Member Eric Billingsley Speaks: Different Selling Motions for Different Growth Strategies
The Challenge:
In the situation at hand, an Alliance CEO of a rapidly growing company was looking to expand his offering into enterprise solutions. He was seeking insight into the best way to approach this transition and to leverage his current successful desktop solution to help drive momentum.
If you were in this situation, what would you do?
If I were the CEO of your company, I would make a two-by-two opportunity matrix in which I consider both products – desktop and enterprise – and measure the potential revenue opportunity for each against two target markets – new and existing customers. I would focus my thinking on the two separate product categories, and decide the best possible sales motions to take, while considering important aspects such as market penetration, target limitations, lead generation, growth speed and upsell opportunities.
If in this two-by-two matrix exercise, I find the greatest opportunity in the enterprise product, I would seek to deepen existing relationships – the desktop customers – toward enterprise-level engagement. This approach is what I call “farming.”
To farm, I would expand upon the existing relationships I have – those who already recognize and benefit from my company’s value proposition. To execute on this path, I would evaluate my current sales team to determine if they have the right skillset to nurture our existing relationships into enterprise customers. If there is a lack of those relationship-building muscles, then now is the time for me to bring in the right talent for the job.
An alternative would be a “hunting” approach, whereby I would recognize the need to spend significant marketing resources to find new leads and clients. While farming and hunting are two different selling motions, I know that making a decisive choice now brings clarity to the overall growth strategy of my organization.
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The Alliance of Chief Executives is an active community of business leaders that focuses on deep strategic exchanges, challenging existing assumptions and generating fresh ideas.
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Contact Us
2175 N. California Blvd., Suite 605
Walnut Creek, CA 94596
925-942-2400 Office
925-956-4424 Fax
Email: info@allianceofCEOs.com
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