What is Sales Opportunity Network
B2B market challenges
When it comes to attracting and retaining B2B customers, the biggest push is on creating value. We know B2B customers buy value – in the form of productivity, customer excellence and synergy convenience, simplicity or integration. As a business owner, you invested a lot of time and effort on your products, peripheral services and partnerships to create values. These values have to align with customer needs before they are realized.
But, B2B customers aren’t going to tell you what they want. It’s possible that they don’t even know, or can’t articulate it in a way that you can easily turn it into a solution. Either way they’re not going to spell it out for you. They don’t have the time, expertise or desire to do so. The traditional ways to tell customers about your product are telemarketing, marketing events or social media, however these are not very effective. But the good news is, there are professional sales agents to help you dig out the customer needs.
Notice that there’s one very important factor I’ve left out of the value puzzle – trust. Trust supersedes all of the other motivations in this list – however, it’s not something that can be outwardly measured. Building trust centers on ensuring that you have the rest of the factors presented in a way that’s relatable, understandable and most importantly, actionable.
How SON can help
Sales Opportunity Network (SON) is a fundamentally new way to bring your business closer to success. It is a trusted people network incentivized to generate qualified business opportunities. SON starts with a Product Referral Link created for business owner. It is a web page where delivers your product message, your reward scheme and, most importantly, your expectation on how the sales agent could help you. After setting up, business owner can then share this link to the channels he is familiar with, e.g. his close friends, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Readers of this link could potentially take 3 actions depending on how he could possibly help:
Share The Referral. A new dedicated link will be generated for him. He can then share it to his own channels. All of the links generated in the chain are tracked such that the business owner and the link owners can see all the subsequent actions generated downstream the chain.
I Am A Referrer / Sales. He will be asked to fill in the contact details and several sales qualification questions. All these information are packed to form an opportunity for the business owner to review and accept. But some of the key contact information are masked in such a way that the business owner cannot directly recognize the customer.
I Am A Potential Customer. A potential customer directly approaches and so the business owner can directly talk to him.
Business owner will get two things as long as the network grows. (1) a network of referrers together with their own trusted connections (2) qualified business opportunities
How SON incentivize referrers
When a business opportunity is created, the business owner needs to qualify it (by reviewing the sales qualification questions and partial contact details, or by talking to the referrer directly) and accept it before he can see the masked contact details. Once it is accepted, the referrers involved in the chain that created a business opportunity are entitled to the rewards. The business owner has the complete control on the reward scheme through several parameters:
Reward for each successful referrer — Successful referrer refers to the action (register as a referrer in your network or create business opportunity) generated by a referrer. Each individual referrer will get the reward configured here. You should set a non-zero dollar value to incentivize the network. Rewards will be realized only after a business opportunity is generated.
Reward for each successful Close-The-Loop (shared) — Close-The-Loop refers to a business opportunity generated from your network. All the referrers involved to make this opportunity happen are rewarded. The reward is shared among the referrers. You should set a non-zero dollar value to incentivize the network.
Maximum level of referrers in one loop — Level of referrers refers to the number of people involved to make an opportunity happen. "0" means no limitation. "1" means only one referrer is allowed in one loop. You can define 2, 3, 4 or more.
Rewards for each successful Close-The-Deal (shared) — Close-The-Deal refers to a closed-won opportunity. If the opportunity generated from your network is closed-won at the end, all the referrers involved to make this opportunity happen will be rewarded.
Business owner should think about how to encourage people to share to their connections, as well as create qualified opportunities through these parameters.
WeExpand introduction
This article is brought to you by WeExpand. Today B2B sales strategy is still very traditional, and it is never easy to scale up. WeExpand creates a new technology platform that brings companies and professional sales agents in the B2B market together to revolutionize the sales ecosystem. We have two innovations to tackle this problem, from generating more leads (Sales Opportunity Network) to closing more deals (On Demand Virtual Sales Team).