.1. This playbook is a quick collection of how we help our customers develop, structure & automate their business development process. However, we work for sales-driven B2B organizations. Preferably with those willing to develop SDR (sales development reps) or Inside sales profiles to correctly assist their "field-sales". Not looking to hire an inside sales team? Then be aware that to correctly follow this playbook you will need to have your salesteam actually set aside time to "prospect" and not be dependant on leads.
1.1.1. Our goal at Nimium is to help companies move away from "spend-to-gain marketing" (i.e. Growth hacking), and to help them move beyond referral business. To do this we put "revenue systems" in place, systems that are solely based on merit. The more work you put in, the more results you'll see! 😎 Make sales great again!
1.1.2. If you need a hand let me know! [email protected]
1.2. This framework is not built for "transactional companies". If someone can get the exact same product elsewhere this isn't for you. HOWEVER, we have another framework in place (which is based on retention and delivering value beyond the product) which is also better suited for B2C companies. If this is of interest to you, don't hesitate to reach out to me directly ➡ [email protected] .
2. What this is not (Click 2 expand)
2.1. This is not training
2.1.1. Want to learn more about selling
2.1.1.1. Read these
2.1.1.1.1. Gap Selling
2.1.1.1.2. Spin Selling
2.1.1.1.3. The challenger sale
2.1.1.1.4. The challenger customer
2.1.1.1.5. Never split the difference
2.1.1.1.6. To sell is human
2.1.2. Want to learn the basics of BD & Inside sales?
2.1.2.1. Predictable prospecting
2.1.2.2. From impossible to inevitable
2.1.2.3. Predictable Revenue
2.1.3. The basics of (online) marketing
2.1.3.1. Dotcom secret
2.1.3.2. How to write copy that sells
2.1.3.3. Influence (the psychology of persuasion)
2.1.3.4. Thinking fast & slow
2.1.3.5. Drive
2.1.3.6. Methods of persuasion
2.1.4. The basics of value prop design
2.1.4.1. Pitch anything
2.1.4.2. Value proposition design
2.1.4.3. Obviously awesome
3. Resources
3.1. Ideal Customer Profiles & Value propositions
3.1.1. Ideal customer profiles are a combination of classic "persona's" with economic buyer profiles. They are "need" or "problem" based. According to "Thinking fast & slow" people buy on an emotional level, and justify purchases based on logic. Most sales & marketing people however don't feel that this applies to B2B.. Guess what? It kind of does 😉. If you can solve their problems, they'll want to talk to you. And that's what Business Development is about, starting a conversation; building relationships.
3.1.1.1. Ideal Customer Profiles
3.1.1.1.1. An ICP is: An economic buyer, That is experiencing a problem, Of which they are or aren't aware. Of course, they live in a specific market segment because we love knowing our issues exist in multiple accounts (or in multiple segments). Once we've verified that the problem is universal we call this product > market fit. We know not only the typical economic buyers in these accounts but also who advises them and can correctly assess their impact on the buying process. As we know how to solve their problem, these are the companies most likely to refer us to other companies (building advocacy). When designing ICP's you want to keep in mind that you'd like to include a number of criteria that are "selectable" which means that when you go to source the data you have data points that can be verified.
3.1.1.2. Value propositions
3.1.1.2.1. A value proposition is no more or no less then how you solve the problems of your ideal customers.
3.2. Data
3.2.1. To facilitate you actually getting in touch with your ICP's you will need to get data on them. But let's be honest, no one wants to spend their time sifting through excell sheets having half matches, having to do the research themselves. So allow me to show you how we would source our datasets.
