Initiate

We help you develop a sales plan and make key decisions about the opportunities you want to pursue. We help you develop effective sales plans, account plans, call plans, and value propositions. Initiating New Opportunities is all about finding and creating new business either with current clients or new clients.

Qualify

The centerpiece of our sales services focuses on qualifying opportunities, which is the easiest step in a sales process to rush or overlook. Qualifying a sales opportunity is a critical inquiry process to shape a solution that exactly meets your client’s needs.

Win

Once an opportunity is effectively qualified, the sales process turns to advocacy—presenting and closing the deal. We focus on the critical skills required to close an opportunity.

Grow

Sales people know the easiest sale is to a current client. However, the bridge between growing the relationship and serving the client may have serious weaknesses that often put relationships at risk. We help you build and develop long-term relationships and mine new opportunities.

Assess

We diagnose before we prescribe. We provide assessment instruments and/or diagnostic consulting to assess critical factors that affect your success across the Initiate, Qualify, Win & Grow sales process. In addition, we assess the skills of your sales people while they’re at work as part of our Execute services. Click to close

Develop

We help you develop your most important asset—your sales people. Using the four stages in the sales process, we will help you develop your sales people to improve their sales skills and knowledge required to be a trusted business advisor. In addition to sales training, we provide consulting and coaching to reinforce and sustain your sales success.

Execute

We help you master and sustain superior sales execution. We provide coaching, consulting, and tools for sales leaders, teams, and individuals to embed a new mindset, skills, and processes into your sales culture. We also help you with sales planning, consult on client engagements, or join you in client calls and meetings

Measure

We help you measure your leading and lagging indicators for success. We follow a sales process that assesses and then measures the indicators and issues that matter most to your sales success. Then we help you create an effective feedback loop, so you can act on your findings.

We assess your sales planning processes, tools, and sales execution to evaluate how well you are building and managing your sales pipeline. We can also assess your sales people’s sales confidence—and the impact their attitudes are having on their performance. These assessment processes are often poorly frontloaded by sales organizations, resulting in wasted time and money.

We assess your sales processes for conducting sales inquiry, building business cases, and establishing mutually valued relationships.

We assess sales processes for winning business and the outputs of success, such as win rates, deal size, sales cycles, and win/loss rates, which are critical to understanding and improving wins in the future.

We assess the relationship between sales and delivery and their combined effectiveness at seeking opportunities and growing current business.

Helping Clients Succeed™— Initiating New Opportunities (INO) This consultative sales training helps sales people learn how to develop effective sales plans, account plans, call plans, and value propositions—and the skills to execute them. It’s all about finding and creating new business either with current clients or new clients.

Helping Clients Succeed™— Qualifying Opportunities: Inquiry (ORD)This consultative sales training helps sales people learn how to break down the dysfunctions in the selling/buying process and get real with trustworthy communication and disciplined business thinking.

1. Opportunity: Should they do it?
2. Resources: Can they do it?
3. Decision-making: Will they do it?

Competition and Relationship training modules are also included in this sales training:

• The Competition modules help sales people establish a competitive strategy.
• The Relationship modules help sales people determine who the key decision makers are, what their decision criteria are, and how strong their relationship is with clients.

Helping Clients Succeed™— Converting Opportunities: Presenting to Close (ER) This consultative sales training transitions the Helping Clients Succeed™— Qualifying Opportunities: Inquiry work session to advocacy and presenting to close.

1. Exact Solution: Proposals don’t sell, people do.
2. Results: Managing the relationship.

This sales training helps sales people learn how to advocate, present, and propose their position effectively. It also deals with handling objections and maintaining relationships.

We also provide:

Helping Clients Succeed™ Negotiations Consultative sales training to help sales people negotiate with confidence and integrity.

Helping Clients Succeed™ Sales Presentations Consultative sales training to help sales people make effective presentations that enable decisions.

We help you:

• Prioritize opportunities.
• Manage and balance sales pipelines.
• Narrow opportunities.
• Develop value propositions.
• Develop sales plans.
• Develop account plans.
• Develop call plans.

To help you succeed, we:

• Coach communication and inquiry skills.
• Provide follow-up consultative sales training (customized if necessary).
• Provide online tools to support application of sales skills and to manage information.
• Provide webinars, mini-training modules, and other reinforcement training.
• Provide telephone, online, and in-person coaching.
• Develop advanced consultative selling skills.
• Help strategize on a specific client opportunity.
• Go on targeted sales calls.

To help you close to win deals, we:

• Coach on sales presentation, proposal, and advocacy skills.
• Coach on deals.
• Help with sales negotiation methods.
• Consult on preparing for and managing closing meetings.
• Provide follow-up consultative sales training.
• Provide webinars, mini-training modules, and other reinforcement training.
• Provide telephone, online, and in-person coaching.
• Evaluate client-specific sales presentations.
• Assess and coach on specific sales proposals, proposal processes, and methods to reduce proposals in the sales process.
• Help you advocate your solution and close the deal.

Growing relationships is essential to growing business. To help you succeed, we:

• Work with sales leadership to install sales processes and sales skills throughout the sales team.
• Install an account planning methodology to leverage current client relationships.
• Create account-growth methodologies.
• Develop client-management processes.
• Coach on advanced consultative selling skills.

Through assessment instruments and diagnostic consulting, we work with you to determine the most important indicators of success for Initiating New Opportunities. Then, we measure sales results and establish metrics around other leading indicators or benchmarks.

Once we have determined the indicators of success for Qualifying Opportunities, we can measure the results against the findings and look at new indicators.

The easiest indicators, benchmarks, and metrics to establish and measure are wins. However, many sales organizations don’t measure, don’t measure the right things, or don’t understand what the indicators mean. We measure win-loss ratios and the factors that affect them and determine the sales results that matter most.

The hardest thing to measure is the value of relationships and the growing partnership with a client. However, all the indicators for the other three steps (Initiate, Qualify, and Win) can and should be applied to how effectively you are growing the business from the inside. We know this is critical. Most sales organizations don’t measure it well. We help you establish criteria for effective growth.