ARE YOU IT SOFTWARE SERVICES OWNER ? ARE YOU FACING CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING GOOD PRODUCTIVE SALES TEAM THAT CAN BRING IN QUALITATIVE BUSINESS FOR YOU ? ARE YOU FACING CHALLENGES IN SETTING UP TARGET AND HELPING YOUR TEAM TO ACHIEVE ? ARE YOU WILLING TO LEARN WAYS TO BUILD A WORLD CLASS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT IS NOT ONLY PRODUCTIVE BUT SELF ENTHUSIASTIC AS WELL.

If the answer to any of the questions above is yes, then this article is for you.

Hello !! This is Maulik Parekh a serial entrepreneur and an IT software services owner running startup successfully for more than 4 years. I am a passionate techno create with expertise in MS stack and frontend stack. In this post I have mentioned a methodology which I have learned and derived by actually experiencing them which you may get free of cost.
I could be reached via my email maulik@envitics.com or you can visit my website www.envitics.com and go to contact us Page and send inquiry and I would be more than happy to answer.

Here you go the steps that you must follow :-

1. IDENTIFY WHAT YOU CAN SERVE BEST

In any field first you must identify what it is yours and your team’s skill set that separates you from others and these are the services which you must have extensive expertise and you must be confident and proven track record. I would advise not to look at what others have to offer. As a startup owner you just need to look at what you or your team can offer the best.
You must have seen Eureka Forbes sales person, I loved them as a sales person because they know every minor detail about their product. Service industry is not different here our sales team must know every minor details that we have done and must know the details of all our projects.

A key mistake most startup owner does is they will show case that we have expertise in every field (JACK OF ALL) and for those technologies for which they do not have in house team they will intern outsource. This is immensely dangerous. Mainly because as a startup you will need long term sustainable customers and client that has very good repo with you, your team and your company. If you will outsource it to an external company it will be very difficult for you to get complete command over the system for you or your team specially when external development team is working on it. Hence, this could only be achieved with good in house execution. Hence, I would advise initially do not outsource it, if you do so only go with a trusted partner to whom you know personally.

Hence, your focus should not be only on Money, be Solution oriented for your client money will follow automatically.

2. IDENTIFY TARGET MARKET

Once you are aware of what is your key strength then next thing which is required is where the sale. Everything could not be sold everywhere. Hence, Identifying right target market and audience is very important and for that you can do research.

Target audience could be defined based on

Domain, e.g. You can have exposure in travel, healthcare, education e.t.c and based on your domain expertise you can plan your target audience.
Technology, you can even plan for target audience based on your technical expertise. e.g. Php,.net, ROR e.t.c
                                                                                         Region, you can do research on what is emerging industry under which country and based on that align                                                                               your expertise industry need.

3. CREATE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVE AND PLAN FOR 6 MONTHS

Every individual or company must have a specific objective or vision expectations and this must be defined on a document. Anything which is written and documented must always guide you as a business owner where you need to reach.

Hence, typical goal and objective could be.
Objective : building good long term customer.
Goal : Acquire at least 6 new long term customers with companies overall revenue 4 (times) than what it is at present.

4. PREPARE ALL TOOLS REQUIRED FOR YOUR TEAM

Plumber before going for work he ensures that he is having his complete tool set so that he can knock out any tasks allocated to him easily. Similarly, once you have defined and explained business objective to team you must define and share all tool set to your team in order for them to perform well.

Below are few most important tools
1) Portfolio document
2) Portfolio sheet
3) Case study documents
4) Formats for proposal documents
5) SEO optimized website with link to contact us page.
Above all these business team must have a complete understanding of what we are trying to sell and what level of expertise we have.

5. IDENTIFY A GOOD CRM

It is equally important to identify a very good CRM and configure it as per your need.
I personally explored multiple CRMs but one that I would recommend for SME is ZOHO CRM

It comes with all standard lead, contact, account management features but one key thing which I liked about ZOHO is there is a possibility of doing contract management within ZOHO this gives you greater flexibility to maintain complete customer journey from lead till regular billing from within CRM.

6. IDENTIFY LIST OF SALES AND MARKETING ACTIVITIES TO BE PERFORMED ON A DAILY / WEEKLY BASIS

It is most important for any business owner to ensure that their team is working in the right direction and constantly validate that.

There could be mainly 2 types of activities.
1) B2B
a) Email Marketing
b) Cold Calling
c) Linkedin Marketing
2) B2C
a) Freelancing Job portals like Upwork, Guru, freelancer, Fiverr, people per hour.
b) Social media marketing

If your objective is short term then b2c portals would work well and you will get customers relatively easily however, if your objective is to build good long term customers then b2b approach has to be constantly followed.
Once all activities are defined based on business objectives and goals then we must create a good tracking tool by which we can understand time spent daily on a typical activity.

7. IDENTIFY AND BUILD TEAM ACCORDING TO INITIAL TARGET MARKET AND BUSINESS OBJECTIVE DEFINED

Another most important question most start up owner would have is how to define sales target for my team. So here is a very simple formula.

Let’s say you have defined a monthly objective of 10000 USD new business.

Now let’s assume you have a business developer to whom you are paying 1000 USD per month, ideally any sales person must bring in 8 to 10 times business compared to his/her payout. Hence, this person should be sufficient to meet the business objective of 10000 USD
Hence, considering these calculations in mind you need to build a strong team of developers.

8. ALIGN PRE-SALES PERSON(S)

If you are working with b2c portals you may need a technical guy constantly working along with your BD person especially because BD person might not have any technical expertise hence, one senior technical person must be aligned to Business team.

For any further inquiries I could be reached via my email maulik@envitics.com or you can visit my website https://envitics.com/contact/
and fill in the form real quick and send it back and I would be more than happy to answer.