The previous four steps would have helped you take stock of what you have in your sales tool bag and you will now be ready for Step 5 of the Five Steps to Sales Growth. The points outlined below won’t tell you how to sell your specific products and services however they will strengthen your sales approach, remove ambiguity from the sales process and help you successfully lead your sales team. 

STEP 5: Selling the Story

• Optimised sales process to support the “business model” – For example; if your strength is manufacturing and your business model relies predominantly on channel sales ensure you have processes that reach as deeply into the channel as possible allowing visibility of the sales pipeline right through to the end customer. However if your business is generating a large volume of leads of varying quality, break your teams up based on capability (hunters, developers, educators, closers, farmers) to address the different stages of your pipeline and the relationship journey your customers want to have with you. You should also look for ways to incorporate the winning habits of your top sales performers into each step of your sales process. Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point wrote an excellent summary of an effective sales process. It can be read here.
• Capture leads and track deals using a CRM – A seemingly obvious step, however two things tend to happen. SME’s frequently take too long to develop solid CRM skills across the team, while many large companies take too long to understand the importance and power of maintaining the discipline of pipeline accuracy. Customer Relationship Management tools and processes have been shown to produce real results including sales up 32%, sales team productivity up 40% and sales forecasting accuracy up 45% (Salesforce.com). Highlighting these benefits to the sales team can reinforce the importance of CRM and process compliance, setting a foundation from which they are likely to win more business.
• Build & retain the right sales capabilities – Once you understand your selling type, and it may be a combination, you can then consider the specific skills needed, broadly categorised as hunters, developers, educators, closers or farmers. So what type of selling do you need to be doing?

1. Product selling; transactional sales generally shorter cycles, sometimes commodity sales that need farming skills
2. Solution selling; added value bundled selling, relationships may not be as important as solution fit, or
3. Consultative selling; often customised solution to address a unique need and longer sales cycles.

Once you understand your selling type you can then consider the specific skills needed: hunters, developers, educators, closers or farmers.

• Align your sales tools to customer journeys – Hopefully by now you will have mapped the common customer behaviours to a customer journey view. Your sales team will have sales tools they use to help them close business including standardized email templates, pitch decks, benefits realisation assessment, pricing configurators, spec sheets, case studies, white papers, Non-Disclosure Agreements, etc. Ensure you have a common view of where and when the optimal time is to use each of these tools and embed them into your sales process. In some cases you should consider not allowing a deal to move forward in your sales pipeline without confirmation that one or a combination of these tools have been deployed, i.e. the benefits realisation assessment must have been completed before a deal can be set to the 60% likely to win stage.
• Test capability to communicate your value – Make time regularly to allow your sales people to learn. Not just what you are selling but also learn from your best practice sales people; what they need to know, do, use, share and avoid at each step through the sales cycle. Use role playing to improve buyer identification, listening skills, messaging, objection handling and closing techniques.
• Focus on reliable forecasting – Sales leaders should not simply run CRM generated sales forecasts and call it done, they need to prove to themselves that each deal is real and has an accurate stage and probability assigned to it. If you know your customer buying behaviours well and your sales are transactional this can be highly automated with rules relating to contact attempts, sales tools deployed and cycle times.  If your sales are not transactional, leaders need to be talking through deals with each sales person to ensure an objective view of stage and probability is recorded. Forecast accuracy will be greatly improved if you can achieve “your minimum standard” of sales process compliance across your sales teams while ensuring each stage in the sales process is associated with at least one observable milestone that confirms that the prospect’s buying decision process has moved forward. Sales activity alone does not represent a prospect’s progress in their buying decision, look for real evidence that they have advanced. Sales forecast accuracy at a macro level can only come from accuracy at a deal level.
• Align sales incentives to strategic goals – Incentives need to consider the current goals of an organisation i.e. a start-up may be focused on customer acquisition numbers where as a privately held mature company may need to focus on new high margin sales.  The sales model will also determine the types of incentives. For example, direct and indirect channels need different incentives, ongoing ownership of the customer relationship may also constrain how incentives can be designed.  The simplest incentives are often based on a percentage of sales revenue given as a one time only payment. Paying on margin is often more complex but has the benefit of sales cost clarity. Another factor that often needs consideration is lifetime value of a sale, this might be to do with support contracts or ongoing licence / SaaS / subscription revenue. There are no generic sales incentive plans as they need thought and consideration to make them work for your specific circumstances. The statement that “you should be careful of what you measure as that is what you will get” could not be truer when it comes to sales incentives.

​If you have managed to stay with me over the past five or so posts you hopefully will have taken on a few ideas about how to address your own issues within each of the Five Steps to Sales Growth. Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss any of these steps in more detail or if you think you could benefit from an objective outside opinion on your current sales strategies.

Foot note on process feedback loops as learning opportunities:Learning Loops –A major Loop from Step five back to Step One exists that can generate product/service improvements which marketing, R&D and manufacturing can lead. There are also minor loops that provide learning opportunities from each step back one.Selling Loop – from Step Five back to Step Two to generate repeat sales and referral business.

Now we are getting to the sharp end of the Five Steps to Sales Growth where you design and execute your one-to-many market communications. If you have taken the opportunity to work through Steps One and Two and then Step Three, you will find you have all the material you need for Step 4: Telling the Story.
STEP 4: Telling the Story

• Create the messages – By now you will know who the buyers are within your target market and what’s in it for them. Focus on the pain, the gain, how you compare to competitors and what sets you apart. Why are you better and what’s your proof? Fold this information into all forms of your messaging and lock it in, creating your elevator pitch, tag lines, value proposition statements, branding, etc.
• The customer journey - Map the Common Customer Behaviours to a customer journey view, pre and post-sale. Consider also if there are different journeys for different segments or personas. This will guide you on when and where to use your different types of messaging, i.e. at trade events, when networking, when blogging, in email campaigns, etc.
• Create the ideal list of artefacts needed to communicate the story – This is the opportunity to get your marketing and sales functions to work collaboratively. The sales folks can bring real world, anecdotal feedback from customers offering advice from what works in the field. The marketing team can keep the focus on a one-to-many approach to ensure the message works at scale but can still be executed in the field in a one-to-one situation. 
• Align messages to customer journey stages - Designing a library of collateral and other artefacts with your sales team's input enables you to accurately map each sales artefact to the different phases of the customer journey.
• Where to place the message – With the clear understanding you gained from Steps 1, 2 and 3 you will be able to map why, how, where and when you need to communicate your message. This will also help you make sense out of the many options (online ads, social media, trade events, print, email, blogs, etc.) and the investment required. Now execute your plan!
• Communicating with your channels – The sales channels you use will need to understand your customer journey/s, messaging, etc. They may also need their own separate portfolio of messaging that is adapted to their sales needs i.e. localize language, pricing information and affiliated branding.

Once you have worked through the above issues you will have a considered set of communication artefacts that provide clear guidance for your sales teams and sales channels to use with confidence. Carrying out Step 4 thoroughly provides a strategic marketing framework that you can adjust as you receive feedback from real in market failures and successes. In my next post I’ll outline the final step, Step 5: It's Time to Start Selling.