Grow Account Sales Predictably: 10 Questions to Ask
Introduction
How to grow any account sales using the predictable customer acquisition model. Let’s dive in. If you’re a part of a sales team and you’re trying to grow sales for your account, for your customer’s account, or your channel’s account. It doesn’t matter. If your job is to increase revenues and grow accounts as a whole, this video is going to be very helpful to you.
So, over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of different teams, CEOs, and marketing departments. We’ve been through millions of dollars in marketing spend and we usually see red lights of what’s missing and what you need as a recipe to get results fast.
So, when you get on a call and you have a few people, maybe it’s a CMO, maybe it’s the marketing team in general, it could be ten people in the meeting, or you could be just talking to one person. And at the end of the day, if they want more sales, this is the process you want to take them through. These are 10 questions that can help you. You can just download it as a checklist, I’ll write it down for you, but let’s start going one by one.
Question 1: Who is your customer?
Okay, so question number 1: Who is your customer? This is what you’re going to ask them. They are probably going to tell you, “Oh, everybody’s a customer or we sell to 20 different target audiences”. No, no, no.
So, ideally, you want to have a campaign or a growth strategy around one product, one offer, and one customer. So, if it’s a multiple prong, there are multiple solutions and multiple customers, it’s fine, but you’re going to go through this checklist with every one of them if you want to be effective and grow your sales.
But you want to ask, who is your customer? And let’s say, as an example, they’re going to say, “Okay, let’s pick. It’s a state and local government and IT decision makers, so, Chief Information Officer, Security Officer, or one of the C suites”. Okay, great.
Question 2: What is your product?
Now, they’re going to say, “Oh, we have this and this” and sometimes you’re going to catch them going on a 20-minute tangent and they still don’t answer the question. You’re going to be like, “Okay, so what is your product?”.
Let’s say in this case, we’re going to focus on a specific product, which is high-volume data migration at the edge. For example, you have remote locations like an oil rig, or let’s say it’s a ship or any remote location that needs to be transferred even if it’s a movie in New Zealand, for example. They need to shoot a lot of data to California. Guess what? Google Drive is not going to work. And it needs to be secure, it needs to be fast.
So what are they going to do in this situation? So in this case, let’s say the solution is high-volume data migration at the edge, right? It’s very specific. It’s not talking about general client migration. It’s not talking about healthcare or education, right? It’s specific. And maybe the promise is to transfer the data at 7X the speed, right? Which is, again, very tangible and very good. You may not have that, but this is an example of what a good product description is, right? Okay, you have a very specific outcome here. “If you have a problem, this is the outcome.”, that’s 7 times faster.
Question 3: What is the offer?
Now they’re going to say, “Okay, we want to sell them”, right? But nobody’s going to jump on the meeting and immediately start buying. So, people go through steps. We cover those in different videos but for this training, you want to drive them to a specific thing, right?
So it’s “Who is the person?”, “What is it that they’re looking for?”, and “What do you want them to do?”. So is it an assessment? Demo in many cases is a tough sell because demo means they’re going to be sold too in many cases. So they want to kick the tires and read some stuff, learn, and educate themselves before they go on the demo call. So if you can give them proof of concept, that’s what POC stands for, so what’s the proof of concept? How do you show them results in advance? Maybe they need to spend a little bit of money. Maybe you have a free savings calculator for the data transfer, right?
Let’s say you’re using this now just enter your data. “Oh, look, you’re going to save thousands of dollars”, right? So it just sells itself. Maybe it’s a self-assessment they will take, but you want to take them to an easy starting step before they’re going to say, “Okay, I’m ready to buy”. Okay, so what is the offer?
Question 4: What is your one customer value?
So let’s say in this case, this is data migration at the edge. And let’s say, this customer is worth $25,000. So if they buy, it’s a $25,000 sale. Great. You have a number.
Question 5: What is your customer retention?
Now the follow-up question to that is “What is your customer retention?”. So on average, when customers buy, how long do they stay for? Why would that matter? Well, if the customer stays for five years and you sell them only once in the beginning, it’s 60 months of retention, right?
It’s not just a one-month sale or a one-year sale. So, it’s important to understand the value of that customer to your account. So, you know, what we are talking about. And it’s going to make sense in a second.
And so let’s say in this case, the customer retention is five years. Okay? So let’s do some basic math. So the actual customer value in this case is 25,000 per year for five years retention. Right? So on average, let’s say if it’s SaaS, 3 years to 5 years is generally acceptable in the commercial space. As soon as you step into the government space, it’s tougher to sell it to the government, but once it’s in, it’s there for five years, for seven years, or ten years. It’s tough to rip it out.
Usually, the harder it is to sell, the harder it is to rip it out. So, you want that retention. That’s why government contracts are so lucrative because of their volume, and it’s a continuous volume. Right? So it’s dependable income. So in this case, one customer is $125,000 per customer. Great.
