Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management-3

OPTIMIZING SALES OPPORTUNITY MANAGEMENT 12 Critical Questions Sales Leaders Must Ask

by Mike Schultz & John Doerr

Build a consistent, repeatable process for managing important sales opportunities and improving win rates.

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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

“In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…self-discipline with all of them came first.”

Harry S. Truman

If you’ve spent any time in complex, business-to-business sales, you know there's been a significant shift in how you create sales opportunities, win sales opportunities, and grow accounts. More sellers are missing quota, sales cycles are extending, buyers are more sophisticated and informed, more buyers are involved in every purchase, and the competition isn’t exactly standing aside to make your life easy.

You know how tough it is.

Yet, while some are struggling to keep up, others are finding consistent success. We’ve researched and published extensively about how sales conversations need to change if sellers want to find themselves winning sales and beating their goals (Fig. 1). While many organizations are finding increased success by changing their approach to sales conversations, few have yet to address serious issues with how they manage sales opportunities.

Sales leaders are now starting to take notice. In The Top-Performing Sales Organization study, 40% of respondents said “Improving sales opportunity approach and planning” is a top priority for the next year.1 Along with

two related initiatives—improving ability to communicate value (41%) and optimizing sales processes (32%)—these represented three of the top four priorities altogether.

These are good priorities, because selling isn't getting any easier. Here are some observations gleaned from our client work and through the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research:

+ Buyers are less patient. If sellers don’t impress buyers immediately with their professional approach and competence, and continue to do so throughout all interactions, they get dismissed.

+ With more sales happening over the phone and Internet, and with purchasing organizations becoming more sophisticated, it’s more difficult to build relationships with buyers.

The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research studied 731 business-to-business purchases from buyers who represent $3.1 billion in purchasing power, and published the results in the What Sales Winners Do Differently report.2 We asked the decision makers for these purchases to compare the seller to whom they awarded their business with the seller who came in second place.

Sales winners are more likely to:

Connect+ Connect the dots: they understand buyers' needs and craft compelling solutions+ Connect with people: they listen to buyers and connect with them personally

Convince+ Persuade buyers they will achieve worthwhile results+ Minimize the perception of risk by demonstrating experience, building trust, and inspiring confidence+ Persuade buyers they are the best choice

Collaborate+ Collaborate with buyers by being proactive and responsive+ Collaborate with buyers to educate them with new ideas and perspectives and bring value to the table themselves

This is what sales winners do differently than the rest. What we don’t often see is good planning to make sure sellers connect, convince, and collaborate as powerfully as possible. We’re working on changing that.

1. Mike Schultz, John Doerr, and Mary Flaherty, The Top-Performing Sales Organization (RAIN Group, 2015). Forthcoming. 2. Mike Schultz and John Doerr, What Sales Winners Do Differently (RAIN Group, 2013).

Figure 1. What Buyers Want from Sellers

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+ Now that more people are involved in the decision-making process, sales cycles are lengthening and sellers are struggling to gain agreement among the full group of buyers. This leads to stalled sales and losing to ‘no decision.’

+ Buyers have a heightened awareness of and aversion to risk, often looking to run pilots, start small, and otherwise figure out how to test vendors before committing to larger agreements.

If sellers want to win in this environment, they must plan to win from the start. Anything short of this and they set themselves up for failure. Furthermore, many sellers who are planning to win now have to change how they plan, or they will find themselves with more losses, outfoxed by savvier competitors.

Even with all the difficulties in the selling environment, there are still sellers and sales organizations who are winning consistently and who get sales opportunity management and planning right. They:

+ Focus maximum energy on the most important opportunities

+ Develop winning strategies for each opportunity to improve win rates

+ Develop a consistent, repeatable process for collaborating internally and with buyers to win sales

+ Gain agreement among multiple buyers

+ Build and communicate maximum value to each buyer

+ Speed up the sales process and minimize losses to no decision

In this report, we pose 12 critical questions sales leaders must ask about how they approach sales opportunity management. As they say, if you want to find the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. Those who consider these questions, and then install the discipline to approach sales opportunity management the right way, will find themselves on the path to greatly increased sales wins.




