Everybody needs to sell!

Part 1: Offer, Market, Route

Everybody needs to sell—whether it’s ice cream, consulting, or indeed brand strategy. And selling is tough.

It takes discipline to shape a compelling offer, and determination to keep going when the pushbacks inevitably come. It’s hard for sales professionals—and it’s doubly hard for those of us who aren’t. I count myself in that group, and I’m guessing many of you do too.

So how do people like us get good at sales?

Passion and process. Passion may be an overused word in business, but it matters. If you don’t care about what you’re selling, why should anyone else? That said, passion alone won’t win the day unless it’s yoked to a process that you trust and follow.

The following two-part blog breaks the sales process into six practical, manageable steps. These are the steps I’ve used and seen work in countless B2B brand strategy projects—steps that give your sales effort structure, purpose and the best chance of success.

1. Offer: What Are You Selling and What’s the Value?

Start by defining your offer—what it is, what it does, and how it helps. You need to describe your benefits and features in terms of the impact they’ll deliver and the value they create. What problem does your offer solve? Why is it better or different?

Once that’s clear, test the appetite for it. Have conversations with potential users. Explore what they’d be willing to pay and what barriers might stand in the way.

Understanding the value to potential customers helps to determine the right selling price. Will that price generate enough income to be viable? You’ll need a solid grasp of what it costs to deliver your solution—whether that’s time, materials, infrastructure or people and understand any competitive solution pricing. If the sums don’t work, your offer needs refining before you move forward.

2. Market: How Big is the Opportunity, Where to Focus?

Now that you’ve got a defined offer, you need to understand who might realistically buy it. This isn’t about everyone in your industry—it’s about your addressable market: the subset of potential customers who have the problem you solve and are in a position to buy.

Knowing this helps in four critical ways; it stops you wasting time selling to people who were never going to buy; it tells you what the total market value is; it allows you to set informed, achievable sales targets and it helps you fine-tune your pricing strategy.

 Start broad, then filter down. Aim for realism, not optimism.

3. Route: How Will You Reach Your Market?

With offer and audience defined, the next step is deciding how to get your product or service into their hands. There are a few common models:

• Direct: the most common approach. You are in charge of the process, you are the expert, you know your offer and the customer sector of your customers. 

• Trade/retail: Selling through intermediaries who apply their own margin and manage customer relationships.

• Resellers: Partners who market and sell your solution, often under your brand or a shared one, typically in territories or markets you can’t reach directly.

• Co-sellers: Organisations that offer your service alongside their own, often as part of a broader value-added solution. 

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Choosing the right route is about alignment—your ambitions, your capacity, your customers’ expectations. A service with complex onboarding for example might need you working directly; a simple, repeatable solution might work through a network of resellers.

Summary

Sales is about clarity. In this post, I shared the first three steps that have kept me focused: get clear on the value you bring, now exactly who it’s for, understand how it helps.

In Part 2, I’ll cover the next three steps: how to keep track, stay visible, and follow up without it feeling awkward.

By the way, there’s a fuller version in my book which you can find here, or if you’d like to see the full process in action, I’m running a free one-hour session for people who don’t do sales. Drop me a line at: bruce@thebrandarrow.com.

Why work together?  

I’m now celebrating my 16th year running my Brand Strategy consultancy, as well as regularly speaking at conferences and lecturing at business schools, I teach brand management on the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s diploma course and am an accredited speaker with the Vistage CEO network. My expertise has helped hundreds of small businesses stand out, grow, and thrive.  

If you’d like to explore how The Brand Arrow can help your business, reach out to me directly at bruce@thebrandarrow.com.