Six Ps methodology includes the elements that need to be attended to in order to win a complex sale. We teach them sequentially, but in fact, salespeople use them simultaneously.
Once you qualify an account with a dispassionate process, you use a combination of a stakeholder analysis and a metaphor of the sales cycle which we have named the canyon and crucible (see appendix Figure A-1).
The stakeholder analysis identifies each buyers pain, power, part, and preference in order to determine a plan to win the heart of each of the key voters or live without it. This process is overlaid with the canyon and crucible, which is a chronologic assessment of the dynamics of changing issues and decision-making politics as they go through a competitive evaluation. Combined, weve put a time dimension on the sales cycle.
The best practice in the industry today is to take your sales cycle and define it in terms of the phases that are unique to your company and your industry. Salespeople tend to do the right things in the sales cycle, just not always at the right times. And timing is critical. How you coach depends on which phase of the sales cycle you are in. In general, we want salespeople doing things earlier than they have been doing them before. The other reason that phases are important is that they match your forecasting process.
The Sales Cycle Coaching TemplateA Vision of Victory
The first thing we do with a client is take the companys sales management team and a selected number of the companys top salespeople and identify, by phase, what an ideal sales cycle looks like. What does a vision of victory look like at each step along the way?
Information drives strategy. We start by defining all of the coaching questions managers will ask during the sales cycle to see if they have included the right activities in the sales cycle that are necessary to answer those coaching questions.
Then, by phase, what are the desired outcomes, questions to ask, information needed, roles and responsibilities, qualification criteria, and action items (with due dates and owners) for each of those phases? The result ends up being a template of an ideal sales cycle from which managers can coach and compare. Because they built it, they own it, and it is tailored to their business. It is then provided to all salespeople so that they wont feel ambushed when the tough questions are asked.
The R.A.D.A.R. six Ps methodology, combined with your sales process, creates a best practice sales template unique to your organization. The purpose of a sales cycle template and a coaching session is to (1)guide the sales team on how to execute these action items most effectively, (2)identify who to focus your efforts on, and (3)explain why the salesperson should do certain activities or what is the risk of not doing the activity.
All a salesperson has is time, and the decisions he makes on that time are critical to his success. You cant really make time, and you cant really save time. All you can do is change the quality of time spent.
The idea is to have one sales cycle for your company for each market segment or industry. By the way, it shouldnt take that long to build this. Weve seen companies spend over $1 million and months with consultants to have this built. Then it sits in a binder without training or execution.
The challenge comes and where many of these projects fail in the action items, questions, anticipated risks, politics, and potential objections. Most plans also dont take into account a thorough transition to post-sales team members.
A best practice sales cycle should be built in three days for less than six figures. For Apple Computer, we built eight of theseone for each industrybecause the solution sets and buying processes for each buyer in each industry are different.
The way you sell to government is different from the way you sell to higher education, which is different from how you sell to health care. You may have a different buying cycle for a different solution set or industry. But once it has been developed, it should become the template for sales execution and coaching for your salespeople and managers.
If
the CEO says that everything is going to be okay and then gets embarrassed at the end of the quarter because some deals slipped and didnt close, investors get surprised and now file lawsuits. It happens about once a quarter, and the result is a stock price that can fall 10 to 40 percent. These are high stakes for a weak forecasting system.
Why Forecasting Doesnt Work Well
One source of sales discipline is the forecast itself especially for product-oriented companies, where the revenue is recognizable when the sale is made. But most forecasts arent forecasts in the first place. Instead, theyre pastcasts, looking in the rear-view mirror at what has happened to date.
If the purpose of the forecast is simply to predict revenue rather than to manage and coach the pipeline, then it fails to reach its potential. In reality, many deals are already out of control by the time they hit the forecast and become visible to management.