Assessment
Workshop
Coaching
Evaluation
Sales Management Services Overview
Resultrek is committed to your success and are uniquely qualified to serve your needs in addressing challenges your sales organization faces.
Sales executives have shared some common concerns:
- Our salespeople are not selling up to their full potential.
- What specific actions do we need to take to help our sales team improve?
- How can we know if we have the right people in the right positions?
- Are our sales managers executing our business strategies as effectively as possible? (See our whitepaper on the current challenges facing salesforces, entitled “Death of a Salesforce.”
Our programs are customized to your company, products, industry, and strategies. We identify the quick hits: steps you can take to increase sales quickly, and we help you solve the longer range issues as you experience the short term gains. Your Resultrek facilitators and coaches are world-renowned authorities in Marketing and Sales. You will have the benefit of their highly-acclaimed research and combined 100+ years of experience in the industry on your side!
Our programs often begin by assessing your sales team—both sales people and management—to identify strengths to build on and develop needs to meet (Assessments). We then customize workshops to help your team learn best practices and adapt the m to your situation (Workshops). We supplement the in-person workshops with web-based courses (Web-based courses). And we help your team apply the principles and best practices in their everyday work (Coaching).
Sales Management: Assessments
The role of assessments in enabling the sorting of sale people, the design of training, and the on-going coaching and development of your team.
Diagnosing a sales force’s performance is a complex process. The Resultrek sales force assessments go beyond assessing sales people’s psychological traits which are only one of several critical components that determine sales force effectiveness.
Perhaps most critical is the selling context: what is the sales task? Supporting distribution? Developing strategic relationships? Value-selling? Hunting for new opportunities within existing relationships? Prospecting? Consulting with prospects to create innovative processes and solutions? Most sales forces are called upon to perform more than one of these tasks.
So a critical first step in the sales force assessment process is to work with clients to create profiles of the sales jobs they want to have performed, which in turn define the “DNA” of the ideal sales person for each job.
Here are the steps in the Resultrek assessment process:
Define the sales tasks and the ideal sales person profiles—the DNA of the ideal sales person Document the key elements of the sales strategies Identify the sales processes and systems Customize on-line surveys for sales people and sales managers Communicate with sales people and sales managers to assure cooperation Manage the administration of the on-line surveys
Analyze survey responses:
Conduct a pipeline analysis: evaluate the quality of each salesperson’s pipeline on 19 dimensions customized for your new pipeline process. Sales Person Assessment: identify strengths to build on and development opportunities to help sales people execute the company’s strategies more effectively. Sales Manager Assessment: identify strengths to build on and development opportunities to help sales managers create a more effective sales force.
Meet with senior marketing and sales management team to review findings and recommendations for ways to address overall sales force issues and to discuss how to use the assessment results to define training and on-going coaching of sales people.
Here are the dimensions our assessments evaluate and kinds of findings our assessment projects produce.
Sales Management Workshops
Based on the assessment of your sales team’s development opportunities, we will work with you to customize workshops. Resultrek has a series of best practice sales tools that we incorporate into the workshops to help your team apply the principles of value selling into their day-to-day work.
Sample tools for value selling training
Here is a sample of the value-selling selling job-tools we often find helpful to developing sales forces:
The Relationship Assessment Job-tool
An important foundation for consultative selling is the value created by the relationship between buyer and seller, in particular, and relationship networks, in general. Our relationship assessment job tool enables sale people to diagnose the exact nature of their relationship with each customer and develop strategies for improving it.
The Relationship Assessment Job Tool consists of 30 questions for the sales person to answer about the customer relationship. The 30 questions break down into three sections:
Section One: Questions 1 through 15: Customer’s View of you. (The status – vendor, credible source, problem solver, trusted source – your customer accords your company.) Section Two: Questions 16 through 24: Your Investment in the relationship. (What you are doing, or not doing to affect the relationship.) Section Three: Questions 25 through 30: Potential for Improvement. (How open you think the customer is to advancing the relationship.)
