A sale, like any other endeavor has key milestones that can be used to judge progress and to measure effectiveness along the way.  At ShadeTree, we call these milestones "inflection" points.  Identifying your organization's key inflection points and measuring performance of your sales team to convert opportunities along to the next point/step is an important step in achieving a repeatable, successful selling process.   

Many sales managers have an intuitive sense about their unique inflection points.  More formalized selling organizations measure, report and manage to success at each point along the path to deal closure.  Identifying your organization's key sales inflection points is one of the first steps in moving from an ad-hoc or informal selling process to a more mature and managed sales process.   

Examples of inflection points in a sale are:

Sellers seeking to be more successful are putting more emphasis on proper sales call preparation.  Competition is fierce and prospect's available time is scarce, so seller's have to be prepared to make the most of this limited customer-facing time.... whether on the phone or in person.  Having an effective call preparation process can significantly improve results.  ShadeTree's Dynamic Conversation Playbooks suggests that the "Prepare" phase of a call consists of:

• Purpose
• Research
• Plan 

 

Want to know the best way to get a prospect to call you back or respond to an email?

Communicate in simple language how your solution helps your prospect: 

• Improve or better execute their business strategy
• Lower the risk of achieving their business strategy
• Solve a problem that is impacting their business strategy

The fastest way to generate revenue is to grow existing accounts.  Most organizations spend the lion's share of their sales efforts looking for new-logo business; with token account management programs in place for existing customers.  Many times these account management programs are more focused on customer satisfaction than revenue enhancement.

 

The selling organization should involve top level managers and sales management in creating a strategy to be increasingly effective at growing revenues to existing organizations.  A "story" should be created that enables the selling organization to get existing customers interested and anxious to spend time investing in bettering their own business through directing more business to your organization.  Below are a few ideas to consider. 

The better a salesperson understands his/her customer's business, the better able the salesperson is to help the customer improve their business.  Improving a customer's business rarely has "price" as the leading topic of interest.  Price never plays a factor in something that a buyer doesn't want or doesn't understand.

Yet, with the pressure to deliver quarterly revenue targets, many sales mangers and performers grab the price lever, believing that price is the fastest way to accelerate a sale to close.   Let's examine a simple approach to getting invited to the short list party... one that doesn't include pricing/discounting.

The primary objective of any sales call is to get the prospective buyer to take action.  Is a lead an actual prospect?  To qualify a lead, we must first get his attention and build his interest prior to "qualifying" him/her and moving to a next step or action.

Welcome!

ShadeTree's mission is to help sales professionals be more successful.

Over the coming months we will be discussing the following topics in more detail: 

• Empowering salespeople to be more effective
• Having better sales conversations for improved results
• Equipping the salesforce with the right tools to be successful
• Ways to optimize and simplify salesforce.com for sales results and measurement

Please accept our invitation to provide your thoughts and feedback as a contributor to this sales community.

We look forward to sharing our experience and learning from you.

Best Regards!

Cameron Randolph