1. Does your team pursue your most important sales opportunities with high intensity and rigor?

Sales leaders often complain that:

+ Sellers are not proactive, failing to drive their most important sales opportunities forward with dogged determination

+ Even when sellers are proactive, they don’t follow a consistent process to leverage the resources at their disposal, and take all the right actions, to put themselves in the best position to win the sale

Much of this is cultural. Changing this requires that people literally change the way they talk about sales opportunity planning.

Enter the concept of the “Win Lab.”

A Win Lab is a collaborative, rigorous process to generate the best ideas, strategies, and action plans to win a sales opportunity.

The definition of a Win Lab includes a number of characteristics, each one a significant ingredient for achieving the best outcomes.

Win Labbing is collaborative. When sellers work together with the right resources at their companies, and collaborate directly with their buyers, they are much more successful than when they work alone.

Win Labbing is a rigorous process. Without a standard approach to sales opportunity management, including an effective planning tool, a collaboration process, and the right job aids and checklists to aid thinking, they often forget important steps, lose focus, and fail.

Win Labbing inspires ideas and strategies. When performing win/loss analyses on major opportunities, we’ve heard countless times,

“The competition did something bold and creative that we didn’t think of, and they won.” A fundamental tenet of Win Labbing is that it creates the platform for coming up with the ideas and strategies that will leave the competition scratching their heads and losing to you.

Win Labbing results in an action plan. The act of planning done right almost inevitably creates energy, enthusiasm, and confidence in pursuing a sale. What often lacks afterward is execution. With a written action plan, sellers know what to do now, next, and for the rest of the sales process. A written action plan also provides sales managers with the opportunity to help sellers make the plan as strong as possible, and hold sellers accountable for getting everything done and done right.

Takeaway: Introduce the concept of Win Labbing to your sales teams.

2. Is the opportunity planning process collaborative?

When sellers create opportunity plans, they tend to do them alone. The problem is that sellers (and people) are almost universally good at some things and not others. When they work alone, sellers often either make critical mistakes, or completely miss opportunities to:

+ Investigate buyers and their situations, challenges, and strategic agendas

+ Discover both explicit and hidden needs

+ Build components of the solution that could make a difference for the buyer

+ Create and communicate the return on investment (impact) case

+ Define the most compelling value and sales messaging for a particular sale

Win Labbing as an overall concept, along with the term itself, has a very important effect on culture. If a seller says, “Let’s build an opportunity plan,” it feels flat. Like a chore. No energy. But when a seller says, “Let’s Win Lab it,” you get the opposite: energy, enthusiasm, and focus.

12 CRITICAL QUESTIONS SALES LEADERS MUST ASK




+ Prepare and respond to objections and minimize vulnerabilities

+ Strategize ideas and creative tactics to give them every advantage to win + Create the action plan that will best move the sale forward

The real magic happens when the right players on the team work together in the Win Lab to cover these various areas and build a compelling opportunity plan.

Our research bears this out. In our Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management,3 we analyzed the factors that set the companies with the strongest revenue, profit, and client satisfaction growth in their existing accounts apart from the rest. One of the greatest differences between high performers and the rest was their internal, collaborative process to discover ways they could be of most value to their accounts (Fig. 2).

The same holds true for sales opportunity management. Those companies that work collaboratively to plan for ways to maximize the value they can offer, and how to communicate that value with buyers, win the most sales across the board.

This is one reason why the concept of Win Labbing is so important. It implies and drives collaboration, which drives more wins.

Takeaway: Encourage collaborative Win Labbing for important sales opportunities.

3. How strong is your sales process?

The purpose of sales opportunity management is to drive opportunities through the sales process and win—which begs the questions of how well defined your sales process is, and how much guidance you embed in the process to help sellers move opportunities forward. It’s challenging to build a plan to move a buyer through a sales process if a seller doesn't know the process, or if it’s not very good.

