Five Key Areas of Decision Qualification

There are five key areas that sellers must understand from prospective customers that will be used to make a purchasing decision. And we instruct our customers’ sellers to identify this information before they submit a proposal or quote. They include The Players, Timetable, Decision Criteria, Proposal Content and Roadblocks. Take a look at these different areas and learn how to make them work for you instead of against you during the sales process to equip you with the best outcome possible.

  1. The Players

We need to understand where the authority for the final decision rests and what role the subordinates (sponsors, influencers) play, and we need to conduct our sales efforts primarily with the decision maker, not the subordinates. Attempting to secure the business by working with people without real authority is a poor strategy, leading to extended sales cycles and low closing rates. It’s important to understand that people who don’t have the authority to make decisions can’t say yes (but they can say no), and they’re not always effective at selling your solutions to their superiors, certainly not as good as you would be. And because they are not at the highest levels, they often don’t even know the real issues the company is trying to rectify. You’ll easily double your closing rate by working harder to get yourself in front of the right people.

While we stress the importance of having clear and frequent access to the decision maker, others in the organization can play an important part in the decision process. Take the time to meet them and find out what their business objectives are and what part they will play. Find out who might be a champion for your competition and try to build your case with them. The more complex the sale, the more important these people become. Don’t overlook their importance.

  1. Timetable

When will the prospect make a decision? Their timetable often provides clues as to the severity of their pain and how they prioritize this business objective. Their timing also will help you understand how to manage your time for this opportunity. Optimally, you will work within the prospect’s timetable and bring your solution to them at exactly the time when they are ready for it.

  1. Decision Criteria

What criteria will they use to make a decision? This is not an area to make assumptions based on your experience. The decision criteria are different for every prospect. Certainly there is often some commonality, but the professional salesperson will have the prospect explain these criteria and rank them from most to least important. Understanding their criteria is critical when dealing with competition. Typically buying criteria are directly related to business objectives. For example, if the prospect’s principle issues are in the area of service, their number one buying criteria will revolve around your ability to improve their service.

Price will be secondary. By the same token, if you have failed to uncover serious business objectives, expect the primary criteria for making a change to be price related and you’ll be fighting off the price objections. It is your responsibility to stop the process if the prospect identifies one or more buying criteria that you cannot satisfy. You might have to say, “I’m sorry, our product can’t do that. Is that a deal breaker?” If it is, and you have to abort, you’ve saved yourself and the prospect valuable time. Plus, you’ve gained the prospect’s respect since you didn’t attempt to force a solution where it was not appropriate. Here’s the bottom line with respect to selection criteria; the more value you are able to help them to identify, the less important price will be in their decision process.

  1. Proposal Content

This is another area where assumptions can hurt you, since people evaluate things differently. When you present a proposal, your objective should be to give the prospect the exact information that he needs to make a “yes” or “no” decision – no more and no less. This approach greatly improves your chances of securing the business.

In one of the largest programs we ever completed, with a 1,100 person sales force, we asked the decision maker what he needed to see from us so he could make a decision when we delivered the proposal. We were expecting to hear, “I want a detailed proposal with an execution plan, testimonials, financial history of your company, etc.” Instead, all he wanted was one page with just the bullet points and a place to sign. Had we not asked, we would have wasted hours putting together a detailed proposal that would have bored him stiff. He got what he wanted, no more and no less.

  1. Roadblocks

Try to determine what roadblocks might be encountered that would delay implementation of the solution. Did you ever run into a situation where the purchasing department wanted to negotiate a lower price or get competitive bids after the VP generated a purchase order for your product? Asking this question may uncover some issues that previously had not come to light, such as other decision makers or budget issues. Checking for roadblocks helps to ensure that qualification is complete and eliminates surprises.

 

 

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4 Ways to Get More Active Selling Time From Your Team

Plenty of sales reps think that productivity is the same as staying busy, or at least “looking busy”.  Strategy meetings, internet research, emails, social networking, golf dates, and dinners may be keeping reps “busy”, but such activities may be inconsequential to the bottom line.  Let’s define sales productivity as the ability to produce.  Productivity is measured by yield or throughput.