If you don’t have those specifics and they say, “We don’t know. I mean, one customer is 50k, one is a hundred, and one is 5k”, you’re going to say, “Okay, so do a rough estimate, let’s divide. What did you make last year? Let’s say it’s $10 million. How many customers did you have? Let’s say it’s 10. Okay, so each customer is worth a million dollars. Just a rough calculation. Divide the income by the number of customers you had last year”. So again, roughly at least, it gives you some kind of a benchmark. Let’s move on.
Question 6: What is your annual sales goal?
So, let’s say you’re in mid-year and this is the last quarter, what’s the goal of this campaign? But in general, you want to plan for four quarters. It just gives you more benefits which we’ll cover later.
But let’s say they say, “Okay, we want to hit 5 million sales, 10 Million, or 100 million”, the number doesn’t matter. All you want is to have a number. Because you’re going to say, “We want to get as many sales as possible”. That’s not clear. Because if you’re going to start executing and start helping, is it working? No. Yes. Right? We don’t know. Because they may be getting sales, but it’s not all the sales. So, you want to have a number.
Question 7: How many customers do we need to hit that number?
So let’s say, they want 5 million in sales. Excellent! Now, basic math again. How many customers do we need to hit that number?
So to hit 5 million in sales, if the customer value is 125k, that’s 40 customers, right? Great. So if we get 40 customers sold, we get 5 million. Right? Very trackable. Now, the question that many will not answer for you based on my experience, but the best in class do. And if they don’t know, your job is to help them figure that out.
Question 8: What is the Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC)?
So, what is the cost of getting one customer? What is the customer acquisition cost(CAC)?
So let’s say the number here is $10,000, right?
We can again discuss different numbers, but let’s just say this is 10k, okay?
So, what do we need now to make sure that the plan is well put together and that the budget is on track?
So, what needs to happen?
So if it’ll cost us 10k and we need 40 customers, that’s $400,000 in marketing spend or advertising spend, or whatever you decide to do with it.
You need 400k to achieve 5 million in sales. That’s twelve and a half ROI.
People will do that all day alone.
That’s a phenomenal return. And again, that’s one of the reasons why government contracts are so lucrative. Now 10,000, I’ve seen this number way below that and I’ve seen this number way above that. So it’s up to you to figure that out. But that’s a decent number to start with because you can test many different options to see where you can land a customer. If the rebuttal is good, you know, you said it’s $25,000 per year for a customer, but for 5 years it’s $125,000. But we don’t calculate it this way. We just see it as a one-year sale. Great, fine. Now, in this case, instead of 40, you’re going to have to do 200 sales, right? And to get the $5 million is still doable.
So, you need $2 million now to get the 5 million. So again, it’s two and a half return instead of twelve and a half at 5x. But, it’s still profitable no matter how you spin it. I mean, it still works. But actually, this is the more true story because you sell them only once. If they say, “We don’t measure it annually”, tell them, “You should”.
Because if you sell to a customer once, which is the hardest thing, you need to educate them, chase them, get close to them, and make sure they’re onboarded and they stay happy. And it’s five times easier to sell to an existing customer an additional product or an upsell to an existing product than to go chase a new customer. Because you’re building trust all over again, right? You’re resetting the process. So it’s very lucrative. That’s why SaaS companies are evaluated at 5, 8, and 10x the revenue because of the sticky rate, right, the stickiness.
Okay, let’s move on.
Now that we have the numbers, which will get you probably 99% further than most teams or companies even go because it’s some thinking, right?
You need to go and look at the data and, “Oh, we don’t know if it’s the sales department job, right? Who’s getting the leads?”
Sometimes it’s such a mess and we see hundreds, of thousands, and millions of dollars, just wasted, right? “Oh, let’s do this campaign. Hope it’s going to work. No numbers behind it at all. It’s just enough. I shouldn’t pray. But look, I mean, the ad is great, we’ll get a lot of likes, and so it must be a success”. But no sales at the end of the day.
Question 9: Which activities do we need to get sales?
So if you want to avoid that, if you want to make sure your campaigns are producing, you want to align with the teams on “What are the metrics?”, “How are we going to measure them?”, and “Which activities, specifically, do we need to get those sales?”. So typically it goes, again, a few channels only. So it’s either events, which we cover the different types of activities, which one you should start with, and how much each one costs. But you could do events, paid marketing, advertising, you can do content, or you could do partnerships, like collaborations with somebody or channel sales, right?
You’re not building sales from scratch, you’re already tapping into somebody’s relationship.
But regardless of the channel, you can just split let’s say, your marketing budget into four different avenues and say, “Okay, we’re going to test, if you don’t know, we’re going to put a quarter of the money on the channel, we’ll put a quarter of the money on the content, quarter on paid, and quarter on events. And within a quarter or a year, we’re going to see which one performed the best”. And each one has pros and cons, but at least you have a plan. What are you going to do to get those numbers?