Recently, there’s been backlash against sales leaders focusing on improving their sales processes. For example, the following was published in the Harvard Business Review:

Sales leaders have long fixated on process discipline...But recently sales has been caught off guard by a dramatic shift in customers’ buying behavior. Even as leadership has tightened compliance with the processes that have served so well, sales performance has grown increasingly erratic…The sales machine is stalling…. Leaders must abandon their fixation on process compliance and embrace a flexible approach to selling driven by sales reps’ reliance on insight and judgment.4

Based on our research and experience, advice to abandon the sales and opportunity management processes is terribly misguided. We have found the opposite to be true: a focus on sales process, good process management techniques (including guides and checklists), and the

3. Mike Schultz, John Doerr, and Mary Flaherty, Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management (RAIN Group, 2012). 4. Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman, "Dismantling the Sales Machine," Harvard Business Review (Nov. 2013).

Figure 2. Process to internally assess and evaluate additional value that can be brought to strategic accounts

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discipline to follow the process doesn’t hamper insight and judgment, it unleashes them.

As Atul Gawande, bestselling author of The Checklist Manifesto wrote, “…Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided—and even enhanced—by procedure.”5

He goes on to say:

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to a protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way.

A well-designed sales process—one that includes smartly-placed checklists, templates, and tools—guides sellers and enhances judgment (and insight), and gets the dumb stuff out of the way. These are outcomes craved by many a sales leader.

Improving Your Sales Process

Let’s assume for a minute you are like the majority of sales leaders who have prioritized sales process improvement. What you do depends on where you start. In The Top-Performing Sales Organization study, we define five levels of sales process maturity:

1. Ad Hoc (Chaos): No consistent process or framework for planning to win opportunities.

2. Emerging: Some consistency and planning framework, but still work to do to standardize it and make it complete.

3. Defined: Our opportunity management process is defined and we have a tool to guide us to win opportunities.

4. Managed (Adoptive): Number 3, plus it’s easy to use, includes specific details and guidance for selling, the process is managed well and helpful to sellers.

5. World-Class (Adaptive): Number 4, plus it’s always being measured and improved, it includes best practices for strategies and tactics across the sales cycle, and the process and planning tools are embedded in sellers' workflow and technology.

If you want to improve your process, first ask yourself where you are. Then…

+ Get to level 3: Define your process. If you haven’t defined your process, do so. You can’t raise the bar on sales success across the board until everyone has a shared roadmap.

+ Get to level 4: Create playbooks, checklists, and job aids in critical areas. Playbooks, checklists, and job aids make it so sellers don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel, and don’t have to remember long lists off the tops of their heads. Take away that stress, and sellers can focus on unleashing creativity and judgment.

+ Get to level 5: Commit to continuous improvement. The difference between a process at level 4 versus level 5 is that the process is “continuously improved, supports maximum value for buyers, and consistently helps sellers win sales and develop deep relationships with buyers.” This is the pinnacle of the pinnacle. Only 8% of all organizations get here. But when they do, the results are impressive (Fig. 3).

Takeaway: A strong sales process enhances seller judgement and insight, and drives compelling return on investment.

5. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Picador, 2011).




According to our The Top-Performing Sales Organization research, 51% of respondents have not formally defined their sales process. Here are some eye-opening metrics from the 49% of those who have, comparing level 3 “Defined,” level 4 “Managed,” and level 5 “World-class.”

We also found that the more mature the sales process, the less likely and less deeply companies were to discount their prices and the more likely they were to grow revenue by 20% or more.

So not only did they win more with stronger prices, but they also grew more.

Along with pipeline and pricing metrics, we compared the maturity of the sales process to other factors, such as customer and value focus and seller time management.

The more mature the sales process, the more sellers focused on driving maximum value for the most important buyers, and have time to do it.

Figure 3. The ROI of Improving Your Sales Process

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4. Is your opportunity management process customer-centric?

