Selling Solutions
The Selling Checklist Why a process is so important for success by: Nik Nikic, Sales Optimizer LLC
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ike has a good sales team. Earning the honor of top overall revenue producers in the company last year, his team members are all tenured, seasoned professionals. However, Mike has a problem. Even though everyone on the team made his (or her) gross revenue goals for the year, they are all sporadic performers. When several had a dry spell at the same time, Mike missed his monthly and quarterly bonus money. Despite their sales, his team is also not very profitable and has not made any progress in the transition to selling more services. After some tough questions and honest appraisal of his team, Mike has identified three issues he needs to address: (1) It takes a long time for his team members to take a customer from a prospect to a closed order. The team rarely forecasts accurately and, as a result, procurement sometimes does not have product available and orders are lost. (2) When he reviews accounts with his team members each week, he can never figure out exactly where they are with a customer. Since all his team members sell differently, he does not know how to help move the orders along. (3) Sales support team members complain about dealing with Mike’s team because every proposal is done differently and it makes it difficult to know how to support the sale. At the same company, Tina has a great sales team. Although her team was not in the top five for the year in gross revenue, it had almost twice the profitability of Mike’s team, which was the top grossing revenue group. Tina’s team members are almost 75 percent accurate each month and the sales support team prefers working with her group. Tina has been asked to discuss the success her team has had with the rest of the sales teams. Process Checklist So what magical quality makes Tina’s team easier to work with and more profitable at the same time? It is as simple as a checklist. In Atul Gawande’s bestselling book, “The Checklist Manifesto,” he discusses how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their job responsibilities and how they
improve outcomes dramatically by using checklists. In almost every profession examined in the book, from sales to surgery, the use of a documented, consistent, repeatable process, used every time, in every situation, improves performance with staggering success. In the sales environment today, the routine task of selling a product or service to a customer has become so incredibly complex that mistakes, missed opportunities and ineptitude are virtually inevitable. Experts need checklists, which can be defined as written processes that walk them through the key steps of a procedure. As an example, let’s compare Barbara (from Mike’s team) to Thomas (from Tina’s team). Several times in Barbara’s sales career, she has managed to meet with a customer, quickly judge the situation and propose a solution that was so well received, the customer signed on the spot. Today, she often tries to recreate that success, figuring she can always delve deeper and propose an alternative if the customer does not bite. Barbara knows it is better to do a needs assessment before proposing a solution, but sometimes the shortcut works, so she often skips it and goes right for the close. Barbara closes about one of every 10 proposals. Tina has coached Thomas to always follow the sales process with every customer. He consistently performs the needs assessment and never proposes a solution without understanding what the customer needs. He has often uncovered additional service opportunities through this process. He delivers far fewer proposals than Barbara, but last year he closed four out of five proposals. He also sells more high-profit professional services than anyone on Mike’s team. Root-Cause Analysis So how could a lack of a consistent, documented sales process be contributing to Mike’s problems? n Long Sales Cycle — Without a consistent sales process, steps of the sale may end up being skipped or done twice. There may be confusion over what task should be done next or who needs to do the next step. Customers may not see a www.officetechnologymag. c o m | A u g u s t 2 0 1 1 | 27
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