3 Ways Marketing Can Help Increase Average Sales Price
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Many people think that increasing Average Sales Price rests squarely on the shoulders of the sales team. They’re the ones negotiating contracts. They’re the ones delivering the value prop and determining discounts. Surely, they should be the ones responsible for making sure they’re bringing in the biggest possible contracts.

But inspect this proposition a little more closely, and it becomes obvious that increasing your ASP is not simply the concern of the sales reps ‒ it’s a core mission of the whole company. Sales reps can only sell the product they’re given, and perhaps more importantly, they can only sell to the prospects in their pipelines. And their pipeline is largely determined by what Marketing passes to them as leads.

That’s why sales teams that want to increase their ASP need to start by working with Marketing to develop strategies for targeting larger prospects and handing over leads with higher expected contract values.

Here are three ways Marketing can help Sales increase ASP:

3 Ways Marketing Can Increase ASP

1.) Use Demographic Data to Target Larger Companies

As your company grows and your marketing team becomes more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly important for them to refine their activities and focus on delivering the right kind of leads, not just the right number of leads.

If your company is trying to increase its ASP, this means Marketing needs to focus their efforts on targeting larger companies.

There are several ways to do this throughout the lead generation process. The first, and perhaps most crucial step, is to perform market and demographic research to identify where larger leads actually come from.

What type of market research is most effective at identifying large opportunities? Well, if you already have a large database of leads, you can more finely segment your leads and run specific campaigns aimed at the biggest ones. Segmenting your database and using the results to help you create more targeted campaigns is an incredibly effective way for marketing to increase the proportion of high-expected-value leads they send over.

If you’re trying to grow your lead database, you can use industry, location and funding demographic data to help you identify where the big fish swim. This way, Marketing can tailor their content and emails for this portion of the industry and/or change their event and outbound advertising strategy to put the company in front of the right audience.

However, casting a net in the right direction is not the only step you should take to reel in bigger leads. You should also use qualifying questions to help categorize the leads you’re bringing in. For example, if you are offering content behind a marketing form, include a question about company size to make it simple to zero in on the leads that most likely represent a larger contract.

But what if you had some success in the past selling to big customers, and you want to amplify that?

Company-size-form-2

Making “Company Size” an option on marketing forms can

help you gather data about where big opportunities come from

Get Our Guide on Increasing ASP »

2.) Identify Campaigns That Led to Big Deals

Often, the best way to get the result you’re after is to look back, see what’s led to similar results in the past, and reverse engineer a plan to get even more of those results going forward.

In terms of increasing ASP, marketing is in a great position to look at big deals that have come in recently, and trace their history to identify the specific marketing campaigns that brought those prospects into your pipeline.

BestInfluencingCampaign

Knowing which marketing campaigns influenced big deals can help you recreate your success

How can you do this? Here’s a quick, repeatable 3-step process:

1) Isolate the top 10% of deals (in terms of ACV) within the last 12 months

2) Trace those deals back to identify the marketing campaigns that generated them

3) Fuel the campaigns that attracted those high-ACV deal

3.) Nurture Big Closed-Lost Opportunities

Big deals you’ve won in the past are a great place to start looking for hints to help you attract more in the future ‒ but if you only look at the deals you’ve won, you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.

It’s equally important to look at the large deals that almost came through so you can start understanding why you lost them. If you identify a lead that is a good candidate for revival, Marketing can help nurture these opportunities back to life.

Many people instinctively connect marketing to lead generation, but for companies that are trying to increase their ASP, marketing can also play a crucial role in helping late-stage opportunities progress through the sales funnel.

Go back and look at the all Closed-Lost above a certain expected value and start sending them targeted emails designed to address some of the pain points that brought them into the pipeline in the first place, as well as some of the concerns that ultimately contributed to them becoming Closed-Lost.

For this last part, you as a sales team have an important role. Your reps should be tracking Loss Reasons diligently in Salesforce for all of the big Closed-Lost opps so that marketing can use this information to provide targeted emails and content.

For example, if a large proportion of high-value opportunities fell out due to a missing feature that has since been added, Marketing can send them emails about the product update that corrects the issue. Or if timing was a large concern, emails featuring fresh marketing content can help keep your company top of mind.

Combined, these three techniques can help your marketing team generate big leads, identify the right campaigns to reel them in, and then nurture these big opportunities past the finish line. Only then will your sales team have all of the resources and tools they need to successfully do their part in increasing ASP.

Loss-Reasons-edited

Tracking Loss Reasons in Salesforce can help you understand why you’re losing deals.

Mike Baker
Mike Baker is the Content Strategy Manager at InsightSquared, where he helps distribute original eBooks, articles and guides about data-driven sales and marketing. He has a BA in English and Journalism from Oberlin College.
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