Everyone says their company is customer-focused, but consider the following from The Top-Performing Sales Organization study:

+ 35% of respondents did not agree that their sales organization focuses on driving maximum value for the customer6

+ 53% of respondents did not agree that their sales process was customer-focused

Companies like to say they are customer-focused, but what they say and what’s true often aren’t the same. For example, popular opportunity plan templates contain prompts for capturing information about seller mission, seller sales objectives, seller positioning and standing, and so forth. What about the mission for the customer? Value proposition for the customer? Buyer objectives? Maximizing and communicating buyer impact? New Reality you can help the customer to achieve?7

It’s difficult to have a customer-focused sales organization when the planning tools and prompts are overly seller-focused. Certainly, sellers need to analyze their own situation, pursue the right opportunities, and build an action plan to win, but this should accompany similar analysis on value for the customer.

Unfortunately for many companies, they’re using the wrong tool, which guides sellers to unhelpful, overly seller-focused behaviors.

Takeaway: You can’t be customer-focused when your tools and language are seller-focused.

5. Do sellers assign a pursuit intensity rating to their opportunities?

Regardless of size, we’ve never heard from an organization, “We have a lot of resources, and funds are unlimited, so we can pursue every opportunity that comes across our radar screen with high intensity.”

The fact is we all have limited resources and we have to make difficult decisions about which

opportunities get the full court press and which do not.

By assigning a pursuit intensity rating, you can be analytical in how you assign resources. Core factors that affect pursuit intensity include:

+ Decision timing

+ Current position

+ Competitive positioning

+ Financial attractiveness of opportunity

+ Current importance of account

+ Account growth potential

+ Relationship strength

+ Effort and investment required to win

+ Attractiveness of logo

+ Likelihood of opportunity cancellation

+ Win probability

Define the right factors for your organization and analyze your opportunities, and you’ll know which opportunities to pursue with high intensity and resources, which to pursue with your typical win process, and which not to pursue at all.

When we work with organizations to analyze their opportunity pursuit intensity, we find that they are wasting resources chasing business that is not worth their time. Once they stop doing this, they find that not pursuing these frees up resources to pursue the rest of their opportunities with the right rigor and resources.

Takeaway: You can only pursue the right opportunities with the appropriate intensity if you know which ones they are.

6. Do sellers leverage the right people and resources on your team?

Sellers systematically miss opportunities to bring in the best people and resources to help

6. Respondents answered either neutral, disagree, or strongly disagree. 7. Mike Schultz, "RAIN Selling: How to Lead Masterful Sales Conversations," RAIN Selling Blog (blog), http://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/rain-selling-how-to-lead-masterful-sales-conversations/.




them win important sales. Sellers often think too parochially. Leaders tell us they think this is because of an underlying protectiveness of their clients, unwillingness to collaborate, or thinking that they must reinvent the wheel every time they sell. We often find these not to be true, and that sellers don’t leverage their team and resources because they forget these resources exist.

There are typically people at any organization who can help sellers because these people have:

+ Deep industry expertise

+ Deep functional expertise

+ Executive-level connections

+ Strengths the seller doesn’t have, such as needs analysis, solution crafting, negotiation and agreement making, presentation, group facilitation, etc.

+ Inside knowledge of the buyer’s company

+ The right personality, background, and gravitas

Imagine the difference if a) these resources existed,8 and b) sellers remembered to use them. It gets the dumb stuff out of the way, aids judgment, and unleashes creativity for winning the sale.

Takeaway: Build helpful tools, make resources available to sellers, and don't let them forget these resources exist.

7. Are your opportunity management processes and tools customized to suit the dynamics of your sale?

There are many diet and exercise plans that say, “A lot of people try to modify our process. Do so at your own risk. Those who have modified our process don’t achieve the results of those who do it exactly as we prescribe.”

Some sales opportunity management purveyors live by the same philosophy: our way or the highway. They don’t allow for language changes in their method, changes in data capture and analysis frameworks, or changes in length and depth of the planning tools.

This is a mistake.

Some companies have individual sales in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Analysis of these opportunities should be more in depth and robust than those that are $50k. Some companies sell in teams, with each person playing specific roles, but the planning framework doesn’t allow for multiple sellers to be named. Some companies have their own language around customers, their needs, company offerings, value propositions, sales messaging, and so on. These need to be in the tools they use or sellers will get confused and frustrated.

