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How to Prototype Buying Prospects to Increase Sales
by Paul DiModica
Selling products and
services is a premeditated process that can use some of
six sigma models of management design to minimize
business errors and increase selling efficiencies.
Managing selling
efficiencies is the basis of any successful sales
program. All salespeople must manage their sales quota
paradigm where prospects' buying cycles and the sales
team's selling cycles don't always match. One mechanism
to manage this division of time is sales prospect
prototyping.
What is sales prospect
prototyping?
Sales prospect prototyping
is identifying replicable, quantifiable characteristics
of prospects' buying cycle and the associated sales
steps needed to close business.
Prototyping prospect
opportunities will shorten your sales cycle, clarify
your sales value proposition, help you identify key
buying characteristics of business executives by title,
reduce marketing expenses, accelerate your cash-flow,
quantify sales team training needs and help increase
your sales closing ratio.
Why?
Because sales prototyping
helps you implement key business metrics that are
replicable and scalable across your sales team.
Salespeople often get caught in "auto-selling" where
they focus on selling to prospects they feel comfortable
with -- not necessarily selling prospects who are the
right fit.
If an account manager likes
selling CFO's of manufacturing companies with annual
revenues of $100 million or less, then they are less
likely to sell CIO's of financial service companies with
annual revenues of $500 million or more. Not that they
can't, but because they fall into a sales comfort zone
based on their current knowledge and previous success.
By identifying patterns of
your sales process and sales inefficiencies, you can
focus on prospect opportunities where you can sell more
in less time.
9 Steps to Build a
Prospect
Buying Prototype Model
- Review and document the last 24 months of sales
history to determine the business title (of the
executive) who signed your business contracts.
- Review and document your top three business
industries or verticals that your company has sold.
- Calculate your average discount off retail for
each closed deal you sold by vertical and business
title.
- Calculate the average selling time for each deal
from lead to contract signing by vertical and
business title sold.
- Determine in decreasing order from most sold to
least sold the type of products or services most
frequently bought by your prospects.
- Determine by industry the average value of a
deal sold.
- Identify (or estimate) the annual revenue of
each company that made a purchase during the last 24
months.
- Determine the number of on-site meetings made to
each client sold.
- Determine how each closed lead was generated
during the last 24 months (cold call, networking,
inbound marketing,
etc.).
By following these nine steps, you should be able to
document a business buying pattern.
- Is selling VP's of Operations of healthcare
companies giving you the shortest selling cycle with
the largest gross margins?
- Are the majority of your sales leads for deals
over $100,000 coming from cold calling?
- Do you as a salesperson have a higher closing
ratio with CFO's than CIO's?
- Does selling directors instead of vice
presidents force you to double your on-site
presentations?
Each one of these types of
observations should by discernable from the data
collected for your sales prospects prototyping model.
With this data, you can decide where you should focus
your energies as a salesperson or where your sales team
should align their market attack to increase corporate
revenue.
If you cannot see a prospect
buying pattern, then more than likely your sales
approach is an undocumented, random sales process
chasing those that will buy -- not a calculated process
of who you can sell.
If selling blue shoes
is a better fit to grow your company . . . don't sell
red shoes just because you can!
Rick Erling
President The CxO Group, LLC and
Publisher of The CxO News
www.thecxogroup.com
info@thecxogroup.com
(972) 727-6880
Recommendations provided are to be used at your
discretion and are provided solely as an independent
opinion.
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