What’s the key to selling your company’s capabilities to the customers you want?
Sure there are many factors – having products and services customers will want to buy, for a start – but there’s a critical success factor overlooked by way too many businesses; it’s sales readiness and it underpins all the ‘people, processes and information’ that will drive your sales execution. Let’s be clear; sales readiness is not optional. Only organisations that are truly sales ready will achieve optimal sales effectiveness. So what does your organisation need to do to be sales ready…?
Market Alignment – understand your market and aligning your offering
Understanding your market, your customers and your competition is fundamental to sales readiness. All three are constantly changing, especially in today’s economic climate. When did your senior management team last spend a day reviewing your target market, its wants/needs, what it will pay and the ever-changing competitive threat? If you didn’t do it in 2011, these key elements are almost certainly misaligned.
Only once your management team analyses and understands these three critical market components can they accurately align what you sell and what you charge for it (aligned capability and pricing), maximising your chances of making a sale – and a profit. Failure to do this can be fatal; consider how many companies went under in the last few years and how prices have dropped for so many products and services; that’s market forces at work! Computacenter looked at their market, adapted their business accordingly and are almost unrecognisable from 5 years ago, and doing very well.
The need for market alignment seems logical and obvious; but still there are companies who don’t do it or do it badly – and suffer the consequences on a daily basis. Why? Perhaps they don’t recognise the problem, don’t know how to fix it or, worse, are burying their heads in the sand and hoping that things will right themselves automatically. As the maxim goes, do what you always did and you will get what you always got.
People and Process
Experience shows that a structured approach to selling, or sales process, greatly improves the consistency of sales execution, as well as individual performance and effectiveness. Sadly, too many people believe that sales is an ‘art’ that doesn’t require structure, rather than a ‘craft’ that does. Just look at the world’s major corporations of the last 50 years, IBM, HP or Xerox for example, and see what ‘structure’ did for them.
Alongside your sales process, your organisation needs to recruit, retain, develop and motivate a team of people who exhibit the appropriate customer-facing skills and behaviours required to sell your products and services in your chosen market. They rely on the organisation being sales ready to deliver sales effectiveness.
What does a typical sales process look like? Firstly, you need to fill the pipeline by creating demand and identify new opportunities. Demand generation has many sources; from major marketing campaigns to cold calling, and the obvious place to identify opportunities is your current customers and prospects, and your network. Your chosen route must be very proactive - it’s currently a buyer’s market.
The qualification of opportunities is the stage of the sales process where we see scope for most improvement; the quicker and more accurately this can be achieved, the lower the cost of sale. Qualification is often emotionally charged and very subjective, whereas it should be at least 90% objective, applying logic, facts and historical information from your CRM system. Sadly, most sales organisations ignore the value of historical information, often not even capturing it. Imagine Manchester United ignoring the video of last week’s performance when preparing for the next match; unthinkable. Learning from past performance should be a top priority for every organisation.
Also note that not all qualified opportunities are equal. You must objectively categorise and prioritise opportunities against agreed criteria, as this helps with focus and resource allocation, and the likely outcome.
Winning the business depends on developing a great win strategy, including the win price and differentiators, a ‘process’ made easier by the quality of relationship with the prospective customer. How many sales people could articulate a win strategy if put on the spot by their boss? Why is this? I believe that poor qualification causes sales people to be overloaded. Qualify harder and faster, thus creating time to develop your win strategy as a discrete stage in the sales process, improving your win ratio and reducing cost of sale as a result.
Prospective customers nearly always require you to articulate your proposition formally using proposals and/or presentations. These must be customer-focused, concise, targeted and compelling. Unfortunately, what we too often see is recycling in its worst form, rehashed work without the benefit of the expertise and/or support that a formal bid function can deliver. Customers aren’t fooled by this.
They want you to write proposals and presentations that come across as written specifically for them. Enabling your sales people to do that is key to being sales ready, and will deliver real sales effectiveness.
The negotiating and closing stage of the sales process represents your main chance to maximise profit and minimise risk. This is best achieved by recognising a buyer’s ‘personal wins’ and negotiating using ‘give and take’ or trading variables, i.e. “If you can do this, I will do this” etc. So why do sales people so often ‘give the shop away’ at the first sign of resistance? Fear of losing their job for underperformance – or because their incentive scheme is revenue not margin focused? As they say, motivation drives behaviour.
I mentioned earlier the criticality of historical information, and here I go again! The single greatest point of failure we see in sales readiness is not capturing and applying the lessons learned from deals won and lost. This invaluable information provides the intelligence required to inform every aspect of your approach to sales, marketing, product development and short, medium and long term business planning and strategy. If you take one thing from this article and apply it to your business, make it this.
Last but not least…
Sales people often tell us they feel ‘let down’ by their company when it comes to delivering the promise sold to the customer. Failure to meet expectations has a huge impact on revenue and margin, reputation, referenceability – and more sales. The solution lies in a better working relationship between sales and delivery, including sharing pipeline information. A salutary sale; some years ago a factory manager showed me an order he had just received from a sales person for 20 high-value machines. Great news, you’d think. Not for him. Nobody had told him it was coming. On the Friday before, he had laid off all the people capable of making the machines and returned all the unused sub-components to the manufacturers. Now the sales person was blaming HIM for failure to deliver the promise.
Underpinning sales readiness are the management information and reporting systems and processes that enable customer and pipeline data to be captured, manipulated and shared to the benefit of the business; short, medium and long term. The term CRM is often used in this context, but CRM is NOT just an IT system, but a way of life for organisations who want structure and control of their sales engine.
If sales readiness had bookends they would be understanding your market and defining, communicating and measuring success; which means how well an organisations defines what success looks like at an individual, team and company level, and how well this is communicated, understood, applied and measured – a big ask, but mission-critical. Do you understand where your company is going, what your role is in that journey, how you can contribute, and how you will be rewarded? If not, ask....
The Get to Great™ Sales Readiness model will help you become truly sales-ready;
With an improved understanding of how to deliver sales readiness; how well does your organisation measure up? You can measure your sales readiness with Get to Great™, a simple and effective benchmarking methodology that enables organisations to assess where they are now, where they need to be and how to get there, supported by detailed advice and action plans.
Other Get to Great™ models include Sales Effectiveness and Bid Capability. All our models are delivered online and in workshops as the front end of a consultancy engagement that will deliver a measurable improvement in YOUR sales execution, performance and results.
For more information contact Chris Whyatt of Get to Great™ at chris@gettogreat.co.uk or +44 777 929 7401
