Step One - Market Identification
Your Market - How large is the market for your solutions? How do you differentiate a great prospect from an average one?
We offer a second set of eyes on the assumptions and generalizations that have come to be accepted as “truth”. This is a fairly simple and short process but if it is overlooked the balance of the plan will be compromised and your success limited. The focus is Who to Reach?
Your Differentiators – Are these plainly written down and communicated in a prospect friendly fashion? Can your staff communicate the same differentiators consistently in 30 seconds? The focus is What to Say?
Your Value – How does your sales team communicate your differentiated value? Does your value support a higher price than is currently being asked? How often is pricing discounted in order to win? Do you know with absolute certainty the dollars per month lost due to discounting? The essence is What does it Mean?
Step Two - Reaching the Who
While it might be tempting to hire a sales person and hand the yellow pages or you’re out-dated database to them for prospecting, (you'd never really do that right?!?!?) perhaps there are more effective methods to first consider.
To start or for incremental growth, your marketing activities may be all the "direct" sales force you require to increase revenue. Professional service firms typically use marketing, strategic partnerships, business development, networking and referrals as their sales drivers and have done extraordinarily well. The reason marketing activity identification comes before sales hiring is it will directly impact the role of the sales person and thus the type of sales person to be recruited.
Will you drive enough activity that the sales person strength needs to be in presenting, qualifying and closing? Or is the marketing only to drive general awareness and the sales staff must be exceedingly adapt at prospecting? Hiring an executive level sales person for a selling environment that is relationship-based and expect them to spend 4 hours a day on telephone prospecting will have a high degree of failure.
The complexity of your selling environment along with the relative number of transactions and their respective average sales volume will lead us to the right role for marketing and the right role for your sales team. For most their potential market is far larger than what they have available to spend in marketing. Thus marketing is a two way street today – your marketing must Reach Your Who and it must engage them in a manner that they in turn will …Reach back to You!
This is the value of all your marketing – speaking, articles, public relations, direct mail and especially your web-based efforts. Once Your Who has responded to a marketing activity (perhaps to a White Paper or Special Offer) and you’ve captured their email address specifically, you can now turn on effective drip marketing campaigns that nurture them into increased interest and awareness of your solutions. The conclusion of Step Two is to decide what is the right marketing investment for you in the next 6 to 12 months?
Step Three - Prepare your Sales Success Foundation
There is no greater loss in resources, market time, goodwill and MONEY than in the staffing of sales people. Why is sales turnover always around 50% year in and year out? Here are the Top 10 Reasons:
1. Misunderstood Role (see Step Two)
2. Poor selection (no objective candidate qualification process)
3. Assuming you’ve hired an expert who won't need training (there are always a myarid of internal issues of training)
4. No effective on-boarding plan
5. Unrealistic sales and compensation expectations
6. Ineffective to non-existent sales tools (Core Story, Site Seller, CRM System)
7. Undocumented sales process (wasted sales time and worse loss of credibility with prospects)
8. Loose to non-existent activity goals for first 90 to 180 days
9. Loose daily management
10. No formal monthly performance meeting
Management should have all the above prepared and thoroughly written out prior to starting the interview process. Why? Because the best candidates you will interview expect them to be!
We offer the documentaiton and summarization of these three steps results into a Sales Operations Guide that becomes your defacto standard methodology.
Step Four - Go forth hire, train and manage
You may be in a setting where there is an opportunity to make a funding request from a corporate budget. If you are an existing business, already fully funding marketing and sales, you may have to “over invest” for a period of time or it may be appropriate to consider rebalancing between your “Sales Portfolio” and you’re “Marketing Portfolio”. Generally speaking this means decreasing one budget (or not rehiring when you have turn over) and reinvesting that into the area of need.
For example, it your sales staff is large and underperforming as a group, reallocate the budget of the least performing sales staff into development of effective sales tools or marketing that will increase overall sales and create a healthier sales environment. You can rehire these positions (with the right people) once the right marketing support and sales tools are in place for the existing staff to be fully performing.
The following are provided as a theoretical example to understand the area’s requiring investment to grow sales. Percentages are shown as a reflection of how you should consider aligning management resources and are not meant to directly reflect hard dollars. Your specific allocation and timing would be identified during our engagement.
Sample Start-Up
Existing Minimal Marketing, Large Sales Staff
Existing Large Marketing, Minimal Sales Staff
A significant part of our value proposition is creating or updating a written view of your market, differentiators and value. Talk is cheap, we write it down. Give us a call.
Your Market - How large is the market for your solutions? How do you differentiate a great prospect from an average one?
We offer a second set of eyes on the assumptions and generalizations that have come to be accepted as “truth”. This is a fairly simple and short process but if it is overlooked the balance of the plan will be compromised and your success limited. The focus is Who to Reach?
Your Differentiators – Are these plainly written down and communicated in a prospect friendly fashion? Can your staff communicate the same differentiators consistently in 30 seconds? The focus is What to Say?
