The aerospace and defense industry is booming. Revenue is projected to reach $697 billion, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, but that doesn’t mean you’re ready to take advantage of that level of growth. To prepare for closing that massive onslaught of new deals, enterprise-level sales operations at Fortune 500 companies like Boeing use Next Quarter’s solutions to land those huge deals.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of our wealth of proven solutions and resources if you’re a smaller company. There are plenty of opportunities to go around. To take full advantage of these market opportunities, though, you need your sales teams to bring their top game to the table. With such a small number of buyers, your team must be laser-focused on their strategic approach to understanding the players and landing the deals.
It’s not always easy, as your sales team still needs to get buy-in from your obvious stakeholders as well as those hidden influencers at your company. Beyond your internal processes, you probably face external approvals and verifications, potentially from government officials, legislators, or sometimes shareholders. All those players contribute to the discussion, but it also takes time and dedication to keep a handle on the process and usher it through to that close.
That’s why you need serious account growth and planning solutions to formulate a detailed map that will help you locate all the decision-makers, budget owners, and hidden influencers, and then a guide to hit them properly. If your first approach doesn’t work, you need a series of backup plans and follow-up strategies. There isn’t just one way to make a sale. So how do you find the optimal path?
Improve Your Aerospace and Defense Sales Operations
The challenge is understanding the market and the organizations and contacts you are selling into. It would be best if you had a systematic way to organize all this information. Here are five tips to help improve your aerospace and defense sales operations.
Learn Who the Players Are
One of your key tasks is to first learn who the players are and how they relate to each other. You’re looking at more than just an organization chart. You need to assess everyone within the organization and gauge how many contacts your team has with each of them.
By determining the levels of connection with your team, you’ll know which opportunities are primed to buy and which need more engagement. You’ll also get a sense of which sales approach will likely work best across the organization, but also where some deviation may be needed to achieve optimal results in your close.
Account Growth Solution
To close aerospace and defense deals in a new territory, you need to sell where others aren’t selling. That’s where white space analysis comes in. Instead of finding the usual suspects, white space analysis helps you understand the hidden prospects in other regions, verticals, etc., that fit the same profile as your main prospects.
Use the built-in artificial intelligence (AI) to find geographic, vertical, and ancillary sales opportunities you hadn’t seen before. As a result, we can show aerospace and defense sales teams how to use our products to grow revenue in this challenging but profitable center.
You could be offering the wrong products or services to the wrong people. Maximize your selling power across the organization. Perhaps another product or service can be your foot in the door.
Apply Collective Intelligence
By learning what has been sold to similar organizations, you apply collective intelligence to the problem of selling to this specific prospect. Your sales team can develop a strategy that matches each product with the proper personas and the best paths.
Form Strategic Partnerships
By partnering with a company that already meets certification criteria, you may leapfrog over those hurdles yourself. Partnerships can be worth more than just a way to get your foot in the door. You become a formidable seller if your product or service can be seen as a valuable bundled accessory or support service. In addition, creating a partnership saves your prospects time and money with a ready-made solution.
Other benefits of strategic partnerships include:
- Technology transfer
- R&D support
- Having a local relationship in a region or country that requires one
- Sharing marketing and sales knowledge and expenses
- Creating a larger geographic or vertical market for both partners
A sales department armed with our sales intelligence tool is uniquely qualified to help the business development team find the right people to approach within potential partner organizations. A robust sales operations team should use proven solutions to find potential partners and reach out to them as if they were valued prospects because they are.
Generate Referrals
Partnerships are an excellent source for referrals and introductions. You don’t have to enter into a full partnership to get referrals. State, federal, and DoD contractors are part of the public record.
Once you find a connection in your network, you can ask for a friendly referral. Then, connect with decision-makers, influencers, and budget controllers within your targeted prospect.
Next Quarter Can Help You Sell to Aerospace and Defense Markets
Manufacturers like Boeing and Dell already rely on Next Quarter’s solutions to take their account planning best practices to the next level. That’s because our customers have already discovered how effective our robust sales intelligence is to sell faster and close more deals for more significant amounts. We’ve proven that we deliver the results you need in the aerospace and defense markets.
At Next Quarter, our AI solutions discover patterns across various sales scenarios and map the best path for you to achieve a sale. It will reveal hidden influencers you may not have considered before and will also help you with guided selling that can optimize each sales tactic you deploy.
Contact us to schedule a demo today.
