The Next Level Series
Formalizing Your Enterprise b2b Strategy
We're going beyond one-to-one sales pro collaboration to outline a formal b2b strategy for Enterprise. This is a one-to-many approach where your Enterprise examines the state of b2b with all suppliers and vendors with the objective of leveraging reciprocity for retention and new and vertical growth.
1. The Project Charter
Build your project charter to align stakeholders across your enterprise and establish a clear mandate for your impactful efforts.
Vision: to retain and grow revenues in excess of [$$$$] by [date] by leveraging Company's [billions of dollars] awarded to contracted suppliers and vendors.
Executive sponsor: a champion of growth culture such as CSO, CRO, CMO, CPO
Business case: quantify current vs. potential revenue from vendors to determine what can be gained from reciprocal business awards
Scope: determine which types of contracts are in or out of scope based on criticality, risk, and functional leadership support (ex. supply chain, treasury, fleet, real-estate, etc.)
Team: Build a core team, led by a growth champion, with stakeholders being leaders in in procurement, functional groups, key contract holders, and sales management.
Risks: clearly identify risks and how you will avoid them
2. Due Diligence
Identifying and prioritizing the right targets for b2b reciprocity.
Get to best few
It's likely your enterprise has hundreds of suppliers and vendors. Your project team will conduct the due diligence to prioritize those vendors for co-prosperity discussions.
Criteria
- Current vs. potential vendor spends with company
- Company spend with vendor
- Vendor criticality
- Contract term and termination
3. Execution
Let's break down execution into three distinct activities: internal kick-off, engaging with suppliers and vendors, and facilitating sales engagement.
Internal Kick-off
This can be one large town hall type meeting with all affected contract owners and sales teams, or individual huddles with each functional group or business unit. Your company culture and leadership personalities will likely dictate the most effective approach.
Focus on the following agenda items:
- present your business case, establishing why this is important to the enterprise
- prepare your contract owners for the coming introductions they will be asked to facilitate
- prepare your sales teams to begin researching these prospects and updating their pursuit strategies
Engaging with Suppliers and Vendors
Your contract owners are best positioned to make introductions between your initiative leader and a point of contact into each vendor.
Do
- make the conversation about mutual wins (co-prosperity)
- seek to understand all of the ways the two companies can add value for each other
- be clear that your company is taking reciprocity into account for renewals and new contract awards, and will displace current vendors if warranted
Don't
- bring a briefcase full of sticks and no carrots
- get stuck engaging with individuals who have no influence
Facilitating Engagement Between Buyers and Sellers
The objective of co-prosperity is to enable each company's selling teams with the access and coaching to help them put a best foot forward.
Establish a single point of contact, an initiative leader, at each of the companies. Those two individuals work within their company, and with their counterpart, to facilitate meaningful engagement of respective buyers and sellers.
No sellers are guaranteed sales success and neither is either party guaranteeing contract awards. Each seller, their strategic selling ability, and the value created in their proposal to meet the needs of their customer must stand on its own merits.
4. Ongoing Initiative Management
You've launched your initiative and there are sales opportunities being actively worked by your selling teams.
Now what?
Every worthwhile initiative, like a roaring fire, will ultimately die down and extinguish itself if it runs out of fuel. Keep adding fuel to your fire by staying engaged with vendor counterparts externally, and your contract owners and sellers internally.
The power of project team meetings
- maintain strong communication including holding bi-weekly or monthly project calls with your project team, contract owners and sellers
- use your CRM or ad hoc sales reporting to track and hold team members accountable for progress on active sales opportunities
- close the feedback loop from sales to contract owner
- regularly report out on the sales pipeline and related retention or new business successes
- recognize people and celebrate success every chance possible
As successes work their way through your funnel, continue to evaluate, re-prioritize, and engage your remaining vendors.