With the advent of social media, CRM software, and marketing automation, sales management has been turned upside down in recent years. Throw in cloud-based applications, a rapidly evolving competitive landscape, and customers who have access to more information than your sales team does – and you have all the ingredients of a selling revolution.
As the role of the sales manager has fundamentally changed, so too have the expectations of your senior management team. As a sales manager you’re expected to do a lot more than just hit your numbers nowadays. You need to understand social selling, SEO strategy, how to create rapport, connection, and interest with brand new prospects through LinkedIn. The question we often hear from senior sales managers (although the words may vary) is: “How am I supposed to change my sales strategy to match the new business goals and metrics I’m being given?” . So that’s what we’re going to discuss today.
The first step is to identify where you are being successful at each stage of the sales cycle and any areas that can be improved.
Identify why you’re winning and losing
If you’re able to listen to customers from their perspective, not everything they say will make sense. Not everything they do will be right. But you’ll know more about what you have to do because of it.
– Peter van Stolk, Founder of Jones Soda
Learning from your customers is the single fastest, most effective way to grow as a company. After all, getting inside the minds of your customers gives you the best insight possible into where you are succeeding or falling short in their eyes and how your value proposition is being perceived.
You can glean in-depth sales management knowledge into where and why you are winning and losing with Trinity Perspectives’ Win Loss Analysis program. Win Loss Analysis may in fact be the biggest differentiator available to B2B organisations, by helping you to laser in on where you excel and pinpoint precisely what you should do differently next time. The process that we take our customers through is deceptively simple.
The Trinity team extract actionable insights while conducting customer interviews on behalf of you, the sales organisation. This is almost always a win-win situation, because it gives your customers the opportunity to provide candid feedback, whilst providing you with valuable, unfiltered and actionable customer intel. Furthermore, by listening to and acting on this customer feedback, the credibility and professionalism of your sales force is increased, making it more of a partnership and less of a hard sell when future opportunities arise.
Over the past 5 years, our experience has shown that Win Loss Analysis encourages B2B organisations to make better decisions on how to approach future opportunities and positions them for greater success. Here are a few other benefits you should expect from any Win Loss Analysis program you implement:
- Better understanding of delayed sales cycles and shorter close rates
- Increased volume in your pipeline
- Clearly defined Win/Loss benchmarks that can be communicated across the team
- Vasty improved win rates by understanding prior losses to key competitors
- A boost in referred business with more attention paid to client care
- Ability to more effectively track sales and quickly identify targets.
Shifting focus in sales management
The modern era of technology has shifted the sales management role away from being primarily a slave to your sales forecast spreadsheet. Nowadays, the best sales leaders devote time to deal coaching, reducing unnecessary admin activities for their team and creating closer alignment between their sales process and the buying process of their customers.
Trinity Perspectives works closely with B2B companies in Australia and throughout the Asia Pacific region to help develop and refine their sales processes through sales strategy and management and Win Loss Analysis services. We provide proven approaches that produce immediate results, reducing your cost of sale, helping you qualify out faster, whilst increasing your conversion rate. Our goal is to provide specific and actionable sales intelligence at the individual and team level at every stage of the sales cycle, whilst bringing you closer to the customers you serve.
Sales managers must become catalysts for change and renewal in the sales disciplines and practices of their team. Status quo doesn’t cut it anymore; you must find new ways to improve and adjust your selling strategies or risk being left behind by both your customers and your competitors. Is it time to re-evaluate your sales strategies and identify gaps or areas of missed opportunity in your customer interactions? If so, we’d love to help.
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