Phase I: Plan and Position
Plan and Position encompasses everything that comes before the initial communication with prospective clientele. Sales territory management, brand articulation, and efficient outreach are all components.
Planning
The first step towards understanding your best target prospects is to thoroughly understand yourself and your brand. There are three key definitions needed to properly prepare for interaction with prospective clients. In order, they become increasingly specific as per your brand and brand value.
- Brand Identity: A broad definition of your brand and the value it provides. It should communicate what you’re all about at a level basic enough for those outside your industry.
- Value Proposition: A more specific definition of the value for someone that understands the basic needs and challenges of your industry. A thesis statement of the product or service you provide, and how you provide it.
- Elevator Pitch: An even more specific, and slightly longer explanation of specifically what makes your brand exceptional, and what sets you apart in the market place. If you had 15 seconds in an elevator with your biggest prospect ever, how would you communicate your value to them?
Beyond the ability to articulate your organization or brand, the infrastructure of planning also includes the systems that are utilized to document, structure, and analyze all day-to-day sales engagements.
Whether you’re just realizing the need for a system to manage customer data and interactions, or aiming to further leverage a tried and true CRM program, Palm sales can help.
Positioning
Positioning essentially refers to the angle at which you want to approach the prospect; and more directly, approach the sale. In essence, if your prospect was to describe your business or brand in a single sentence, statement, or phrase what would you want it to be?
- Trusted Strategic Resource: To be viewed as a trusted strategic resource, your focus must be on the prospect themselves, and understanding their specific business challenges and goals, and thereby their specific needs. A strategic resource helps their clients to understand not only how to buy from them in a mutually beneficial manner, but also how to most efficiently partner with vendors, and conduct business in general.
- Industry Expert: Being viewed as an industry expert requires you to truly be on the technological and intellectual forefront of the industry. Being up to date on current scientific or strategic breakthroughs isn’t enough, you must be able to communicate how these breakthroughs combined with your services give your clientele the best opportunity to reach their organizational goals.
These are just a few examples of broad position points. Regardless of what positioning you choose, it is absolutely imperative to have a concise unified stance for your sales team to approach opportunities from. Overall, a commitment to a specific positioning approach throughout a sales process, will dramatically increase your chance to close, and conversion rate from prospect to customer overall.
How we help:
- Stategy and Insight: Palm Sales works with your executive team to establish a powerful articulation of your brand, and the value it presents to the marketplace. Beyond structuring and creating these interpretations, we establish the optimal strategic positioning from which to approach prospective clientele and convey your brand message.
- Process and Analytics: Palm Sales defines the optimal processes to structure territory planning, and guide day-to-day sales engagements. From activity metrics to sales forecasting, we maximize visibility for management, without creating tedious or cumbersome reporting for your team.
- Training and Enablement: Palm Sales educates your team on how to optimize their territory planning within the framework of your systems and overall strategy. Our teaching on how to present your brand’s value during client outreach will enable your team to operate at a high level of activity and consistently bring new opportunities into their sales funnel.