The ClinchPad Blog
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Just like venture capitalists, customers these days also expect an elevator pitch from the salespersons they meet. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it refers to telling the customer what your offering is all about in the time it takes to ride an elevator. This approach is the first among the many rounds of elimination before you can get someone to pay for your product or service.
Elevator pitches get you a foot in the door, but, it’s business proposals that get you a seat at the table. By laying out your roadmap in its full glory, a business proposal serves as a single piece of document that will make or break your chances of closing the deal.
Thankfully, every entrepreneur is aware of the pivotal role of a business proposal and they pay a lot of attention developing one. In an effort to make it comprehensive and to give the illusion of being upfront, some might over do this and end up preparing a document that rivals a Harry Potter novel when it comes to page count.
Some on the other hand, try to be cool and downplay the details to an extent that nothing substantial is conveyed to the customer. Essentially, a business proposal should not look like a flyer or a paperback. Striking a balance and coming up with a proposal that stands somewhere in between, explaining all the key aspects in detail is an art. Here are ten tips for you to master that artform:
Do Extensive Research
The first rule of this game is not using generic, off the shelf business proposals and filling in the blanks with details of people who you are planning to pitch to. Dig deep to understand the prospective customer’s business, the problems that they face, their buying process, the decision making hierarchy and whatever that you need to make your business proposals wholesome.
It’s this research that’ll help you stand out from the rest of the dozen proposals that land on top of a customer’s table. Interestingly, this research not just lays the foundation for the other 9 steps that follow but also puts you in a better position to understand the customer’s psyche and in turn develop and fine tune customer personas. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by doing proper homework, which eventually leads to efficient lead management.
Image Source: So … You’re a Cartoonist?
Whenever you sign up for an website, you generally receive an automated welcome email. For ClinchPad, I wanted this email should look professional, similar to the ones you would receive from a well established company. So I created a sleek looking email that matched the color scheme of our app. I spent hours making it pixel perfect. I spent money on a service that sent you screenshots of how your email would look on different email clients and mobile phones and optimized the email so that it looked great across all platforms. I spent time perfecting the copy of the email and signed off the email as ‘Team ClinchPad’.
In the email, I requested users for feedback on what they thought about our application since feedback for a startup in the early stages is crucial. Out of the hundreds of signups that we got, how many people responded to this professionally crafted email that I spent almost a week on?
We have recently added webhooks to our API. Now you can configure webhooks such that every time an activity takes place involving a lead, an HTTP POST request can be sent to a URL or multiple URLs of your choice.
There are 33 types of activities in total that are tracked. This allows you to get real time notifications of activities, such as a lead being marked as won or moved from one stage or another. The full list of activities and the webhooks documentation can be viewed at the webhooks API documentation page.
You can add webhook URLs by going to see your Settings page and then selecting Integrations. You’ll see a Manage Integrations link for Webhooks on the integrations page.
For every business, the goal is to sell more and sell often. Employing an army of salespeople and having boots on the ground isn’t always an effective solution. There is a simple reason for that - you just can’t meet all your customers on your own.
In an era when a downtown boutique could turn into a multinational e-commerce juggernaut by just installing an open source shopping cart, it’s unwise not to explore avenues to improve your bottom line.
Each and every customer is unique. Their purchasing cycles vary and so does their buying process. A sound customer persona strategy will help streamline the sales pipeline. But, eventually the onus is on you to smooth things over for your customers to buy something from you without asking them to get out of their comfort zone.
Bob always likes to visit a store, play around with the product before paying up. John on the other hand likes to order stuff from the comfort of his couch. Jenny trusts the judgment of Jason, her vendor and always places orders through him. So, a one size fits all sales strategy is a deterrent to expanding your customer base.
Customers are a finicky bunch. They are never sure when it comes to parting with their hard earned money. They love to check, double check and rinse and repeat that whole charade whenever they feel like it. You aren’t in the clear until they cut the check and it clears!
Gone are the days of employing smooth talking, silver tongued devils to charm people to buy your product or service. These days, customers have become very cautious and are highly research oriented. The advent of Internet and social media has only made the sales pipeline more convoluted now than ever.
In a couple of clicks, a customer can quickly run down the entire history of your business. And, they can easily cross check all the tall claims that you’ve made. One single blip in their radar and it’s time to kiss the order a good bye!
Selling has always been a high touch job. Now, with a ton of choices and intense competition, this is more pronounced than ever. Customers expect you to hold their hands not only during the process of decision making, but also after closing the deal in the form of maintenance, after sales support, training and more.
Even though it gets unproductive to spend more and more time on each and every deal, comforting customers all the way through has its own set of perks. In addition to the obvious benefit of building a warm rapport with the prospective customer, you’re always aware of how a customer thinks.
You’ll know the very instant the customer is getting a second thought and the reason for it in the first place. It it your pricing or is it the sweeteners that your competition is luring the customer with? Staying in the loop all along the customer’s decision making process is a highly rewarding experience to fine tune your sales lead management skills.