GRYPHON KNOWS

5 downloads 227 Views 918KB Size Report
Planning and creating an effective sales strategy is at the top of any sales ... For example, let's say your company ...
GRYPHON KNOWS THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN SALES STRATEGY & EXECUTION

2 | Case Study by StockInDesign

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN SALES STRATEGY AND EXECUTION By Scott Edinger founder of Edinger Consulting Group and Eric Esfahanian, SVP and General Manager at GRYPHON Networks

INTRODUCTION Planning and creating an effective sales strategy is at the top of any sales leader’s mind, regardless of industry. It involves a comprehensive understanding of the business sales cycle, as well as intimate knowledge of your own sales team’s motivation and personal goals. Without complete alignment with sales; execution will suffer. Too often, there is a disconnect between the strategy established by the boardroom and the execution by the salespeople who are engaging with customers and prospects. Alignment is the most common disconnect and has major ripple effects across the efficiency and efficacy of sales performance.

WWW.GRYPHONSALESINTELLIGENCE.COM

STRATEGY AND EXECUTION MISALIGNMENT When the strategy is not translated into specific actions for salespeople to take, execution will suffer. For example, let’s say your company has a strategic objective to pursue financial services companies with $2B+ in assets. Anytime a salesperson engages with a financial services company that has assets under that threshold, it is an off-strategy and a misaligned use of resources, hours and tactics. Chasing the wrong dollars further pulls sales reps off the strategy, yet when they need to make their numbers and are behind on their target any revenue becomes “good” revenue no matter how much time and effort is spent on pursuing off-strategy dollars. This misalignment results in a wasted spiral cycle and wasted opportunity to pursue the targeted revenue.   Another common disconnect happens when the boardroom and the sales floor have different definitions. In these situations, because there is no connectivity between boardroom and the field, it’s common not to have an accountability culture that flows top-down. For instance, when executives say reps should be “consultative selling“ but during their calls, the reps are pitching products. This not only limits the sales conversation but it prevents it from becoming a more interactive and sophisticated discussion between the rep and the client/prospect. When the rep straight pitches, he or she cannot drive a deeper understanding of the customer’s pain points and therefore cannot offer a solution to those pains and really speak to the client/prospect’s

needs. You never want your client or prospect to hang up the phone feeling as though there is a lack of empathy and thoughtfulness. Organizations need to focus on how to solve customer pain points. Leaders need to work with their teams to develop consultative selling skills that align with strategy if they are going that route – and reps need to be trained properly. Consultative selling is showing a clear and complete understanding of what the client/prospect hopes to achieve and seeing an opportunity to understand their client/ prospect’s situation and provide solutions to problems they might not have even considered.

WWW.GRYPHONSALESINTELLIGENCE.COM

When done correctly, the sales professional creates value to make the customer feel as though they were worth the time they have invested in the rep. By demonstrating an understanding of a customer’s problems beyond the sales script, revealing insight is shared and creates a more meaningful relationship between the rep and the customer. This in turn makes the rep a trusted advisor. This is nothing revolutionary, it’s been done for ages. However, the degree of how many times it is successfully executed versus what the boardroom thinks results in a wide gap.

Establishing Benchmarks and Analyzing Metrics To establish benchmarks and analyze the right metrics, the most important thing to do is to find the elements of the sales process that are most predictive of success. Too often, CRM systems are simply a series of check boxes, but odds are there are three and four things spread across sales process that have a huge impact on whether a sales effort is successful or not. In many cases, while all pieces of the process are necessary, only a few are key to winning the business. Let’s look at an experience with a bank. For this organization revenue increase is tied to face-toface branch appointments. Set qualified appointments are the barometer for growth and are obtained via the telephone. However, without the proper measurement in place, there was no way to tell if the bankers were successful or, if they were not, there was no way to adequately help those who were struggling. Consequently, sales strategy and overall effectiveness were limited due to the lack of data.

Through access to real-time call data, sales managers had a much better handle on branch activity. Once an issue was detected, follow-up was provided during live coaching. There was less reliance on anecdotes or opinion and more focused on objective examples of activities resulting in desired outcomes. Simply, once the bank understood exactly what levers to pull, it was finally able to drive a much greater likelihood of sales success.

ABOUT GRYPHON NETWORKS Companies with field-based, mobile or branch-based sales teams depend on Gryphon to optimize sales performance and eliminate regulatory risk. The highly-patented Gryphon Sales Intelligence Platform automatically collects and analyzes call data from any device to transform phone-based activity into actionable sales intelligence that delivers significant return-on-investment from customer communications and outreach. The world’s top banks, brokerage, healthcare andinsurance firms are among over 700 enterprise clients.

To Learn More Please Visit www.gryphonsalesintelligence.com