Here are four tips to help increase the productivity of your sales team giving them more active selling time:

1.  Analyze Current Processes

Do a health check on the selling processes currently being followed by your team.  Although each sales rep’s process may be unique, consider the following key productivity drains across your team:  How much time is spent weekly on administrative tasks? How many calls are being made on qualified vs. unqualified opportunities?  How many in-person calls end in a sale?  What is the average time of lead to sale?  What is the current cost of sale?   A good sales process based on the analysis of the data retrieved from these questions will provide guidelines for keeping productivity in check.

 

2.  Define Expectations/Goals

Every team member needs to know what is expected of him/her.  Once new expectations are set, look at your team and see who needs help organizing their time and territory.  Help reps prioritize which opportunities are worthy of their time and get rid of the ones that are not qualified.  Being on qualified sales calls is where results will happen.  Once you set expectations, expect them.  Set up a streamlined accountability process of reps’ progress toward outlined expectations.

 

3.  Leverage Technology

Reduce the administrative responsibilities required by your reps by providing an electronic format for as many tasks as possible.  A good CRM system will automate certain tasks and keep customer data organized.   Technology can also aid you in getting quality lead lists.  Monitor social channels.  Set up alerts on topics of interest and respond to those who show buying signals.  Consider timesaving video calls and web conferencing.  There are hundreds of time saving sales technology tools out there that can help increase the productivity of your team.

 

4.  Increase your Team’s Skills and Knowledge

Sales training, and coaching are important for every salesperson, no matter how experienced they are.  There are always new skill sets to learn and new tools to master.  Analyze deficient sales skills in the individuals on your team and coach to those needs.  These skills may include phone etiquette, product knowledge, industry knowledge, customer engagements and rapport, presentations, and everyone’s favorite topic:  negotiation.  Look for a training company that will offer a customized approach to developing specific relevant skills for your team.

 

Try these tips and you will see increased productivity in your team.  The measure of success will be evident in a yield to be enjoyed: More revenue!

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The 3 M’s: Getting Buyers to Change

It seems ridiculous to think that change from a typewriter to a computer was anything but a “no brainer”. It wasn’t. In fact, there are still published authors, John Irving to name one, that write entire novels in long hand or on typewriters. Without the vision of how a change will provide benefits, very little may occur.

Getting a prospect to adopt your product or service and make a fundamental change in how they do business is hard, yet sometimes necessary. The best way I know to get a prospect from no to “Yes, I’ll consider making a change”, is mastering the 3 M’s of establishing value. If they can’t see any value or in other words a compelling reason to make a change, then they will stay firmly in the no column.

  1. Measurement. –  find out how the buyer measures value.  What we want to measure is something that gets a number in dollars. The best numbers are not based on opinion or conjecture. Asking questions helps determine what numbers the buyer values most.  With medical devices, value dollars are measured by recovery times and reimbursements;   with fleet management it’s fuel efficiency and driver safety, and in the food business it’s waste and storage costs.  These are all costs, costs that you can help them reduce with your product. How much can you help to reduce their costs?  This is establishing value with monetary results.   Dollar savings is a powerful value illustrator.
  2. Mechanism – What’s the mechanism you use to calculate the value?  In the food industry it’s cost to store food per square foot, in fleet management it’s miles per gallon.  Does your client have one?  If not, co-create it.  To have an effective mechanism the prospect needs to agree on the way the value is measured.
  3. Meaning – How do you analyze the data you created or co created with the buyer in step 2?  These numbers should be analyzed to improve the bottom line.  For example, a driver in a truck’s fleet reduces the average driving speed from 65 to 64 miles per hour; the driver will realize $100 savings from increased fuel efficiency per month, thereby, saving $1200 per year per vehicle in fuel. That alone has meaning to the buyer.  To provide greater meaning and more value as a sales partner, the seller should also provide context.  Give them context as to what you’ve seen in your industry or with other clients.  This is what context sounds like, “Mr. Buyer the other companies in your industry that has adopted this fuel efficiency strategy, and they realized on average a savings of $ 1200 per year per vehicle.”

