Sales & Marketing Support

Sales Process Optimizaton

Your business-to-business sales process is how you systematically “manufacture” your customers and prospects. Through a series of specific steps, you discover promising prospects, engage them, and ultimately convert them into long term repeat customers. Using defined steps during this process vastly improves the predictability of the outcome, and the likelihood of closing. There are numerous other reasons for using a documented sales process and they include a.o.:

  • receiving more predictable order and revenue outlooks and thus improving your profitability
  • create more professional sales teams that have a common language to communicate about where they stand with their deals
  • ensuring that internal resources are focussed on deals that can be won
  • getting the full potential from each existing account
  • gain better customer understanding and become your customer’s trusted advisor who will have access to more value generating deals
  • accelerate demand creation by creating the right value proposition for each customer need.

Whether your sales process is complex, different per division or geography, nonexistent or somewhere in-between, we can help you create or customize a sales process that fits your business needs.

Complex Strategic Account Planning

You know as well as anyone that B2B selling is not like it used to be. More hoops to jump through, more buyers in the process, international customers with diverse needs and customers who expect even more from their existing partners. Now more than ever, preparation and a consistent approach is required to make the sale and build a long-term relationship to reach the customer in a way that inspires them to buy from you, and buy from you for a long time.

Instead of just having whole sales teams on training to learn about account planning templates, our strategic account planning pogram assists your sales and services teams for strategic large accounts to:

  • develop a dynamic, ready to go strategic account plan, an executive contact map and account territory or deal map
  • reveal how to best manage and grow the account by bringing the entire relationship into view
  • enhance the relationships between the selling and buying organizations
  • provide an overview of the tactics that can be executed within the account and deals
  • transition from a vendor to trusted advisor status with strategic customers
  • ensure that relationships continue in strategic accounts regardless of manager or key sponsor turnover
  • achieve account growth and profitability objectives that are set by the executive team

As a result of adopting this process, account managers will craft strategies for managing cross-functional teams to clarify roles and responsibilities, boost collaboration, and ensure accountability. Furthermore your account teams will avoid being surprised by the loss of key accounts and deals within key accounts.

Our process uses Strategic Selling and Large Account Management Process by Miller-Heiman, SPIN Selling Coversations by Neil Rackham, and numerous other methodologies depending on customer requirements.

Outsourced Bid Management and Proposal Writing

Nowadays, large public sector organisations and businesses frequently outsource major projects to external suppliers who can deliver a required outcome using their expertise.

Clients approach us because they don’t have the time, resources or skill set to produce the best quality tender submission for their company. This doesn’t mean that they can’t deliver the contract. It is in fact quite the opposite, with many clients being very well placed to supply the work. It is portraying their strengths and competencies in the bid for the contract that is the tricky task. It requires specific commercial, project management, presentation, financial, and communication skills, and this means that outsourcing your bid management function is a proven methodology for when a business critical, “must win” RfP lands on your sales manager’s desk.

An experienced bid manager will assemble your teams around the bid process and will analyse the RfP, deconstruct the RfP questions, develop the bid strategy, delegate and project manage the deliverables of the individual bid team participants and will ensure a structured response with compiling evidence and supporting documents. All of these contribute to assembling a winning response for your organisation.

It may also be more time effective to outsource your bid to a professional writer who will be able to complete the submission in a shorter time frame due to their experience and skill. This is often the case in last minute submissions where organisations don’t have the resources to complete a bid successfully in a short time frame alongside their every day job duties. This might mean it is also cost effective for the submission to be completed externally, with members of the organisation being allocated to other projects and therefore spending time more efficiently.

Outsourcing submissions to an external bid writer allows someone outside the organisation to provide a fresh pair of eyes and new ideas. Managing a bid is never an easy task: sometimes this can prove a lot simpler for an external bid manager who is able to identify weaknesses and fully supervise the process.

Having another person to assist or lead your bid can also ease the stress of the whole process. This in itself relieves pressure for staff and means resources can be allocated elsewhere instead of spending time worrying about the bid!

When it comes to actually writing the bid, we can be as involved as you would like. This ranges from managing 100% of the PQQ or tender, to partial bid writing and reviewing, where we work alongside your bid team to offer our suggestions and improvements.

Sales Team Coaching and Training

When people and resources are both scarce and expensive, every investment in your sales force and the teams that support the sales force must count. For any organisation, the sales force is a major growth engine and a critical source of market feedback. It is also a substantial investment and one that can rapidly grow out of control. Stimulating the sales force while simultaneously controlling costs is a necessary but elusive balance.

Our program is based on extensive experience from managing national and international sales teams and assisting B2B2B and B2B2C organizations with implementing a growth engine called sales teams. The extent of our program is defined by the size of the organization but the main element of our program always contain:

  • Management and strategy of key account sales efforts
    • Why are key account initiatives getting you into trouble?
    • When does a key account strategy make sense?
    • How to successfully design, execute and manage a key account initiative?
    • How to map an account territory for growth?
  • Compensation strategies
    • The power and perils of compensation as a management tool
    • Fundamental building blocks for design of sales force compensation
    • The relationship between sales force compensation and sales force management
  • Deployment and allocation of sales force resources
    • The generic problems in deployment and allocation of sales force resources
    • Identifying the relationship between resources and returns and then optimising
    • Interactive exercise in customising the deployment and allocation software to your business contexts
  • Sales force effectiveness
    • The drivers of superior performance of the sales force
    • How to identify the right hire?
    • What makes one salesperson more efficient than the other?
    • How to influence salesperson effectiveness?
  • Realising judgemental biases and making better business decisions
    • The unconscious heuristics and biases that impact managerial judgement and decision making
    • Remedies for correction of biases in decision-making
    • How to improve decision-making – when is a group better than the manager?
  • Sales force control systems
    • Spectrum of sales force control systems
    • How do you know if your control system is off-balance?
    • Finding the right sales force control system for you
  • Tackling emerging markets
    • The sales force challenges in emerging economies
    • The organisational and managerial challenges for leading sales forces in emerging economies
    • Best practice

Sales Team Assessments

It is painful when you see some people in your sales organization succeed brilliantly, while others fail miserably. It is especially painful if you cannot leverage or replicate that success through your training and development efforts.

Our sales talent assessments will help you better understand the state of sales talent in your organization, enabling more precise and accurate decisions in hiring, onboarding, and development.

As part of our assessment we can provide advice about the end to end performance management process that consist of objective setting, performance feedback, performance evaluation, performance improvement plans, and 9box sales team performance evaluation.