The Path to Sales Growth through Customer Focus – Part 2
This post continues the previous discussion of enabling sales growth through customer focus.
“The journey toward sales growth starts and ends with our customers.”
– Mike Kunkle
Customer Focus Framework for Sales Growth
In part 1 of this series, I shared my Customer Focus Framework for Sales Growth. The five pillars of this framework include:
- Modeling Buyer Personas
- Mapping the Buying Journey and Buying Process
- Aligning your Sales Process and Methodology
- Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues
- Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture
Last time we discussed modeling personas and mapping the buyer journey and process. This time we’ll discuss step 3, Aligning your sales process and methodology to the buyer journey and buying process.
If You Want to Shine You Must Align
As usual, I don’t see the need to recreate the wheel. If you don’t know how to map a process (or think you need some support), that’s the first place to start.
- How Do You Map a Sales Process from Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
- Avoid The Four Most Common Mistakes of Sales Process Mapping (same source)
- Michael Webb offers a lot of great info and resources at: http://salesperformance.com/category/articles/sales-process-basics
- Practical Guide to Creating Better Looking Process Maps post from iSixSigma
Align the Process
If you know how to map a process, here are some other good thoughts for aligning your sales process to the buying process:
- From my bud, Dave Brock via an OpenView Labs video… note that not every activity on either side needs to be mapped or align:
- A sharp SlideShare presentation by Swayne Hill who blogs at Data Driven Sales Management shows one way to think through it here:
- Mark Sellers of Breakthrough Sales Performance, author of The Funnel Principle, offers 5 videos at the bottom of this page:
- http://www.breakthrough-sales.com/Funnel-Principle-Selling.html
- My friends at Sales Benchmark Index offer a great post about A Sales Process Worth Adopting and an instructive downloadable Guide for Creating an Adoptable Sales Process that considers and starts from the Buying Process.
A Method to Your Sales Methodology Madness
With the processes in alignment, the next thing to consider is your methodology. Put simply, sales methodology is your approach to selling – it’s the skills and methods that your sales reps use, to successfully shepherd the buyer from one stage of the buying/selling process to the next, ending in a successful purchase/sale – a win-win decision.
Bruce Rasmussen wrote an interesting post recently on the new LinkedIn platform, called, It’s Not WHICH sales methodology – it’s WHEN! Worth sharing and thinking about, if you use vendor training. Nuance and context matter greatly and the only thing that matters for you, is what is happening with your customers, in your world, with your company/products/services and sales organization.
In my experience, designing your own or deeply customizing your sales methodology is what gets the best result. I typically use sales analytics to bucket sales performers, and then find the differentiating (and replicable) practices of top-producers (compared to the middle), and build my sales methodology around what I learn. What do the top-producers do differently, to move their buyers through their process to a successful conclusion? Capture that, and train, coach and reinforce to it, and you’ll have the best chance of lifting performance in that big bucket of mid-producers (the B and maybe even some C players.
Sales Growth through Customer Focus, One More Time
In the next and final post in this series, I will discuss the last two steps, which go hand-in-hand:
- Understanding Market Conditions and Buyer Issues
- Aligning Your Sales Solution Architecture
In the meantime, thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means, let’s continue to elevate our sales profession.
Mike
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Mike Kunkle
Transforming Sales Results with Clear Insight & Focused Execution
Contact:
214.494.9950
<mike at mikekunkle dotcom>
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Blog: https://www.mikekunkle.com
Slideshare: http://bit.ly/MK-slideshare
