Sales News & Views

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Sales News & Views

Sales managers are constantly urging their salespeople to sell ‘Value’ to senior customer executives and to do it early enough to influence any RFP’s issued by the customer. However, many salespeople repeatedly fail in this task simply because they haven’t built effective, business based relationships with their customer’s senior executives.

Why?

Because to do this requires the salesperson to acquire an in-depth understanding of a customer’s business, the key business issues facing the customer and a real understanding of how their own products and services can be deployed to help the customer executive achieve both their business goals and their personal, work-related ambitions.

By failing to engage senior customer executives in a business based discussion early enough, salespeople get ‘locked out’ of the critical phases of business problem resolution and are limited to sales discussions in the middle phase of the decision cycle when a solution has already been specified and their competitors are already active in the account. It can be seen from the graph why attempting to engage a senior executive in this middle phase of the decision cycle is unlikely to meet with consistent success.

A structured and well thought out account plan would go a long way to addressing this common sales management problem. Sadly, most account plans fail to arm the salesperson with the appropriate knowledge to enable them to sell business value to senior executives because they are often simply an historical summary of what has happened in the account, plus a profile of the customer containing basic facts and information about the target organisation. Very little critical analysis, if any, is applied to the information contained in the ‘account plan’. Once completed, they languish on a bookshelf to be dusted off once a year when the sales manager requests an account review.

This is because the processes used for account planning rarely direct the salesperson to critically analyse the information they have garnered and to then make the connections to their products and services. Nor do they require the salesperson to develop short and medium-term planned activities to ground the plan in reality and keep the plan alive. Whilst some may show long term objectives and strategies, they are usually far enough in the future for the salesperson, and their sales managers, to ignore them under the day-to-day pressures of life in a busy sales team.

Finally, many account planning processes fail to provide sufficient motivation for the salesperson to keep the plan current. Usually the account plan is completed at the insistence of sales management and it provides little ongoing value for the salesperson for the effort required to maintain the plan.

The Account Development Cycle designed by The Sales Academy Ltd is a six-step planning process which enables a salesperson or an account team to identify the key business issues facing their customer; make the connections to their products and services and then develop Initial Benefit Statements and Value Propositions, linked to those business issues, to provide a focus for planned activities and meetings with senior customer executives. Five Critical Action Plans are designed to create the momentum needed to execute strategies to achieve longer-term, high level goals and objectives.

The five Critical Action Plans keep the Plan current - and dust free!

Selling ‘Value’ to Senior Executives

By Tony Hillyard

Director & Principal Consultant

The Sales Academy