Archive for October, 2012
Creating a Powerful Sales Plan
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 26, 2012
Professional sales people have a unique aspect to their job. They have the ability to decide what to do every moment of every day. The need to make such decisions as; where to go, who to see, who to call, and what to do sets a sales person apart from most other professionals.
I’ve often thought that the quality of this decision, more than any other single thing, dictates the quality of the sales person’s results. Consistently make effective decisions, and your results will improve. Make thoughtless, habitual or reactive decisions and your results will be sub-par. One of the ways to ensure that you make good decisions about your selling time is to create a comprehensive sales plan.
So just what is a sales plan? It’s a written, thoughtful set of decisions about the most effective things you can do. A sales plan should be the result of some good thinking, wherein you analyze and prioritize a number of different aspects of your job.
A good sales plan addresses different time durations and different aspects of your job.
Annual planning
Every sales person should discipline himself/herself to an annual planning retreat. Set a day or two aside, every year, to engage in some serious planning. Turn off the phone, shut down the email, and immerse yourself into deep thought about the coming year. Begin by specifying a series of annual sales goals. What, specifically, do you want to accomplish this year in your job? I recommend no more than five specific sales goals. Typically, one of these goals describes the total volume of sales dollars you want to create; another may describe the number of new customers you want to acquire; yet another may relate to the number of high potential customers with whom you want to increase your business. Regardless of what your goals are, an annual, written, specific set of goals is the beginning of a sales plan.
Next, give some thought, and express that thought on paper, as to your basic strategy to accomplish those goals. If you are going to acquire 20 new customers, for example, exactly what are you going to do in order to accomplish that annual goal?
Classify all your accounts by their potential. Rank them in order, identify the highest potential, and then plan to spend more time with the highest potential.
Re-organize your filing system; throw out the obsolete hard copies and delete the unnecessary electronic files.
To do this well, you will need to devote a full day or two. This annual exercise is the first part of a good sales plan.
Monthly plan
Next, you should develop a more detailed plan every month. Produce a one or two page document which contains your specific commitments to the most effective actions. Once again, you are required to analyze and prioritize your efforts in regards to a number of issues.
First, your monthly objectives: What do you want to accomplish relative to the annual goals that you set? If you said you wanted to sell $2,000,000 worth of your goods this year, how much do you have to sell this month? Each of your annual goals should have a monthly component.
Next, you should address your prospects and customers. In order of priority, in which prospects and customers should you invest your time? That priority often takes the form of a methodical and objective ranking into categories – typically A, B, and C – based on potential. The sales plan then describes your plan for coverage of the A’s and B’s.
You should address the CTM opportunities, regardless of where they occur. CTM stands for Closest to the Money. Analyze and prioritize your efforts related to those opportunities within your territory that are closest to the money. What are you going to do to bring each of them to fruition? Specify each, the dollar amount of the opportunity, and what your actions should be.
Your company may have certain key product or product lines that it wants to emphasize. If so, you’ll need to analyze and prioritize your efforts in regards to those product lines. What will you do this month to increase sales of those product lines? What specific actions will you take, in which specific accounts?
Finally, what will you do this month to improve yourself? What classes or seminars will you attend? What books will you read? To which CDs will you listen?
Note that all of this addresses not every action you will take, but rather the most effective actions. You can note these things on a page or two.
Don’t think that you can keep all this in your head, and skip the discipline of writing it down. Writing each specific action and strategy down, whether it’s on a yellow pad or a computer document, forces precise thinking. The written word also commits you to a degree much deeper than if you keep the idea locked in your head.
After you have completed this monthly sales plan, it’s time to schedule your time. Lay out a plan for each day for the next 30 days. Where will you plan to be, and who will you plan to see? Reflect first your priorities from your monthly plan. Then fill in the non-priority calls.
One irrefutable truth about being a sales person is: your days will rarely go completely according to plan. However, without a plan, you will have totally given up the ability to control and manage your time. By having a plan you have something to fall back on, something to refer to, some benchmark by which to measure the constant and urgent demands on your time.
