A Guide to SONAR2 Customer Life-Cycle Management

Maximize your sales opportunity across all four phases of the customer life-cycle

What is SONAR2?

Sonar2 is a sales enablement system used to optimize sales opportunity across all four phases of the customer life-cycle.

It installs a structured approach to creating interest and converting it into sales, maximize customer experience, and attract more leads to existing accounts.

The purpose of SONAR2 is to engineer improvements in B2B sales and marketing processes.

SONAR2 has been implemented in companies across the US, Canada, and Europe. It’s the first of its kind; a system that installs best practice throughout the sales life cycle.

SONAR2 has four phases: 

  • SEDUCE – Draw new business opportunities to your door
  • ENGAGE – Operate an effective and predictable sales process to win new business
  • DELIGHT – Manage the customer relationship to maximize returns and customer experience
  • EXPAND – Achieve more sales to existing customers

The Benefits of SONAR2

MAXIMIZE

  • marketing spend by ensuring opportunities don’t get lost due to weak links in sales and marketing processes
  • effectiveness of inbound activity to drive real sales opportunities
  • predictability of sales activity and pipeline visibility
  • enforce positive salesforce behaviors that maximize their productivity and your returns
  • repeat business from customers

MINIMIZE

  • boom or bust marketing
  • the size of your marketing team
  • wastage in marketing and sales activities
  • time lost to unprofitable business activities

B2B marketing has changed (for good)

According to a Gartner study, most buying activity happens online before individuals engage with potential suppliers.  Data privacy laws mean it’s not an option to blanket unknowing individuals with emails either.

The digital era demands a different approach.  In most cases, it still takes a salesperson to close a deal.  That means sales and marketing teams must work together, aligned to the most profitable customer conversational paths that lead prospects to buy products and services.

The 4 sales life-cycle phases

In the pursuit of new business, it’s easy for maturing technology companies to invest too little in RETAINING and GROWING existing customer sales. The marketing spend is often focused on this one area. Yet, it’s four times easier to sell products to an existing customer as opposed to a new customer.

Seduce

As much as 80% of the B2B buying process happens online, with potential customers looking to learn new things, work out how to solve problems, evaluate buying options, and make a purchase. You need to engage your target audience in a sales conversation.  Before you can do that, you’ll probably need to draw them to your website.  It’s not about attracting anymore.  Marketing today is about getting people to WANT to become your customer.  It’s a practise that’s best described as SEDUCTION the process of deliberately enticing a person, to engage in a relationship.

In SONAR2 Conversational Marketing theory, the five steps of the SEDUCTION phase are:

1. Profile
2. Tempt
3. Entice
4. Gain Consent
5. Assign

Engage

It’s never easy to convert an interested prospect into a buyer.  Regardless of what some marketers might think, technologies sold to companies still need ‘selling’ which is about educating a potential buyer on the risks, choices, and opportunities of a purchase, drawing out the value of your offer, and closing a deal that benefits both parties (i.e. the buyer and the seller). 

An engagement sales process typically takes on the form of a sales funnel or pipeline.  These reporting approaches are commonly employed by B2B technology companies to monitor the progress of sales opportunities as they draw closer to a closed deal.  The most common phases are interest, opportunity, prospect, and customer.

In SONAR2 Conversational Marketing theory, the five steps of the ENGAGEMENT phase are:

 

  1. Suspect
  2. Opportunity
  3. Propose
  4. Prospect
  5. Close-Sign
Delight

Delighting customers is about delivering an above-and-beyond customer experience that results in repeat customers.  Existing customers represent a huge source of income that’s rarely realized.

Organizations often lack workable strategies, processes, systems, and outcome metrics. They may measure success on the number of calls or visits, but that’s no measure of results. Most will also monitor revenues, though overperformance in one area can disguise underachievement in another. 

In SONAR2 Conversational Marketing theory, the five steps of the DELIGHT phase are: 

1. Onboard
2. Review
3. Re-Scope
4. Petition
5. Pre-Propose

Expand

Few organizations today have a dedicated sales team to expand sales to existing customers.  That’s a big missed opportunity given that it’s 5x less expensive to sell another product to an existing customer compared to winning a new one.

The customer sales expansion discipline is very different to New Business Sales and Customer Service (the focus of customer Delight and Retention policies).  It relies very much on data-centric decision-making and an Account Based Selling approach.

In SONAR2 Conversational Marketing theory, the five steps of the EXPANSION phase are:

1. Profile
2. Evaluate
3. Risk Assess
4. Engage
5. Propose

Why SONAR2?

Overcome the inhibitors to sales.  The following factors are often identified as being inhibitors of sales capacity:

Leads

What is a marketing-qualified lead? Salespeople want authentic sales leads that suggest a prospective buyer wants to make a purchase. All too often, inbound marketing produces ‘interest’ but no intention to purchase.  Fix this problem by aligning sales and marketing efforts around profitable conversations.

Focus

Knowing which prospects are likely to generate the biggest rewards.  Sales focus can be improved enormously through the effective use of sales performance insights (that qualify profitability of existing accounts and pinpoint the most desirable prospect accounts).

Time

Sales time is precious. Many salespeople get tasked with completing data-entry tasks for CRM systems, writing reports, etc., reducing time spent pursuing new opportunities, or meeting with existing clients to grow trust and strengthen partnerships.

Content

Salespeople are sometimes short of the tools and information they need.  Other times, they are overloaded with content.  What they ask for is the best content and tools at the right time in the sales process that’s personalized as much as possible to their use case.

Credentials

Often, the task of establishing credentials falls somewhere between sales and marketing teams.  In consequence, salespeople can lack the evidence they need to present to customers that their company has suitable experience to deliver the solution they seek.

Proposal writing

Whether the business demands a written proposal or an RFP response, salespeople can lose a great deal of time composing customer offers.  Today, this task can be aided by AI-led response management systems.

You can master all 4 sales processes with the right know-how.

Fill out the form to speak to one of your experts and find out how to apply SONAR2 to your business.