Successfully selling your company’s capabilities to
customers depends on many factors. I
have spent a lifetime looking at this subject, focusing on what many people
call sales readiness. Sales readiness is
what underpins everything that sales and marketing does, including people,
processes, and information. To help
consider where you stand, I have broken it down into 5 segments and 13 key
elements...
- Getting ready
Fundamental to sales readiness is understanding your
market; sounds simple doesn’t it, but these days ‘your market’ changes by
the day, or even the hour. If you were
dependant on the automotive industry six months ago you will be hurting now. When did your senior management team last
spend a day reviewing their target market, its wants / needs, and what it will
pay, as well as considering the ever changing competitive threat? If they
haven’t done it in 2009 they are almost certainly out of touch.
If they do understand their market, they can be sure that
what they sell and what they charge for it (aligned capability and pricing) are 100% aligned to that market,
maximising their chances of making a sale, and a profit. If you don’t believe me, just look at the
companies that have failed in the last year, and the way prices have dropped
with so many types of products and services – market forces at work. An example of a company who have looked at
their market and changed accordingly is Computacenter – almost unrecognisable
from 5 years ago and adapting very well.
Now, to me, it all seems completely obvious and totally
logical; but still companies don’t do it at all, or don’t do it very well, and
pay the price on a daily basis. Why?
Because it is easier to bury your head in the sand and just hope that things
will right themselves on autopilot! As they say, if you always do what you
always did, you will always get what you always got.
Experience shows that a structured approach, or sales process, greatly improves
consistency of sales execution and outcomes.
People who use the process
improve their individual performance and effectiveness, and deliver results for
the business. Sadly, many people believe
that sales is an ‘art’ that doesn’t require structure, rather than a ‘craft’
that does; they are wrong. Just look at
the world’s major corporations of the last 20 years, Nestle, BA, and IBM for
example, and see what ‘structure’ did for them.
- Finding business
Having established a solid foundation, you need to create opportunities to fill the
pipeline. Demand generation has many
sources; from major marketing campaigns to picking up the ‘phone and cold
calling, but whichever your route of choice, it must be highly proactive, as
it’s currently a buyer’s market. In
today’s market ‘sweating’ your network of contacts, old and new, is a good
place to start.
The continual
qualification of opportunities
is the next big area where we see huge scope for improvement on a daily basis;
the more accurately this can be achieved, the lower the cost of sale or sales ‘overhead’. The big issue with qualification is that it
is often subjective, whereas it should be applying logic, objectivity 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 picking this week’s team – it would
never happen. In my recent memory I can
only think of one or two companies doing this even half decently, whereas it
should be a top priority for everyone.
- Winning business
Winning the business depends on developing a great win strategy, including the win price
and your key differentiators, a ‘process’ made easier by the quality of
relationship with the prospective customer.
I wonder 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. If
they could qualify harder and faster and create time to develop better win
strategies, they would greatly improve their win ratio and reduce your cost of
sale as a result.
At some point in the sale, prospective customers nearly
always require proposals and/or presentations as a way of taking things
forward, and these need to be customer focused, short, sharp and
compelling. However, what we see is
recycling in its worst possible form, in that sales people more often than not
just resort to old proposals and presentations.
The customer should rightly feel offended by this approach, as it is
always obvious when it happens. It
doesn’t take long to make the customer feel that the proposal or presentation
was written for them, so why don’t you do just that?
Many sales organisations place a lot of emphasis on the negotiating and closing element of the
sales process, and rightly so, as this is your chance to maximise profit and
minimise risk. This can be best achieved
by recognising a buyer’s personal wins, and doing some give and take, or
trading variables, i.e. if you can I
will etc. So why do sales people often give
in so easily at the first sign of resistance? Probably one of two reasons; fear
of losing credibility for underperformance or because their incentive scheme is
revenue not margin focused. As they say,
motivation drives behaviour.
- Learning lessons
A few paragraphs ago I highlighted the criticality of
historical information, and the issue arises again here. The single biggest point of failure we see in
sales readiness is not capturing and
applying the lessons learned from deals won and lost. This provides intelligence 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.
One big beef we often hear from sales is that they are often
‘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 costs, reputation, referenceability, and the opportunity for more
sales. The solution lies in a better
working relationship between sales and delivery, including shared access to
pipeline information, of which more later.
Many years ago a factory manager showed me a faxed order he had just
received from a sales person for twenty high value machines. Great news says I, bad news says he – nobody
had told him it was coming and on Friday before he had laid off all the people
capable of making them as well as returning all the unused sub-components to
the manufacturers! Now the sales person
was blaming HIM for failure to deliver
the promise.
- Measuring success
Underpinning sales readiness are the management information and reporting systems and processes that
enable customer and pipeline data to be captured and utilised to the benefit of
the business, both short, medium and long term.
The term CRM is often used in this context, and rightly so, however, 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, I suggest you ask.
In this article I have explained the 13 elements of Sales
readiness. How well do you measure up? You
could find out by using our assessment methodology, Get to Great™, a simple and
effective methodology that enables organisations to assess where they are now
and where they need to be in any number of key business areas. For more info please look at www.mentorgroup.co.uk
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