Sales Synergistics Strategy Guide

To Increase your New Business Revenue               Step 1 - Carefully map your target personas Understanding the specific types of clients your team wants to reach and ensuring that every individual who touches a client OR any product, service, or communication that will reach them, is a key component of a customer-centric approach to selling. Persona Mapping enables multiple effective sales strategies like account-based marketing, frictionless selling, and collaborative campaigns True persona mapping goes beyond role, title, and industry.  True Persona mapping dives DEEP into the empathetic exploration of your target personas needs, decision drivers, communication styles, and day-in-the-life struggles and pain points. Next-level persona mapping also explores the deeper goals and personal objectives in career and life that our target personas are LIKELY to seek.  This gives deeper emotional leverage than job-focused alleviation of business pain Step 2 - Analyze the Target Personas’ Buying Processes Your teams must understand that in 21st century sales, the customer will spend MOST of their time during the decision process AWAY from the seller. This time away includes actions like gathering outside information, deliberating internally (more frequently in committee, lately), and most often, just letting life happen to them without progressing their progress toward, or away from your solutions until acted upon by outside forces like market conditions or your competitors. The best teams know what their selected target personas are likely to be doing in between touches from their team members (sales, marketing, or any team member) within a very narrow margin of variation This helps the teams select the proper steps in sequence to ensure that all customer facing team members know where they are in the buying process and what the next best steps SHOULD accomplish Step 3 - Identify the Centers of Influence where they learn and network In 21st Century Sales, customers everywhere now are influenced through advice and information that they curate for themselves through a Trusted network of recurring mutual value built through Relationships earned from Insights that are current and relevant to the entire Breadth of shared Experience over time (Trusted Relationships of Insight from Broad Experience = TRIBE) Your team must determine What groups and people do the various roles within the target/client organization are part of the TRIBE? = Centers of Influence (COI’s) -- Professional Associations / Recurring shows -- User Groups (pre-existing outside those you create for your users) -- Industry Publications / Certification groups -- Blogs & Forums -- Training resources -- Vendors -- Value Added Reseller / Consulting Partners (Chanel Sales) -- Personal relationships with industry influencers -- Talent Recruiting Resources (Including Undergrad and MBA Programs) To easily reach multiple individuals within the target personas you have selected, your organization must establish presence and relationships within those centers of influence (COI) and thereby gain credibility for multiple clients/prospects in less time? Over time, Identify TRIBE for each Territory and set targets for getting established in those individual COI’s through regular content contributions, events, sponsorships, individual representative presence in various organizations and groups, strategic partnerships, personal relationships, etc. Step 4 - Assess your best rep’s activities for best practices As an organization that is currently successful but seeking a new level of performance growth, your team already has best practices that are working well for your ongoing revenue Rather than seek lots of new activities to change what your reps are doing to get that change, the most efficient means of growth comes in proliferating the best practices that are already present.  Many of these best practices are enabled, enhanced, or hidden by the natural charisma and intuitive/experienced reactions of your top reps.  This makes those practices very difficult to identify and even harder to pass on. For example: when asked how one top rep got such high close rates, the only key practice she could identify was “I just ask for the business.” While this may be true, this masks a myriad of interpersonal skills like timing and delivery of the ask, as well as all of the previous interactions that lead to the moment of the ask.  The rep’s presentation and presence, both emotionally and physically, carry far more weight than the ask itself or the choice of words when doing so. Most reps cannot identify all of these contributing factors, and these factors may be different for each scenario that they encounter. These best practices CAN be observed over time through real time interactions with the customers. This process takes a great deal of time and dedicated effort to observe, qualify, quantify, map out specific actions and their results on customer behavior Observation can effect the behavior, so it must be done organically, with a frequency that helps the reps behave naturally This observation process must start from a baseline of stated beliefs from top performing reps about what those best practices are.  Armed with that information, observers can then go out with something tangible to try to observe and thereby “Qualify” that best practice as valid and through ongoing observation “Quantify” the degree to which that activity helps influence customer behavior Through front line-leaders, in localized training and coaching, often through weekly team meetings and the like, these STATED best practices that are gained through conversations with the best reps, can be passed on to the other AVERAGE or below average reps in your organization for immediate use The degree to which these stated best practices improve the success of the average reps can also be measured as a means to Qualify the practice as effective or not.  This must be done one practice at a time, as not to overload the reps on the team with multiple things to attempt to implement, and as to not mask the proper attribution of any positive change to the right practice Step 5 - Identify “Actual” Sales process from reps of ALL performance levels With best practices identified and the steps are verified.  The steps should be “mapped” in a sequence of follow up that increases the chances of predictable success This process could vary significantly from the process that reps have stated they follow, but consistent observation should show the truth of the process that you and your team are able to uncover Find internal points of friction Within this identified process, certain points of consistent, systemic stress will be identified These points of stress are often hidden by various acts of heroics that many members of your organization take on to overcome these inefficiencies Some of your team members may cling to these acts of heroism as points of pride, validation, or job security.  Some may have been handling excessive work that they never should have had to take on for so long, that they now feel a sense of security in their outsized span of control over more of the various processes that determine their ratings and compensation These points of stress often exist at the boundaries between silos within your organization, through which parts of the sales process must flow and they always cause turbulence or slowing of the flow These portions of the sales process that have to cross barriers between sales, marketing, and various operations teams might be: -- various legal or operational approvals -- creation and distribution of learning collateral for customers -- customer hand offs from sales to implementation and onboarding teams -- Alignment between sales messaging and marketing messaging -- Production of quotes and contracts -- Turnaround times for customer deliverables ---- And many more Step 6 - Optimize Sales Execution activities according to Persona Buying Process With your team, prioritize the points of friction that can be eliminated quickly, with the least output or stress FIRST There may be other major projects or cultural shifts that will bring larger and more lasting improvements, but large change initiatives bring frictions of their own.  Starting with the simplest fixes first free up energy to tackle larger projects in turn, and the quick wins will build belief in the team for the general optimization effort as a whole. The changes made MUST be made with a focus on the customer’s needs according to their persona-specific buying process.  To that end, you should select your most profitable, or largest customer segment/persona to focus on first, as optimizations the success and satisfaction of that customer persona will have an outsized impact on your revenue vs. others Step 7 - Optimize company culture for Synergy focused on the 5-ring Framework Throughout all of these efforts, you can accelerate the 1st ring of the framework, SALES EXECUTION, by promoting a focus on all of the other 4 rings throughout the entire organization. Helping the entire organization understand their direct role in content strategy (as collaborators in the research and development of industry-leading thought, regardless of their role), affiliate/channel strategy (recognizing affiliates such as channel partners as external stakeholders to be groomed like customers), Advocate Strategy (as fueled by customer experience driven by the inputs of the entire company working in synergy throughout the entire lifecycle of the customer), and Mass Marketing (as part of the overall PR/corporate citizenship components of your company brand strategy, which involves the entire team in various ways, to include their personal presence on social media and other lenses within the public eye)