You only have so much time to chase prospects, pitch your services, and get to a close, so being able to use your time effectively can have a direct impact on the amount of new business you ultimately win. Your Emissaries can help you save time by providing support throughout the market development strategy and full sales cycle, from identifying the right prospects on day one all the way through the final stages of purchasing and procurement.

Here’s how to work with them during your engagement to get the critical assistance you need to identify and capitalize on a market development strategy that brings new business opportunities that make the most sense for your product.

Use Market Development Strategy Insight to Deliver Value

The primary barrier to identifying and capitalizing on new opportunities is lack of insight. There’s a tangled web of mysteries that needs to be unraveled before you can make any progress with any new prospect: How should you navigate procurement? Who are the real decision-makers? Does your solution fit into their existing infrastructure? And even if you research all these areas, you may still arrive at the realization that the buyer in question just isn’t right for you.

That’s great to know, but it would’ve been better to have known it before you wasted all those hours chasing a dead-end lead. Work with your Emissaries here at this key market development strategy stage to make sure you’re going after the buyers that are actually worth your time.

Your Emissaries will have information about your prospects’ current contracts and buying cycles to help you get the timing right. Your Emissaries can also reveal your prospect’s pain points to help your pitch cut to the chase. It’s this demonstration of value that Emissary sales director Bruno Hoxha believes is such a key differentiator for salespeople today:

“Because technology is now critical to the success of most business decisions within a large corporation, sellers have to navigate every opportunity by engaging decision-makers with value that affects the bottom line. This requires a deep understanding of your target buyers’ priorities.”

Craft Outreach that Buyers Love

Cold outreach is simply a fact of life in the sales game, and while you should avoid it as much as possible, sometimes you simply can’t. Even though you can’t eliminate the need to cold call entirely, your Emissaries can help warm those calls up so your message lands more effectively.

A major problem with cold calls is that they’re not based on a prospect’s needs. They’re also intrusive and often involve a detached, cookie-cutter message that can telegraph a certain disinterest in a buyer’s business. Worse yet, when they lack any form of personality and personalization, they become very easy for your prospect to ignore.

This is another opportunity for your Emissaries to help. Turn to them before you make your initial outreach to learn as much as you can about your prospect’s priorities, personal preferences, and internal politics so you can address them directly in your call. Here’s how Emissary sale director Curt Clauss sees it,

“The ability to leverage an Emissary’s insights to help create the feel of a warm opening in cold outreach—one that’s tailored to a company’s initiatives, power players, partners, or otherwise—can be the difference between generating a meeting and closing a deal and never even making contact.”

If you make the effort to show your prospects that you really understand them, they’ll be much more open to your business now and in the future.

Get Support in Every Stage of the Sales Cycle

In addition to unearthing your prospect’s major pain points during the market development strategy phase, your Emissaries can also help throughout the entire selling process.

As you venture deeper into the sales cycle, new challenges inevitably arise. How many stakeholders do you need to convince, and which ones will ultimately have the final say? What hurdles stand in your way during procurement? Your Emissaries will be able to help you identify the key decision-makers to deal with so you can shine a light on their preferred procedures for vetting and adopting new technologies to inch you closer to closing.

One leading data management company recently leveraged Emissary precisely in this way—and to outstanding effect. Our client learned the identities of all the major decision-makers and was able to gain a better understanding of their prospect’s buying process. In the end, their engagement resulted in an impressive 33 percent increase in pipeline revenue.

But even when a deal doesn’t quite work out, your Emissaries can still help you maintain momentum and set your sights on new prizes. If your advisors come back and tell you that the timing is off or that there’s an existing migration or large-scale data project blocking the sale, don’t give up. There will be other businesses that your Emissaries have worked for in the past that may be better fits, and other teams inside your original prospect’s business could be more open to striking a deal, as needs can differ from department to department.

Executive Insights for a market development strategy

Emissaries excel at helping sales teams land new opportunities and creating a market development strategy, and they do that in a variety of ways. Lean on their insight early on to identify your prospect’s main pain points and tailor your pitch to address them. Emissaries can also help you identify the main decision-makers at your buyer’s business, target the main influencers, and navigate procurement without a hitch. Even when a deal isn’t as successful as you hoped, your Emissaries can help you identify new opportunities at other businesses or on other teams.