Checklist

When sales are declining or flat or just not growing very fast it’s easy to blame the sales team. Here is a checklist of items to examine including poor sales professional habits which may uncover the root cause of your problems:

1. Are you training your sales team on your prospect’s world? Do they understand what it’s like for your prospect in their environment. Think production manager, financial controller, marketing operations manager, sales manager, teacher, nurse, CTO, because whatever your target audience is, you need to understand their issues, their challenges and their objectives. How can you improve their lives?
2. Do you understand the procurement process of your customers? What the decision process? Who needs to sign off when?
3. Do you have a sales process that’s repeatable? There are three elements to effective and repeatable processes. Technology, process and people.
4. The best processes don’t hurry the prospect along but instead spend time discovering the facts, diagnosing the consequences and therefore designing a solution that resonates with how a prospect’s life can be improved.
5. Have you defined the questions that build relationships? These are insightful questions that open up prospects to consider the need for change. These questions uncover symptoms of pain.
   1. Symptom -Supply chain costs are rising – you offer a service to review the product lifecycle to take costs out of the system.
   2. Symptom – Software bugs are causing huge cost overruns and deadlines to be missed – you offer an intuitive code analyzer tool to trap bugs earlier in the process and allow corrections.
   3. Symptom – Throughput in the semiconductor industry is not meeting your customer’s demand – your system offers a higher level of throughput at a competitively attractive price.
6. Teach challenges faced by your customers, difficult issues preventing the companies in your key markets achieving their goals e.g. they can’t launch products quickly enough, they can’t scale production, they are struggling with inventory management, etc. Show you understand their challenge in their language.
7. Are your prospects crystal clear on how they will use your product on a Monday morning? Ease of use is a huge hurdle in the mind of the prospect.
8. Beyond the first purchase order have you developed a strategic management account system? Or bluntly what’s your 3 plan for this client in terms of value creation?
9. Does your sales collateral focus on outcomes and business results not just bland specification sheets droning on about features and benefits.
10. The CRM system will allow brief but important logging of activity and reports will show whether deals are being progressed and are not lingering.
11. Metrics will be measured objectively and consistently and real time updates will allow personal accountability of cookbooks. (a cookbook is a comprehensive set of activities that guarantee success)
12. Every sales professional will have a personal dashboard that measures their weighted sales pipeline by quarter compared with quota. These forecasts will be compared to actual results to build a better forecasting muscle.
13. It should be possible to see a direct relationship between the vision of the company and the sales scripts being deployed.
14. The sales process will demand clear next steps with dates at every juncture. This will create the essential environment of mutual respect between buyer & seller.
15. Especially in this economic environment, the process will bring out the cost of the problem and therefore an ROI will be easy to articulate that the prospect recognizes.
16. Referrals will be recognized as precious assets to be sought after and only after results have been delivered.
17. Too many sales professionals are in the mindset of “taking” instead of “giving”. Service first, sell second. Get yourself in the mindset of offering insight, offering value. And not just generic value, but value that resonates with that role in that company in their vocabulary.
18. Practice putting a cost on the type of problems that might exist in your prospect’s business. (Hint: The real cost of a customer’s process is often 2x when all costs are identified)
19. Understand all your new  products and why you launched them. Understand their relative competitive performance.
20. Understand the FAQs asked by your customers when implementing your products.
21. Key Dates For Completion move. As you diagnose and design the best solution based on responses from your prospect, clarifying expectations, you need to behave like a world class project manager. You need to act as if the key goal of all your conversations is NOT a PO but a happy successful customer who is operationally ready to use your technology/software/system.
22. Create alignment between marketing and sales by:
    1. Defining your compelling story. Articulate your unique positioning. Create a memorable and inspiring  boilerplate. This covers what you do and the big business results you deliver for clients supported by authentic evidence that makes your claimed results credible. Teach this boilerplate to both the marketing teams and the sales teams. Explain why it plays to the central history, DNA, culture and skill-set of your company. Make them believers. It drives everything.
    2. Identify the Persona that represents the likely user of your product and tell their story. Make it feel that you are directly talking to their world. Demonstrate the outcomes you achieve for them. That’s Persona thinking. Identify not just the target company but the managers within it who care about the issues you are solving.
    3.  Identify the sectors you want to dominate. Sector thinking brings a focus to your story telling. Sectors have their own unique language. Datacom, Military, Transportation, Logistics all use their own unique language. Ignore this and you will be treated as an outsider.
    4.  All marketing collateral needs to articulate how the prospect could use the product in their business today. Instant gratification. Use videos, case studies, blogs, white papers, whatever it takes to make it clear how a prospect derives value from your product. So many products fail the compelling usage tests. Having great capabilities is not enough.
    5. Also because of their deep knowledge of the market the marketing team (heavily assisted by smart product managers) will produce excellent competitor cheat sheets highlighting why you are unique. The key is to identify the essence of your competitors and why your solution solves a problem that their solution does not or why your solution is far more compelling.
    6. Audit your SEO results and drive strategies to improve your rankings. Engage an SEO consultant for top results. The AI version is now available!
    7. Marketing departments are lead generation machines. They need targets, metrics, and driven to achieve them. Use Google analytics, HubSpot type metrics management tools to measure your success and continue to drive improvements.
    8. All marketing collateral, web site narratives and speeches will focus on the awareness of key symptoms and their consequences. This will over time help push traffic to you, as people realize their negative present.
    9.  Hold regular review meetings between sales and marketing to make sure the language of marketing is resonating in the marketplace. Do the prospects really understand that last blog post, white paper, product announcement?
23. As CEO interview a few of your top sales people ask them:
    1. What does the company do?
    2. Who is your ideal prospect (person & job title not company) and what outcomes do we deliver for that prospect?
    3. What is your vertical market and what is our estimated market share?
    4. What companies do you believe should be in your pipeline for this year?
    5. How much business can you win from these companies during the next four quarters?
    6. Can you summarize your engagement strategy for three of your most attractive prospects, especially questions you will deploy to understand them?
    7. How would you describe your sales process from start to finish?
    8. What are the key differentiators of our product when they solve real customer issues?
    9. Can you summarize using three examples what problem you solved for a customer, the solution deployed and the results achieved?
    10. What’s your opinion of our marketing team, the collateral they produce and our website?These answers will indicate how your sales team are thinking. It will indicate their knowledge of three key aspects, product knowledge, customer knowledge and a world class sales process. It only takes one of those three to be weak for sales failure to occur. It will indicate how well you are telling your story.
24. And as CEO interview on a one on one basis, a representative sample of the marketing team, let’s say three team members maximum.

1. 1. What does the company do?
   2. How would you communicate our story and brand values better?
   3. What are the competitive advantages of our products by market?
   4. How can our customers use our products in their jobs and what outcomes can they expect?
   5. What type and volume of sales leads are you targeting to achieve over the next four weeks?
   6. What customer issues do we solve that will appear in a blog post in the next six months?
   7. What are our most successful campaigns in winning new business?
   8. What would you change in our website?
   9. What vertical market has the greatest sales potential?
   10. What’s your opinion of our sales team in terms of their effectiveness handling inbound leads? Cover urgency and ability to engage in a conversation.

Operator Tip

Stand back and curate a checklist that works for you. Use it to discover what’s happening and then start to diagnose the prioritized actions required. Don’t assume – discover to reach insights and actions.

Always available for a chat at Ian@TPPBoston.com.

Current strategic focus – Private company owners looking to exit in the next 2 years with EBITDA > $5m. Services here.