How to Write a Sales Territory Plan
Posted by Ron Snyder in Best Practices | 1 comments
As published in Selling Power Blog, August 18, 2011 What are the critical steps in writing a successful Sales Territory Plan? You may be wondering, "Where do I start?" The key is asking the right questions to gather the insights you need to generate a winning plan. Use this checklist as a guide. 1. Analyze your Territory/Business Start with what is going on in your territory/vertical market.
- What are the key trends in your geography/ market?
- Who are your top prospects and customers?
- What are customers buying?
- Based on your conversion rates, how much business do you need in your funnel?
- What is the gap between what you need in your funnel and what you have now?
Five Reasons you Need a Strategic Account Plan… to Win
Posted by Ron Snyder in Territory planning | 0 comments
Here are the top 5 reasons you need a good territory/strategic account plan. Without it, you will: 1. Miss important opportunities 2. Lose sales you could have won 3. Take longer to win business opportunities 4. Unnecessarily lower your selling price and reduce your profit margins 5. Waste time and resources Good planning enables you to optimize the results from your territory/strategic account. By adopting and implementing good planning and selling methods, one of my clients: • increased Bookings by 43% • boosted Margins by 10% • improved Market Share by 53% • increased Productivity per Salesperson by 50% • grew Win/Loss Ratio by 131% Having a plan enables you to manage a great deal of complexity. This includes understanding the market, focusing on the customer problems you can solve, selecting your best solution, and managing the internal and partner resources necessary to meet your objectives. It enables you to make the best use of your time and resources by connecting strategy to key tasks. Using the plan, you make sure the tasks get implemented the time frame required to win. Through it, you give appropriate attention to the critical path – the steps that have the most impact on producing the result on time. Without a plan, it is easy to omit a key element and dramatically compromise your results. Success Story: Account Management I managed a $20M opportunity for HP, selling to another Fortune 100 company. The sale took 18 months and involved a wide range of internal resources and customer representatives. My detailed strategic account plan enabled me to: 1. Identify our competitive advantages. 2. Articulate our value proposition and clearly describe how it met their needs. 3. Make sure our sales, division people, and executive sponsor were on the same page. 4. Manage meetings between a wide range of people from the customer’s and our organization. 5. Respond effectively to competitive threats. 6. Keep the sale on track. I could never have managed the effort, kept everyone engaged and won the business without a clear plan that I updated on a regular basis. The bottom line is that you need a good plan backed with persistent effort to win a complex, competitive business opportunity. Self-Assessment
- Consider companies you regard as successful, well-managed, high-performing organizations. Can you imagine how they would have performed without a solid business plan?
- Reflect on times when you did not have a plan and/or did not work your plan. What did you miss? What were the consequences?
- Are you a skilled planner? If not, how could you improve your planning abilities?
- Think of the best planner you know. Ask them how they do territory and account planning.
2010 resolution – Up sell and Cross sell
Posted by Steven in Sales planning | 0 comments
Want to sell more to your customers? Re-Prospect
More and more I hear sales leaders talk about up sell and cross sell with their team. The situation as we all know is that it costs 80% less and takes 50% less time to sell more to people who are buying from you, than to acquire new customers. The problem is that few sales people really know how to accomplish this task. The method that I have found to work is simply to re-prospect. What the hell is re-prospecting you ask? It is simple, but not easy. Simply approach your customers as if you know nothing about them and have honest conversations about them and their business.How To Write a Successful Sales Plan? Know your stuff!
Posted by Steven in Sales planning | 0 comments
Especially in a turbulent economy, having a strategy and a sales plan is critical for staying focused, staying on track and making the mid-course corrections necessary to succeed. But the basis of any sales plan has to be based on your knowledge of your business. What has worked and what hasn't worked? More importantly, IS THAT STILL TRUE? So do an analysis of your business whether you are the CEO or the Sales rep.
- First, what is your average deal? I really have to laugh when I ask a sales person and they tell me that "there is No average". The dictionary defines "Average" as:
–nounStatistics.
the mean obtained by adding several quantities together and dividing the sum by the number of quantities: the arithmetic mean of 1, 5, 2, and 8 is 4. Now, why is this important? You have to know based on your business, what you need to do to succeed. Knowing that if I closed 20 deals last year and made 110% , with an average deal size of $30,000, that is good information. (Usually what I do is take out the two biggest deals that are not typical) So now I can focus on how many I need. I can now look at my performance YTD and my pipeline and see where I am at, NOT JUST from a dollar amount. So now YTD I have 15 deals and that average is $27,000, I know that the deals are getting smaller, (or that I had a couple of big ones if you didn't take them out) and I need x number of deals based on the average deal in order to make my number. Now I can look at my pipeline and see if I have the deals I need.