Your Value – How does your sales team communicate your differentiated value? Does your value support a higher price than is currently being asked? How often is pricing discounted in order to win? Do you know with absolute certainty the dollars per month lost due to discounting? The essence is What does it Mean?
Step Two - Reaching the Who
While it might be tempting to hire a sales person and hand the yellow pages or you’re out-dated database to them for prospecting, (you'd never really do that right?!?!?) perhaps there are more effective methods to first consider.
To start or for incremental growth, your marketing activities may be all the "direct" sales force you require to increase revenue. Professional service firms typically use marketing, strategic partnerships, business development, networking and referrals as their sales drivers and have done extraordinarily well. The reason marketing activity identification comes before sales hiring is it will directly impact the role of the sales person and thus the type of sales person to be recruited.
Will you drive enough activity that the sales person strength needs to be in presenting, qualifying and closing? Or is the marketing only to drive general awareness and the sales staff must be exceedingly adapt at prospecting? Hiring an executive level sales person for a selling environment that is relationship-based and expect them to spend 4 hours a day on telephone prospecting will have a high degree of failure.
The complexity of your selling environment along with the relative number of transactions and their respective average sales volume will lead us to the right role for marketing and the right role for your sales team. For most their potential market is far larger than what they have available to spend in marketing. Thus marketing is a two way street today – your marketing must Reach Your Who and it must engage them in a manner that they in turn will …Reach back to You!
This is the value of all your marketing – speaking, articles, public relations, direct mail and especially your web-based efforts. Once Your Who has responded to a marketing activity (perhaps to a White Paper or Special Offer) and you’ve captured their email address specifically, you can now turn on effective drip marketing campaigns that nurture them into increased interest and awareness of your solutions. The conclusion of Step Two is to decide what is the right marketing investment for you in the next 6 to 12 months?
Step Three - Prepare your Sales Success Foundation
There is no greater loss in resources, market time, goodwill and MONEY than in the staffing of sales people. Why is sales turnover always around 50% year in and year out? Here are the Top 10 Reasons:
1. Misunderstood Role (see Step Two)
2. Poor selection (no objective candidate qualification process)
3. Assuming you’ve hired an expert who won't need training (there are always a myarid of internal issues of training)
4. No effective on-boarding plan
5. Unrealistic sales and compensation expectations
6. Ineffective to non-existent sales tools (Core Story, Site Seller, CRM System)
7. Undocumented sales process (wasted sales time and worse loss of credibility with prospects)
8. Loose to non-existent activity goals for first 90 to 180 days
9. Loose daily management
10. No formal monthly performance meeting
Management should have all the above prepared and thoroughly written out prior to starting the interview process. Why? Because the best candidates you will interview expect them to be!
We offer the documentaiton and summarization of these three steps results into a Sales Operations Guide that becomes your defacto standard methodology.
Step Four - Go forth hire, train and manage
You may be in a setting where there is an opportunity to make a funding request from a corporate budget. If you are an existing business, already fully funding marketing and sales, you may have to “over invest” for a period of time or it may be appropriate to consider rebalancing between your “Sales Portfolio” and you’re “Marketing Portfolio”. Generally speaking this means decreasing one budget (or not rehiring when you have turn over) and reinvesting that into the area of need.
For example, it your sales staff is large and underperforming as a group, reallocate the budget of the least performing sales staff into development of effective sales tools or marketing that will increase overall sales and create a healthier sales environment. You can rehire these positions (with the right people) once the right marketing support and sales tools are in place for the existing staff to be fully performing.
The following are provided as a theoretical example to understand the area’s requiring investment to grow sales. Percentages are shown as a reflection of how you should consider aligning management resources and are not meant to directly reflect hard dollars. Your specific allocation and timing would be identified during our engagement.
Sample Start-Up
Existing Minimal Marketing, Large Sales Staff
Existing Large Marketing, Minimal Sales Staff
A significant part of our value proposition is creating or updating a written view of your market, differentiators and value. Talk is cheap, we write it down. Give us a call.
312-217-2080
Search Accountability Partners:
Loading
© 2011 Accountability Partners Phone: 312.217.2080 Email: info@accountabilitypartners.com
| Timeframe | Marketing Planning | Marketing Activities | Sales Planning | Sales Tools | Sales Staff |
| 1 to 6 months | 40% | 10% | 25% | 25% | 0% |
| 6 to 12 months | 15% | 20% | 15% | 30% | 20% |
| 12 months + | 5% | 25% | 10% | 15% | 40% |
| Timeframe | Marketing Planning | Marketing Activities | Sales Planning | Sales Tools | Sales Staff |
| Current | 5% | 5% | 5% | 5% | 80% |
| Adjustment Period | 20% | 5% | 10% | 10% | 55% |
| Go Forward Plan | 5% | 25% | 10% | 20% | 40% |
| Timeframe | Marketing Planning | Marketing Activities | Sales Planning | Sales Tools | Sales Staff |
| Current | 20% | 50% | 5% | 5% | 20% |
| Adjustment Period | 10% | 30% | 20% | 20% | 20% |
| Go Forward Plan | 10% | 40% | 10% | 10% | 30% |