Question 10: Do we have a plan?
Do we have a plan to achieve it? Because they’re going to be like, “Great, we have the numbers, let’s start executing. What are we executing on? So is there a timeline for the burn? Right? The money is, let’s say, now we have either $2 million or $400,000 in marketing spent. It’s not going to be spent in months, right? It’s going to be spent throughout the year. How is it going to be allocated? Which campaign?”.
So ideally you want a calendar, a simple spreadsheet with a burn, right? How much spend goes where, which activities, and what are the measurables? Are you expecting to get leads? Are you expecting to get subscribers and demos? What are you shooting for? What’s the outcome?
So if you have the plan, you need the quarterly breakdown and you need to look at it as often as possible. We’ve seen many times that companies say, “Okay, we have this strategy, let’s do $250,000 in marketing spend for the year”. They deploy it, they set it, and forget it. Are we running? Yes. Are we on time? Yes. And then they check in in October or November and then, they see eleven red lights. And then, you know, the money is wasted. So they learn for the next year. But that could have been avoided. Right? You could learn that within a quarter. So you don’t have to pay another year of your team burning resources to know what we already know. Let’s move on.
The next thing you should do after number 10, is the final question. So, do we have a plan?
If you have the quarterly breakdowns, tracking activities and results. Now your question, if it’s running and you’re measuring, let’s take this example for $10,000 customer spend. So, if it’s $10,000, let’s break it even further. So what needs to happen? So what are you converting?
Let’s say, to get that one sale, how many demos do you need to run? So let’s say it’s 1 out of 10. You’re closing 1 customer out of 10 demos. Great. So if you paid $10,000 for 1 sale and you need 10 demos, that’s each demo is $1,000 per demo, right? So if somebody would come to you and say, “Hey, would you buy $1,000 per demo of a quality qualified customer?”, that would be a yes to you all day long. As long as the customers are qualified, they’re coming in and you close 1 out of 10. Great! Now you can work on closing 2 out of 10, or 3 out of 10, or 4 out of 10, right? We’ve seen even 7 out of 10. Depends on the product and what strategies your teams are using. Now another way to look at it, how do you get a demo? So the $1,000 demo, how do you get those?
Conclusion
So again, whether it’s an event, whether it’s a partnership, or content play, at some point the fastest way to validate is some paid traffic. You could deploy, let’s say, $1,000 on ad spend and you’re going to get some clicks. There are some best-in-class numbers that we are publishing.
So there are some benchmarks that you should look for and be like, “Okay, I’m way below the benchmark, so my ads are bad”. But if the numbers are good on the ads, then the digital is fine.
You can look at each piece of the funnel to see what needs to have to be tweaked.
But $1,000 per demo, is it what, 100 downloads of your assessment or checklist? Is it just 100 or 1000 clicks?
So let’s say, it’s for $1 a click, you can get 1000 clicks. Maybe 1 person out of 1000 will register for that demo and that’s your play, right? Just $1,000 demo play, 10,000 on paid spend. And if it works, great! So all you need is, in the beginning, at least one validated source that gets you customers and then, you can start building on top of it.
If you’re chasing eleven things at once, it’s like trying to take off eleven planes at once, right?
The idea is you lift off in one plane, put it on autopilot, it’s running, and now you can take a parachute, climb down, take another plane, and on and on and on instead of eleven at the same time. So conversion optimization is the game here to see if it’s an event.
Let’s say you spend $10,000 on an event, okay? How many leads did you get? How many calls did you follow through with that? Is there a sequence to play? And at the end of the day, out of the $10,000 spent, did you get something or what did you get? And so within a very quick few iteration cycles, you could see, “Oh, these channels are not even performing for us. But the other thing we didn’t even suspect, right?”. Maybe a podcast or it’s content repurposing. Maybe you have a lot of content, but it’s an hour-long webinar. Who’s going to watch an hour-long webinar today? Maybe a few people are very interested, but way down the funnel.
But, how do you chop it into 50 different things? Maybe put some spinning animation in it and make shorts, so you can repurpose that content and start being top of mind. Again, if it’s valuable, if it’s helping your customer, and if it’s educating them. Sort of like this video, you’re getting yourself educated on, “Hey, this is what it takes to take an account, to sit down with a Mr. CEO, and say”, “Hey, do we have this? And if it’s not, in many cases it’s not, they go back and they do some homework”. Or you at least deploy, say, “Okay, let’s do one test, one campaign, and one customer. Let’s take it for a quarter, let’s run it, and then we see”. So at least you minimized resources.
If your numbers are green, I mean, you need to see which part didn’t perform so you can work on that part. Maybe it’s just more money. Maybe it’s just more time. Maybe the sales are dropping the ball. Or maybe it’s the marketing. You know, there are many ways to troubleshoot this. If you’re planning on something, you’re not sure how to put together, reach out. If not, I hope your accounts double and triple this year. Good luck to you. See you in the next one.