The 3 M’s are measurement, the mechanism by which value is measured and meaning (dollars) to the measurement.  When value is established, the risk of changing is diminished.  If there is still hesitancy, start again at step one because you never found out the measurement that the buyer valued most.  We help clients frame the conversation with their buyers to include value in their conversations.   These tools, if used properly, will help buyers change from their old ways to your new ways.

Let Flannery Sales Systems help your sales staff sharpen their skills in establishing value.

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The Top 3 Milestones for Sales Success

Over the past few years, the majority of the work that we have done with customers is on defining (or refining) their sales process. This was necessitated by the dramatic changes exhibited in buying behavior during the pandemic. And indeed, the most important aspect of our customer’s sales processes is that it mirrors how their customers buy from them.  During conversations in both a formal and informal settings, we are asked “how many steps should there be in the sales process?”  If we knew that exact answer for each of our customers, we would be retired and they would have Instagram-like success!

So instead of trying to pinpoint the exact number of steps in a sales process, here are the must have, Top Three milestones that each team/seller must have in place to assure success. Please note that very few of our B to B customers have only 3 milestones (or stages), but when pushed to the wall, here are the 3 you can’t live (or sell) without:

1-     Access to the Key Players (Decision Maker): there is nothing new to the notion that you must get access to all of the key players, but the budget scrutiny that many organizations have placed on all expenditures since 2008 has made this step even more difficult. A clear articulation on how all important titles would benefit from the usage of your product/service is a mandatory requirement for completing this stage.

2-     Clear Understanding of Value: once you have the access as described in #1, can the individuals understand the value that your offering provides. Without this, you will be dancing in the dark when it comes time to go into the evaluation phase.

3-     An Approved Implementation Plan: approved as you co-develop the opportunity with your customer/prospect, not after the deal is signed. This sole step can help you to determine your “pole position” deep into opportunity development, and the seriousness of the participant’s gauges how “sticky” your solution will be thereafter.

One of our customers in the Medical Device industry was struggling to get into conversations with the key players in their existing customer base on a new offering they had obtained through an acquisition. The offering was an existing diagnostic test with a new enhanced feature.  The challenge was that the enhanced feature  provided a benefit that had never been completely commercialized. We sat down with a cross functional team from their organization and built a pro-forma model of what impact the solution had on the existing practices in the testing environment, and who would benefit from this.  They went searching for data to substantiate their assertions of what value this add-on widget could provide.  They found a reputable research company that had done a study that provided the information they were looking for.  We were able to help build a dollar value and a testing value into a pro-forma model (Benefit Summary). The Benefit Summary provided all involved with a complete understanding of the value of their new enhanced feature.

Next, we helped them to create a prototype of an Implementation Plan that correlated with how they could roll this out to their customers. Once completed, the sales process plan was delivered and executed with their main customers.  As a result, they have successfully sold an additional 12% in total revenue on this product alone in an $80 million dollar division.

What are you or your organization waiting for to drive more revenue? Let us help you to define (or refine) these steps and start picking up incremental revenue now!

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Top 3 Tips for an Effective Presentation

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how to be an effective presenter

We all have to deliver a presentation at some point in our lives. The kindergartener “presents” in show and tell, the politician presents in hopes to get elected, the PhD candidate presents in pursuit of a title. And, of course, the sales rep presents in order to close a deal. 

Over the course of my career, I have delivered hundreds of presentations and sat through my fair share as well. Some were good and others made me want to jump out the nearest window. So, what was the difference? Here are some best practices I’ve developed over the years: 

1.PREPARE – When you’re creating your presentation, keep things simple.  No fancy power point transition can deliver a message as effectively as you can through your words.  Over the years, I’ve learned that less is more on a slide, which means I need to know my material well to effectively explain what’s not there. 

