Training Sales Teams to Win New Opportunities: How Sales Plans Can Drive Success
By Steve Andersen and Scott Benjamin, Ph.D.
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
Within your organization, you may have noticed that top performers are meticulous planners. They understand that success doesn’t happen by chance and, as a result, they spend time at the beginning of the sales process preparing a well-thought-out strategy for “planning to win.” In our previous article, we explored the importance of understanding what matters most to your customer’s key stakeholders, and the types of questions that can help you discover and align their objectives and challenges with your solutions and unique business value. In this article, we’ll explore how you can teach your sales teams the critical step of translating that understanding into a winning sales plan to gain a competitive edge in your key and must-win opportunities.
Top performing sales professionals treat the sales planning process akin to the game of chess. With the ultimate goal of increasing win rates of their most important sales opportunities, they start by developing a strategy or “plan to win.” It begins by developing a strategic vision that extends several moves ahead of the competition. This involves evaluating available resources, aligning them with customer objectives and formulating dynamic plans that move the pieces around to increase the likelihood of winning.
The most effective salespeople and account managers leverage their deep understanding of their customers’ unique needs in order to originate plans that focus on the co-creation of customer value and the achievement of important business outcomes. The process begins by training your salespeople to understand all of the pieces on the board, the capabilities of each piece and evaluating your competition — let’s take a look at how this plays out in planning to win new sales opportunities.
Know Your Stakeholders
Most B2B sales professionals agree that companies don’t buy from companies; rather, people buy from people. This statement embodies the importance of building relationships and establishing trust with key customer stakeholders, but first, we need to understand who the key members of the customer’s decision team are, and what motivates and matters most to each of them.
Top sales professionals are trained to identify the key stakeholders in the decision-making process at all levels — well before the first engagement. Mapping out the stakeholders in the customer’s organization can be compared with evaluating and matching the different pieces on the chess board, and by doing so, they are able to align their solutions with the needs of each level of the customer’s organization, from the user and influencer all the way up to the decision-maker and approver.
Winning sales planners have already discovered the professional and personal drivers of each stakeholder to ensure alignment of these solutions with every level of engagement. Armed with this information about the customer’s “players on the board,” the sales professional can begin to align their cross functional team members to strategically deliver value at every level of the customer’s organization. This forward-thinking approach begins to separate their offering from that being offered by the competition by meeting the objectives and overcoming the challenges being faced by the customer’s key stakeholders in the decision process at all levels of the organization.
Know Your Competition
One critical oversight that we’ve noticed in many sales plans is not identifying the competition and the blocking factors that stand in the way of winning more deals early enough in the sales process. Again, sales professionals trained in effective planning are able to predict several moves ahead. Procurement often requires several bids and, thus, companies are speaking with multiple competitors. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the market landscape, taking into account the direct competitors and their value propositions as well as the indirect competitors, which sometimes can be status quo. If teams have done the proper discovery ahead of time, their account plans will already align more precisely with the customer’s needs than the competition.
Now, by evaluating the competition that could also be pursuing the opportunity, the successful sales team is able to prepare to address the customer’s needs across the competitive landscape during the conversation with the customer. This proactive preparation and planning create a competitive advantage in the sales process and many times is the difference in closing more deals, and provide salespeople and account managers with the ability to foresee and predict several moves ahead on their sales “chess boards.”
Following the planning and mapping of the competitive landscape and what they are offering, the sales “champion” can develop an effective “plan to win” that is several moves ahead of the competition, accomplishing this by formulating a differentiation strategy based on competitive analysis that reaches far beyond just the features of their product or service. By doing so, the successful sales team can craft a differentiation approach that not only emphasizes the unique business value of their solutions, but also positions their offering in a way that addresses the shortcomings in the competitor’s offerings.
This approach demonstrates the distinct value created for the customer and positions their offering uniquely in the market. Just like in a competitive chess match, if we are not positioning our offering, we are being positioned by the competition. Once the differentiation strategy has been developed, the successful sales planner anticipates potential hurdles that could derail the deal including any blocking factors that could stand in the way of winning the opportunity. This includes a meticulous examination of factors ranging from budget constraints to regulatory challenges. By anticipating these potential issues in the sales planning process, the top sales professional can assemble the information necessary to assuage any concerns or issues during the conversation.
Conclusion
Winning opportunities in today’s sales environment requires investing time on the front-end by gathering and synthesizing information into a comprehensive sales “plan to win.” Entering a competitive sales cycle without investing the time to develop a strategy is like playing checkers when the competition is playing chess. Successfully trained sales planners understand the pieces on the chess board (both on their cross functional teams as well as the customer’s key stakeholders), analyze the competition and what competitive moves they have available at their disposal and anticipate potential blocking factors that could stand in the way of successfully winning the opportunity. In order to drive success and increase win rates, train salespeople and account managers to initiate their sales campaigns with an effective plan to win and develop strategies to “checkmate” their competition by focusing on customer value co-creation and differentiating their unique business value. Do your sales teams have the training necessary to “plan to win?”