Sales Wars: Does Your Sales Team have a Battle Plan?

Challenge 2: Battle Preparations

It’s okay to admit it. Your sales people may not do enough planning before going to battle.

But, before you put them on the front lines again, make sure your salespeople can answer these questions (honestly):

1. What are you trying to sell and most importantly, why? Sounds simple enough until you actually try to quantify it.

2. Is there a budget? What if there’s not enough? Who has discretionary use of the funds? Who can get more? Are we speaking to the right person here?

3. What is the sale worth to the organization? Does the ROI justify the investment of time, money and effort?

4. Have we sold this prospect anything in the past? Answer: who, what, when, where, why and how.

5. How many conversations have you already had with this contact? How many phone calls, face-to-face meetings and so on? Do you have a clear next step?

6. Do you have an organizational chart? Do you have an inside coach?

7. What has been (or will be) your sales strategy?

8. Where are you in the selling process?

The Selling Process

Don’t have a selling process? Here is a basic checklist:

1. Were you invited in or did you beg for an appointment?
2. What were the prospect’s reasons for seeing you?
3. What were the challenges, problems, and frustrations that you identified in the interview?
4. How important is it to the prospect to fix those problems?
5. How committed is the prospect to fixing those problems? (Time, effort, money, willingness to fail?)
6. What is the agreement you and the prospect have reached concerning the decisions that will be made each step of the way?

Few salespeople understand the cost of pursuing sales and often fill their funnels with bad business. Even fewer think through winning strategies before going into a sales “battle.” So, ask your sales people these fundamental sales questions before committing resources to a battle you cannot win.

Successful sales professionals qualify vigorously and religiously before committing time and energy so their closing ratios are 90% or better.

So, what are yours?

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Photo Credit: Pull and Bear

Greta Schulz is president of Schulz Business SELLutions in West Palm Beach, Florida. She is the best-selling author of “To Sell is Not to Sell”. Greta does corporate training for fortune 1000 companies and she has an online training course for entrepreneurs.