Some people think that sales is just sales and there is nothing to differentiate one sale from the next but that is not entirely accurate. In fact, that’s specifically why Aexus uses different approaches in its sales methods. First though, it’s important to know what sort of clients (or partners as we call them) Aexus works with. We predominantly work with scale-ups. These are usually run by people who have developed something unique or disruptive in the tech field and have had some success in selling in their home country. Their intention now is to replicate that success in other countries and grow or in other words, scale-up. The thing is though that despite the success they’ve had in their home country, they don’t necessarily know how to do it in other territories. It’s understandable. They can’t work out how they had success at home and why that’s not enough to guarantee success abroad. Sometimes they realise the advantages they had at home were only advantages because they were at home. So, if we were to break that down, they speak the local language, they know the local market, they have local contacts as well as local clients and their salespeople are native to the region and integrated into the process. Once you change territory, these advantages go out of the window. Cultural differences should not be ruled out either. For example, if you are trying to sell into Germany or the Nordics, they like to have a lot of information up front. They will then do their own investigation using the information you gave them and then and only then will they consider setting up a meeting. For the sake of balance, if you’re trying to sell into the Netherlands, a one-pager is enough to pique interest. This is where the help that Aexus is able to provide comes into its own as it is always both commercially and culturally relevant.
The real trick is knowing where to start and what message you think your prospects want to hear. There is a story going around where there was a particular partner with a great product who was just not generating any interest at all. Not even from people we know well. After much head scratching, the word “conversion” was added to the pitch and the next thing you know, the diary is full. I only use this story to illustrate that the details are that small yet can still have a huge impact. However, Aexus never likes to put all its eggs in one basket anyway, so instead of targeting everyone, the philosophy very much relies on quality and continuity over quantity. This is why we use the test and measure system to find out what is working and what is not because don’t forget that it will not necessarily be the same solution for every partner. Once you get those initial insights though, you can start to make it a bit more scalable and really focus on building a pipeline for the specific situation. We like to teach this in the Aexus Academy as well so that our SDRs, who are still learning, can take on board out-of-the-box thinking and we also do a lot of on-the-job training so that Aexus methods become second nature and they can put into practice what they have learned every day. This means that our SDRs are never caught out of their depth. That’s because if you have for example a cybersecurity expert who is suddenly given an agri-tech partner, they’ll know exactly what to do because of the methodologies we employ.
Another area that Aexus excels in is building relationships. As you already know, we are not the sort of company that does mass email campaigns. Rather than that, we look at, why should this person be interested in talking to us and is there some way we can we relate to them. Obviously, you want to end up on a call so you can actually have a conversation with somebody but how you get there is important too. Email has an advantage in terms of being able to share a lot of information, even visual information but it has its limitations as well in that it is all too easy to delete an email without paying any attention to it at all. This is why we use a multipronged approach making full use of SDR services like Telemarketing, Email, Social Media and Conferences or Events. In fact, conferences and events are a great way to get some face time and coffee and make a proposal for a proper introduction at a later date.
Obviously, this is just a flavour of the tactics we use to help our partners but if you’d like to see what we could do specifically for you, get in touch. We’re always happy to jump on a call.