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Start-up Sales: Set A Single Sales Objective

Your purpose as a start-up sales executive, client acquisition manager, or even as the CEO is to acquire new clients. Your role is to sell your services to organisations in your target market. In start-up sales, you need to set single sales objectives.

Too often we engage with a prospect, creating dialogue, using sales tools like HubSpot, emails, messages, etc. But what are we trying to achieve? A sale right? But what odes that sales look like?

Get laser-focused and define what your Single Sales Objective is with your prospect.

When targeting a new client, or even trying to upsell an existing customer with additional services, you must always determine what your SSO ‘Single Sales Objective’ for that prospect is. SSO’s have a monetary value, a related product or service, and a targeted completion date – which is in effect the date your start to invoice the client.

Not all prospects have the same SSO, thus, you should tag each prospect with a unique SSO, and assign them the probable financial outcome. Your sales plan must have an assigned simple sales objective against each prospect.  This objective will obviously vary from prospect to prospect.

startup sales

When you sit down and plan your sales activity for the next 100 days (20 weeks), first determine which organisations you are targeting, then assign them a Single Sales Objective.  

Let’s look at a real start-up sales scenario

This sample table provides a view of a real example of a prospect list of a client we worked with in 2020. Each should be assigned SSOs.

TargetServices + Price€ Lifetime Revenue Value[1]Target Start Date
Org ATier 1, €50 pm + €250 installation€2,650August 2021
Org BTier 2, €100 pm + €500 installation€5,300September 2021
Org CTier 3, €500 pm + €1,000 installation€25,000December 2021

Consider this?

What the table above tells you is a Tier 3 client is worth x10 more in terms of revenue to your firm.

In other words, if you secure 2 x Tier 3 clients, it will have the same revenue and likely profit impact as securing 20 x Tier 1 clients. Going forward, when you communicate, email or talk to the prospect have their SSO firmly in mind – and importantly – use it to prioritise your time and efforts.

Actions

1. Do you accurately categorise your prospects by their potential monetary value to your business?

2. Are you planning and setting out your time and marketing spend proportionately?

3. If you gauge your marketing expenditure and sales effort are unbalanced, can you remedy this?

If you are a business struggling with sales get in touch and see how we can help.


[1] Lifetime revenue value is based on a 4 year period.

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