Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]
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There are questions that the sales rep asks the client. There are questions that the reps should ask themselves. And then there are questions that a coach should ask the rep. There are over 100 in all that we have documented from some of the best salespeople in the world. This is how many it takes to win a complex sale.
Traditional questions asked of salespeople by sales managers typically include, for example: What are your differentiators that will cause them to buy from you? What is the source of urgency that will cause them to buy now? How will they make the decision? Whose votes really matter on the committee? Why would they buy from you? Do enough important decision makers prefer you to win? Who cares about your benefits, differentiators, and value?
This checklist can be automated as part of a drill-down forecast so that the vice president of sales can see the manager’s confidence level in the sales plan and the chances of winning.
This practice is spotty at best in most organizations and missing altogether in many others. Look for these organizations in the financial section of the newspaper when they miss next quarter’s earnings.
Coaching in Eight Simple Questions
Exactly what the 100 questions are needs to be validated by your sales managers for your industry and solution set. It is one of the first things we do with a client. But many managers have found it helpful to categorize them into eight universal questions that everyone can keep in their head or on a wallet card:
| 1. Why buy? | Pains, gains, needs, value, fit, budget |
| 2. Why us? | Differentiation, prior preference |
| 3. Why now? | Source of urgency |
| 4. How much? | Proposed solution, amount, approval process |
| 5. Why them? | Qualification |
| 6. Who matters? | Politics, roles, decision-making process |
| 7. Who cares? | Linkage, preference |
| 8. What next? | Strategy, action items, due date, owner |
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The top salespeople we know discover 80 percent or more of the information they need early in the sales cycle and either qualify out or pursue. Mediocre salespeople usually have less than 50 percent of the information late in the game. Coaches help the average salesperson to fill in blind spots and challenge assumptions earlier to gain advantage.
A good coaching session not only can improve the chance of winning, but also improve the forecast as well. The coaching process lies above the sales process and is an “analysis of the analysis” from a more experienced eye.
Our principal, Phil Johnson, has worked with several of our clients to include the front-line sales managers’ analysis and confidence rating in the salesperson’s plan as part of the official forecasting system.
A major flaw in current forecasting philosophy is to multiply the percentage of your chances to win by the value of the deal to get an expected value for the opportunity. This is usually reduced by the manager based on his or her confidence in the rep rather than the analysis. All of the opportunities on the forecast are then combined in the hope that the law of large numbers will get us to a total figure that is somewhere close. In reality, deals are binary. You either lose them or win them.
Phil’s approach of including a confidence rating feedback system from strategy reviews ensures not only that the analysis is being conducted on a periodic basis but also that the forecast reflects the realities of winning rather than a probable expected value for each deal. This is a new way of thinking about a forecast.
There is a symbiotic relationship between good coaching questions and the activities in a best practice sales cycle. The coaching questions are what the salesperson needs to know in order to win the deal. The activities are the things the salesperson needs to do to find out what he or she needs to know.
Answering the questions isn’t about filling out a form — it’s getting the information it takes to win. If your sales management team doesn’t have the discipline to require salespeople to get this information and get it early, then your organization doesn’t have the discipline to win, no matter what technology you use.
Too often coaching is really a “review” of where you are and have been in an account or opportunity. True coaching is discussing blind spots, strategy, and actions to support both accounts and opportunities. A good coach can help a salesperson challenge what he or she doesn’t know or is assuming and then build actions to fill the gaps. A key value that coaches bring to sales reps is to anticipate competitive responses and prepare counterstrategies. Better information leads to a better strategy.
Unfortunately, a large number of deals that are on the forecast have already spun out of control owing to one event or another. Consequently, every pipeline also should include “suspects” so that sales managers can start asking pointed questions and coaching salespeople how to get in control of these deals early in the cycle. This is the difference between a forecast and a pipeline. And this is also where a good CRM system allows sales managers to track lead quality and responsiveness.
Forecast or “Pastcast”—Driving in the Rearview Mirror
Many sales managers don’t review or coach forecast and pipeline opportunities early enough to make a difference because of the current quarterly focus. Public companies’ deals generally don’t get reviewed until the quarter in which they are forecasted to close. If the average sales cycle at a company is six months, the deal is not being focused on until it is in its last 90 days.
Think about how big of an issue this is if the sales cycle is 12 months. This would mean that the deal was ignored by management for nine months! This is aggravated by salespeople who don’t want the manager’s scrutiny on the deal until it is either virtually closed or in trouble.
Every manager should schedule coaching sessions for all pipeline deals, no matter how far out they are. These sessions should occur once during the early part of a quarter, when you can focus more on the long term, and then again when the deal is moving to the next phase of the sales cycle. Or the sessions should happen before each major phase of the sales cycle that requires additional resources (see Figure 7–3).