Collaboration – The key to accelerating your sales

Recently I had a conversation with a sales professional about his challenges. A good friend had called me who had just missed his quarterly forecast. To say this friend of mine was disappointed would be an understatement. He was discouraged and feeling the pressure from his management for not delivering the revenue he had committed.

So what happened?

Here is the situation, my client works in the healthcare industry. He sells capital equipment to hospitals. His products improve both efficiencies and patient safety in hospitals. All good, right? Here is the catch, his products and solutions are a brand new approach to a set of problems that his clients have learned to live with. So his sales process begins with a good amount of education. He is actually educating his prospects on innovation and that there is a solution to their manual processes, that the problems which have plagued them actually have a viable solution that can impact their business.

The executive he was working with it understood all of this. Actually, the sales person has been told that they will become a client. The prospect absolutely loves the solution and understands the impact. The prospect has determined that the solution has enough value to justify the significant investment and yes, the prospect is the decision maker. The area that is grey or undefined right now is timing!

As it turns out, this prospect will buy from my friend. He just needs to make some process and infrastructure changes within his organization to prepare for the new equipment and processes. The prospect estimates that the changes will take him 60-90 days to implement and he will be ready to buy in January. January also corresponds to a new budget year, and the capital investment has been allocated!

Why didn’t the sales person know this before he forecasted the September deal?

One key to maintaining control over your sales cycle and forecast credibility is to make sure that you and your prospects are synchronized and collaborating toward a joint and agreed upon outcome. Have you ever wondered why when it is your idea, it is a good one? Collaborating in the sales cycle includes the skill of getting your prospect’s to own the idea of becoming your client! Collaboration, as a rule, breaks down resistance through involvement and ownership and tends to insure the result will be more effective.

The key to collaboration is involvement in the sales plan. The best sales people that I know are extremely competent at uncovering, understanding, and when necessary accelerating the steps that the prospect needs to complete to become a client. In the ValueSelling Framework, we call this creating a mutual plan.

A mutual plan is a set of activities, a timeline, and a sales tool all wrapped into written correspondence between the sales person and the prospect. It is not only a list of next steps, but certainly will include the next steps that both the buyer and seller need to complete to formalize a business relationship.

Key components:

Plan: Plan is a word that is used again and again in business and especially sales. There are compensation plans, territory plans, account plans and opportunity plans and each of them have a place in sales. A “Plan” in ValueSelling terminology is an agreed upon process between the buyer and seller that culminates with the buyer resolving a business issue and set of problems with the seller’s solution. The plan is where a superstar sales person can reverse engineer the prospect’s buying process and uncover all of the steps this company and individual will need to be convinced that your solution will do what you said it would do.

Mutual: By definition, mutual means joint, shared, common, collaborative and reciprocal. The plan is not mutual if only the sales person knows it or created it. A ValueSelling plan must include the prospect not only in its creation but also in its execution. It is critical to engage the prospect in creating the plan. To do that, ask the client specific questions to involve them in creating the plan with you. For example:

• What do they want to see completed to be convinced?
• How long do those steps take?
• What resources might be involved?
• When do they need for their problems to be solved?

A number of pointed questions to engage and involve in the creation of a mutual plan which involves both parties will take you a long way in your success.

Writing: Yes, the plan needs to be in writing with the prospect. The power of the written word is immense. Whether in email, a document attached to email, letter, or PowerPoint format, the written plan should be created by the sales person and provided to the prospect during the sales tool. (A side note, if you are not sure what the best way to communicate a written plan to your prospect is: Just ask him or her!) There should not be any new information in the written plan. The plan is a confirmation process. It should include the jointly developed timeline and activities as well as assigned accountability. The written plan is just a summary of the conversation that has taken place.

A good plan can differentiate you from your competition and put you back in charge of the sales cycle. Many sales people don’t take the time to complete this critical step in the sales process; they may send follow up notes and emails about next steps, yet the focus is on the sales person’s need to get an executed contract. The focus of the ValueSelling plan is on your prospect, their needs, and the resolution of their issues and problems.

My advice to my medical sales friend: engage the client today in creating a joint plan. Focus on the result, securing your order is a means to an end for your prospect, not the end itself. Put the plan in writing and then adjust your forecast accordingly. It is not a problem that the client may not buy until January – it is a problem if the sales professional doesn’t know that and then over commits on a forecast.