Businesses fail just because of TIMING. Don’t worry if I started with a bad note. Like every Bollywood movie, things will end happily at the end. Or not, I am an Anurag Kashyap fan.
Launching too early or launching too late. Pitching too early or pitching too late. Proposing too early or proposing too late.
All that matters is the TIME when you do it.
While you cannot predict, but you can always optimise.
Sales also have this element of TIME in it. Every sale that happens, happens at a TIME when the buyer needs your services or products the MOST.
That’s why it’s important to understand this curious case of TIMING in terms of B2B sales.
Let’s break it down and see where all TIMING can impact your B2B sales and closure rates.
Prospecting stage
When you reach out to a company for pitching your product or services, you need to understand at what stage the company is in the need of your products.
Let’s say you offer digital marketing services to startups. Now if you reach out to every other startup, at random time, the chances are that you won’t hear back anything from the decision-makers.
The right time for you to pitch your digital marketing services will be:-
Funding round
The startups who have raised funds are the ones who will be now at a stage where they want to invest into digital marketing and that’s the right TIME when you should reach out to them to pitch your digital marketing services.
This is the TIME when the investors will push the founders of the startup to start investing in growth, start hiring for an agency to push their mobile app downloads, increase website traffic and drive quality leads to the startup.
This is the TIME when a digital marketing company or perhaps any company selling to startups, should ideally reach out to the startup, if not any other time.
Hiring a digital marketing person
Another important TIMING milestone is when the startup decides to hire a dedicated digital marketing person.
This means, the company has budget allocated for digital marketing and more importantly their focus is to grow digital marketing.
That’s the perfect time for any company to pitch digital marketing services to the startup company.
While there will be many startups who will strictly be looking for a dedicated and full-time person as an employee, there will be many who are more likely to outsource to a third-party digital marketing agency, if the value proposition is aligned.
Launching a new product
A company that has recently launched a new store, a new mobile app or a new product is more likely to invest in digital marketing than a company who has nothing going on from last year.
This is about the TIMING of launching a new product.
Let’s say you launch a new product, what would you do next?
Promote it through offline or online channels.
This is what everyone would do and this is what you have to find out and reach out to those companies who have launched new products or apps or stores etc.
Decision-making stage
Let’s say you have moved passed the stage where the company has already shown interest in your product or services.
The next stage is where you will have to flow in the river of several follow-ups, pushy sales calls, stalking the buyer on social media and many more such Anurag Kashyap’s thrillers acts, like this.
All this becomes overwhelming when there are many such customers in the pipeline.
It’s important to identify where you have to invest more energy and resources when you follow-up with those customers.
A customer who opens up your email 2 times a day has more chances of closure compared to someone who has never even clicked on your website.
All these signals help a salesperson identify the time and the opportunities to schedule a follow-up email and sales calls.
There are many tools that will help you track such important events and help you prioritise the timing of your follow-ups and calls.
So next time when you think of sending a cold email to a prospective customer think about it hard and understand where in the lifecycle of their business, the customer is.
Identify the critical milestones and reach out to the customers at the right time to optimise your lead funnel and closure rates.
B2b Signals
Lead Generation
Sales Intelligence