The first part of our World Class Sales Cultures Framework looks at the strategy and scope of your sales operations. It aims to understand how you are set up to sell, as an organisation, and whether there are fundamental things that you can do to improve things.
We break this down into 3 elements.
1. Coverage and Targeting - How integrated are the business and sales planning processes?
For a low performing business they won’t be integrated at all. As a result, sales figures are a number given from the top without taking the market and territory into account. Financial objectives are typically the main driver here, giving Sales Leaders an uphill task to hit goals that have not been properly condsidered.
On the other side, high performing business have both business and sales processes fully integrated. Sales targeting is linked to the coverage and exisitng opportunity and frequently reviewed with stakeholders. Any alliances, partnerships or key campaigns are driven by the organisational strategy and supported by the full Leadsership team. This open loop integration across the business allows Sales Leaders to be heard and supported.
2. Value proposition - Are all communciations from the business about your product/service consistent and do you clearly articulate your value proposition?
Low performing businesses will find their sales and marketing teams are often not joined up. The product/service is typicaly spoken about in features and benefits, which is evident across the organisation, which leads to frequent discounting to close sales.
Businesses that have taken time and consideration over their value propostion find that all communciations from their organisation are consistent and clearly articulate the client problems and challenges that they solve. As a result, salespeople are able to sell at a premium.
3. Winning characteristics - What are the standard characterics of an opportunity that will benefit your business and does everyone uderstand and utilse them?
What we see in the teams that haven’t understood this is that there isnt enough qualification by their sales teams and as a result every opportunity is pursued. The Ideal Client Profile hasn’t been identified and win probability isn’t taken into account when understanding if an opportunity is worth pursuing.
For high performing organisations they have identified their Ideal Client Profiles and these are used to identify the best opportunites. As a result, there is systematic qualification and win probability analysis is conducted for each opportunity. The sales teams understand these and use them to drive prospecting and questioning strategies. These organisations find they have a high win rate as they typically only invest in the opportunites they can win.
Think about those elements and try and rank yourself - do you fit within the high performing organisation, or the low?
As I mentioned on this post, the aim of the World Class Sales Cultures Framework is so that you can start to rank your organisation and understand where you have room for improvement and where you are currently high performing.
If you want to access the full framework you can head here. Our recommendation would be that you accompany this download with a session from one of our team, to help you fully understand the Framework and how you can create your blueprint for success.
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