Tag Archives: Qualify

How Do You Establish Sales Accountability? Three Approaches

Situation: Several CEOs have experienced difficulty establishing accountability within their sales teams. Sone sales reps consistently come up with excuses for not generating new accounts or meeting their sales objectives. The impact of lost sales had significant effects on revenue performance. How do you establish sales accountability?
Advice from the CEOs:
• It is vital to understand who are the best customers and most profitable products and services for those customers. Establish regular sales meetings to discuss customers, products and services, to identify promising sales opportunities and to coordinate sales efforts.
• Work with both sales management and individual team members to determine desired outcomes:
 Set sales targets – work with the team to establish firm expectations on reasonable and achievable sales targets. Agree on a tracking system to measure progress toward those targets. Encourage members of the team to work together to achieve the targets.
 Customer type – who are they, what are their priorities and expectations, and how can the company best address these.
 Product(s) – work with the team to determine which products best fit each customer type and develop creative ways to position those products to increase sales.
• Establish measurable behaviors which if done will result in success. For example:
 Calls per week and results of those calls.
 Relationships with key decision makers and development of additional relationships within existing and potential customers.
 Thorough qualification before quoting, presenting, demo, and so on. The who, what and why that connects with successful sales..

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How Well Do You Know Your Target Audience? Five Points

Situation: A CEO and her team manage a growing and profitable company. She is interested in what others have done to expand their market presence and penetration. In discussion, other CEOs have been curious about her company’s marketing capabilities, and how well her team knows their customer base. The essential question that they ask is “How well do you know your target audience?”

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Become a thought leader:
    • This is Inexpensive because the company is already a leader in its field.
    • Marketing through thought leadership allows the company to get its message out with fewer resources than push marketing efforts.
    • Thought leadership adds credibility and educates the customer.
  • Qualify the need and/or the perception of the need. If there is no need, there is no sale.
    • It’s perfectly acceptable to ask clients about their challenges and needs.
    • Ask them to measure the need on a 1-10 scale.
    • Ask the client to play out the scenario without an adequate solution.
    • Ask the prospect how they have worked with others offering similar services to your company’s and how did that go?
  • Ask your customers to help.
    • Develop a Customer Advisory Board to test a new product or concept – a “Blue Ribbon Panel”.
    • Write a paper together with them to highlight the findings.
  • Use common sense, but:
    • Set measurable goals and listen to enough people to get more directed feedback.
  • The company’s internal staff is also a target audience.
    • Integrate departmental cultures to assure that they don’t clash.
    • Conduct collaborative off-sites to encourage cooperation and support.
    • Create processes for all departments and staff.

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How Do You Create Larger Deal Sizes? Six Options

Situation: A company has good deal flow, but the CEO finds that margins are significantly increased with larger deals. Larger deals reduce the overhead component, much of which is the same regardless of deal size. The company is dominant in their market and can provide multi-site and multinational services. How do you create larger deal sizes?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • One company with multiple consulting contracts has found that bidding for RFPs on larger projects has opened the door to larger contracts..
  • Another company has looked at cost of sales and its contribution to business wins. .
    • Under 6% was ineffective and over 12% did not generate significantly more business. Their target win ratio is 30%
    • Factors that positively influenced win ratios were positioning the company as the preferred bidder up-front, and avoiding sham RFPs which are already slotted in favor of a competitor that helped to spec the RFP:
  • When bidding on RFPs, if the company will not be the low bidder it is important to identify the critical non-price parameters where the company will offer a differential advantage.
    • Focus on large multi-site or international RFPs which are more likely to be larger dollar RFPs.
    • Look at supply chain management opportunities.
    • Offer to warrant results in exchange for a higher price.
    • Look at system-type opportunities where the company can offer a more comprehensive solution based on its depth and experience.
    • Look for situations where the company can develop an advantaged position.
  • What are the implications of these strategies?
    • It will require retraining the inside sales force to research and qualify RFPs.
    • It will shift the focus to project vs. outsourcing opportunities. The latter are more price and availability driven and don’t play to the company’s strengths.
  • Explore channel sales through the existing partner network.
    • Offer a referral fee to regionals for referring opportunities outside their scope. In return, hire them as subs on the project.
  • Take a look at the big engineering firms who work multinational contracts, and handle their mitigation matters with small teams.
    • Offer them a comprehensive approach that is less expensive, more consistent, and more visible than their current self-service approach.

