Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
Шрифт:
1. Establish realistic expectations with upper management.
2. Assess your individual and organizational pains.
3. Compare these pains with your vision — identify your performance gaps.
4. Prioritize your initiatives:
• Build a management team that shares your vision.
• Upgrade quickly those who can’t or won’t improve.
• Define your own best sales cycle model.
• Build a new hiring profile for reps; repeat upgrade.
• Re-examine your messaging positioning.
• Train on the methodology using your unique sales cycle and live accounts.
• Only then automate your process, giving reps what they need to win.
• Build your methodology into your forecast, performance reviews, compensation, and hiring profile.
5. Execute change while selling; you can’t stop to rebuild.
6. Document some quick wins to build belief and trust.
7. Reinforce coaching discipline to make winning a habit.
8. Introduce new metrics for accountability, continuous improvement, and perpetual advantage without slowing the reps down.
| Transformation Scorecard | |||||
| Best Practices, Transformation | Importance | Execution | |||
| Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) | Agree, but we never do this | We sometimes do this | We often do this | We do this consistently | |
| Individual | |||||
| We conduct sales-specific performance reviews for salespeople that include the specific skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to execute our best practices sales cycle. | |||||
| Opportunity Management | |||||
| Training is relevant and involves working live deals in class. | |||||
| We have a coaching feedback system from strategy sessions that is a part of our forecast. | |||||
| We have a presentation and messaging feedback system to measure presentation effectiveness. | |||||
| Account Management | |||||
| We have a closed-loop sales and marketing system that integrates sales, service, marketing, and design. | |||||
| Managers attend and help lead training sessions. | |||||
| Managers can track action item completion and training follow-through by individual. | |||||
| Industry/Market | |||||
| We have a top-management commitment to full integration of all sales processes — training, compensation, rewards, hiring, and tools. | |||||
| Our feedback and innovation processes keep our competition reacting to our initiatives. |
Appendix-Review
R.A.D.A.R.® Six P’s of Winning a Complex Sale
As described in detail in Hope Is Not A Strategy, R.A.D.A.R.® is an opportunity management process for controlling competitive evaluations involving politics, strategic solutions, competition, and decision-making processes by committees. This section provides greater detail on the six-P process, so that this book will be complete in itself. If you have already read Hope, this is a review.
In fact, how well and quickly you review and revise your plan is more important than the perfection of the original plan.
The first step in the process is to understand the client’s pain (or gain). What problem is the client trying to solve? A dormant pain is a problem clients don’t even know they have compared with an active pain that they have not only acknowledged but for which they are actively seeking a solution.
Active pains already have money budgeted and teams working with vendors to find a solution. But if you can uncover a dormant problem, elevate it to an active pain, and effectively link your solution to solving it, you gain competitive advantage.
When linking your solution to a benefit, remember to ask yourself what the customer is always thinking: “So what? What does it mean to me?” Failing to answer this question leaves the job of linking your solution to the client’s business pain up to the client, which results in a loss of control and perceived value of your solution. You need to make sure to sell strategic benefits to strategic buyers and sell technical benefits to tactical buyers.
How you qualify a prospect depends on the number of opportunities in your pipeline and your available resources. The first question you should ask yourself when qualifying a prospect is, “Will this business happen for anyone at all?”
Many deals are lost to “No decision.” This is so for two reasons: Either the business pain that you solve is not urgent enough to act upon or there is no political sponsor strong enough to push it through. The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency, or else the deal will sit on the forecast.
The next question should be, “Is this a good opportunity for us?” Keep in mind that in many evaluations the client has already decided who they are going to buy from.
There is a wide range of preference in complex sales ranging all the way from disclosure, where the client is telling you what you need to know to help you win, to the highest level, trust, where they’re buying whatever you’re selling. There is also a spectrum of negative preference, which ranges from skeptical to even open hostility.