For some companies, especially those just getting started with sales opportunity management, off-the-shelf planning frameworks are helpful. However, as a company matures, it should customize sales opportunity planning tools for the unique dynamics of its sale.

Takeaway: Customize your sales process and opportunity management tools.

SALES RESOURCESWhen it comes to resources, sellers forget they have at their disposal:

+ Intellectual capital

+ Case studies

+ Presentation material

+ Product and service information

+ Buyer-interaction opportunities

+ Needs discovery resources and tools

+ Sales conversation, opportunity planning, account planning, objection handling, and solution crafting guides

+ Industry and functional experience guides

+ Proposal checklists

+ Strategies for winning against competitors

+ Sales messaging resources

8. It’s the addition of these tools and resources that represent the jump from a sales process at ‘level 3’ and one at ‘level 4’. See "get to level 4" on page 5.




8. Are sellers satisfying the buying criteria of multiple buyers?

There’s no question that buying cycles are lengthening and more buyers are getting involved with the sale. In many business-to-business sales, there are five or more buyers involved in the purchase decision.9

Unfortunately, many sales opportunity planning processes and tools don’t account for satisfying the buying criteria of multiple buyers. They should. (Well, at least the one you use should.) It’s no secret that the more buyers there are in the sale, the more likely the decision itself will take longer than usual, or stall out altogether.

We’ve found the sellers who succeed most with decision making groups:

+ Identify buyers and categorize them into five decision roles

+ Facilitate buyer alignment

Each sale can have up to five kinds of decision makers:10

1. The Business Driver, whose primary interest is return on investment.

2. The Approver, whose primary interest is allocation and best use of funds.

3. The Evaluator, whose primary interest is evaluating the purchase as both operational (“Will this work here?”) and personal (“Will this work for me?”).

4. The Champion, whose primary interest is getting the project approved or helping you succeed personally.

5. The Domino, whose primary interest is influencing the action and direction of their teams.

The best sellers identify each, and make sure they cater to their specific needs.

The fifth decision role, The Domino, is critically important, yet rarely discussed, and thus deserves special attention (see call out).

Takeaway: Analyze and satisfy the buying criteria of the 5 decision roles.

9. Kelly Liyakasa, "B2B Tech Buying Cycle Is 20 Percent Longer," CRM Magazine (Sept. 2012). 10. Mike Schultz, "5 Decision Roles in Every Sale," RAIN Selling Blog (blog), http://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/5-decision-roles-in-every-sale/.

THE DOMINO EFFECT

The Domino is the person (or two) in the sale who, should they bless the opportunity or the seller, increases the odds of the sale closing because others will follow their lead. In many complex sales, if there’s one person who says, “We should do this,” or “We should do this with you,” everything else falls into place.

In one sale, for example, there were three buyers in a staff function advocating for a purchase. They were Champions and Evaluators. The business leaders they were supporting were Business Drivers looking to achieve great ROI. A big challenge for the seller, though, was that several of the Business Drivers had a preference for another provider.

One other senior executive was loosely involved in the process. She was a tangential Evaluator, who trusted her team to make decisions. In general, however, when she expressed a preference to make something a priority, or preference for a particular provider, everyone else tended to follow.

The sellers identified this person as The Domino. They worked tirelessly to arrange schedules and build a case for The Domino to attend an experience the seller had created for the buyers around their offering. After several weeks of effort, they got confirmation The Domino would attend.

At the end of the session, The Domino said to the core buying team, “This was great. Looking forward to seeing it all get underway and working with these folks.” What had been a nine month process up to this point quickly turned to contracting. Two weeks later, the seller won the opportunity.




9. Do sellers facilitate agreement among buyers so the sale can move forward?

Sellers who succeed at selling to multiple buyers:

+ Talk to buyers individually to uncover their concerns, needs, and decision- making criteria

+ Facilitate discussions and the sales process to connect buyers to gain mutual agreement on their needs, the intervention, and the action plan

+ Tailor and customize their solutions carefully to make sure the ultimate offering will work for all

+ Make sure the offering is easy to buy

The best sellers also motivate buyers to advocate for them and their solution. These sellers create internal Champions who not only want the seller to win, but who are also willing to advocate publicly for the seller. For multiple-buyer sales, at least one influential buyer must be inspired to put a stake in the ground and make a stand for moving forward. When they do, they are not simply Champions, they are Change Champions.

