inflexion-point discover-design-align-refine jun-2015

DISCOVER -

DESIGN -

ALIGN -

REFINE

A Breakthrough Approach to Accelerating Revenue Growth

A structured approach to revenue growth 1

Today’s CEOs and sales leaders have one over-arching goal: to accelerate revenue growth. But many face a significant performance problem: the latest figures from the highly respected CSO Insights research organisation [1] show that fewer than 3 in 5 sales people made their annual quota in the past year.

Even the companies that manage to make their overall numbers are often forced to rely on a handful of top sales performers to carry the rest of the sales organisation. That’s a risky, unsatisfactory and ultimately unsustainable dependency, and one that most business leaders would like to avoid.

It turns out that there is a better way: many top performing companies not only achieved their revenue goals but also managed to get a significantly higher percentage of sales people on target. They did it by implementing a structured, dynamic sales process that combined the lessons learned from their top performers with the latest industry best practices.

A skeleton, not a cage

If you’re in a complex, high-value sales environment, the last thing we would recommend you do is to implement a rigid sales process that insults your sales people’s intelligence or constrains their creativity. That’s why it’s best to think of your sales process as a flexible skeleton that is designed to support your sales people’s success, rather than as an uncomfortable cage that serves only to unnecessarily restrict their freedom of movement. And anyway, we all know that if a process doesn't work for them, smart sales people will ignore it.

Facilitating the buying process, and not just driving the sales process

The other critical consideration is that your pipeline stages need to accurately reflect the key phases and milestones in your prospect’s buying process, and not just the key steps in your sales process. The primary reason why so many sales pipelines and revenue forecasts are so stubbornly inaccurate is that the reported sales activities are out-of-sync with the true state of the prospects buying process. It’s no wonder that the same CSO Insights research [1] showed that average sales forecast accuracy on a deal-by-deal basis is no better than tossing a coin.

How we help: on a customer acquisition mission

Inflexion-Point’s primary purpose is to help our clients to implement customer acquisition systems that systematically align their sales and marketing activities and enable them to achieve breakthrough levels of revenue growth by reliably and repeatably targeting, attracting and converting more of the right sort of customers. We would welcome the opportunity to help you achieve the same - through the disciplined implementation of a deceptively simple 4-step framework.

[1] CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Study 2015 Key Trends Analysis

> DISCOVER > DESIGN > ALIGN + REFINE

4 steps to breakthrough 2

1: The first phase of our methodology is a short initial discovery process. We’ll start by evaluating your existing sales and marketing messages, materials and processes and conducting a series of 1:1 employee and customer interviews and at least one interactive workshop to come up with a set of simple, actionable recommendations.

2: Moving quickly to the second phase, we’ll work with you to design and implement a structured customer acquisition process that will allow you to systematically target, attract and convert more of the right sort of customers - and we’ll help you to configure your existing CRM system to reflect the new process. If you don’t have a CRM system, or are unhappy with the one you’re currently using, we’ll help you to put an effective solution in place.

3: The third phase is all about adoption. Our next goal is to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are fully aligned with your new customer acquisition philosophy - and are enthusiastic and effective adopters of the new systems and processes. We’ll do this through tailored training and coaching programmes that help to ensure that everyone involved sees a clear personal benefit in embracing the new approach.

4: You can expect tangible results in the form of stronger pipelines, shorter sales cycles, higher win rates and more consistent overall sales performance within weeks of starting the programme. But this initial performance uplift is just the start - we’ll set things up to make it easy for you to identify additional areas for improvement as the basis for the fourth and final on-going phase of evidence-based continuous refinement.

Discover > Design > Align + Refine: it’s a deceptively simple but well-proven and highly effective 4-step framework for systematically accelerating revenue growth. As well as coaching you in the approach, our role is to provide the external perspective, experience and guidance that will help to ensure that it quickly delivers the desired results in your environment.


[1] DISCOVER [2] DESIGN [3] ALIGN

[4] REFINE

Phase 1: The initial discovery process 3

Our initial goal will be to capture the knowledge, messages, materials and processes that already exist within your organisation, identify gaps in best practice and recommend obvious immediate opportunities for improvement.