So, there is an annual component to your sales plan, as well as a monthly discipline. But you are not finished yet.
Weekly plans
You need to reorganize and recommit to your monthly time and territory plan each week. Adjust your plan based on what actually happened the previous week. For example, if you didn’t get to see an ‘A’ account that you had planned, can you see them this week instead? Make your adjustments each week. At the end of the week, spend some time planning and preparing for the upcoming week.
Daily plans
Finally, you need to plan each sales call. What do you want to accomplish in each call? What do you need to prepare in order to accomplish it? Again, you’ll be more focused and more committed if you write down a specific outcome you would like to achieve in each sales call. Keep in mind sales is a process, consisting of a series of steps the buyer and seller take to arrive at a good decision. Your planned outcomes should be narrow and specific. Something like: “Acquire the information I need in order to structure a proposal,” instead of “Sell this account.”
The creation of a sales plan, as you can see, is not a simple, one-time event. Rather it is a discipline which involves a commitment of time and thoughtfulness at specific intervals in the year.
It is also not just an administrative requirement, but a powerful tool that enables a professional sales person to consistently make good decisions about the most important decisions s/he faces: Where to go and what to do!
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Six Essentials in Building a Value Proposition
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 23, 2012
A great deal of conversation these days is about the way the buying process has changed. Sales professionals are discovering they must step up their game to stay in line with customers’ expectations. One thing that hasn’t changed is the buyers’ expectation for receiving value in each transaction be it goods and services or just conversation. There’s been a good amount of interest in the” Value Proposition” as a method of satisfying this expectation and being a “silver bullet” to sales success.
There isn’t quick fix or an easy answer but you’re going to pursue this path here are essential six things to help smooth your value proposition journey.
1. Create first, communicate second
We often find that there is confusion between creating your value proposition and then how you take it and communicate it during the selling process or through marketing channels.
In my experience, it’s absolutely critical to do the high-level creation part BEFORE attempting to communicate the value proposition to your customers and potential customers. Doing it this way around makes the communication part, and therefore the selling part, so much easier. Suddenly we all become clear about the key messages. They’re obvious, simple, clear and based on reality. One of the biggest problems we come across is good sales professionals doing their best to create value messages in the absence of any wider understanding of where the source of their company value lies. Suddenly, the sales professional is forced to come up with a value proposition based on the latest opportunity – retrofitting their messages back into the rest of the organization. Hard work and almost impossible to achieve – I’ve seen many demoralized sales teams sweating this one.
2. Top down, not bottom up
It’s so much easier for sales people to have a clear, high-level, company-wide, value proposition created, and then they are free to tailor this to specific opportunities, rather than having to make them up from scratch. Also, doing it this way around (i.e. top-down) will reduce your cost of sale as you’ll know which opportunities are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
So the starting point needs to be company-wide, or division, or sector or product group, before translating the messages into major accounts or specific products or sales opportunities.
3. Involve all stakeholders
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and a belief from the customer of the value that will be experienced. And you can’t create this by thinking up some clever words. You need input from many sources including people in your organization and your customers.
4. Understand customer risk
We use the value equation where Cost must also include the risk taken by the customer in choosing to buy from you and your company. Benefits are shown squared because the benefits you discover after going through the value proposition creation process must significantly outweigh the costs:
Value = Benefits – Cost
5. Value is not just rational
During the value proposition creation process, it’s not just the rational dimensions of the client’s organization that need to be taken into account but also the political and emotional/psychological. Look at the 3 dimensions of:
• Rational (price, ROI, speed and feeds, features etc.)
• Political (e.g. how is this going to affect the buyer’s job? How will this value proposition be received by their organization?)
• Emotional/psychological (how does the customer feel about you, your products/services and your company?)
6. Offerings deliver value
You can often achieve a huge surge in value for your customers, with very little outlay, by re-bundling or re-packaging existing offerings.
So, is a value proposition a silver bullet? No, it isn’t, but it will significantly help with lead generation, conversion rates and overall profitability but only if you put some blood, sweat and tears into the creation process first. Mine the silver first, hand-carve the bullet and then aim it at a precise target.