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How Do You Assure Consist Reliable Service? Six Solutions

Situation:  A company has remote employees who are on a wide variety of schedules. Retaining great employees is a challenge, and with this consistent service due to turn-over. How do they improve the relationships that they have with remote employees? How do you assure consistent reliable service?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Guarantee employee income for a period after they lose a client and as you seek another assignment for them. Limit your exposure by setting hurdles – an employee must have served the company for X time to qualify for this benefit.
  • Create your own “down time” bank. Say you pay an employee $10. Give them $9 and put $1 into a bank so that you can pay them once they lose their current client. The fact that their bank is limited to the amount of these contributions creates an incentive not to draw down the bank.
  • Offer a paid day off per month of service.
  • How do you shift your business from commodity to specialty, as a value add business?
    • What Peace of Mind features could you provide to your clients to create added value and stickiness? For example, can you provide a portal into your system so that clients can access information on the services that you’ve provided, or enhance their ability to communicate with their own clients? What about access to time schedules, account notes, etc.
    • Look for a solution that will shift the industry.
    • Look at menu driven packaging and pricing options. Examples include discount pricing for purchase volume commitments or iPads for a significant level of investment.

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How Do You Optimize Your Buy/Sell Funnels? Three Strategies

Situation: A CEO is concerned that his company’s sales and marketing efforts are not effective. Too often the sales team finds a good prospect, but fails to convert them to the company’s offering. How can the company improve its sales conversion rate? How do you optimize your buy/sell funnels?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • To improve both your marketing and sales functions, it is essential to move the company’s perspective from the Sales side of the Seller’s Funnel to the Marketing side of the Buyer’s Funnel. Only by understanding your customers can you:
    • Create awareness of their needs,
    • Acknowledge interest in a solution to their needs,
    • Consider options and develop preferences among the possible solutions, and
    • Determine how to effectively communicate with them through your marketing and sales efforts.
  • In today’s world, a quality web site is essential to your business. The objective of the web site is to convince the customer that they want to talk to or do business with you. Your web site must tell them:
    • Who you are.
    • What your values are.
    • Why you are special.
    • And it must include a “call to action” – a convincing reason for them to call you.
  • To better qualify your prospective clients:
    • Develop a scripted telephone interview that can be conducted by your sales people or less expensive inside sales/marketing people to qualify prospects before you spend the time and effort for an in-person sales call.
    • Use targeted marketing programs to leverage references to prospective customers.
    • Have lots of conversations with potential customers to understand their needs. Tailor your value creation process to address these needs.

Special Thanks to Craig Olson of MXL Partners for his contribution to this discussion.

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What’s the Best Way to Allocate a Bonus Pool? Three Points

Situation: A company allocates 10% of pre-tax profit to a Bonus Pool. Employees qualify for quarterly bonuses based on company and group performance, and for semiannual bonuses based on individual performance. Last year not all funds were paid out of the pool because some employees failed to hit performance targets. What’s the best and fairest way to allocate the excess funds in the pool?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Why not let the pool be the pool? Employees will or will not qualify for bonus participation based on individual and group performance. The company determines who qualifies at each level and these individuals become the pool participants, splitting the full pool in proportion to their level of qualification and their salary.
  • Not all companies will do this based on pay and bonus level policies. For these companies there are options on what to do with unpaid bonus funds in the pool:
    • Leave the funds in the pool for future distribution;
    • Shift unpaid bonus to Retained Earnings; or
    • Retain a percent of the funds in the pool and shift the rest Retained Earnings.
  • Another consideration is whether to use discretionary or metric criteria to determine bonuses. Some companies use only or primarily metric criteria, others use discretionary criteria, and some use a blend of metrics for one portion of the bonus with the remaining portion discretionary. The rationale behind discretionary criteria is to give managers the opportunity to recognize extraordinary contributions that fall outside the normal metrics.

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What are the Strategic Components of a Sales Model?

Interview with Sanjay Sathe, President & CEO, RiseSmart.com

Situation: RiseSmart is in the process of building an inside sales program to complement their outside sales capabilities. What are the most important strategic components of an effective sales model?

Advice:

  • In a marketing and sales system, marketing is the precursor to everything. If you can’t effectively deliver your message to your audience, you have no lead generation machine and sales must resort to cold calls.
    • In an online world, one of the key components of a marketing system is the email campaign, combined with tools for rapid and responsive follow-up.
  • In RiseSmart’s system, the inside sales team is primarily responsible for following up on leads.  The team’s role is:
    • To qualify the prospect responding to our marketing efforts. Is this person the right buyer for their company? If not, who is?
    • Does the company have a budget for our services? If not, when will they?
    • Is this the right time? Do they have a current contract in place? Are they actively looking?
  • The most critical aspect of the inside sales rep’s role is to be an effective filter in collecting and passing data to the field sales force.
  • Many inside sales reps fail because their performance is measured on the number of calls made, not the quality of the calls or information gathered.
  • Our incentives for inside sales are based on the quality of data gathered and on the success of field sales in closing the leads they receive.
  • The effectiveness of outside sales really comes down to choosing the right people.
    • The 80/20 rule applies here.  One out of five field sales reps hired is truly successful, one is marginal, and three don’t make it.
    • We hire based on experience selling to our target customer groups, subjective elements, and careful reference checks.
  • As CEO, I consider hiring good people the most important thing I do.

You can contact Sanjay Sathe at [email protected]

Key Words: Inside Sales, Field Sales, Qualify, Filter, Performance, Measurement, Incentive, Selection  [like]