Hello again! Lesson 3 of the warm calling course focuses on strategy.

Before we can target potential new customers, we have to define a strategy for our local office. These strategies will vary around the Group depending on what parts of the business lifecycle your office is currently at.

If we take the UK for example; the UK started in 2010, and at that time, we were very new to the UK market, so we wanted to develop our brand awareness. As a result of this, we started by targeting EMS companies firstly. And this is because, for every EMS company that we were successful with, it gave us exposure to potentially 5 to 10, 15 OEMs that we hadn’t spoken to before.

If we fast forward 9 years to today, our strategy is completely different. We now have excellent brand recognition, we’re also the UK’s leader in PCB production. This means that we can be more selective from which customers we choose to target. So, our strategy now is to focus on OEM customers in high technology PCBs.

This is important as it gives a sales team structure, a focus, and a target group that they can specifically focus on when looking at lead validation; which will be contained during lesson number 4.

Which leads me on to a very famous Russian proverb; “If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither.” What does this mean? It means that we, as a Group, have to be focused in our approach, we shouldn’t be targeting every customer. We know what the target customer is that we’re trying to achieve based on the strategy that we define, so let’s focus on those because it means that, should we have any success during the warm calling process, it means they will add significant value to it, not only the local office, but us as a Group.