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Selling on Price is the Wrong Path to Follow
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 17, 2012
Earlier this month Mark Hunter of The Sales Hunter fame came out with a short and “dead on” accurate article about the serious consequences of slashing prices for the sake of making a sale. Now some of you may say this topic is being beat to death. I hear sales people constantly saying they understand and they realize the impact of such actions and so on and so on… But for some reason (and for far too many sales people) when it comes down to crunch time selling price suddenly becomes flexible. So now everybody, let’s review once more why selling on price is not the path to success;
- Somebody will always come along and offer what you’re offering for a slightly lower price than your price. Don’t think for a moment you are the only one who can offer a low price. As soon as you lower your price, you can expect somebody else to do the same.
- The people you sell to at a lower price will be customers who can’t afford to pay you full price. There will always be a group of customers who are seeking the lowest price, and if you think you’re somehow going to turn them into loyal customers who will pay you full price, you’re crazy. These people have zero desire to pay anything but the cheapest price.
- The customers you attract will see value in what you’re selling at the lower price, but will not see value at the full price. Why should they? If you sold it to them at a lower price, then that is what their expectations are built around.
- Customers who haggle with you wanting a lower price are the same ones that will haggle with you over everything. This is the bane of so many issues. Why do anything that would attract difficult customers? A smarter move would be to encourage them to buy from a competitor.
- The lower profit margin you’re making selling at the lower price is not going to give you or your company the level of profit you need to operate. If you’re not making a profit, there’s no way you can stay in business for very long. Not only do you need to make a profit on what you’re selling today, but you need to make enough profit to allow you to invest in building your business for tomorrow.
- You’re worth full price! Do you view yourself as a cheap person? Of course not! Perspective does matter and if you think you can make a sale only by lowering your price, it will become your go-to method. It will become your “normal.” If you want to see yourself successful and capable of being at the top of your industry, then you simply can’t sell on price alone. And you certainly can’t make a habit out of discounting.
Mark’s list is pretty comprehensive and the points are all valid. I would add one more: The customers’ perception of value goes beyond just the product or service you’re offering. That perception extends to you personally. If you’re ever going to be considered as a valued advisor or consultant i.e. sales professional – caving in on price whenever the negotiation process becomes difficult will destroy any creditability you may have established in the eyes of your client. You become just as much a commodity as the product or service you’re selling. And, you can be just as easily replaced by the next shiny bauble or offer which walks in the door.
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Characteristics of a Successful Sales Team
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on October 14, 2012
What does it take to develop a high performance sales team? This question has been asked by business leaders for as long as B2B sales transactions have been around. So what should you be looking for in your people and what separates a great sales team from an average one.
In this article I’m borrowing heavily from a piece originally written by Steve Eungblut the Managing Director of Sterling Chase. His group worked with hundreds of sales teams and conducted extensive research into what makes the real difference between an average sales team and a great sales team. They came up with the following characteristics:
1. Customer orientation: Since selling is all about aligning your solution with the customer’s needs and desires, a superior knowledge of the client’s world is crucial to the success of any sales team.
To gain superior customer knowledge and outsell the competition, team members should gather as much information about their customers as possible. They should be passionate in their pursuit of customer satisfaction and should immerse themselves in conversations around the customer’s external environment, internal ‘pain points’ and their (known and hidden) needs. Individual team members should also sell their customers’ needs to their own company and portray their customers as the most important that the company has.
2. Own company capability knowledge, relationships and innovation: To acquire a superior knowledge of their own company’s capabilities, each team member should be encouraged to familiarize themselves with the features, advantages and benefits (FABs) of all their products and services. Along with superior customer knowledge, a high degree of product knowledge will make it easier for sales people to align solutions with customer needs and desires. Individual team members should also map out innovative ways in which their company’s capabilities can be positioned and/or adapted to differentiate their proposition from that of the company’s competitors. This should also help team members to up-sell and cross-sell solutions across their portfolio.
3. A proactive drive & determination for results: The sales team should be highly self-motivated and proactively create and drive sales opportunities forward. This should enable individual team members to deliver benefits for their customers, as well as great results for their employers, the team and themselves.