 

2. PRACTICE – In our workshops, we ask our attendees to role play what is being taught.  I’m consistently amazed at how people struggle with this.  But, the only way to really practice is to make the words come out of your mouth. It’s funny how halted and jerky a presentation sounds during my first practice run, when in my mind I was so witty and articulate. But sure enough, after three, four and five times, the words start to flow, I build my cadence, and I can add some finishing touches like pauses for emphasis, interesting asides, and, of course, a bit of humor, to help my words really stick. 

 

3. CONNECT – In order to be engaging presenters, we must be entertainers, too. How do we entertain? If size permits, engage the participants by asking them thoughtful questions. Invite discussion. Many presenters are fearful to do this because they are unsure of what the responses will be and how they may derail the presentation. But, I’ve found that the better I know my material, the more effective I am at steering the dialogue. Yes, there has been some unscripted participation that has been shocking, but some that is also memorable, entertaining and engaging. 

 

If asking questions seems too daunting, then share a personal experience and relate it to the concept being presented.  Recently, I shared a story about meeting a 20-year-old who had never flown before, and helping him from the ticket counter, through security and to the gate. I related my story to the sales process steps that I was teaching. When I asked the client how she thought the presentation went, the first thing she mentioned was my story. Real life examples are engaging and memorable. 

 

Need tips on effectively presenting when you and your prospect are not in the same room? Check out our article on being a more effective virtual salesperson. 

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Maintaining Momentum In Quarter Four

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This time of year brings thoughts of Thanksgiving, Christmas and 2024.  For some sales organizations it brings a number of worried thoughts and concerns as well.  Will we hit quota, is the pipeline as strong as it needs to be, and do we have the right players in place?  Are our buyers as committed to us as the information reflected in our recent correspondence? Or have they slowed the communication down?

For some, the pressure is mounting to close the year out in a strong capacity and it seems like requests are coming from every direction – senior management, buyers and the sales team.  Don’t panic.  There is time to assess the situation and make some course corrections.  Here are some solid steps you can take to bring in the 4th Quarter business:

  1. Grade your Pipeline. Do it early in the quarter (aka NOW) and often if the opportunities don’t seem as solid as desired.  Lower probability opportunities should be re-qualified and moved to 2024 if a Q4 close doesn’t seem to be realistic.
  2. Manage your Buyers. Some buyers will let the clock tick to the end of the year for concessions.    If a buyer senses that a seller is too desperate, too needy or tips his hand that he is behind budget, prepare to have your margin eroded.  Seek to establish milestones early in the quarter so buyers don’t feel like they are being pressured at Quarter’s end.  Negotiate from a position of strength.  If a seller reviews milestones with a buyer and offers Quarter 1 target dates, the buyer will believe that you have a full pipeline and may communicate a commitment to close earlier.  The seller must be strategic about allocation of time and resources.  If a buyer is not ready to move, adding them to the 2024 pipeline may be the smartest move.
  3. Maintain Business Development Activities. Start to identify opportunities for 2024.  Too often sales teams have moved from crisis to crisis and fail to understand that insufficient business development activities are the cause of the reoccurring nightmare.  Don’t buy the argument that sales staff can only step up their game under pressure.  Every major league coach knows that games are won on the practice fields and that good behaviors and performance are exhibited on game day only after detailed preparation.  Early business development activities insure that sufficient time is available for the lead to be nurtured.
  4. Assess your bench. Do you have the right people on the team?  What resources do you need to deploy to close the deals you need to hit quota?  Are additional skills and practice needed to increase your close rate?  What approaches are going to be the most effective with your buyers?  Is there an opportunity to improve the skill set of the sales team?  Can you role play the critical opportunities to maximize the potential for a successful outcome?  Is there a development plan for 2024 that you should be budgeting for now based on the assessments and opportunities for improved performance?
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