Complex Sales - yeah!
Okay, time to relaunch this category a bit. And if I am to do that, then I think that I need to talk about the one thing that non-professional sales people cannot do well, or even understand is necessary. And that thing is: Qualification.
Qualification is the rather hard hearted but very necessary process of determining whether someone you are dealing with is ever going to turn from being a nice person to go and visit, and who likes you and your products, into someone who will insert cold hard cash into your organisation`s bank account in return for what you have to offer. In word, how confident are you that they will actually buy something?
To slightly paraphrase Hugh. "Markets are conversations, Sales are conversions" In other words, the conversation was converted into hard cash, and a contractual relationship.
Also, I have written rather naughtily about the Quarterhack, the on the ground sales person, well, actually, qualification and another process that we will discuss later, closing, are the two things that they are responsible for. They can actually be pretty average at the other things, but the had better be damn good at those two, or get rid of them before they bankrupt you.
So, how do you qualify a sales process? Well, first we assume that there is some relationship with the client, and that you have been discussing some notion that looks like you might do business. In a complex sales situation this is usually quite clear cut, there is a tender process for these kind of projects in most organisations, whether it be IT procurement, building a factory, signing a commercial services deal, etc. What do you need to have in place for the deal to work?
Several things, and I have a checklist that I use, to question whether all is in place. There are a number of Acronyms for this, all of which have been copyrighted, and trademarked or whatever, so the one that I will use, courtesy of wordsmith is the highly original and non-business friendly TRAM BURP.
Timing
Requirements
Action
Money
Budget
Uniqueness
Relationship
Priority
For reasons of structuring, I will explain this in the following posts.
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