Why Some of Your Revenue is Having an Out-of-Funnel Experience

Meet my friend Marta. Marta is a busy Executive Assistant in a big company. She supports two senior people, runs the lottery pool on her floor and leaves pissy notes in the kitchen when someone doesn’t do their dishes.

Marta also happens to decide how to spend almost half a million dollars a year. She books dozens of business trips a month, each time choosing the airline, rental car, hotel and taxi service. She organizes at least one big offsite meeting per quarter, also choosing the location, menu, entertainment, speakers, trinkets and accommodation for out of town guests. She buys mobile phones, monitors, printers, stationery, lots and lots of lunches, massages, car detailing, flowers, books, smoothies, chargers, software licenses and things that come in boxes with air holes which she won’t discuss.

In between all of this, Marta is currently researching executive coaches, change management consultants, speech writers, recruiters and someone who can quietly help her Overlords set up a Twitter account.

Guess how many Sales Squirrels take this revenue machine to lunch? How many send her a lovely basket at Christmas? How many funnels is she in? How many retargeting emails is she getting? That’s right, none.  Marta is a G-Spotter.

The G-Spot in a Nutshell

B2B selling involves a number of creatures on your customer’s side. There is the C-Suite, the Procurement Department (the P-Cube), the Functional Decider (the F-Word) and the people like Marta, whose job is to go get things done (the G-Spot).  These dynamos of revenue make dozens of purchase decisions a week, and depend on a stable of reliable suppliers to make them look good and to help them get stuff done. The G-Spot rarely creates the need for a purchase, and they may lack authority to sign off on some items, but rest assured, they have a lot of influence over which products come through the door and which don’t.

She’s not in any funnels and for years she has flown beneath the radar of most of her company’s vendors, quietly executing micro-conversions without much help from a human being on your side.

Oh, sure, the P-cube guys negotiated the pricing with the airlines and hotels and other big-ticket suppliers, but Marta chooses from among many dozens of suppliers in a given space, and she does this based on much more subjective criteria than the P-cube, because these are much more personal decisions for her and her Overlords.

So how do we solve a problem named Marta? Big data, my friends!

The G-Spot doesn’t spend a lot of time in sales funnels, and they aren’t likely to be on anyone’s SFDC task list. Chances are, they order online, use some corporate procurement system or just call your order desk directly without any help from a Sales Squirrel.  They probably pay with a credit card or charge it to a master purchase order or account code.

If your company sells smaller value things to businesses that don’t require an act of parliament on their part to purchase, you will need to get into your billing systems, order trackers and customer feedback records and run a bunch of fun queries to find out where this revenue is coming from.

You’re looking for patterns around purchase frequency, recency and value. If you can track it all back to specific purchasers,  that’s even better. If you can benchmark your data against others in your industry, then you are sitting on a goldmine.

Your next step, of course, is predictive analytics. I know, I know you’re already all over it and someone in a small room is merrily cranking out data you don’t really understand. But I’m going to bet they are not looking specifically at the G-Spot revenue.  And here is why they really should.

The G-Spot makes multiple small purchases, most of them of commodity items, and always in response to a need – a problem to be solved, a thing to take care of.  When you understand the triggers, the problems and the things, you become much more valuable and much more useful.

If you can predict purchase behaviours, you can have some fun with Marta. You can test pricing on her. You can do some multi-variate stuff with digital to see what turns her crank. You can test out new ordering systems, or you can do some quick and dirty preference research.

Best of all, you can start constructing an evidence-based persona for Marta to help you figure out how to get on her good side and stay there.

At the very least, you can automatically send Marta a lovely bunch of flowers each time she hits some revenue or purchase milestone. Trust me; that will just make her day.

Related Posts

The Road to Yes is Paved with Maybe
Why We need to Shut Up and Let Our Customers Buy Something

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter