Most marketing managers are convinced that they can understand their market without doing research, and that they know what prospective customers are thinking about their products without asking them. Some of them have maintained this delusion through their professional career. But most eventually realize they are locked in a separate reality, and that they must develop a client-centered approach to selling to help them qualify prospective customers’ needs and concerns, move business forward, and move their sales objectives.
HOW TO PUT EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS IN PLACE TO QUALIFY PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS (PART 3)
Sales Planning
After your company has created its sales plan, it can create territory account, and sales call plans to help it achieve its business objectives:
- Develop a territory plan
- Develop an Account Plan
- Develop a Sales Cash Plan
- Communicate your marketing story
- Achieve your sales objectives
- Define new business objectives
- Develop a marketing Plan
- Develop a sales plan
Step 7: Evaluate Your Territory Plans
A territory plan is a subset of a sales plan. It defines the selling activities that will occur in a specific territory, and specifies how and when those activities will achieve specific sales objectives that have been defined in the company’s sales plan.
Step 8: Evaluate Your Account Plans
An account plan defines your company’s objectives for an account and describes how and how specific sales activities will occur. A key element of an account plan is an account analysis, which describes the history of the account and its current relationship with your company. Account plans are a valuable tool to help your company’s sales force achieve its objectives. But a recent study found that only 20 percent of sales professionals developed account plans for their top accounts. Taking the time to identify and describe all of the individuals who will influence your customers’ purchase decision will enable you to better position key elements of your company’s marketing story to each customer contact.
Step 9: Evaluate Your Account Review Process
It is important to review your company’s strategic accounts periodically. In many companies, a sales manager facilitates the review process, and each salesperson describes his or her customer’s account history and any outstanding service or support issues. The salesperson also describes the objectives for each one of his or her accounts, including new contract and revenue potential.
The account review process is a great way for salespeople to communicate the status of their accounts and for management to get a top-down picture of its entire team’s sales activities. However, account reviews are not a good forum for sales coaching or for brainstorming about how to handle difficult sales situations.
Step 10: Evaluate Your Sales Call Plans
In most cases, a salesperson’s primary objective is getting a purchase commitment; however, in many cases, the primary objective is solving a technical problem, delivering marketing materials, soliciting referrals, exploring new business opportunities, or resolving some other issue. Regardless of their reasons for making a sales call, salespeople have a much greater chance of meeting their objectives if they know exactly what they want to communicate and what they expect to accomplish, before leaving their office.
Review Your sales Representatives’ Sales call reports
In some selling situations, such as when a sales team is working with a major account, it is necessary to complete detailed sales call reports. However, in other selling situations, it may be sufficient to summarize what happened on sales calls over a period of a week or a month. This type of sales call report might contain, for example, the number of sales calls made, the number of demonstrations given, and the revenue generated from products sold, during the report period.
In any case, the process of completing a sales call report provides an opportunity to review the sales call, plan a strategy for the next customer contact, and communicate what happened on the call to the responsible manager. Companies that achieve total market domination use their sales representatives’ sales call reports to help them evaluate their sales representatives’ performance and determine whether any additional marketing resources need to be targeted on specific selling opportunities.
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