4. Collaboration and a balance of personality types: To be a successful sales team, it is really important that individual members of the team work together rather than in competition with one another. By working collaboratively and being dependent on each other’s selling skills and knowledge, members of the sales team will be deterred from behaviors which can be destructive to the entire team. Collaboration will reduce the likelihood of a destructive blame culture developing in the sales team, for example, while it should foster a more positive and creative working environment – in turn, improving team performance and results.
The team also needs to be balanced with creators, shapers and completer-finishers. If you have a team that simply consists of fiery hunters and you ask them to work together, sparks will most likely fly and team members will clash. On the other hand, if all of your team members are farmers, it is most likely that your sales strategy will take too long to bear fruit.
5. A structured approach to planning and actions: The sales team must take planning really seriously and ensure that they develop and implement plans that have direct and tested links from the analysis stage right through to action and results. Many times a team will implement a sales strategy which fails to credibly link the past, the present, the near-term and the long-term. Successful sales teams make their plans and all associated activities SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). They make their plans drive their activities and constantly revisit, review and test their plans.
6. Manager, leader, coach: Great teams need great leaders. Great leaders are inspirational in the way they are able to adapt to different situations and different challenges. Sometimes they need to tell and drive; sometimes they need to create a credible vision for others to aim for; sometimes they need to facilitate and coach; sometimes they simply need to let go. In fact, every day and every task requires a slant towards different requirements and the sales team’s leader has to let go of his or her own ego – they need to be agile when it comes to switching their leadership style.
Many say great leaders are born and great teams rarely come together by chance. But in reality, successful sales teams can be designed, built, developed and emulated in any situation. You need intelligent, willing and passionate sales people on board who are willing to work together for the customer, the team, the company and for their own ultimate gain.
In summary, great teams need to be put together carefully. They need to love their customers while leading the way for their own company. They need to plan and drive results. They need leaders who can adapt their style from being a sales manager to a sales leader to a sales coach when the time is right.
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Steve Eungblut’s original article can be found at the Sterling Chase Sales & Business Development Blog.
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6 Steps to Enable Your Sales Team to Sell with Insight
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on October 12, 2012
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, it should come as no surprise to you that buyer behavior has changed dramatically. I’ve come across a number of well-written research documents, such as Base One’s “2012 Buyersphere” report and Forbes Insight’s “The Rise of the Digital C-Suite” study, that highlight how this is playing out in the marketplace. Simply put, buyers are more educated, better prepared, and further along in their buying process when they engage sellers.
So, what does this all mean for a company, its sales force, and its ability to compete? Here are 6 steps to leverage “insight selling” to help your team engage buyers early in their process and shape a solution that gives you the best odds of winning:
1. Understand the forces driving your customers to change. Changing external forces such as new technology, competition, or regulatory requirements, as well as internal forces such as new leadership or strategic initiatives, drive organizations to change. Whether driven by external or internal factors, change creates opportunities for providers who can help companies navigate the change. To be successful, you and your sales team must stay on top of the latest trends so that you can guide your clients to capitalize on those that are worthwhile and steer them clear of pitfalls they should avoid.
2. Determine how your organization can uniquely enable these change imperatives. This requires you to reframe your value proposition to address the change your buyers face. You need to determine how you can help them navigate the change process, the benefits they will realize, and the investment (e.g., financial, emotional, or time) required on their part for success.
It’s not enough to be able to say, “We’ve been in this business for 50 years.” That can make you sound old and stale. What have you done lately? Can you demonstrate to prospects that you and your people are at the cutting edge? What makes you better than other companies offering the same service?
3. Proactively educate the buyer on the change imperative and solution options. Be a source of knowledge and insight to raise awareness of the issues driving change and potential solutions to navigate the change. This happens both at a macro level in marketing through research and thought leadership programs and at a micro level by helping your sales reps identify prospects in flux and engage in an insightful dialog around the issue and potential solutions.
