Creating Digital Selling Plans That Win Over Investors

Summary

A strong digital selling plan can be the difference between securing investment and losing out. To attract the right investors, start by exploring "Attracting Investment with Digital Selling Strategies". If you’re looking to secure venture capital, check out "A Complete Guide to Securing Venture Capital for Startups". For advice on preparing for funding, see "How to Secure Investment for Your B2B Business". Finally, learn how to structure your plan to retain control of your business in "Retaining Equity: Strategies to Minimize Loss During Funding".

You'll Discover:

• How to structure a digital selling plan that appeals to investors.
• Key data points and metrics to include in your proposal.
• Steps to align your plan with investor expectations.
• Tactics to stand out in competitive funding environments.

As a seasoned business-to-business sales professional with over 30 years of experience, I have investigated, researched and developed a more effective and profitable way for you to build a business and grow and reach their total addressable market. Include these top ten points in your business plan to impress your investors with digital selling.  Below I explain what you need to do to create the one of the best B2B business plans your inestors will have ever seen.

1. Impress Investors Because You Understanding Digital Marketing is for B2C and Digital Selling for B2B

Your investors are expert in finding and raising money.  They know who's got it and who want's to invest it.  They have significant experience why B2B portfolios fail, however, they do not know about B2B digital marketing, that's your area of expertise.

If you want to have best chance to raise the investment your business needs It's important to understand how to attract investors with your knowledge of digital selling.  Impress upon them you know B2B organisations have, from the beginning of the 'digital revolution' been applying B2C digital marketing techniques and strategies and they don't work, they never have.  To drive this home, businesses, on average, are only turning over an average of $100,000 per person/employee per annum, or ARR-FTE, around the world because they are all using the same marketing automation technology and new business development strategies as each other, a fraction of the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon and for good reason. 

Over the past eight years, the average tenure of chief marketing officers and senior marketing leaders is only eighteen months, as they promise to increase new business but fail and are fired. The reason behind this is that traditional digital marketing strategies and technologies are not suited to business-to-business selling. 

To give your business and team the highest odds of securing investment, you must include digital selling!  

2. Reaching Your Total Addressable (TAM) Market Anywhere in the World

There is a simple but effective strategy; You acquire a database of your identified TAM and upload it to your CRM.  You also upload it to a platform like Mailchimp.  Don't be thinking Mailchimp is too small for your business, keep reading.  Mailchimp charge £100 to email 10,000 addresses, up to twelve times a month.  You don't need an expensive contracted marketing automaiton platform!

Next you upload it to LinkedIn and pay for banner adverts to appear in the newsfeeds of the database of the individuals you just uploaded.

You now have exposure to your total addressable market, anywhere in the world without needing Google. 

The next major factor is the fact that approximately 1-15% of your TAM is looking to start their buying journey each week.  If your TAM was 10,000 then 100-1500 businesses would become prospects.  But you would need to tell them you exist as a company and be able to talk to them at scale!  Read Point 3. Leverage Live Streaming. 

3. Leverage Live Streaming to Engage with Prospects at Scale

This is where you tell the investors how you're going to get more traction than they've ever seen before in a startup.  Now you have access to your TAM, you're going to put on a weekly live show and invite them every week by email and by adverts on LinkedIn to watch you. 

You will email your TAM every week, telling them what you broadcast the previous week and what you've got planned for the current week.

Live streaming, unlike any other medium, allows you to engage with prospects on such a large scale, making it a crucial aspect of digital selling. Salesxchange offers live streaming services that allow businesses to reach a wider audience and build stronger connections with potential customers, but we can talk about that later.

Explain to your investors the simplicity of access to low-cost live streaming technology and equipment, such as Blackmagic Design and that this approach is by far the least cost they will have ever seen.  Suggest they look at any other budget projection for a B2B and to look at the sales and marketing rows.  Yours will be less.

Salesxchange's digital selling strategy reaches more people via email and banner invitations and can engage with hundreds, if not thousands of prospects all over the world by broadcasting a weekly live show.  Show your investors the pros and cons of traditional selling vs Salesxchange's digital selling, as detailed in this article here.

4. Showcase the Benefits of Digital Face-to-Face Selling

Sales in a numbers game and by definition, if you're reaching a TAM, you will create more enquiries which need to be handled.  Digital selling offers numerous advantages over traditional selling starting with the process of your intended salespeople engaging with and talking to their prospects via Zoom and Teams but NOT using a simple webcam, rather, they will be exploiting mini studio technology to broadcast one-to-one or one-to-many from their homes or perhaps a kitted out main office studio? 

Everyone is fed up with looking up the noses of the person they're talking to on Zoom or Teams when the other party is using a laptop.  Technology is available that will instantly set your startup apart from all competition.  In addition, your salespeople will have the ability to connect and engage with far more people than ever before, yet more professionally than your prospects will have experienced from any of your competitors.