The larger the buyer group, the more resistant they will be to change. The energy and effort of insiders to break through the inertia and get something underway helps tremendously. Having a Change Champion in your corner can make all the difference.

One of the best ways to develop Change Champions is to create shared experiences for buyers, much like what our seller did in the example to reach The Domino and gain momentum across all buyers for moving forward. These kinds of experiences can be instrumental for increasing momentum, building trust, reducing the perception of risk, and getting multiple buyers on the same page.

Once sellers have made their value case (see question 10) and created a Change Champion,

they should equip their Change Champion with resources to help them spread the message and persuade internally.

Provide Change Champions with examples, case studies, messaging, research, custom built presentations, ROI cases, and so on, that they can use to socialize the ideas, and win advocates.

Takeaway: Create Change Champions willing to advocate for you proactively.

10. Do sellers craft and communicate a compelling value case?

In our What Sales Winners Do Differently research, we learned that the winner of a sale was more than twice as likely as the second-place finisher to make the case for why they offer overall superior value.

It’s confounding to us that some of the most common and widely used sales opportunity management planning tools do not include prompts for the seller to craft and communicate their value case. It's also missed in the corresponding training that accompanies these tools. This is a huge mistake for many companies and sellers, and a significant opportunity for those proactive about making the value case rock solid.

To make a compelling value case (and create Change Champions), you must build the most compelling value proposition to win each important opportunity.11 A value proposition has 3 components:

1. Resonate: Maximize perception of reward because people will be motivated to buy, and advocate for your solution with their colleagues, when their imaginations are captured and their desire is maximized.

11. Mike Schultz and John Doerr, Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently (Wiley, 2014). See chapter 3.




2. Substantiate: Minimize perceived risk because most buyers won’t act if they think it’s too risky.12 13 They must believe you can achieve what you say you can. And they must believe they won’t look bad by hitching themselves to your wagon.

3. Differentiate: Position yourself as the best choice so when the buyers buy, they buy from you and not your competitor.

A good way to check if your value case is rock solid is to ask the following four questions:

1. Why Act? The initiative must be seen by the buyer as important.

2. Why Now? The initiative must be seen by the buyer as urgent or other issues will take precedence.

3. Why Us? Without a compelling answer to this question, the buyer will pressure price or select another provider or option.

4. Why Trust? Buyers are risk averse. Without a compelling answer to this question, fear of failure will block the initiative from moving forward.

For every important opportunity in your pipeline, the answers to these questions must be compelling or your sale is in jeopardy.

Takeaway: Make your value case rock solid for each important opportunity.

11. Do sellers plan in advance to inspire buyers with insights?

The number one greatest difference between sellers who win and those who come in second place is that winners educate buyers with new ideas and perspectives. Few sellers, however, plan in advance to create insights for buyers.

With a little structure, support, and discipline, they can.

Think for a minute about your buyers. Where does their thinking typically need to change? Are they approaching certain problems the wrong way? Have they tried and failed to achieve a goal in ways that you could have predicted?

What concepts or offerings are your competitors selling that are not the best for buyers?

Assuming you can answer these questions, ask, “How should they be thinking about these areas that would allow them to make better decisions and achieve better results?” Then prepare:

+ Questions to uncover their perceptions in these areas

+ Questions to disrupt their thinking about those perceptions

+ Questions and message points to reframe their thinking

+ Questions and message points to direct their thinking down a different path

+ Message points to build belief in the new path

Will sellers remember to do this? Will they (can they?) do it themselves with no support? Unaided and unprompted, typically not. If, however, it’s in your sales conversation planning template and process, and your sellers are provided ideas for what to ask and say, they will.

Sellers spark ideas with buyers when they ask these kinds of questions. They guide buyer thinking down new paths. Not only do they sell like winners, they create differentiation and add value over-and-above whatever product or service they are selling.