Remember our premise above: buyers are more educated and better prepared than ever before. This gives you an opportunity in your marketing to provide research, thought leadership, and practical case studies addressing common issues so that as buyers are getting educated on the matter, insuring you’re already on their radar.
However, don’t assume that your customer is aware of the need or how to solve these challenges. External forces, such as regulatory change or technological innovations, may not be front-page news in the mainstream media. Your organization has to keep its finger on the pulse of the forces that create need for your solutions. You need to help your sales team connect the dots between the emerging challenge and your ability to help. Savvy buyers will be skeptical of following the latest trends, and rightly so. It’s up to you to help them realize what trends to pursue and which to avoid.
What’s the best way to do this? There’s a lot of debate around whether your sales reps should lead with questions or with insights. Much of this depends on your prospect and their level of familiarity with the issue. Sometimes, prospects won’t know what they don’t know, and other times, they will know more than you do. It’s important not to patronize your prospects or speak over their heads. As such, we believe that it is best to either phrase your insight as a question (“How have you prepared to deal with issue XYZ?”) or to state your insight and follow up immediately with a question (“Many organizations we work with have done ABC because of XY&Z; have you considered that concept?”).
4. Proactively educate the buyer on how your solution is typically bought and sold. You sell your solutions every day, but your buyers may only buy a solution to a problem once in a lifetime. You need to tell them how to buy and why that is beneficial to them. This will surface other players in the buying organization who influence the decision and who need to be on board with the solution.
There is some recent thinking on the usefulness of asking questions to better understand the buying process. We believe that not asking these questions is a lost opportunity. The mutual sharing of information around the buying and selling process with prospects that you’ve motivated to change will help you avoid missing key influencers in the sale and help you refine your value proposition to address their unique concerns.
Chances are that what you’re selling will have a greater impact in your clients’ organizations than your buyers’ immediate business unit. Explore with your buyers the “ripple effect” throughout their organization, and use that as an opportunity to engage influencers in those areas.
5. Ensure your sales reps have the knowledge and skills to educate clients, position your value proposition, and cover their bases on a complex sale. With so much information available on the internet, it is easy for you to assume that your sales reps are following developments in their field and can confidently engage in business discussions with buyers. While your sales reps may all be active consumers of industry news, this is seldom sufficient. The biggest risk is that they will misrepresent the issue or your company’s solution or exaggerate the benefits in their enthusiasm to win business.
You need to provide your sales reps with your company’s position on the issue, solution guidelines, and expected benefits. This should be a collaborative activity with your marketing and product teams. Insight selling works most efficiently when your marketing team works on the front end by doing the research on the issue, market, competition, and thought leadership – while your product team creates the roadmap and pricing policies.
Then, you need to arm your sales reps with this material. Teach them to communicate your value proposition to different buying influencers involved in the decision-making process, and the process to advance the sale to closure.
6. Reinforce and sustain “Insight Selling” as a key strategic initiative. Even after you’ve done your positioning and solution preparation and training, you need to continually reinforce the behavior change necessary among your sales reps to realize the full benefit of insight selling. Don’t think of this as a sales training or a marketing initiative – it is really a strategic initiative that requires alignment across your organization.
It requires awareness of the issues, value proposition, and solution from top to bottom. The business needs to make the investment in thought leadership, refining solutions, and marketing. In order for the behavior to stick, each level in the sales organization has a responsibility to “own” their part of the process:
- Sales leadership needs to make the investment in sales rep and management development and have the discipline to establish metrics and measure the progress and impact of the initiative.
- Sales managers need to invest in their own continuous learning about the issues, build their ability to coach sales reps in this new selling paradigm, and hold their sales reps accountable for the right activity and effectiveness.
- And of course, sales reps need to embrace a new way of thinking, continuously build their ability to share insights, and engaging customers in business conversations.
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This article was originally posted to The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™ by Dario Priolo on October 10, 2012
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Five Ways to Keep Your Biggest Customer
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 11, 2012
Before you slash prices, check out these strategies for keeping your best customers happy and loyal.
