Navigating big deals through to closure is complex.
Multiple decision-makers, influencers and big dollars can make these anxious waters. It’s easy to get lost. To help you find your way follow the sales road map.
It’s an inventory of sales actions and corresponding buyer commitments that advance a sale step by step, but it isn’t something you buy at a store. It’s something you build.
Building your sales road map provides instant clarity into where your sales process is healthy, and where it’s weak. It gives you insight into why you’ve achieved the level of sales success you have and where to focus to improve those results.
To start to build your sales road map, you need to be aware that generally there are four classic phases that any sale passes through on its way to being secured:
- Suspect: You suspect a company has a need for your products or services.
- Prospect: You have met with the company, confirmed it has needs you can satisfy and confirmed that it would spend money to resolve those needs.
- Target: The company has your pricing in hand and at least 75% of the issues that stand between you and closure have been dealt with.
- Closed: Pricing is agreed to and implementation dates are set.
With this groundwork laid, you’re now set to begin building your sales road map.
Gather your key account salespeople together. Ask them to plot and document the sales activities and corresponding buyer commitments needed to move a typical large deal through each aforementioned phase.
For instance, to move a deal through the suspect phase, sales must first reach the right buying contact and request a meeting (sales activity), and the buyer must say “yes” to that meeting (buyer commitment). Follow this thought process through for each of the four phases. Capture all sales activities and buyer commitments within each. When this task is complete, you will have your sales road map in hand.
Optimizing your sales road map brings you great value. Not only does it increase top line revenue and eliminate waste in the sales process, it also improves sales velocity, simplifies the closing of complex deals and makes the company healthy for the long term.
To optimize your sales road map look at the sales activities in each phase and ask:
- Is this the right activity to be doing at this time in the sale to get it closed?
- Have the right things been done previous to this sales activity to set the stage for its success?
If your answer to either of these questions is “no,” look at your sales road map and begin optimizing it. Here’s how.
Move your sales activities to their optimal place in the road map. An insurance provider found it was issuing price quotes too early in its sale, before all the buyer’s needs had been identified. This explained its poor ratio of closes to quotes issued. By doing a more vigorous needs assessment up front and quoting later, it was able to close more deals.
Insert sales activities early in the road map that will make closing the deal later smoother. A transportation company discovered large closes were being stalled by last-minute objections from the buyer’s warehouse staff. By engaging those buying influences earlier in the sales process it eliminated late-stage glitches.
Delete road map activities that bog down your sales process. A biotech company identified that having sales hand off system demonstrations to its field service technicians team slowed sales. With some training, the sales team was able to perform demonstrations on its own and field service was able to focus on its customer care duties.
Documenting and optimizing your sales road map is a straightforward way to improve your team’s effectiveness and efficiency in closing large deals.