Only the most sophisticated and natural sellers do this organically. Everyone else needs support and planning.

Takeaway: Plan to inspire buyers with insight.

12. In What Sales Winners Do Differently, we found that sales winners attend much more to reducing buyer’s perception of risk than second-place finishers. 13. Mike Schultz, "Risky Business: 4 Areas Buyers Achieve Risk in Sales," RAIN Selling Blog (blog), http://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/risky-business-4-areas-buyers-perceive-risk-in-sales/. 14. James Allen et al., Closing the Delivery Gap (Bain & Company, 2005).

Buyers Are Skeptical—Make the “Why Trust” Case

In a study by Bain & Company,

375 companies were asked if they believed they delivered a “superior value proposition” to clients.14 Eighty percent said yes. Bain then asked the clients of these companies if they agreed that the specific company from which they bought delivered a superior value proposition. Only 8% agreed.

Buyers don’t believe they get what they expected or were promised by sellers. They’ve been burned in the past and are skeptical of sellers and their claims.




12. Are sales opportunity plans written, compelling, and built to win the sale?

Creating sales opportunity plans is too often viewed by sellers as a chore: something to fill out quickly so they can check the I-filled-it-out box. If a plan is worth creating, it’s worth creating properly or you put the sale at risk. Not all opportunities warrant the same rigor and resources for either planning or pursuit, but when the stakes are high, plans should be rigorous and impressive.

Once a plan is written, it increases the likelihood the seller will execute it,15 and allows sales managers and others to challenge the plan, vet it, and improve it.

It’s in the vetting and improving where the real value comes. The first draft of a plan may be terrible, okay, or good. However it is, you can’t make it better unless you can review it and provide feedback. You won’t know if a plan is

persuasive unless you can put yourself in the position of the buyer, and ask yourself if you would be persuaded.

After Win Labbing, a plan should be great. When it is, and it’s reviewed by leadership, their positive feedback and support will give sellers confidence in executing, support positive seller attitudes, and inspire motivation to drive opportunities forward.

Takeaway: Make sure sales opportunity plans are written, compelling, and built to win the sale.

PLAYS AND BIG PLAYS

The action plan component of a sales opportunity plan spells out the plays a seller will run to win the sale. Plays are actions sellers take during the sales process to move the sale forward and maximize the probability of winning. Not all plays, however, are built equally.

There are plays, and there are Big Plays. A Big Play is a bold, atypical action a seller might take to change buyer thinking, inspire buyer action, and set themselves apart from the competition. Big Plays require investment by the seller and seller organization. Sellers should employ Big Plays when pursuit intensity is high, and the value of winning a sale is significant.

Examples of big plays include:

+ Flying a buyer and their team to another customer site to allow them to experience what it’s like to work with you and see your offering in action

+ Offering a money-back guarantee for a pilot project to prove to the customer your solution will succeed

+ Putting some, or all, of your fees contingent on achieving success milestones for the customer

+ Performing a significant amount of work ‘on spec’ that no other seller would be willing to do, that puts you in the lead position to win the work

+ Creating a surprise-and-delight moment with anything you might do in your selling process that makes the buyer might say, “Wow, that must have taken a lot of effort. Nobody else did that for us.”

15. Commitments that are verbal, written, and made public are much more likely to be acted upon than those that only meet one or two of the criteria. Written plans that are reviewed by managers or others then meet all the criteria. Source: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, rev. ed. (New York: HarperBusiness, 2006).




BONUS Question: How are we going to win this sale?

It’s a natural question that every leader should ask about important opportunities. It’s the point of this whole report. Divining the answer to this question is the crux of opportunity planning.

When leaders ask this question, what they don’t want to hear is half-baked conjecture about if and how they will win.

Important opportunities need plans. Plans that are compelling, persuasive, and defensible. To get here, it’s leaders who need discipline. Discipline to:

+ Change how selling is done at their organization to adapt to the new world of buying and selling

+ Optimize their sales process

+ Build tools and resources to support sellers’ intense pursuit of major opportunities

+ Inspire, train, and require sellers to build plans for major opportunities

+ Review and improve plans collaboratively so they become persuasive and compelling

Sales leaders who have the discipline to implement these tend to be quite happy with their sellers' answers to the "How are we going to win this sale?" question.



