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You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:
If you’ve been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.
You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:
If you’ve been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.
You’ve heard the acronyms. BANT, for example: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. There are others. You may have worked with your team to define yours precisely.
Still, close ratios are erratic and deals are unpredictable. Sales people, trying to make quota, have little choice but to spend enormous amounts of time and money pursuing them. They can’t help it if many of the wrong prospects are in their sales funnel.
Right?
Not right.
Most companies use an approach to qualification criteria that fails in at least three crucial areas. It is:
There is a far more productive approach to qualification than any you have probably heard of. Companies who fail to update this critical part of their sales process will continue wasting enormous amounts of time and money – which they probably cannot afford in this economy.
On Thursday, February 26, we will present a new and more effective approach to solving this problem:
In this webinar, you’ll learn an approach that has achieved some astonishing results:
• 90%+ forecast accuracy where ever it has been used
• Works at the beginning of the sales cycle, not just at the end
• Actually helps salespeople sell by influencing their decision making strategy
Rather than being myopic, remedial, and static, this simple new approach increases your company’s vision into customers, enables all of your salespeople to be more strategic, and changes with market forces.
It will lean out your sales funnel and improve the quality of your team’s sales opportunities. And that will certainly increase your revenue, profitability, and success.
This will be the seventh sales kaizen webinar we have conducted since its inception last November.
I hope you can attend, because this one is really going to be good.
Comments (2)
And rightly
so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several
people working with a large organization that is very concerned about
its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall
Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.
No surprise there! The economic crisis affects large and small
companies: everyone needs to know where next month’s revenue will come
from.
Forecasting sales has always been difficult, but, in a threatening
market like this, the problem is compounded by the need to get enough
people to buy in the first place! This is a scary challenge,
especially with the state of the sales process in most organizations.
Ask yourself:
If you are like most companies, the answers to those questions are:
So, with the
sales process so much in the spotlight, what are you supposed to do?
How can you figure out what changes will have the right effects? How
can you get everyone to realize that improving the sales process is the
solution?
On Thursday
of this week, Robert Ferguson and I will present the first of two
initial webinars around design principles and tips you need to make
your sales flow like water – and get results fast. Part one is this
Thursday, February 19:
Guidebook Launch Webinar
Thursday February 19, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/feb-19-webinar
Visit that page now, and register for this unusual and timely event.
Part two will be next Thursday, February 26. More on that event soon.
Michael J Webb
February 17, 2009
Comments (1)
And rightly so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several people working with a large organization that is very concerned about its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.
Recently I spoke with Burke, the VP of Business Development for an engineering firm in the material handling industry.
Unlike many people in this industry, Burke has a marketing background rather than a technical one. Since he joined the firm, their business is booming, seemingly unaffected by the recession. I asked him about that.
What he told me was really useful from a sales and marketing point of view:
“However, I discovered that was not the problem at all.
“Our prospects are warehouse managers who have to put together proposals for projects and get them approved. Some justification is involved for both business (cost) justification, and justification for technical architectures and other decisions.
“What I learned was that we were not helping prospects assemble their information in a way that was sellable up the chain of command.
“So, I put in place a process for doing that:
“So, setting up a structure to follow for handling the customer’s information enabled them to become more productive, because it helps them partner better with the customer. They now know they should be looking for business as well as technical information, and they know what to do with that information before they give it back in the form of various documents, including proposal documents. The questions, the steps, and the documents we provide help the warehouse manager ’sell’ to others within their own company more effectively.
“You need business ROI, we got that. You need rationale for the controls architecture, we got that. You need a throughput analysis, we got that. You need a time-phased projection of the project cost, we got that too. Whoever they need to talk with inside their company, we help them do it.
“We’re easier to deal with than the other guys, and we’re winning more deals as a result.”
I thought that was a great example of how sales is supposed to work. It is supposed to be simple.
Of course getting to that simplicity within your organization is not always so easy!
That’s where we can help you, hopefully a lot:
There are lots of new free materials, including articles, videos, recordings, and some new membership levels:
You can visit the site and surf anonymously, as you always have been able to. Then, there is the opt-in Free SPIF! Sign up, where we’ve added some videos, an “Ask You’re Question!” section and access to some of the best articles from the original website (including “Customer Value Mapping,” which Burke applied heavily).
Then, we’ve added a Professional Members area, where (for a fee about equivalent to that of a professional association) you get access to the in-depth Sales Kaizen webinars every month, archives of past webinars and conference presentations, the Print SPIF! Newsletter, private bulletin boards, and other helpful goodies for executives and consultants.
One of the coolest things is the ability for you to comment, compliment, criticize, or what ever you want on virtually every page. Check it out!
And don’t forget to check out Thursday’s Sales Kaizen Webinar:
I look forward to hearing from you!
Michael Webb
February 2, 2009
Comments (1)
Recently I spoke with Burke, the VP of Business Development for an engineering firm in the material handling industry.
Unlike many people in this industry, Burke has a marketing background rather than a technical one. Since he joined the firm, their business is booming, seemingly unaffected by the recession. I asked him about that.
What he told me was really useful from a sales and marketing point of view:
Atlanta, Ga. (Jan 30, 2009) — Sales and marketing managers are struggling to bring in more revenue without spending money.
SPC, Inc., a company in Norcross, Ga, is releasing valuable information on how B2B companies can sell more while spending less using kaizen – a management method that generates continuous improvement. Michael Webb, founder of SPC and author of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” (Kaplan Publishing, 2006), teams with Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” (McGraw Hill, 2006), to illustrate how to permanently increase your company’s ability to generate qualified sales opportunities for your B2B sales team in 90 days or less.
“How to Generate and Sustain a 25% Increase
in Sales Opportunities in 90 Days or Less”
Sales Kaizen Webinar with Brian Carroll
Author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale”
The press release can be read here:
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