Training the sales force and sales management

Managing the sales process

Managing the sales process across your business is critical to your organization's success.
Selling is not just the interaction of salespeople and prospects. Effective selling is the continuous dialogue of marketing, promotion, proposal, contract, fulfillment, and service. It's the customer conversation that occurs with your salespeople, on your Web site, and through the partner organizations that represent your products and services.

Information drives selling success

Accurate information must be available at the right place, at the right time. Accurate information about customers, prospects, products, and pricing. When you use information to drive selling, you ensure sales alignment to the overall corporate objectives so your selling resources are mapped to your richest opportunities. Information-driven selling guarantees that every selling interaction moves sales effectively forward. Finally, information-driven selling ensures that the selling process occurs collabo-ratively across the different organizations and channels that support your selling efforts.

Information Drives Selling Alignment

Your selling success is managed in three dimensions.

First, how you optimize sales territories against your richest opportunities.

Second, how sales compensation correctly influences selling within those territories.

Last, how you use marketing to drive territory opportunity to revenue.

Information is the key to using territory planning, sales compensation, and marketing to optimally align selling to corporate objectives.
The major challenge is to have one single basis of information that aligns sales efforts to corporate objectives.
In an economy where opportunities are harder to close and competition is high, sales is frequently asked to meet growing revenue goals with fewer resources.

Many sales applications and methodologies concentrate on increasing management visibility and administration, De Zwarte Consultancy's Sales Training and Coaching focuses on accelerating your sales cycle by using your implemented sales methodologies and specifically the available information from your sales professionals to drive selling effectiveness.

De Zwarte Consultancy wants to help you move from sales administration to selling effectiveness.

Information Drives Selling Collaboration

Selling doesn't occur only in the sales department. Selling is supported through marketing, fulfillment, service, support, and all the organizations with which your customers interact. Moreover, selling isn't just occurring through your employees. Your customers are also learning about and purchasing your products and services on your Web site and through your partners. It's imperative to collaborate in the selling process across all the organizations and channels your customers interact with, making enterprise information the keystone to collaborative selling.

For direct selling, the key in leveraging enterprise information is to completely connect the sales process from lead to quote, for inside as well as field-based sales organizations. Likewise, Partner Management drives indirect selling for channel managers as well as program participants by leveraging the same enterprise information. It's not just about coordinating selling across channels. Successful selling also requires cross-departmental coordination. Information-driven selling ensures the alignment of selling with corporate objectives. It delivers selling effectiveness and collaborative sales across your internal organizations as well as your external selling channels. Information-driven selling requires a single understanding of information across your business.

What if you could...

Increase the number of sales opportunities or transactions by 10%
Increase the average revenue of each opportunity by 10%
Improve the win rate of your partners or your own people by 10%
Decrease average sales cycle time by 10%

You would improve sales productivity by 48%.

This is equivalent to growing your selling capability by one-half without having to recruit and train a single person or any new partners.

Put another way, you could increase revenue by half with the selling resources you have today.

Research has shown that successful sales professionals do things differently in the following areas:
- they have a consistent and structured way of interacting with customers and
a structured approach in dealing with their accounts
- they have a clear portfolio- or major account strategy that is leading their tactics
- they understand the business issues of the customer, know their competition and move well in the political landscape

Successful sales professionals not only manage their opportunities as a process
but above all focus on the real and most profitable ones.
Being successful is a result of personal profile, training and experience.
Sending people to training is done by most organizations.
However the effect of most training is limited because the training is not tailored to the situation and ambition of the organization.
The major reason for not benefiting full from training is lack of structured implementation,
back in the office people continue working the same way they were used to.

Over 80% of the training effort is wasted if the new methods are not properly implemented
in the daily activities of the sales professionals. This means that sales management needs to be coached
how to systematically manage the new methods or processes.
Many sales managers are pushing on the outcome rather than on managing the sales process.
Implementation of new methodologies and processes in the sales organization
is the most underestimated phase of sales force improvement projects.

De Zwarte Consultancy delivers The TAS Group's repeatable processes,
best-practice methodologies,
enabling skills,
and technology integration
to enable you to achieve improvements like these in your selling capability.
The outcome—improved sales productivity and accelerated sales growth.

De Zwarte Consultancy is certified to sell and deliver the following sales methodologies
offered by the TAS Group (previously Siebel Sales Methodology Experts, formerly knows as On Target / Target Marketing Systems):

Opportunity Management - Target Account Selling (TAS)

By focusing sales effort in the right place, with the right people, and on the right issues, Target Account Selling (TAS) shortens the sales cycle and enables sales professionals to win more opportunities.

Account Management - Enterprise Sales Process (ESP)

A sales process that enables sales teams to penetrate, cover and grow large strategic accounts

Portfolio Management - Portfolio Management Process (PMP)

A process for driving the maximum amount of revenue from a group of accounts, while maintaining customer satisfaction.

Partner Management - Channels and Alliances Management Process (CHAMP)

Channels and Alliances Management Process (CHAMP) helps alliance managers create predictable streams of revenue with strategic alliances by providing the methods and tools necessary for effectively going-to-market with partners.

Partner Portfolio Management (PPM)

Partner Portfolio Management (PPM) is a structured process for channel or alliance professionals responsible for growing and managing a portfolio of partners. It shows them how to assess their partners and apply the right strategies to each, resulting in an optimal mix of resource allocation and revenue achievement.

Currently I work on getting certified in:

Territory Management Process (TMP)

A practical approach for analyzing a sales territory's potential and developing an effective territory management plan.

Selling to Senior Executives (SSE)

A great addition to the above mention programs is sales coaching, to reinforce the use of the concepts and fully realize the potential of the sales people involved.

If you want some more information on De Zwarte Consultancy's training offerings, don't hesitate to email me at info@dezwarte.com.