Contrary to popular belief, a big customer that buys a lot of product from you is not necessarily a good thing. Big companies have a habit of pigeonholing smaller firms into being suppliers of commodity products. That way, they can play you off against your competition in order to push prices down. They don’t care whether you make any money on the deal because they can just switch to another vendor should the price drop drive you out of the business.
Now here’s the good news. There are five ways to defend against this kind of pricing game.
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Strategy #1: Differentiate Yourself. If your firm offers a needed product or service that no other company can provide, then it’s impossible for the big company to play you off against your competitors. To create that differentiation, you position your offering so that whatever is unique about it becomes a “must have” for that customer. There’s the story of a lost a sale of a million-dollar publishing system because the competitor convinced the customer that they needed the ability to set type around the shape of a hand print, something that the customer had never done before and would never do in the future.
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Strategy #2: Provide Expertise. If you or your firm can offer expertise that the customer needs in order to fulfill their goals, you can be strategic to them, even if you’re a commodity supplier. For example, a company that sells glue for manufacturing consumer electronics might have world-class expertise in volume manufacturing that, if shared with their customer, would make them more profitable. That expertise is then periodically “lent” to the customer in order to reduce their manufacturing costs, thereby making an ongoing relationship valuable to the customer.
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Strategy #3: Create a High Replacement Cost. If it would cost the customer a prohibitive amount to replace your firm’s products and services, they’re far less likely to replace you with another competitor. What’s important here is that you create the high replacement cost AFTER you’ve made the sale, because prior to the sale, the big customer (if they’re at all self-aware) are likely to see the replacement cost as liability and thus be less likely to buy from you in the first place.
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Strategy #4: Really Know the Account. If you can get yourself involved in the inner workings of the customer account and become part of their strategic planning, they’ll begin to see you as a consultant rather than a mere supplier. For example, IBM sometimes assigns an employee as a general IT consultant inside Fortune 100 firms. In addition to being a sales representative, that employee is mandated to act as an independent IT resource acts as a clearing house for any problems that occur with IBM’s offerings.
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Strategy #5: Generate Reverse Credibility. This one is tricky, because credibility usually flows from the larger company to the smaller one. (e.g. “Our customer list includes GM and Oracle!”) However, if a smaller firm has a market reputation that helps the larger firm create credibility in a new market, the larger firm will may see the relationship as strategic. Example: the Taiwanese computer manufacturer Acer used to publicly tout its’ relationship with boutique studio FrogDesign in order to seem more “cool” in the consumer PC space.
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Neil Rackham Speaks to the Changing Face of B2B Buying
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 4, 2012
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Neil Rackham – the man who brought us SPIN® Selling – offers some fresh perspectives on the changing state of B2B buying. If you’re a serious Sales Professional dedicated to remaining on the cutting edge of your profession, this short video is a must-watch. Here are some of the key points:
- In a fast moving world, your prospects are struggling to balance coping with their current situation with the need to anticipate and pre-empt future events
- Today’s top sales people are challenging their prospects with ideas and possibilities before the customer has even recognized they have a need
- The changing face of B2B buying behavior is affecting every stage of the “sales process” – vendors must adapt or they will become irrelevant
To find out more, watch this video:
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If video fails to load/start, click this link: Neil Rackham speaks to the changing state of B2B buying
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Structuring an Effective Sales Funnel
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 2, 2012
B2B companies often represent their sales process as a funnel. The sales funnel usually starts with qualified (or “sales ready”) leads and ends with closed-won opportunities. Modern sales methodologies insist on managing this funnel professionally. But how should it be structured in the first place? Obviously, the answer will vary from company to company, but here are three quick tips to hone your funnel.
Meaningful Internal Transitions –a good way to choose the right sales funnel stages is to focus on “meaningful transitions”, i.e. borders between stages representing a shift in the sales process. In this respect, the distinction between “continuations” and “advances” established by the SPIN Selling model is very useful:
- A continuation is an action that is useful in the context of the sale (e.g. sending the prospect a presentation he requested) but does not “move the sale forward”.
- An advance is an action that moves the sale forward (e.g. answering an RFP formally).
