The document appears to be a pie chart or graph showing percentages for different categories, with the largest sections being "No Value" at 40%, "No Time" at 30%, and "No Knowledge" at 20%. The remaining categories "No Request" and "Other" make up less than 10% combined.
55% of Sales Reps are leaving money on the table (self-reported).Most sales people don’t get the most value from their strategic accounts.They fail to adequately identify their customer’s goals, drivers, and initiativesAnd know who to reach in the customers’ organization, And learn what is of high value to both them and us.They fail to plan.How many of you maximize the value of your deals?Source: Dealmaker Index
Thank you Suzanne.I’d like to start our session today with a question.Imagine we are one hour from now. You finish up the webinar, log off of the web meeting and your phone rings. It is one of your sales people if you are a manager or one of your customers if you are a frontline sales professional. You have been working with this customer for quite some time on a very large and important deal – both to your customer, your company and to you personally. They are calling you to break some bad news – they have decided to go with one of you competitors.Here is my question – think about that deal – each and everyone of you have “that one.” Why did you lose? Why did they decide to go in another direction – away from you. For sales people, that is a cruel question – but one that can be all to real. The point of this webinar today is to outline the thinking of The TAS Group to prevent that call from happening.Lets dive in.
I like to start by framing up the discussion. Where doesour conversation today fall into the overall Go to market strategy?This chart orients left to right. When thinking about your go to market strategy, you first need to decide how you are going to segment your market. Then once you have that completed, you need to undergo some sort of Strategic Account planning to understand how to best serve your customers and your company by understanding where are those places in your relationship where they have a business problem that is either known or unknown that you can help them solve…the classic white space analysis. After that work is done and opportunities are identified, then you will need to have a methodology to guide the management of your selling strategy and tactics…this is where we will be focusing our time today. On the far right side of this continuum is opportunity management. How do you best work with your customers to bring the business need to a signed order?
Over the years, our sales people have seen so much in terms of tools, methodologies and sales automation.Xcel was (and for some) still is their primary sales “automation” tool. For many sales managers, Xcel is still their default forecasting tool.Then we experienced applications like ACT, Goldmine and other desktop based contact managers.Salesforce.com lead the way to provide organizations with a tool to bring together sales teams with their social, mobile and cloud service.What’s next for sales teams? Sales people expect their sales automation tools to be everything I’ve described but also “smart” with real time coaching. The evolution of sales has shifted “from who you know” “to find the pain” “to intelligent insight.”We believe intelligent deal coaching is the next wave of sales automation.
If Sales Automation is about making sales people more efficient, sales methodology is about making sales people more effective. This is a key distinction.But some Sales Methodologies are not delivered in context with their deals, their accounts and their team selling activity. We’ve seen hours, days and some times week of training, where people are just focused on learning the material, and not necessarily the application and impact…or how they are going to use this everyday.It is difficult to remember.If you think about how we all operate now in our always connected world, we have seen a shift to an “always on world” and amazing amount of information that we encounter everyday…and we want it at our finger tips.And buyers are getting more sophisticated, therefore sellers need to become more sophisticated too.
Buyers are getting smarter, sometimes sellers aren’t. As buyers get more sophisticated, sellers need to become more sophisticated too. And as “sales professionals” if we don’t take this challenge very seriously, the gap is widening.
Over the years, there reaches a point where the more you invest in training, tools and community the improvement in sales effectiveness does not necessarily correlate. A vast majority Companies Are Not Realizing Sales Training ROI on the $10B annual spendCompanies spend between $2,700 to $10,000 / sales person / yearIt’s amazing to see how much companies spend on sales training today.Sales people appreciate training but a lot of the dollars being spent today are going wasted. There must be a better way.
There is still a problem with efficiency and effectiveness. How can we help sales people be more productive?According to the Sales Executive Council, when coaching is added, sales productivity is improved by 88%. As a result of coaching, Return on Investment in sales goes up 27%, according to Gallup. And, where sales coaching is involved, customer loyalty improves by 56%.Why do managers resist coaching? Managers don’t see the valueNot enough time to coachManagers don’t know how to coachSales reps don’t ask for coachingOtherWe are going to come back to this in a little bit.
If you are a sales manager on this call, You can improve your sales team’s performance by improving 4 levers that impact sales velocity.# Deals – how many deals are you working on and more importantly – are they the right deals?$ Value – has the value of those deals been maximized to best meet the needs of your customers?% Close – Are you winning the right amount of deals?Length of Sales Cycle – how long is it taking your team to win these dealsThese become your core KPIs.The are the factors that impact revenue – your sales velocity (what are your dollars per day)And the magic is when your sales KPIs come to life and you start impacting the sales velocity formula.
