Sales Teams – 5 Major Actions Needed For Success

#1 Develop more urgency – Processing deals through your Sales Process:

I’ve blogged many times about my favorite Sales Process – the Diagnostic Selling approach called Prime, developed by Jeff Thull. Read my summary here. Once deals are in your sales process, you really need to control the timetable to PO. You need to establish 10 things really quickly:

1. You can help solve their issues.
2. Your sponsor’s life (ie the person) can be improved with your technology.
3. The problem is a priority for that person.
4. Your sponsor can find the money because it’s a priority for the company.
5. You prove you understand their requirements by walking them through your recommended solution.
6. You’ve clarified why your solution is a better fit than alternatives.
7. You’re clear on your operational timetable to onboard the prospect
8. You’re clear on the ROI the client is achieving
9. The prospect is keen to see the proposal and has confirmed all dates including PO issue.
10. As a condition of sending the proposal, you have established permission to chase if the PO hasn’t arrived by a key date.

#2. Own your targets – treat them as minimum performances required

1. Be aware of the pace required on a weekly basis to hit a quarterly target, E.g. $400,000 requires POs totaling $30,769 every week. Missed weeks add up quickly. After 3 weeks that’s $92,307 of POs.
2. Be aware of the various road maps to hit target. Have options if deals fail.
3. Treat whales (unusually large deals) as yet another deal. Mentally you need to treat them as average sized deals. Otherwise if they slip, you have no chance to fill the gap created.

 #3. Own your sectors – why are more companies in your sectors not choosing [INSERT YOUR COMPANY]?

1. Work with your marketing team to develop Red Zones – sectors that have spent money with you already.
2. Understand their issues – why could better [insert what you do well] improve the performance of an automotive company, a government department, a biomedical company etc.
3. Flaunt your case studies as credibility statements.
4. Set up Google alerts to be kept informed of events affecting your customers.
5. Get known in these sectors, using blog posts, LinkedIn, trade shows.
6. Generate product ideas to make the product family more competitive.

#4. Develop better stories for your sectors, better case studies

1. Develop newsworthy case studies.
2. Build better landing pages, showing recommended configured solutions wherever possible.
3. Build better blog posts.
4. Build your personal brand in the sector – LinkedIn, networking, social media. 

#5. Develop stronger, faster, deeper prospecting

1. You need to be actively working more deals in every rolling 3 month period. This is not possible using inbound lead generation alone. We need to go into the market and professionally grab it.
2. You must assume you have limited time to meet prospects. 
3. Build a pace to your prospecting. 30 conversations per week are minimums, not maximums.
4. Deep farm customers. Understand how they would deploy your solution.
5. Use land & expand smartly. Prospects buy for emotional reasons! Get to know your customers/prospects.
6. Get emails and let’s nurture some who are not ready to buy today but one day they will.
7. Invite prospects to join you on LinkedIn after you have spoken to them and added value.
8. Stand back and measure how many red zones you are responsible for and your % penetration in each one. Continuously ask yourself, where is the money?