Category: Sales

More and more organizations implement RealZips for Salesforce. We’re excited to now share how high-growth companies use our app to propel their success!

The RealZips app provides territory management and a geographic structure for CRM data in Salesforce. Your CRM data is automatically enhanced with geographic data, such as market data, sales territories and sales regions.

RealZips for Salesforce makes it possible to identify market potential and compare against sales performance. Sales teams using the app can focus their efforts in areas with the highest growth opportunity.

These are the six steps to manage growth with RealZips:

1. Industry

Select best-fit industries
The product or service you sell must solve specific challenges for the targeted industry, and be supported by customer success stories. A targeted industry should have enough potential companies of the right size and profile, to be worth pursuing.

Challenges
If your team needs to change the sales pitch for different prospects, it’s takes time to build a high-value pipeline of opportunities. The key is a best-fit industry focus, making the sales pitch consistent. However, switching to a narrow industry focus makes most sales teams uncomfortable, as we all fear of missing out on opportunities.

Find answers
Your team needs data to answer these questions:

• For which industries is our solution a great fit?
• Which of these industries can generate most sales and highest margin?
• Which industries are most profitable, lowering their barrier to buy from us?
• How many companies are there in each of our targeted industries?
• What is our market share and growth opportunity across these industries?

Take action
There are 1,000 industries in the US, defined by NAICS codes (North American Industry Classification System). Each industry is segmented by employee count. For companies servicing B2B in the US, it is crucial to understand the “Perfect Customer” and compare against their existing customer base:

1. Download the RealZips NAICS industries spreadsheet, divided by employee size.
2. In the spreadsheet, pull out industries you consider selling to.
3. Eliminate companies by employee size, that you should not serve.
4. Compare against existing customers. The difference is your total opportunity.

Chances are your total market is much larger than your current customer base. Continue to narrow down industries and company sizes. Focus on markets segments where your team will be able close deals fast, with highest possible revenue and margin. Carefully seek out segments with the highest possible stickiness (customer retention / repeat business).

The goal is to find a “Perfect Customer” profile in highly targeted industries.

2. Geography

Focus on markets with highest potential
Once you have a defined your targeted industries by employee size, selecting geographic areas is next. Attempting to serve large geographic areas often leads to inefficient marketing and sales. Therefore, combining industry and geographic focus is crucial for organizations ramping up customer acquisition.

Challenges
Companies that rely on inside sales teams often believe geography does not impact the sales process, since they can engage customers remotely. This could not be more wrong, since geography directly impacts the buying process. Time zone is important, when sending email and making calls. Distance is crucial, when inside sales set up meetings of field reps. Regulations and taxation on state and county levels impact your ability to sell. Never underestimate the importance of your customer’s customers. Focus on geographical areas, where you can help your customer serve a thriving market!

Field sales teams are directly impacted by territory size and market potential across their territories. Many sales reps have failed, either because they were given either too small or too large of a territory. Even if your territories are sized right, are you giving the sales team guidance to focus on geographical growth hotspots?

Find answers
Achieving geographic growth raises many hard questions:

• Where will we find clusters of companies in our chosen target industries?
• Are we geographically organized to tap into these industry clusters?
• Does marketing focus on hotspots in each territory, to drive lead generation?
• Are we generating leads close to each field reps home office, to drive efficiency?
• Can sales reps segment their territories by low, medium, and high growth areas?

Take action
This is where the RealZips app is used to enable the sales team: Your defined target industries are divided across every Zip code, to identify market potential. Each Zip code in RealZips will showcase the number of target companies, rolled up into cities, metropolitan areas, and sales territories.

Next, each Zip code will automatically have the number of existing leads, customers, contacts, activities and opportunities. It is now possible to compare your market potential, against your existing customers.

Lastly, Zip codes are automatically indexed based on market potential and current performance. From that moment, your team can focus on growth areas and track market share:

3. Company

Pick targeted companies in the right areas
You will now know which geographical areas – based on Zip codes – hold the highest growth opportunity. It is now time to identify the companies – across select industries – within the Zip codes that will quickly generate revenue.

Getting data is not the challenge. Instead, selecting the right data and methodically getting in touch with the right companies is the right areas is the hard part.

