One of the easy traps for anybody who is managing their own sales activity to fall into is to start chasing the big deals. One of the sales meeting myths, usually put around large organisations by non-sales people is that:

• Every sales person wants to close a single deal on day one that blows his/ her target for the year – and then spend the rest of the year playing golf/ tennis/ Sudoku/ …..

Even very intelligent people fall into this trap. They start chasing the big deals, spending all their selling time on a relatively few opportunities that have a long sales cycle. The net result is either a poor sales performance or an unpredictable business. And they have probably consumed a large amount of their firm’s resources in constructing bids or proposals.

What to Do

• Break your potential sales opportunities into categories. Change your thinking from Sales Opportunities to Routes to Market or Sales Channels

• Get some idea of scale & of how competitive you are

  • If you have access to market data, use this to understand the size of each route to market, if not, assign an attractiveness score to each possibility – you might base this on population, demographics or a reasonable set of assumptions

  • Make sure you write down the basis for your assumptions – it is easy to translate a best guess into fact on the third iteration of the plan.

• Manage your time

  • Decide how much selling time (or how many people!) you will devote to each route to market

  • Plan your resources accordingly

• Define the metrics that you will use to measure the return you get from each route to market and over what time-frame

• Plan your activities for each channel, based on:

• The people you are dealing with

• The outcomes you are looking for at each stage in your process

• The people you hope to build relationships with

• Influencers

• Introducers

• Specifiers

• Choosers

• Users

• Decision makers

• Authorisers

• Payers

• Match your marketing promotion activity to the sales plan – making sure that you consider all the potential means of establishing the required relationships and supporting your sales process

  • On-line

  • Networking

  • Advertising

  • PR

  • Direct Marketing

  • Field sales force – ideally doing the things that only they can do

Measure

Measurement of sales and marketing activities is vital. In most businesses, the sales process consumes a substantial proportion of the business’ resources (or cost). You need to ensure that every activity is generating a return. That means ensuring that each step in your sales plan has the right metrics – reviewed often and used to drive performance and behaviour in the right direction.

This was a guest post by Paul Fileman of Results-Zone. Results-Zone bring extensive knowledge and experience gained in Blue Chip organisations to businesses like yours. They ensure that your business is fully exploiting a well thought through operating plan. They work alongside you and your team – as business results managers. They ensure that your team and your business are elevated to the results-zone. They bring you “hands-on” experience – similar to employing high quality management skills without the risk or costs in recruiting full time employees.

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