Is your small business focused on the right sales priorities?

Friday Funnel Focus by EPOCH Sales Management Solutions

Last week, we discussed the importance of making your business sales team ready and introduced the concept of focusing on the right priorities as one area to get there. This week we will go into more detail on focusing on the right sales priorities, i.e. “Get the Sales Strategy Right!”.

In last Friday’s blog post,  we shared these five items to Focus on the Right Priorities:

• Get the Messaging Right. Make sure everyone can answer the question, “What problem does your business solve that people are willing to pay for?”
• Align Sales Strategy from Business Results Goals to Selling Objectives to Sales Activities
• Get Targeting Right. Identify Ideal Client Profiles by first building Ideal Account Profiles and then applying different prospect profiles to each Ideal Account Profile. Use ICP’s to build target lists.
• Determine Prospecting Priorities. Build the right culture.
• Measure what matters. Build dashboards for Sales Results, Sales Pipeline Health and Sales Activities.

Let’s dig a little deeper into each one this week.

Get the Messaging Right.

Make sure everyone can succinctly answer the question, “What problem does your business solve that people are willing to pay for?” We teach our clients how to use the answer to that question to build their “Why Your Exist Story!” That story addresses their target persona in a problem statement and is followed by how they do it, a brief overview of their offering and what results they get. This foundational messaging piece is then transformed into key sales and marketing messaging using one or more of these frameworks:

• Marketing Messaging Framework. We are fans of Donald Miller’s Build Your StoryBrand framework to support your “one to many” marketing messaging.  This framework is excellent at supporting websites, landing pages, marketing emails and social media posts.
• Tactical Sales Messaging Framework. In our opinion, Mike Weinberg provides the best Tactical Sales Messaging framework in his Company Sales Story or Power Statement in his book, “New Sales Simplified.  Mike’s framework is excellent for one-to-one sales communications such as introductory letters, email sequences, phone call guides and voicemail scripts.  His framework helps you set yourself apart in situations where prospects are in the market or open to considering a product or service like yours.
• Strategic Sales Messaging Framework. Chet Holmes shared his Core Story/Stadium Pitch concept in his book “The Ultimate Sales Machine”.  His framework is great for breaking into new ground, using relevant research to gain attention of those that may not currently be in the market for your product or service.  Chet’s framework is designed to get the attention of some of the 60-90% of the market that is not actively shopping or currently open to buying your typeof product or service.  Its strength is in the “aha moment” created by the research information.

Align Your Sales Strategy from Business Results Goals to Selling Objectives to Sales Activity Metrics.

Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana shared this concept in their book, “Cracking the Sales Management Code”.  Here is a quick summary on how small business owners can best implement the concept.

Set Business Results Goals

The Business Owner owns this one. While “Business Results” can mean many things, typically small business owners set revenue goals as business results goals.  In executing this process we recommend the use of a “Six Factor SWOT Analysis” that Jeremy Donovan and Marylou Tyler shared in their book, “Predictable Prospecting”.

Selling Objectives

The sales manager or the business owner acting as the sales manager owns the selling objectives. They usually fall into one of four categories:

• Customer Focus
• Product Focus
• Market Coverage
• Sales Force Enablement

Typically, the most important selling objective is customer focus. We will discuss this one further below in Get Targeting Right.

Sales Activity Metrics

These metrics are again set by the sales manager or the business owner, if acting as a sales manager.  Metrics can be built for weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual periods.  Each period should have a dashboard consisting of multiple sales reports in 3 primary areas:

1. Sales Results
2. Sales Pipeline Health
3. Sales Activities
   

Get Targeting Right

This starts with identifying your Ideal Client Profile (ICP).  We encourage companies to build their Ideal Client Profiles by first identifying 1-3 Ideal Account Profiles based on industry, company size, geography, technology used (if applicable) and other psychographic factors.  Next apply 1-3 Prospect Profiles to each Ideal Account Profile.  At this point, you need to prioritize up to 9 Ideal Client Profiles and focus on the top 1-5 ICPs.  The next step is to build focused, fixed, written workable target lists for each salesperson.  We recommend updating salesperson target lists weekly.  As Ryan Reisert says, “The list is the strategy.

Determine Prospecting Priorities

Here are 10 things to consider as you build a new business development culture for your sales team.

1. Can you deliver clear, succinct messaging to your prospects that truly resonates with them?
2. Did you create a finite, focused, written, workable target list for this month?
3. Do you set and track weekly and monthly new opportunity goals?
4. Do  you block time on your calendar each day/week for New Business Development?
5. Are you dampening the “Roller Coaster Effect” by working your sales funnel in the right order?
6. Do you use all available channels?
7. Do you measure and track meaningful selling interactions?
8. Do you practice your sales outreach techniques?
9. Who helps keep you accountable?
10. How many touches do you make before moving someone to nurture or DQ?

Measure What Matters

Click here for a link to a description for a set of Sample Weekly and Monthly Sales Dashboards to help you track Sales Results, Sales Pipeline Health and Sales Activity Metrics.

These five areas provide the foundation for a solid sales strategy.  In the next two blog posts we will review key processes to build healthy pipelines and win more deals.  We will follow that with a post on building your sales CRM for success.

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While growing Small Businesses and Building Great Sales Teams is hard, the process to do this is simple. But, simple does not mean easy. 

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