We’ll start by reviewing examples of your latest marketing messages, materials and sales tools - including the most frequently used sales presentations. We’ll also want to take a look at your current opportunity qualification, sales pipeline management and revenue forecasting processes and guidelines.


Internal interviews and workshop

In addition, we’ll conduct a series of 1:1 interviews with key members of your sales, marketing and executive teams. These interviews allow us to develop a consensus around what your ideal prospects looks like, what seems to be most important to them, and how you currently go about communicating and interacting with your potential customers.

Our ability to take an independent perspective allows us to capture insights and identify patterns that have often been invisible to people in their day-to-day roles. We’ll then hold at least one discovery workshop with key members of your sales, marketing and executive teams to review our initial findings and fill in any gaps in our knowledge.

Customer and prospect validation

At this point, we’ll have developed a set of well-informed hypotheses about who your most valuable customers are, what really matters to them, and how and why they decide to buy. Then we’ll quickly test and refine these initial ideas through a series of 1:1 interviews with key representatives of your customer and prospect community.

Completing the discovery process

Within just a few short weeks, we’ll be ready to present our findings in the form of a concise set of actionable recommendations that will usually include:

§  The common characteristics of your ideal target organisations and roles §  An assessment of your most promising market opportunities §  The identification of key trigger events that initiate buying processes §  Key positioning and messaging recommendations §  Buyer-aligned pipeline stages and milestones §  Pipeline management and revenue forecasting guidelines §  High-priority initiatives for unlocking revenue growth

Phase 2: Design 4

Once you’ve reviewed and approved our initial recommendations, we’ll work with you to design a customer acquisition system that reflects what we’ve learned about your ideal customers, what is important to them, and how and why they choose to buy.

Our objective will be to clearly identify the issues that are going to cause them to take action for which your solution offers a set of powerful and distinctive advantages. We want to ensure that your messages to the market stand out from the crowd and make your target audience want to learn more.


Converting interest into action

Having captured your prospect’s attention, we then want to ensure that your sales and marketing actions move qualified prospects quickly and effectively through each key stage in their buying decision process. And, of course, we’ll want to ensure that your sales people are equipped to assess the true potential of opportunities at an early stage in their discussions - and qualify out poor fits before a great deal of effort is wasted on them.

We’ll help your sales people to anticipate their prospect’s evolving priorities as they move through their buying decision process, and we’ll provide guidance in the form of a series of simple checklists about what best practice suggests they ought to know and do at each stage along the way, and what resources are available to support their sales efforts.

We’ll help you to configure these key stages, activities, milestones into your existing CRM solution, and to organise your sales resources so that they are easily accessible to your sales people. And we’ll help you to establish a set of simple metrics and leading indicators that will enable you to monitor the progress that is being made.

Key deliverables

The key outputs from design phase typically include:

§  Clearly defined customer acquisition process stages and milestones §  Key differentiation theme: “what sets you apart?” §  Documented ideal target organisation and key stakeholder profiles §  Message maps and talking points to engage stakeholders at each stage of the process §  Progressive opportunity qualification checklists §  Competitive landscape and positioning §  Template for dealing with the hardest-to-handle prospect questions §  Template for supporting stories and anecdotes

Phase 3: Align 5

In many respects this is the most important phase: there’s no point in going to all the effort to design and implement a customer acquisition system that few people are going to contribute to or use.

That’s why it’s important that we involve a representative cross section of your sales and marketing organisation in the initial discovery phase - and why the resulting system must be seen as something that improves their effectiveness, and not simply as another administrative burden.


Satisfying the “what’s in it for me” test

We’ll pay particular attention to ensuring that your new customer acquisition system is easy for users to understand and adopt and that it passes the “what’s in it for me” test for everyone who is going to be using it.

We’ll work with you to launch the initiative through customised training programmes and materials that enable everyone to get aligned around the thinking behind the new approach – and we’ll back it up with coaching sessions for your management team.

It’s not just your existing sales and marketing teams that will benefit. You’ll find our approach particularly effective when on-boarding new hires - recruits that are inducted into a well-defined and widely-supported customer acquisition process are much more likely to succeed.

