Effective Sales Development In The Water And Wastewater Industries

Successfully navigating the web of relationships that goes into selling product in the water and wastewater industry is an art form. Depending on the product you sell, you’re likely trying to herd some combination of the following cats:

• Your own rep
• The operators at the plant that needs your product
• The superintendent or plant manager at the plant that needs your product
• The engineer at the plant that needs your product
• The contractor who has been hired by the plant to install the equipment
• The local consulting engineer hired by the plant that needs your product
• The treatment-specific expert at the national level for the consulting firm hired by the plant that needs your product

And this is just a starting point. Throw in the elected official overseeing the municipal budget or the rep at a different firm selling a complimentary product to yours on the same project and identifying a single, effective sales development strategy looks bleak.

Isn’t it just easier to put the sale in the hands of your rep firm?

It certainly is easier but arguably less effective. There are some tangible steps marketing can take to expand the top of the sales funnel and attract a greater number of prospects and then assist sales in qualifying these prospects as you guide the real buyers towards your closing sales professionals. 

Initial Attraction

The first step in an effective sales development process is to gain visibility. You can rely on your rep firms to do this but a lot of manufacturers have rep networks that are strong in certain areas of the country and weak in others. It’s also very difficult to find reps with the breadth of contacts to cover all the players in a water or wastewater treatment equipment buy. A great relationship with the consultant engineer does not necessarily translate to being able to strongly influence the plant manager and vice versa.

In order to canvas the country or the globe if you sell worldwide and reach all the contacts you need to influence, create content that loudly addresses the universal pain points and challenges your product solves and distribute it through a variety of media types. These might include:

• Distributable literature for your reps to hand out or email
• Presentations at local or national conferences
• Articles in industry magazines or websites
• Content on your own website or blog distributed via social media

Playing It Cool

Not to sound too much like a dating website but the next step in effective sales development is to play it cool and not overwhelm your budding romance. You need to develop the initial engagers into buyers and each one is going to move at their own pace through your sales funnel.

Relying on your reps here is inefficient. Reps will consistently gravitate towards the lowest hanging fruit and fail to invest the time and energy into your slower moving prospects. This is where a standardized lead nurturing process can help you. Feeding prospects additional content over a timeframe matching their level of engagement is a highly effective method of moving prospects through your sales funnel.

In order to do this you’re going to need the following:

• A body of meaningful content
• A delivery methodology for sharing content with prospects based on their activity
• A means to track your prospects engagement with each piece of content
• A database that allows you to store each prospects activity

Deepening The Relationship

Alright, we’re really getting into the dating metaphor now! Armed with data about which content a prospect has engaged in, the old-fashioned cold call becomes a lot warmer. And even at this stage, you might decide to hold off putting the lead in the hands of your rep. Here are some examples of activities you should consider once you have data on what prospects are reading:

• Have an inside sales rep contact the prospect to pre-qualify them based on what they’ve engaged with
• Append the prospect’s contact information so that you can influence them further through additional channels beyond email or print
• Cross reference your prospect’s contact data to inform your other marketing activities e.g. where you choose to exhibit based on prospect saturation
• Have a non-sales rep such as a product engineer reach out to a prospect to see if they have any technical questions

The Engagement

By nurturing a prospect with a variety of content and touches from within your organization, you will have successfully moved a prospect through the funnel. It’s important at this stage to arm your rep with the data you’ve collected throughout the engagement process. Many companies fail to connect the work marketing has done with the arrival of the cavalry i.e. the rep. But an informed rep who understands the time and research the prospect has already put into understanding the problem they face enters the conversation in a far more productive way.