We have been in business for 3 years, over that time we have made a lot of mistakes. By far the most costly in terms of time and effort was caused by 1 simple issue... not having the discipline to focus our sales efforts effectively.
We got really busy filling our funnel with opportunities and ramping up pressure on the sales team to find and win more business. If you throw 1000 darts at the board you are sure to get a bulls-eye, right? The problem was we simply couldn't keep up with the growing list of actions required to bring these opportunities home. Our propsects grew but our sales did not.
The funnel grew stale, opportunities grew cold, sales costs grew but revenue did not. We needed to change our sales team from scatter effect to precision targeting. We needed process, templates and discipline.
We established a formal opportunity validation process and bid no bid decision tree, more closely aligned sales, technical and operations staff for all pursuits and overhauled funnel management.
We increased our win rate
Decreased the cost of sales activity
Increased revenue
Had a lot more time developing quality proposals
Bid less and won more
The most powerful thing we did was the simplest. We agreed on a simple but robust method to focus our efforts on delivering sales.
We implemented this simple template.
Setting an expectation for an invoice date focuses the mind and provides cash flow confidence.
Speaking of confidence, this is a percentage assessment of the prospect likelihood to spend money to solve the perceived problem by the date.
An assessment of the likelihood that (once the prospect decides to spend money) they spend the money on your proposed solution.
Anticipated invoice total for the sale. May be part of a larger campaign.
A sensitised revenue figure = Go x Get x Revenue. Allowing for cash forecasting and priority setting.
A calculated sales budget for that opportunity.
A description of the proposed solution.
The next action outstanding. These should be directly targeted at lifting either the Go, the Get or the expected Revenue.
Would you like a working version to try?
No problem... send us a quick email and we will send you a free copy for you to use forever more.
We have since rolled this process out throughout our network and incorporated the model into a range of Pipeline and funnel apps. We can help you to do the same if you like.