Challenges
When sourcing companies for targeting, it’s very common to cast a too wide of a net. Since data is cheap, why not get all company names we can? This presents a number of challenges, such as how to assign all the data to the right sales team. Having a access to a lot of company data easily gets in the way of running focused marketing and sales activities, not to mention how quickly data deteriorates.

Find answers

• What are the exact company profiles we are targeting, within our defined industries?
• Where can we reliably source the company data, preferably integrated with Salesforce?
• When importing thousands of records into Salesforce, how do we automatically associate the data with sales regions, territories and sales reps?

Take action
It’s time to further narrow down companies: By location types such as headquarters, years in business, credit rating, use of certain technology, and by dollar spend within the solution you provide. Instead of acquiring large amount of company data your team will never use, focus on high-growth geographic areas.

There are many great sources for company data. As the company data is integrated into your Salesforce system, the RealZips app will automatically associate each record with the right sales territory and sales team. The app structures each record by geographic areas such as city, county, metropolitan area. RealZips for Salesforce can even provide the distance to closest sales rep, office, distributor and service location.

4. Title

Source contacts with the right titles
You now have the right industries, in the right geographic areas, and the right companies your team will target. It’s now time to decide which titles your team will build relations with.

Most often it makes sense to start high in organization, and ask whom to talk to about your solution. It’s also important to get in touch with key stakeholders that influence the decision, and get their buy-in.

Challenges
Sourcing contact data from e.g. LinkedIn and add to Salesforce can be time consuming, even if your team is using automated apps that pull the contact data. Getting reliable email addresses is another challenge. Carefully evaluate how to acquire contact data within your select companies. Avoid at all costs to burden outbound sales reps and account executives to source contact data, since it will slow their sales efforts tremendously.

Find answers

• How can we effectively source quality data on contacts in the right positions?
• How do we reach out and open up discussions with these contacts?
• Which message will resonate with the titles we select to reach out to?
• How do we keep our contact database up to date?

Take action
Your highly targeted approach is now tapping into narrow segments of similar companies, in similar geographic areas, with people in the same positions. Your team can now run micro-campaigns with highly targeted messaging, across your highly defined audience.

While seeding a CRM system with companies and contacts, it’s extremely important to provide all territories and sales teams with as equal opportunities as possible to motivate and empower the team to reach sales quota. Many companies discover they need to optimize their sales territories at this point, enabling the sales team to succeed.

The RealZips app provides key metrics across each sales territory in real-time, used to help the team reach leads and contacts with the right titles:

5. Demography

Utilize underlying demographic data, to identify your customers’ markets
Most companies selling Business to Business (B2B) have yet to discover the value of demographic data. Demographic data is still considered to be “Big Data; too big to use while servicing B2B customers.

We’re now seeing the cutting-edge B2B sales management and sales operations teams take full advantage of demographic data. They simply use population data to understand their customers’ markets, providing talking points and insights downstream in the sales channel.

Challenges
Traditionally, demographic data could not be associated with a specific customer location and did not provide any added value. Demography has been hard to match in real-time against customer locations and linked to revenue growth.

Find answers

• What are the demographic drivers, either for us and for the downstream sales channel?
• How can demographic data be used to improve marketing and sales activities?
• How can localized demographic data be presented in every sales pitch?

Take action
We’re now witnessing companies combine demographic data with all other data in Salesforce, using our app RealZips. The results are surprisingly effective. For example, sales reps showcase demographics around the doctor’s office they are visiting. The customer is given immediate insights into their local consumer market, helping them to identify their growth opportunity associated with your product!

Time and again, we’re seeing this approach generate unexpected new revenue, since your team is now providing unique data, helping your customer connect with their customers.

6. Pitch

Market and sell in the right place, to the right customer, at the right time
We’re now seeing more and more proactive companies use the RealZips for Salesforce app to effectively combine the steps outlined above. Their revenue acceleration can often be noticed within weeks.

With the RealZips GeoData Platform in place, they manage territories and grow revenue. They automatically structure all their CRM data, and break down target markets into manageable geographic chunks. They unleash their marketing and sales activities in highly targeted areas – learning what works best – as they improve their sales process.

High-growth companies effectively adjust the pitch as they discover what works best across targeted industries, geographic areas, companies and certain titles. They utilize all structured data they now have available in Salesforce, to even better service their targeted customer segments.