5. Utilise Social Media and Automated Posting

We all know social media can be an invaluable tool for promoting your business and reaching a wider audience. Our strategy Social 444 is based around automated posting on social media, ensuring your brand remains consistently visible and engaging to your target audience.

That said, we address social media slightly differently than others.  As a B2B organisation, you need a finite amount of content.  you don't need to be writing blog after blog.  You're not a B2C.  B2Bs write articles which are read by businesses who are looking to be educated before they speak to you.  Historically, we all jumped on the Google bandwagon.

Google will choose to index and then rank your content and irrespective of what you think of it, it may or may not get ranked, rendering it invisible.  You could pay-per-click, but that's going to be very expensive.  It is common practice to have aPPC banner link to a landing page whwre you request a name and email address before revealing the content to the browser.  90% of browsers hate this, so do I.

Tell the investors you're going to create your content and then create multiple adverts to promote the content, e.g., say ten adverts per item of content and you have twelve content items, that means 120 adverts.  Once the ads' are ready, they are uploaded to an auto-posting platform that enables you to post four adverts, four time a day over four weeks and repeat (that's where the Social 444 comes from) for up to say, eighteen months.  This is set and forget with only twelve content items.

By the time they've read this they're going to love you. But we're not finished.

6. B2B Video 

Your investors will have seen on your P&L you have made provision for multiple video cameras, microphones and lights as well as all the other necessary live streaming and filming kit. 

It's not going to go to waste; you're going to use the same kit to film interviews with senior staff, customers and partners.  You'll record training videos, product demonstrations, introduction videos and launch videos.  you will use the kit to record events you attend, from exhibitions to your own roadshows and any other possible visual event you can think of. 

You'll upload everything to your website and get it on social media too, they'll be no stopping you.   

7. Podcast Production

Each week you'll be recording your live show and you'll take the audio from the live show, top and tail it it, meaning someone weill do a voiceover introduction and then you'll upload thre new podcast to a platform like Buzzsprout or Spotify and repurpose/represent your content to a new audience who prefers podcasts to live shows!

Nothing wasted!

8. Emphasise Your Team's Expertise and Dedication

A strong, capable team is essential to executing your digital selling plan. Demonstrate to investors that you have assembled a group of talented individuals with diverse skill sets, including expertise in live streaming, social media, SEO, and content creation.

By highlighting your team's experience and dedication, you can assure investors that your digital selling plan will be well-executed.  This is probably where we come in and help support you in the early stages.

9. Measure Your Success and Provide Tangible Proof

Utilise tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track your progress and measure the success of your digital selling plan. By providing investors with tangible proof of your plan's effectiveness, you can build confidence in your strategy and demonstrate its value.

It is also quite likely the main investors will want to see your progress over the ensuing months, therefore getting everything set up in advance is going to be a very good thing.

10. The Detail in the Budget Projections

It is quite likely you have been putting together your costs based ujpn the traditional digital marketing approach of demand generation, lead generation and ABM.  It's important you keep all these costs and build a comp[arison set of spreadsheets to show the investors.

We have an excel file that has twenty five integrated and caculating speadsheets to provide costs for everything you'll need.  This file can be integrated with your own.

Takeaways

1. Understand the limitations of traditional marketing strategies and the benefits of digital selling.
2. Leverage live streaming to engage with prospects at scale.
3. Utilise social media and automated posting for consistent brand visibility.
4. Emphasize your team's expertise and dedication to executing the digital selling plan.
5. Measure your success and provide tangible proof to investors.

FAQs

How do I convince investors to invest in my digital selling plan?: 

Showcase the benefits of digital selling over traditional marketing strategies, present a strong and experienced team, and provide tangible proof of success through data and analytics.

What do you say to convince investors?: 

Clearly articulate the problems with traditional marketing strategies, highlight the advantages of digital selling, and demonstrate your team's expertise and dedication to executing the plan.

How do I attract investors to my idea?: 

Present a well-researched and detailed plan, emphasize the potential for growth and profitability, and showcase the unique aspects of your digital selling strategy.

How can you ensure your potential investors that your plan will be successful?: 

Provide tangible proof of success, such as analytics data and case studies, and maintain open communication with investors to address any concerns or questions.

Do investors want to see a business plan?: 

Yes, investors typically want to see a detailed business plan that outlines your strategy, goals, market analysis, financial projections, and other relevant information.

Do you tell investors your idea?: 

Yes, you should share your idea and strategy with potential investors, as they will need to understand your vision and approach in order to make an informed decision about investing.

What do investors like to see in a business plan?: 

Investors like to see a clear and concise plan with a strong market analysis, competitive advantage, realistic financial projections, and a capable team that can execute the strategy.

Why do investors look at business plans?: 

Investors review business plans to assess the viability and potential of a business, as well as the competence of the team responsible for executing the plan.