We all know when it comes to sales it begins with Prospecting as the first step of the process, which consists of identifying potential customers. The sales landscape is more volatile and scattered today than ever with multiple buying options, channel partners, and increasing modes of purchases.
The customers today require guided decision-makers and sales representatives that can demonstrate deep subject-matter expertise and the ability to quickly customize a message to each customer. Manufacturers must adapt quickly to enable their sales teams and equip them with all the tools required to provide the best sales experience to potential prospects.
Driving recurring revenue streams is essential for manufacturers to help stabilize their business during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 downturn and prepare for future growth. For this, manufacturers should drive sales teams to be more proactive and engage in aftermarket sales, with a very tactical path forward, in form of hunting lists of the prospect accounts.
Hunting list increases the chances of converting these prospects into converted opportunities. There is a simple yet fascinating proverb “Well Begun is Half done”. Hunting lists is that method of beginning the journey of sales in the most effective way.
An Installed Base Platform helps you to create a Hunting list in a more automated and less time-consuming manner with these steps
1. Segment the target accounts based on specific requirements to create hunting list:
Identify certain equipment models that you want to provide services like Upgrades, Modifications, and Replacements and filter out based on variables like age of equipment, type of equipment, last transaction date of the installed location. This will dynamically fetch all the customers from your install base that satisfy requirements.
2. Utilize saved prospecting time for further optimizing the hunting list:
The initial step could still have a lot of noise which you want to get rid of by doing research with the help of the IBDP database by analyzing the buying behavior of the customers. This can be achieved by:
- Comparing through revenue trends dashboards of customer accounts with indicators going up or going down.
- Calculating the Propensity to buy using AI algorithms fetching results from transactional data.
The decision then lies with the strategy team on finalizing the initial group of target accounts. These hunting lists can be converted into dashboards (for Managerial persona) and opportunity pipelines (for Sales persona) for ease of utilization.
3. Discover useful insights about accounts and share these with target contacts:
After the sales representatives are provided with the hunting list, they should always do a prerequisite discovery of the account transaction details from the IBDP and gather useful information that will help engage customers more.
For example, rather than giving a cold call and saying “Can you provide me with the service you would like to purchase”
The sales representative can be more reactive in approach by saying “I noticed you have XYZ machine installed for XX years, we noticed that you have not performed any maintenance activity for last XX years. Can I help you with the details of our maintenance plans? “
4. Create value propositions and emphasize them when prospecting to the hunting list accounts
Traditional methods of discovering what is needed from the clients over the call tend to waste a lot of valuable time. Instead, we can use IBDP platform transactions to create valuable insights that align with the buying behavior of the hunting list accounts.
For example, “I was reviewing your order history and noticed that customers in ABC industry typically upgrade XYZ machine models on an XX-year interval. However, from our records, it seems as though we haven’t upgraded your XYZ machine model yet. These intervals are defined so you don’t have an unexpected catastrophic failure, and since it seems that you are a couple of months overdue to upgrade, I’d recommend purchasing these upgrades. Would you like a quote?”
These hunting lists and the subsequent process takes the manufacturers to a structured approach, prioritized relationship building, service process optimization which will lead to manufacturers being closely aligned with customers to aim at
- Real-time evaluations
- Predictive insights based on transactional data
- Product upgrades to avoid stoppage
- Better operations and outcomes
Interested to learn more about how to use an IBDP to create Hunting Lists for your Sales Reps? Contact Us