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.
Comeback of the Decade – Who Dat!?!
Posted by Steven in Other | 0 comments
What a Superbowl! Man, that was a great game and the party in South Louisiana may last until May. I love New Orleans. In 2005 I went there with 1500 lbs. of relief supplies for the NOLA Police department. You see, I am from Louisiana, and some of my family lived (a few still live) in New Orleans. The picture that you see here, I took 3 blocks from the French Quarter. When I was there there were tons of troops, few people and boat rescues still taking place. Last night in the French Quarter the scene below was taking place. This city committed itself to rebuild and to comeback from the brink. Many people don't really know how bad it was in New Orleans. But this city stuck with it and fought back. Much like the Saints did last night. So here is the question for you... Are you willing to fight back? 2009 was a bad year. According to CSO Insights, only 55% of sales people hit their number. Are you able to take a huge blow in your sales world and still keep fighting? We lose deals. We screw up and lose customers. Stuff happens. The bottom line is "How do we deal with it?"
"Never, never, never, never give up!" - Winston ChurchillI am proud of New Orleans... the city and the team. It would be easy to quit, to give up, to move away... But they stuck it out. We can learn from this. Suck it up, try and on-side kick and keep on getting better. So... what is your plan to fight back this year? Oh.. and for the record... WHO DAT?!?
Inside Sales Best Practices
Posted by Steven in Best Practices | 1 comments
Last week I spoke at the AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals) along with Michael Damphousse, CEO of Green Leads, (@damphoux) and our Host Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group (@bridgegroupinc). I talked about the inside sales best practices in training and coaching your team, while Michael talked about outbound dialing. What I really enjoyed was that I learned some really good stuff from Michael that I am going to use and steal. But first, what are the best practices in outbound dialing? You can get the entire slide deck here, but I learned 2 significant things:
There were a number of significant best practices
- Dial at between 8 - 10 in the morning local time, or 4 - 6 in the afternoon (people are at their desks)... Lunch works too
- Dial at the top of the hour, 10 minutes of until 5 minutes after the hour. The prospect is just out of a meeting, and hasn't headed to the next one.
Do something amazing this year!
Posted by Steven in Other | 0 comments
