An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. Jack Welch
How do you take your sales successes and replicate them across the organization? According to Miller Heiman’s latest report; only a small percentage of companies actually do this; the ones that do have far greater success. Last week, an interesting article by Bob Apollo, What have you learned from your top sales performers? explores M-H’s findings and offers some excellent suggestions for forming a Sales Playbook.
What we have found in working with numerous organizations of various sizes is that very few of them have any mechanism for capturing the true Intellectual Capital of their sales organizations. You’re probably thinking – now wait a minute! What about CRM? Isn’t that what it is supposed to do? That is the promise of CRM; but in practice, unless you are constantly scrubbing and analyzing the data (which hardly anyone does), you have a lot of data that doesn’t give you much in the way of real actionable ways to improve performance. To emphasize the point even further, we have found that the majority of companies do not do any form of win/loss analysis with their clients and prospects. How can you learn and adjust if you are not objectively investigating your successes and failures?
In analyzing this problem, we have created an approach that allows Sales Leaders to simply and effectively start to capture and leverage the Intellectual Capital of their sales teams. We have developed INK Sales Strategy software to provide a framework for strategizing and winning large opportunities. By using the framework consistently, Sales Leaders are able to understand the key factors in winning and losing large opportunities in their industry. Sales Leaders and Sales Representatives both like INK because it provides them with a repeatable template that covers all of the client’s key decision making criteria and the Sales Team’s alignment against these criteria.
Using a framework to execute the strategy in large deals leads to the understanding of the sales patterns and behaviour that most frequently result in wins. Providing a repeatable, easy to use structure for Sales Strategy will help the organization create true competitive advantage from the Sales team.
The formula is simple: Take valuable sales conversations and apply an easy to use tool to guide the process. The result is improved win rates and lower cost of sales.
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