This distinction gives you an “internal view” of the best structure for your sales funnel, as advances obviously signal borders between funnel stages.
Meaningful External Transitions – you can also take the “external view” of the transition of opportunities from one stage of your sales funnel to the next. The idea here is to consider your sales process from the perspective of the buyer. What information are they looking for in each stage of the funnel? How do they confirm you have answered their questions? From this, you can infer the content of each funnel stage, hence the overall structure of your sales funnel.
Reflect and Refine – there is another, potentially easier way to find the right structure for your sales funnel: start with the time-tested SPANCO model (see below) and refine it based on the analysis of your funnel dynamics. You are looking for two indicators.
- “Reasonable” conversion rates from one stage of the funnel to another: as a counter-example, a seven-stage funnel with a 55% conversion rate from stage one to stage two would obviously be weird.
- Balanced stage durations: funnel stages should have approximately the same length. This is not a question of aesthetics, but of convenience – it makes identifying potential delays easier and thus reduces monitoring costs.
Over time, pipeline dynamics will reflect both the internal and external view of the structure of your funnel. The key is to keep monitoring them.
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Quick foot note on the SPANCO Model: Just in case you need a reminder, and as I hate making a reference in an article (especially when it’s an acronym) without explanation and/or clarification.
“SPANCO” stands for:
- Suspect – Definition of the target
- Prospect – Identification of the lead
- Approach – Analysis – Evaluation and qualification of requirements, identification of the solution
- Negotiation – Negotiation process
- Closing – Finalization of the order
- Order Ongoing – Account follow-up (up and cross-selling, etc.) Order management and sales monitoring
The SPANCO method offers visibility for each lead and progress at the various phases of the sales process. It also provides you with an ongoing vision of the rate of sales activity in your company.
By clearly identifying the stages in the sales process, you will be able to see the state of your portfolio of leads, so that at any moment, the salesperson (and their line management) can identify where and how to intervene in order to turn a lead into a customer.
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Looking to Accelerate Sales? Get Back to the Basics!
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on October 1, 2012
Feeling frustrated about your current sales results? Trying to accelerate sales can be tough, especially when the economy isn’t doing so well, but it’s not impossible. You don’t have to come up with a completely new game plan to accelerate sales. By sticking to these proven basic simple sales strategies you can increase sales:
Sell “Value”: Focusing your sales pitches on short term value helps people justify buying what you are offering, even in an economic climate of decline. Trying to market a product or service that isn’t necessary in a time when people are trying to cut costs is incredibly difficult. A product or service that offers more immediate value, however, is a lot easier to sell. Make sure your value is expressed in the terms that your target audience uses to describe their business issues and business goals.
Become a Resource: Building trust is key to accelerating sales, especially in a down economy. If you can be a source of valuable information and content, your prospects trust in you will increase. Developing trust and relationships with your prospects will greatly increase the likelihood of a sale. Trust can be built through credibility generated from publishing relevant content, being active and helpful using social media, networking and generating referrals, giving impactful referrals, along with many other non-traditional sales activities.
Personalize: Instead of relying on mass email newsletters, mailing campaigns, or newsletters add an element of personalization to your interactions with prospects. A brief phone call from a sales person could be the key to landing a sale. Personalized contact allows prospects to go from seeing you as a faceless organization to seeing your sales team and company as real people.
Follow Through: Sometimes prospects don’t convert to sales the first, second, or third time you reach out to them, and it can be easy to let these prospects disappear from your radar. Lead nurturing emails, a phone call, or any other way of interacting with your prospects keeps you in front of them and increases your chances of moving forward with the sale. Make sure you set up your sales process in your CRM to allow for regular and value added re-connecting touches with your contacts.
Qualify Your Leads: There are a lot of ways to qualify your leads, but the bottom line is that working with qualified leads saves time, and ultimately increases your campaign ROI. Instead of wasting your top salespersons time with cold calling to unqualified leads, find a way to bring them leads with a higher chance of converting to sales.
It’s the basic and consistent blocking and tackling in sales which yields results. If you do nothing else, keep your focus on these five strategies and you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.
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