RAIN Group Can Help You Master Sales Opportunity Management

40% of sales leaders made improving their sales opportunity approach and planning a top priority for the year ahead. Are you among them?

Thinking about the 12 questions in this report and how your sales opportunity management approach stacks up is a great start—it creates the framework for strong opportunity management processes.

Now what you need is the engine: a systematic, repeatable process for maximizing the value you bring to buyers, differentiating yourself from the competition, and consistently winning more sales.

In RAIN Group's Mastering the Sales Opportunity training, your team will learn to build and execute strategies to win opportunities of all sizes—from the everyday to the most important—to hone in on value, speed up the sales cycle, and minimize losses.

In Mastering the Sales Opportunity, your team will learn how to:

1. Lead the Win Lab process and build strategies to win the most important sales opportunities consistently

2. Succeed with multiple decision makers and satisfy their decision-making criteria

3. Create action plans to capture opportunities of various priority levels

4. Identify the best opportunities, and use the necessary resources to win them

5. Maximize value for the buyer and focus on winning on it over price

Your team will also be introduced to the Sales Opportunity PlannerSM, an easy-to-use tool to create a rigorous opportunity plan. The opportunity plan framework has been used successfully across industries to help our clients consistently win sales of all sizes.

Don't leave the most important part of your business to chance.

Contact us to learn how we can help you optimize your opportunity management processes and get everyone on your team consistently winning the most important sales.

WINNERS SELL RADICALLY DIFFERENTLY THAN SECOND-PLACE FINISHERSIn our groundbreaking What Sales WinnersDo Differently research, we studied whatseparates sales winners from second-placefinishers. According to buyers, among thetop differences were:

+ Educated me with new ideas or perspectives

+ Collaborated with me

+ Persuaded me we would achieve results

+ Listened to me

+ Understood my needs

+ Crafted a compelling solution

+ Connected with me personally

+ Overall value was superior

Many sellers leave these to chance. WithMastering the Sales Opportunity, yourswon’t. They’ll plan to win.

CONTACT [email protected]://www.raingroup.com

LOCATIONSAMERICAS • EMEA • APAC



About RAIN Group

UNLEASH THE SALES POTENTIAL OF YOUR TEAM WITH RAIN GROUP

RAIN Group is a sales training, assessment, and performance improvement company that helps leading organizations improve sales results. We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of salespeople, managers, and professionals in more than 62 countries increase their sales significantly with our RAIN SellingSM methodology. We can help you:

IMPLEMENT WORLD-CLASS SALES COACHINGWe coach sellers, professionals, and leaders individually and in groups to achieve the greatest and fastest increase in sales results. And we train and certify leaders and managers in our RAIN Sales Coaching system. Often, it’s RAIN Sales Coaching that truly unlocks the team’s potential, and keeps them motivated to produce the best results consistently.

IDENTIFY WHO CAN AND WILL SELL WITH GREAT SUCCESSOur assessments measure sales attributes and skills, identifying the factors that really make a difference in sales performance. Whether you’re looking to hire someone who can and will sell, or looking to improve sales performance, we’ll help you build the most successful sales team.

Find out more about how RAIN Group can help you unleash the sales potential of your team by visitingRAINGroup.com or calling (508) 405-0438.

GROW YOUR KEY ACCOUNTSAt most companies, there’s a huge, untapped opportunity to add more value—and thus sell more—to existing accounts. We help our clients capitalize on these revenue growth opportunities. Whether it’s simply increasing cross-selling and up-selling or implementing a major strategic account management program, we can help.

IMPLEMENT SALES TRAINING THAT DELIVERS REAL RESULTSRAIN Group’s sales training system inspires real change and delivers real results that last. Our rigorous approach includes sales team evaluation, customized training programs, robust reinforcement, and coaching to help you and your team develop sales and negotiation skills, and maximize your results.

LOCATIONS

AMERICAS • EMEA • ASIA-PACIFIC

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