How to Prepare for a Successful 2020: The Salesperson’s Guide

December is one of those months that is so intense.

In the beginning, you’re super stressed to close as many deals as possible before people go on vacation.

And towards the end, you’re super stressed trying to look busy, even though everyone knows you’re not going to be starting any new sales processes until January.

Oh, the irony.

We thought we’d do our best to help with some tips to help you get through the second half of December/first half of January, to set you up for success for the rest of the year.

Keeping that in mind those of you in the adtech industry might be interested in downloading a list of US leads that need more paid traffic.

Or a list of UK sites that need more paid traffic.

This will help keep you truly busy.

Market Mapping

Something that is always good to do when planning ahead is to perform market mapping to understand the market and motion of the industry you are trying to sell to.

This will give you a good idea of which markets are growing and becoming important, as well as give you an overall understanding of how you’re going to be tackling your pipeline for the coming quarters.

Let’s take, as an example, a sales rep wanting to map out the fastest-growing e-commerce markets.

Here we see that markets that are experiencing growth are the United States with 3.6%, China with 4%, Germany with 8.8%, Russia with 6.7%, and the UK with 4.9%.

Understanding the growth in these markets can help you strategize and see which regions you should be targeting that you aren’t already, or where you should allocate more resources and manpower.

Create a Lead List

Once you’ve understood which markets you’re going to be targeting, you create a lead list and see if you can understand their pain points.

We’re going to be targeting those countries we see are experiencing growth, which as we mentioned before is the United States, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

We want to only be looking at transactional websites within e-commerce and shopping.

We also only want to see sites that have at least 100,000 visits a month, and at least 30,000 unique visitors a month. This will ensure the sites are getting enough traffic, and unique visitors.

And in order to make sure these are sites experiencing an upward growth curve, we want their monthly visits to have increased by at least 50% YoY. The idea behind this growth filter is to bring up sites that are experiencing very fast growth.

Here we see the top 15 sites that fit into that category, so let’s see how we’ll decide how best to approach them.

Prioritize Your Pipeline

Now that you’ve (1) established the markets you want to move into, and (2) created a lead list to fit all your qualification criteria, you need to plan your approach.

The best way to get your prospect’s attention is by using a consultative sales method.

The idea behind consultative selling is to approach your prospects from a place of subject expertise and knowledge on their specific pain points and how to fix them.

Let’s explore the site drop.com, and see what metrics you can look at that will help you understand where you might be able to come in and solve their issues:

Monthly visits, monthly unique visitors, average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate will help you understand the overall “health” of your prospect’s site.

You want to see high numbers in the monthly visits and monthly unique visits because it means many people are visiting the site, but not all visits come from the same person.

Long visit durations and lots of pages per visit because it means people are browsing around and more likely to convert.

And low bounce rates because it means people actually meant to enter the site and are exploring it once they reached it.

If you’re not sure what numbers you should be seeing there, compare them. You’ll see what seems normal, above average or below average.

In this case, drop.com, the prospect we’re currently gathering intel on, has the highest amount of monthly visits and unique visitors but falls behind in average visit duration, page visit, and bounce rate.

Offering your services to increase time spent on site, or lower their bounce rate solves an important issue for them.

Other interesting metrics to check is where that prospect’s traffic is coming from.

If you see they have a lot of traffic coming from countries where they do not currently deliver, that’s a problem you might be able to help them solve. You can also find information on which are their strongest markets and help them grow others where they see strategic value.

And what channel their traffic comes from.

These guys get very little traffic from display ads. You might solve an issue for them by helping them increase their ROI on ad spend.

Summarizing what you see, and letting them know you are able to solve a problem they currently have is a great way to engage with your prospects, and show your value from the first touchpoint.

Prospecting like this is an art form, so feel free to download below our amazing guide created by the most successful salesperson in our team!

In Summary

Using this time to make some order and strategize for the upcoming year can really set you up for success in the coming quarters.

Use data to maximize your knowledge on prospects and enable you to have a better perspective of how you can solve their pain points.

And when you book your first meetings, lean on the below checklist to make sure you come prepared.