What is Your Sales Opportunity Plan?
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Transcript:
Hello, Hello everybody. This is Jack Kasel with Anthony Cole Training Group bringing you our next sales brew. And the topic is, what is your sales opportunity plan?
Now, let’s face it, we all know that sales is an emotional activity both for you and your prospect. For your prospect, it’s because they’re going to put their faith and trust in you to help them grow their business or they’re going to make a significant investment. If they make a bad choice, bad things could happen to the company. And for the salesperson, hey, let’s face it. It’s our livelihood. We’re competitive. We want to win by nature. And so with all those things coming together, this can be a little bit of an emotional situation.
So take a look at both sides of that coin real quick. Number one, from the prospect, we know this: people buy emotionally and justify logically. The only time that emotion is not involved is when you’re buying a pack of gum or a gallon of gas. Other than that, there’s an emotional tinge to this and that’s our job is to find that trigger that’s going to get them a little bit charged up and so they can lead them to choosing you, because you are the best option. Now, questions that help you do this, hey, suppose this situation doesn’t get transpired. I’m wondering how will that impact your growth in the upcoming year? What if this continues to go and you can’t find a solution for this thing you’re trying to accomplish? What’s the impact going to be on you? And then that great last word is what I call the great “I” word, the impact. We’ve got to know the impact of this current situation because if there’s no impact, there’s no problem. If there’s no problem, there’s no opportunity. So that’s our job, is to find that emotional trigger that would lead them to believe you’re the best option.
Now let’s flip that coin over. On the salesperson side, we have to keep our emotions in check. Otherwise, we start running with things that seem like a good opportunity, but you never had a chance to begin with. And all they’re trying to do is use you as a leverage to get a better opportunity somewhere else. So let’s take a look at how we can keep that emotional part of this sales process in place for us.
Switch over to our scorecard here real quick. And this is a scorecard that really what we want to try to do, is take some of the subjectivity out of this process and bring a little bit more objectivity in it. You see, on the left hand side, there are several things that we know at Anthony Cole Training Group. We use this as a guide to determine what’s the probability of me winning this business, what do I know about this account, or what do I need to know about this account? So here’s our recommendation to you is find your top 5678 customers. And what’s that common thread is there a certain size of company that you guys work very well with. And how this works is, if this is right in the bullseye for us, you give yourself ten points. If it’s not really in the bullseye, but it’s still an opportunity, maybe we’ll give ourselves maybe five points. And if it’s something that we’ve never done before, the question is, why are we trying to win this business when the probability of us winning this is going to be very minimal?
Now, whatever these things on the left hand side, that’s why I would recommend you sit down with some of your colleagues and figure out what are the indicators. All right, we know this that when we get entered. How did we know this is going to be somebody that’s going to be really good for us? The source of the opportunity. If they see us speak or we get introduced, we have a high probability of winning that business. And so look at this as a living document. Yes, today you may give yourself a four or a lower number on here, but as you’re progressing through the sales process, that number gets to be a little bit higher. And we’ve had some companies we work with that will not release a term sheet or a quote until this score gets to be at least a 65 or higher. So our recommendation is simply sit down, figure out what is it the common thread that goes through all the accounts that you’ve won, that you’ve been very successful, usable with.
Give yourself a scoring mechanism and then once you score yourself out, you simply now can figure out, hey, what do I know? What do I need to know either way? From the salesperson side of it, the emotion drains out and we can look at this thing very objectively. And what you’re going to find is some of the opportunities may go away, so the quantity of the opportunity may go away, but the quality is greatly going to increase. And you’ll see your closure ratio jumping up the higher you get on this scorecard. Hey, I hope this has been helpful. If there’s anything we can do for you, let us know. Thank you for taking time to listen to this sales brew.
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