3.2.1.1. Sourcing data
3.2.1.1.1. Standard datasets
3.2.1.1.2. Complex datasets
3.2.1.2. Data Quality
3.2.1.2.1. Yes, before doing any kind of outreach: VERIFY YOUR DATA! (We use Neverbounce and it's pretty awesome!)
3.3. Communication and marketing
3.3.1. Our belief is that to sell is to educate. We believe that us contacting a customer is to help them solve a problem. As such, we would be doing them a disservice if we wouldn't connect. However we're not satisfied with just connecting, we want to drive value for our prospective customers, we want to build life-long relationships, we want to create advocates
3.3.1.1. Outreach
3.3.1.1.1. Always multi-thread within an account (touch multiple contacts concurrently).
3.3.1.1.2. Writing quality outreach copy and need some strategy?
3.3.1.1.3. Always multitouch (check out the link)
3.3.1.2. Marketing
3.3.1.2.1. Adding value
3.3.1.2.2. Creating customer intimacy
3.4. Tools
3.4.1. Data sourcing tools
3.4.1.1. Phantombuster
3.4.1.2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
3.4.1.3. COLDCRM
3.4.1.4. Integromat
3.4.1.5. KBO open data & The KBO Cookbook
3.4.2. Outreach tools
3.4.2.1. Lemlist
3.4.2.2. Woodpecker
3.4.3. CRM's
3.4.3.1. Pipedrive
3.4.3.2. Salesforce
3.4.3.3. Hubspot
3.4.4. Sales Training tools
3.4.4.1. SalesArchitects - uw ecosysteem voor commercialisering
3.4.5. Webinar tools
3.4.5.1. GoToWebinar
3.4.5.2. WebinarGeek
3.4.6. Email verification
3.4.6.1. Neverbounce
4. Phase 1: Product > market fit
4.1. In the initial phase you'll want to define your Ideal Customer Profiles in combination with Value Propositions. This includes not only company traits but also the profile of the economic buyer. On Value Propositions: you'll probably have a list of PGV's (Problems, Goals, values) for each Customer Profile. The basic idea is to transform each of these into a value proposition (more on how to do that in the resources section (click to expand)). Please include a number of traits that can be externally validated, for example: Nimium's target audience are business owners with a small sales team that are currently trying content marketing (or have done so in the past) and that are advertising on search engines and/or social media.
4.2. DON'T FORGET: VALIDATE YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION! Go out there and talk to your customers and prospects and ask if they feel the "pains" you're working on. How are they currently trying to solve them, what have they already tried. What are the words they use to describe their issue? Would they buy your product? What do they see as the advantage? etc. etc. Their choice of words will help you write compelling stories that resonate with your economic buyers and that are aligned with the world they operate in.
4.3. Once your value propositions are validated. We advise that you jump right into creating assets. To clarify, we heavily believe that to sell is to educate your customers. As such we help our customers design:
4.3.1. Playbooks
4.3.2. Customer Testimonials
4.3.3. Video content
4.3.4. Written content
4.3.5. Webinars
4.3.6. Events
4.3.7. Any other channel that we can use to demonstrate thought leadership.
5. Phase 2: Data sourcing
5.1. You've seen it in phase one, some criteria within your ICP's will be more complex to source. We work with a Virtual Assistant that we've found through Fiverr to clean up data and to make sure everything is properly formatted.
5.1.1. Links
5.1.1.1. Access to This Page Has Been Blocked
5.2. Of course there are alternatives! You can easily combine phantombuster with coldcrm through integromat and then feed the data in your outreach system of choice
5.2.1. Links
5.2.1.1. Phantombuster
5.2.1.2. Find the Email and the Phone Number for anyone - ColdCRM
5.2.1.3. Integromat
5.3. Keeping data up to date is equally important as getting it IN the system in the first place. Put your prospects in LinkedIn Sales Navigator "Lists" and have your VA monitor changes.. If someone leaves the company, have them update your CRM; and of course, find the next best contact within the account
5.4. ColdCRM delivers 95% correct email adresses. However we highly recommend you verify the generated email addresses using Neverbounce to preserve your sender score.
