Sales Strategy Software
Sales Strategy Software is a new category of innovative, intuitive tools that enable and elevate your sales process. Using INK will raise the level of selling skills and increase your chances of success through the creation of daily habits, a consistent approach and better pursuit strategies. You should expect higher Win Rates and a decreased Cost of Sale through improved deal qualification and a more strategic approach to the opportunities that you choose to pursue.
A secondary outcome for Sales Leaders through consistent use of INK is that you will become better Managers and Coaches while raising the skills and sales acumen of your teams.
INK Sales Strategy Software contains two discrete software tools.
Sales Pursuit Assessment (SPA)
The SPA is a point-in-time qualitative and quantitative tool used by the owners of individual pursuits to understand where they are positioned based on key question areas. The objective is to understand current positioning as a decision making and action-planning tool based on available information and data. As a component of the organization’s formal Sales Process, the SPA gives the team common information at a critical point in the pursuit based on the important question areas, such as:
Will The Prospect Make A Change – charge is hard and the status quo wins more than half the time. This has a material impact on our Win Rate and Cost of Sale if we are chasing the wrong opportunities.
Should We Invest In This Pursuit – all deals are not created equal based on what we care about. We can measure tangible elements that pull emotion out of our decision-making.
Can We Differentiate – Based on how we create measurable value and whom we are competing against, what is our ability to create true value differentiation. We want to understand whether the prospect has the same view that we do.
Can We Win – If we don’t think we have a strategy and opportunity to win, them we should not be competing. We are just consuming our valuable resources. The questions guide our understanding of where we are now and what we may need to do next.
Win Strategy
As the name implies, the Win Strategy contains sequential modules that ask critical questions and provide guidance to help create a Sales Strategy that maximizes your chances of success.
Today, Sales teams and Sales Leaders will inconsistently think about pursuit elements that are critical to the strategic and tactical choices that they will be forced to make if they choose to pursue an opportunity. Our goal is to help drive a consistently higher level of strategic discussion and understanding.
The Win Strategy focuses pursuit teams on several key areas.
The People On The Client Side of the Buying Process – in complex sales, there will be seven or more people involved in the buying process. They arrive from different functions, different hierarchies and come with different goals, biases, knowledge, influence and credibility. We want to understand who they are, their role, your relationship with them, their relative power, their style and their personal value created by buying from you based on what they care about in their role. This is the People Puzzle.
How Will We Be Judged and How Are We Positioned – Sales Reps will generally asks prospects about the decision-making criteria by which we will be judged. Sales Leaders will ask their reps the same question in Deal Reviews. The reality is many prospects do not have a formal criteria or process. The primary opportunity is to better understand our positioning by continually asking and testing. The secondary opportunity is to teach the prospect how to buy, driving them toward our points of unique differentiation. This is the Differentiation Matrix and it helps create the first ever graphic visualization of your pursuit position.
Strategy and Tactics – Leveraging common sales strategy terms, we want to raise the level of the internal conversation about strategy and strategic choice. We want to help focus the sales dialogue on our strategy, which leads directly to the creation of our Tactical Plan. Given what we know or don’t know at this point of the pursuit, this should guide our near-term tactics as we seek to create value differentiation and momentum for the opportunity. Everything that we have done up until this point in the pursuit, leads to our Tactical Plan.
Price To Win – This is a common internal question that may come from our CEO or CFO. What is our Price to Win? Candidly, we are guessing most of the time. We are trying to leverage previous information and what we know about our competitors, their pricing, their value creation areas as a guide to how we may price based on how we will be judged. This is more art than science, but want to use the information we have collected to reduce the guessing.
Assuming that you think that understanding the information we have referenced above is valuable, then consider the process you go through to gain this level of understanding today. The economics of even marginal Win Rate improvement or Cost of Sale reduction make sales effectiveness improvements pretty easy to justify. That said, change is as hard for Sales Leaders and Sales teams as it is for the prospects that they are selling to.