The second purpose of a sales plan is to communicate your strategy to your manager, who may be able to help you with your strategy, and to your teammates, who need to know who is responsible for which actions, which messages, which stakeholders, and when each activity is due.
This is a major area in which salespeople must move from loners to leaders. Lots of salespeople like to keep this in their head, and as a result, the forecast suffers, the presentations suffer because teammates don’t know what is expected of them, and prospects suffer because they have to sit through endless presentations that don’t address their pains.
“Meeting demands for increased visibility does not help salespeople or organizations sell more,” Galvin says. “The reporting of pipeline and forecast values to meet requirements of CEOs and CFOs has little impact on individual or organizational productivity. To increase productivity, sales executives should focus the execution of the sales methodology and processes that accelerate selling, not the reporting requirement of finance.”
It’s about communication, your plan, and leading your team. Your process needs to drive your technology, not vice versa.
It is helpful to examine technology in light of how it empowers the four levels of sales strategy. At the bottom are tools that empower selling to individuals, or face-to-face selling. Obviously, these are the contact and activity managers, and there are many vendors in this area. This has been one of the most productive areas for information technology in assisting salespeople.
Not only has new technology given salespeople a tool for searching and finding contacts earlier and then generating e-mails and correspondence more quickly, but it also gets the information, which is a company asset, out of the salesperson’s head and into the corporate system.
A well-known fact among salespeople, however, is that almost every salesperson has two databases: one that is shared with the company and one that they keep in Outlook or ACT or some other database of contacts that doesn’t really belong to the company. This is only natural, but it still means that every time a salesperson has to enter a contact, it may have to be entered in two places.
Network Management Tools
Some of the more innovative technology tools in the area of contact management for selling at the individual level (as of the date of this book) are those offered by such companies as Spoke, LinkedIn, and Plaxo that allow you to electronically validate your contact information, keep up with changes, and find out where people in your network have moved.
Spoke and LinkedIn have an interesting approach in that they acknowledge that the key to political navigation is sponsorship. They allow you to link people into your network — and vice versa — so that you can find out who actually knows whom. In this way, if you can’t get access to someone, you can get sponsorship from someone else who has access to that person. This kind of political navigation is one of the most effective ways of gaining access to executives. You can borrow influence from someone you know to get to someone you don’t.
These companies have moved beyond contact management to linking networks and saving salespeople dozens and dozens of phone calls to find out who in their firm or industry knows someone who can help them get that precious first 30 minutes of access.
A contact manager is not adequate for opportunity management, and neither is the simple forecast that comes with most CRM systems. Among the best practices we see in opportunity management tools are:
• A lead prequalification checklist
• A prospect qualification checklist
• A competitive assessment
• A value linkage chart
• A stakeholder analysis
• An action plan
• Coaching questions
Lead Prequalification Checklist
Marketing tends to measure its success by the quantity of leads generated by any given campaign. But the sales department is frustrated when it receives a blizzard of unqualified “leads” from marketing, most of which will not turn into prospects even after hours of phone calls.
Research shows that a very large number of these leads are never followed up on at all, probably because of the lowquality experience of previous leads.
Jim Ninivaggi, director of the sales performance practice at SiriusDecisions, a sales effectiveness analyst firm, says:
In some organizations, up to 90 percent of leads don’t get followed up on at all. If I get 100 leads and only two pan out, the next time I get 100 leads, I’ll ignore them because they aren’t worth my time.
Of these leads that aren’t getting followed up on, most of those prospects will buy something in the next 12 to 18 months. They may not buy it from you, but the interest level was usually high enough that they will probably buy something.
It is more economic to have a marketing person nurture these leads than to have a field person follow them up. This is where marketing can play a very effective role.
Prospect Qualification Checklist
An agreed-on set of qualification criteria not only prompts the salesperson to identify the risks of proceeding but also removes the emotional issue of qualifying out versus quitting. In this way, you have the proper expectations for the forecast because everyone is using the same standards.
What are our agreed-on criteria for pursuing this opportunity? Will they buy from anybody? Will they buy from us? How does this prospect compare with our other opportunities? Do we have the resources?
Competitive Assessment
The key to competitive tactics is timing and anticipation. A technology that prompts our thinking promotes earlier action and competitive advantage.
How do we compare against our competitor in this account? Do we have a good chance to win? What are our relative strengths and weaknesses compared with their needs? Do we have any unique differentiators? What strategies can we anticipate from each competitor? How do we beat them out of the starting blocks?
Value Linkage Chart
A tool that helps us think through our value proposition allows us to present and focus benefits and messages to the right stakeholders without them having to figure it all out by themselves (and sometimes get it wrong). How do our solutions link into their issues and needs? Who cares? Does our value proposition link into strategic initiatives or issues? What cultural, financial, political, and strategic benefits can we offer?
Stakeholder Analysis
Who will be involved in the evaluation? Who matters? What part will they play? What is their current preference? How much power and influence do they have? How do we win their vote? How can we live without their vote?
Action Plan
This is the outcome of the analysis and strategy review. It is the purpose of a sales process. Without it, people wander in an account, waiting for things to happen. The most important impact of technology in this area is the ability to adjust the plan purposefully and dynamically through online strategy conferences with teammates who may be remote.
What actions are needed to win this opportunity? Who is the owner of each action item? When is it due? How will each competitor respond?
Coaching Questions
While there is no substitute for a manager’s coaching to challenge assumptions and blind spots, embedding the list of questions to ask the customer and yourself about your strategy is a useful tool to jog salespeople’s minds about all the issues they need to cover. This “coach in a box,” in an automated opportunity management system, not only reminds reps of the training concepts back in the binder in their office but also eliminates “ambush coaching” because all the questions have been previously defined. The result is competitive information earlier and fewer blind spots later.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Sales
One of the most useful technology tools we have seen is color-coded organizational charts of the stakeholder analysis. These charts are generated automatically from the opportunity management tool that we use with our clients, and they help sales managers to immediately visualize who in the organization prefers us and how much power they have.