In a world where there are so many factors influencing so many elements of our day-to-day existence as sellers, we have boiled it down to 10 elements that make Great Opportunity Management:We know that Smart Qualification of the deals we are choosing to allocate our most precious resources on is critical – lets enable our organizations to win 4 of 7 deals vs 3 of 10 deals – Smart Qualification is critical.We know that truly understanding the landscape of the people and the influence in a buying and selling scenario is paramount to your successWe know that discovering the business drivers, the challenges, and the evidence of what can and should influence the customer’s buying decision and then collaborating with your customer on this can truly differentiate your Unique Business ValueSelecting and pursuing the proper competitive strategy is a key element to the success or failure of your selling scenarioAll of this needs to be tied to actions so you and your team stay accountable to each other and your customer - building that element of trustAs we saw just a few slides ago, there are huge benefits to sales coaching. Why not have it embedded into the DNA of your sales methodology - so it happens every day – whether you remember to do it or not?Motivation – what motivates sales people? Studies show that ahead of compensation, knowing that you have made meaningful progress toward winning everyday is the key motivator to most sales people.Social and collaborative – As companies rely on social collaboration tools like Chatter, sales people are leading the way to improve collaboration within their sales teams. Great Opty Mgmnt that leverages a social and collaborative approach helps by letting everyone ‘follow’ the opportunity, contribute to the conversation, and collaborate on the deal...this is the today and the future of selling.We are very proud of our relationship with Salesforce.com. Integrating your opportunity management with your CRM should be a “no brainer.” But, not all integrations are created equally. If you are on Salesforce, then your opportunity management will benefit hugely if it is ‘native’ on the Salesforce Platform. Unlike other solutions that are linked to Salesforce, or just lightly integrated, this means that your data resides in the Salesforce Sales Cloud, with the same security as Saleforce, the same performance as Salesforce, and all of the data captured is inherently accessible to Salesforce reports, dashboards, and other applications. It is where you work everyday. . You do not have to worry about the security of a third party Cloud, the data transfer issues that occur with non-native solutions, or the reliability of a third party hosting infrastructure. Complete integration with your CRM delivers the optimum experience for the sales person, and provides sales managers with greater flexibility on how they view the data in the context of the rest of the business. It is important.Time is precious, and the sales person’s time is incredibly precious, both to them and to the sales organization looking to maximize the performance of their key quota-bearers. Since so much of a sales person’s time is spent moving between A and B and back again, they should be equipped with the mobility to connect to their opportunity management allowing them to be responsive, productive, collaborative and consistent at any time, wherever they are. In other applications, mobile and cloud capabilities are being leveraged to facilitate access anywhere, anytime. It must be the same here as well.
So how does it all start fitting together? How do the Sales Velocity Equation and the elements of a Great Opportunity Management Solution intersect?Here are a few examples:
AsI mentioned earlier, wouldn’t it be great to get our sales teams to begin winning 4 of 7 deals verses 3 of 10 deals or even better?It all starts with Qualification. In Target Account Selling methodology or TAS, we start with four key questions:Is there an Opportunity? – does the customer have a Compelling Event – a reason they truly have to act?Can we compete? – Do we truly understand what the Key Players in the opportunity need to accomplish and do they feel we have Unique Business Value that is beter than the alternative?Can we win? – Do we have Executive Credibility? Do we have Political Alignment? Do we have Inside Support?And critically – Is it WORTH winning? Is the short term revenue - the potential future revenue great enough to allocate resources? Is there strategic value to this particular customer? Is the degree of risk and profitability a good choice for your organization? These can be hard questions for a sales person to ask when they are responsible for bringing in their quota – on time.
Are your sales people picking the right competitive strategy? Are they aware of the different types of competitive strategies there are? Do they know that two specific strategies can allow you to create more incremental value for your customer by altering or enhancing the buying criteria? This approach can affect the value of your opportunity and increase the value your customer derives from their buying decision.
Alignment and understanding of the customer’s organization are table stakes. Based on the analysis of 1000s of sales reps in an annual report we sponsor – the Dealmaker Index, we know that only some sales professionals know how to access key players better than others. In the 2013 version of the Dealmaker Index survey we learned that those sales reps can gain access to Key Players achieve 30% more Revenue than those that do not access Key Players. I’ll be asking you all what you think the % of reps is that can access key player is in a moment.Getting a picture of the buyer’s organization and how key players influence each other is really important. We will take a look at this in more detail in a moment.
I mentioned earlier that knowing the customer’s Business Drivers, Challenges and issues created by those challenges is key to unlocking what the Compelling event is for your customer. Using the Insight Map to collaborate and confirm this information with your customer is key to moving the deal along.
Suzanne to make this a poll in GoToWebinar.Suzanne: Will Jacqueline be onboard to help?
We surveyed thousands of sales people and they shared what’s working and what’s not working for them. Sales people are struggling: -getting access to power-qualifying deals-uncovering compelling events-developing a competitive strategy.
A customer is most likely to buy when they have an active and defined need. As we have seen from much research lately, customer are doing much of their research prior to engaging in the buying process with a potential vendor. They are a highly qualified prospest but our ability to affect the solution they want or to add additional value is at its lowest…they are shopping.
When we are able to partner with a current or potential customer to help them demensionalize an otherwise unknown need that helps them drive their business forward – this is when we are able to drive the greatest value creation for our customers, but his approach takes a highly capable sales professional that is receiving great coaching from their manager.
According to the Sales Executive Council, when coaching is added, sales productivity is improved by 88%. As a result of coaching Return on Investment in sales goes up 27%, according to Gallup. And, where sales coaching is involved, customer loyalty improves by 56%.
As we can see by this slide from The Sales Leadership Forum, Sales Coaching is seen has highly important, but least supported activity…this is strange.
Make this slide a poll.
So the question to ask is: How do you enable Managers to coach when they may not know the how or the what of coaching in today’s time starved 100mph world? How do you put that enablement at both their finger tips AND the finger tips of the sales professionals on their teams? These questions have been keeping us late and getting us up early here at The TAS Group for the last 8 years. We have be on a quest to put these enabling tools in the hands of sales professionals where they work everyday = salesforce.com
PresenterAssess, pol map, insight, coach me integration with CRM (call out importance of native)The TAS Methodology is the DNA for our Dealmaker Application
I’d like you to introduce you to Dealmaker Smart Opportunity Manager
Ask for and address any final questions.
55% of Sales Reps are leaving money on the table (self-reported).Most sales people don’t get the most value from their strategic accounts.They fail to adequately identify their customer’s goals, drivers, and initiativesAnd know who to reach in the customers’ organization, And learn what is of high value to both them and us.They fail to plan.How many of you maximize the value of your deals?Source: Dealmaker Index