Inflexion-Point helped to bring impressive clarity to our positioning and enabled us to speak in a distinctively different voice from the companies we compete with for our customer’s attention. Their work on our sales processes enabled us to bring best practices, winning habits and sound disciplines to bear in our day-to-day sales activities.

Charles Clarke, CEO Rosslyn Data Technologies

Getting everyone aligned behind a common process can also do wonders for inter-departmental cooperation. Sales and marketing will be much better positioned to jointly develop new marketing materials and sales tools that are actually going to get used.

Key Deliverables

The key deliverables from this phase typically include:

§  Delivery of customised training programmes and materials §  Coaching sessions for your management team §  Development of a new recruit induction programme §  Specialised presentation, conversation, storytelling and question handling sessions

Phase 4: Refine 6


The process of improvement continues even after your new customer acquisition system is up-and-running - in fact some of your most significant long-term gains will come from data-driven, evidence-based continuous refinement.

There’s an important cadence to the change process: once established, if your high level positioning, core messages and differentiation themes do not remain reasonably consistent, you run the real risk of confusing your target audience as to what you stand for, and what sets you apart as an organisation.

Refining the details

Although your high-level themes should be consistent, the issues you choose to focus on will need to evolve in line with the changing priorities of your target audience, and you will want to be continuously adding to your stock of customer stories and anecdotes and your pool of intelligent answers to your prospect’s toughest questions.

You’ll also want to regularly review, analyse and refine your customer acquisition processes to reflect your sales people’s day-to-day experiences at the front line. Having the appropriate metrics, robust analytics and effective feedback loops between the field and the centre is particularly important.

We work with many of our clients on an on-going basis - either on retainer or project-by-project - helping them to ensure that their messages, systems and sales tools always reflect the latest learning.

Typical involvement

Our typical involvement during this continuous refinement phase often includes:

§  Regular reviews of messages, processes and metrics

§  High-impact projects targeted at bottlenecks in the customer acquisition process

§  On-going training and coaching

Inflexion-Point helped us to identify our ideal customers and understand our key stakeholders, enabling us to clarify our value proposition and to refine our sales processes. Their initial involvement culminated in the creation of a substantial sales playbook and in the delivery of customised sales training that precisely reflected our particular sales environment. But the involvement didn't end there: they continued to reinforce the programme through regular coaching at the team, individual and opportunity levels, helping to ensure that our new way of selling was embraced by the sales team, and helping them to adapt to our new expectations on them. We saw a significant increase in the volume and value of our business through these targeted accounts. Frank Højgaard, Managing Director

Firebrand Training

Our approach 7

Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners are based in Reading, at the heart of the UK’s “Silicon Corridor”. We believe that best practice in modern B2B sales and marketing involves an intelligent blend of art, science and engineering - and that a thoughtful, evidence-based approach is more likely to result in sustained revenue and market share growth than a reliance on “sales heroics”.

Our clients are typically B2B-focused, expansion-stage business that find themselves involved in complex and lengthy sales situations with multiple stakeholders. They have already come to the conclusion that “sell harder” is not a winning strategy. We help them to sell smarter.

The methodology outlined in this brief guide is enabling them to target, attract and convert more of the right sort of customers:

Target the right sorts of roles in the right sorts of organisations with the right sorts of issues

Attract this target audience with compelling messages that make them want to learn more

Convert more of these well-qualified opportunities into satisfied customers more efficiently

You can learn more about our approach on our website www.inflexion-point.com and in our blog www.inflexion-point.com/blog.


Find out more If our approach appeals to you, and you’d like to find out how it could be applied to your organisation, please drop me a line or give me a call, and let’s agree a time for an exploratory discussion. I look forward to our conversation…

Bob Apollo!

CEO

Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners

Reading, UK

UK Mobile: +44 7802 313300

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.inflexion-point.com

Inflexion-Point worked seamlessly with our Sales and Marketing team to transform our tired sales processes and inaccurate sales forecasting into a buyer-aligned process that delivered measurable results almost immediately. They are very knowledgeable on the “state of the art” of complex technology sales environments, and the PXP team benefitted hugely from working with them. I highly recommend Inflexion-Point for businesses facing similar challenges.

Ritz Steytler, CEO, PXP

inflexion-point discover-design-align-refine jun-2015

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