Samsung made significant investments into R&D during the steepest part of the financial crisis decline. The result: they moved their brand value from 31st ranked in the world to 6th following the crisis. Amazon made investments in something called ‘Prime Video’ and ‘Fire TV’ in early 2009. The companies that were thinking about opportunity when most companies were cutting their way to security and waiting for demand to pull them out of the ditch positioned themselves for transcendent growth.
Not all companies are on fire right now. Many businesses have the liquidity to get them through the storm, and many more will find firmer footing as they adjust to new normals. Even now, when uncertainty is at its maximum, commercial finance organizations should be building plans to originate ‘through the U” or the U-shaped recovery.
A shift in messaging
What does equipment finance do to help companies reimagine, retool, transform their business? That’s the shift at hand. It’s not just around growth, staying on the cutting edge of technology, helping vendors sell more, or even delivering more intricate financial benefits. It’s about how you can help them move forward and evolve. The world that awaits many businesses will require new approaches to business as usual and breakthrough thinking to achieve real growth (especially early on). You can help.
Build this new messaging approach connected to your unique value proposition tailored to each of your audience segments. Once the messaging is firmed up, you can mobilize it.
Sales Enablement
We still find it fascinating how shocked industry executives are when they hear how badly their average salesperson tells the company’s unique story, which is further compounded by less than stellar needs analysis work. The hard truth is, however, that little training and resources are given in most cases to help them understand how to tell the story in the first place. In times of economic weakness, the “Do you have any upcoming equipment needs?” approach is just not going to be good enough.
Build resources to help salespeople do significant needs analysis tailored to the maligned economic condition surrounding their customers/prospects. Then bring in training on your evolved value proposition ‘through the U’ to create consistent quality conversations at every point of contact
Get the word out
Let’s assume it takes 6-8 high-quality touches before a prospect will seriously consider you for equipment financing (and our data shows it does BTW). For most of you, if your sales team made 150 calls per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year, you’d still only reach 25% of your total market potential. Marketing can help be a quality touch without this high expense salesperson even being engaged. While the sales talent will always drive the best outcomes, solid marketing of your updated messaging and value proposition should reduce the ‘touch cycle.’ Depending on the audience segment, dozens of tactics can be deployed and a surprisingly low cost and dramatically lower investment than people exclusively dialing for opportunities.
Show them what works
The best sales/marketing tool you can leverage is a success story. Tombstones are great, but in this market, people need to know HOW you get the deal closed, not just THAT you get the deals closed. There is no reason why you don’t have an inventory of two dozen success stories of some type in your arsenal. In the coming weeks, we’ll write on some creative ways to deliver the HOW without the burden of revealing your secret sauce to competitors or chasing down client consent for the use of their details.
We know people are still hurting. We know there is still uncertainty. But as soon as you start building your plan to help people ‘through the U,’ the quicker you might get through it yourself. Sawbux is a marketing firm that specializes in commercial finance. If you ever want to talk about this topic or anything like it, give us a holler.