Get started in a matter of days
The RealZips app and market data is designed to instantly empower your team. In a matter of days, your team could start taking advantage of these six steps:

Need for Actionable Sales Data

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies market and sell in highly complex environments, while helping doctors treat more patients.

To stay competitive, these companies must have actionable data in their CRM systems to unlock strategic decisions, manage focused marketing campaigns, and run efficient sales activities.

The ultimate goal for Life Sciences is to better serve doctors and care providers, so they in turn can help more patients with better treatment methods.

Disconnected CRM data

Unfortunately, we are learning that most Life Science companies still have disconnected data repositories across:

• Demographics and patient data
• Medical market studies
• Potential customers: doctors, offices and hospitals
• Existing customers and their interactions
• Sales data; both their own and their competitors’
• Medical procedures databases

All doctors in the United States have a federal NPI number (National Provider Identifier or NPI is a unique 10-digit identification number issued to health care providers in the United States by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The first step to better CRM data is to integrate NPI numbers.

“Disconnected data limits a company’s ability to understand their market opportunity and slows down marketing and sales efforts, which allows the competition to jump in.”

For example, we have all seen companies spend millions in marketing and sales efforts in geographical areas that have limited growth opportunities. Meanwhile, they are leaving other areas of the country wide open to their competition’s hyper-growth.

Five steps to revenue growth for Life Sciences

More and more Life Science companies are taking full advantage of our RealZips GeoData Platform for Salesforce. They are implementing these five simple steps to protect and grow market share:

1. Connect all data

By using the RealZips in Salesforce, these companies are now connecting endless amounts data geographically, starting on the Zip code level.

As different data streams are automatically connected within the RealZips geographic structure, the combined real-time data becomes highly actionable GeoData.

GeoData can range from demographics, leads and existing customers divided by hospitals, to care provider specialties, medical procedures, the company’s own sales data and competitive sales volume analytics:

2. Structure GeoData for instant decisions

When all GeoData becomes available in real-time, analyzing the data and create automated indexes that will guide all marketing and sales initiatives.

For example, it’s very easy to index GeoData based on market potential and your company’s performance. Every geographic area will automatically be indexed, so everyone in your company can act within the GeoData matrix (shown below).

• If an area of a city has high potential and no performance, the growth opportunity is substantial
  (Represented by the tile “1. GO!” below)
• Reversibly, if an area has low potential but relatively high revenue performance, it’s mostly tapped out
  (Shown in the tile “4. MAINTAIN” below)

3. Transform GeoData into action

All this powerful GeoData is 100% available in Salesforce.com and integrated with all existing customer data. It now becomes possible for your whole company to immediately act on this continuously updated GeoData!

Your team will be able to:

• Focus sales in areas in sales territories with the highest potential
• Run marketing campaigns in the top 100 markets across the country
• Pick the best locations to host customer events
• Spend the right amount of effort in each zip code, based on opportunity
• Point out demographic markets for doctors, to help them succeed in their patient onboarding and treatment

Continuously updated RealZips Dashboard, combining demographics, count of Doctors, sales activities and sales progress:

4. Turn action into Doctor’s interest

When your team is empowered with actionable data, every discussion with care providers (such as doctors and nurses) take on a whole new meaning. Your team will have data about the care providers’ local market, including deep demographic insights such as age, income, lifestyle preferences, insurance data and much more.

Your team will be able to help position your product and services in the context of each local patient market; helping Doctors pinpoint their own market opportunity.

With GeoData at their fingertips, your marketing and sales teams can select which local markets to engage in. They can focus on enabling care providers in markets with the highest patient reach, while providing a best-fit for your offering:

5. Convert Doctor’s interest into revenue

As our customers embrace the RealZips GeoData and these workflows, they often experience revenue growth within five weeks. The relationship between the sales team and care providers turn into a partnership, enabling the care providers to even better treat patients.

Typical feedback from Life Science users of RealZips:

• “Our marketing and sales teams can focus on the top 15% zip codes with the highest growth potential in each sales territory.”
• “As we meet more doctors in the field, we engage with at least 15 % more care givers.”
• “Discussions with doctors are no longer focused on products. Instead we share local demographics and how our product and service will help the doctors serve more patients.”

Help care providers serve patients

We are amazed to see the success our Life Sciences customers create for their companies, care providers and patients.