5.4.1. Links
5.4.1.1. NeverBounce: Bulk Email Verification & List Cleaning Service
6. Phase 3: Initial Outreach
6.1. Tools
6.1.1. We use Lemlist for our customers, it has some wonderful features such as dynamic video, dynamic landing pages. The V3 beta even combines LinkedIn connection requests, messages with Email workflows. Another great option is Woodpecker (although Lemlist at that price difference is the obvious choice)
6.1.1.1. Link
6.1.1.1.1. Send Cold Emails That Get Replies With lemlist
6.1.1.1.2. Cold emails & follow-ups | Woodpecker.co
6.2. Messaging
6.2.1. The goal of outreach efforts is NOT TO SELL No! It's to open conversations! Imagine that you've defined that CFO's are having trouble reporting on the P&L because they have a lot of different sources to pull data from before throwing everything into excel; again and again and again, month over month.
6.2.2. You then don't do outreach to tell them that you've built some AI solution to automatically gather all that data.
6.2.3. No you do outreach to tell them how your customer x has solved that problem; and to invite him/her to a webinar in a few weeks.
6.3. Channels & flow
6.3.1. Strategy
6.3.1.1. IMPORTANT: DON'T SEND MARKETING HTML MARKUP EMAILS, send emails from a person, like you would send your best friend an email
6.3.1.2. We advise our customers to multithread (touch multiple contacts within one account (and being upfront about it))
6.3.1.3. We also advise them to multitouch (for the love of god, touch a contact multiple times on multiple platforms)
6.3.2. Flow
6.3.2.1. 1. Call (leave voicemail) with content asset mention. Mention that you'll send an email.
6.3.2.2. 2. Send email: send suggested asset, use Value Proposition to indicate why you've sent it (you work with similar companies on similar problems)
6.3.2.3. 3. (if no reply or callback) Send a low-conversion point. Invite them to a webinar you've previously recorded. Reiterating on the value proposition.
6.3.2.4. 4. Visit LinkedIn profile, send connection request/InMail
6.3.2.5. 5. Final call
6.3.2.6. 6. Breakup email
6.3.2.7. 7. Onboard in a pauze sequence, pick up on the next iteration (next PGV statement).
6.3.3. Links
6.3.3.1. Reply Method - Blissful Prospecting
6.4. CRM
6.4.1. Reactive prospects get synched over to your CRM
6.4.1.1. Links
6.4.1.1.1. Sales CRM & Pipeline Management Software | Pipedrive
6.4.1.1.2. Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business
6.4.1.1.3. HubSpot | Inbound Marketing, Sales, and Service Software
6.4.2. As you usually pay per x number of contacts it makes sense to only have 'responsive contacts' in your CRM and to perform any 'workflow actions' in the CRM and not in your outreach tools
7. Phase 4: Working through the salescycle
7.1. The initial call
7.1.1. The discussion (Click to expand)
7.1.1.1. You said something, that reasonated with them.. The first meeting is like the first date. It's not about you! It's about them.
7.1.1.2. Explain to them who you are, what you do and then ask them "which part of our message resonated with you. What are you currently doing to solve PGV (a,b,c)"
7.1.1.3. Apply radical candor: You think that you can fix their problem; what would convince them to buy (if you've prevalidated your ICP's then this should all sound familiar).
7.1.1.4. Tell them that you have a framework to solve for X, that it's repeatable, scaleable and that they'd be a great fit. BUT DON'T TELL THEM HOW IT WORKS
7.1.2. The goal (Click to expand)
7.1.2.1. There is but ONE goal, and that is to get to the next meeting. In the next meeting you'll present your solution; and your proposal. The goal is to end the call with okay, I think I can help you. Would you like me to draw out a proposal with a detail on how we would solve your PGV? Can we then also book a session to expand on this because it probably needs some clarification. Clarfiy BANT -> (No I don't mean that you literally ASK FOR BANT.) I mean that you have to PROBE for BANT and which other stakeholders are necessary to make the decision process work Also make sure that if this person is your "champion" within the account to ask for reasons this deal might fall through, what the pitfalls are that they see etc.
7.2. The sales call
7.2.1. Present schedule of the meeting
7.2.2. Revisit last conversation
7.2.3. Reïnforce and expand PGV
7.2.4. Present proposal
7.2.4.1. Project
7.2.4.2. Price
7.2.5. Objection handling
7.2.6. Next steps