The diagram below represents the dimensions of the relationship assessment scores. The outcome of the assessment can tell you the level of strength of the relationship and whether your response is appropriate. If the response is not appropriate it can mean either over resourcing or placing the customer at risk. Note that if your response is too low, the account is at risk because the relationship your customer’s would like from your company is higher that the reality of your investment in the relationship. If your response is too great, you are over investing resources in the relationship.
The Relationship Assessment Tool enables you to sort your account relationships according to the level each wants:
In practice suppliers have a portfolio of customer relationships that range from transactional to alliances. This course and the self-diagnostic enable you to sort your accounts into their relationship level and identify the type of value each is looking for.
Sales Management Workshops: Best practice based job-tools
Economic value calculator job-tool
The cornerstone of a consultative selling strategy is presenting the value-proposition, the economic value to the customer of the proposed solution. If your organization already has an economic value calculator job-tool, we can adapt our training to your job-tool to help your sales people better understand the underlying principles and best practices in using it. If you do not have a common economic value calculator job-tool, we can work with you to adapt our calculator to your specific solution selling situation.
Buyer structure mapping job-tool
Complex products, services, and solutions are typically purchased by complex buying structures of users, specifiers, purchasing people, influencers, economic decision makers, and others. Our buyer structure mapping job-tool enables sales people to uncover what they already know about their customers’ buying structures, key information they need to obtain, and the implications for how they construct their value- propositions, often differently for different people in the buying structure. Our training supports the understanding and use of this tool with a classic case study.
Opportunity planning job-tool
Consultative selling is opportunity driven, and our opportunity planning job-tool, supported by a case study, provides the sales person with a methodology and checklist for applying the principles and best practices of consultative selling in the specific context of a selling opportunity.
Efficient sales process
We often find that sales people do not have a disciplined sales process, of if they have one, they do not follow it. If a lack of process is a challenge faced by an individual, a sub-group within your sales force or the sales force as a whole, one of the most important and highest impact sales job-tools we can contribute is a customized sales process.
Sales Management Workshops Sample Agenda for a two-day workshop
Sample Agenda for Value-selling workshop
As we discussed on our conference call, the actual agenda for training will be decided upon based on the assessments and the identification of development opportunities (see page 6). We can customize a single workshop for multiple divisions of a sales force that have different strategies and sales tasks. We do this by discussing common principles and case exercises in the whole group and then having break out exercises in which the different groups apply the principles to their distinct situations and strategies. Below is a sample agenda for a value selling workshop in which we had exactly this kind of break out session approach for each topic and sales tool.
Sales Management web-based courses
Sample Agenda for Value-selling workshop
Forecasting Series:
- Forecasting Basics
- Intermediate Forecasting
- Advanced Forecasting (under development)
- Value Word Equations: Integrating quantified value propositions into the sales process
- Customer Investment Matching: Delivering the right level of value to each customer
- Relationship Mapping: The cornerstone of an effective account plan
- Opportunity Planning: Templates and Checklists to leave no stone unturned
- The Account Plan: Templates and Checklists to leave no stone unturned
- Business Review and Development meetings: The main tool in winning share of wallet
- Difficult Conversations: You’ve got the customer’s attention—here’s how to turn it to your advantage.
Free Sample: Have one of your Strategic Account Managers take our web-based course including assessing the quality of one of your strategic relationships
The cornerstone of B2B strategy is to create the right value for the right customer. Resultrek’s web-based course helps you develop and implement your strategy in two ways. First, it is a training course that presents principles and best practices. Second, it includes a self-diagnostic survey for one of your key account relationships. The training course shows you how to sort your customers according to the kind of relationship value they want, and how you can calibrate your performance versus the desired value.
First, sort your account relationships according to the level each wants:
In practice suppliers have a portfolio of customer relationships that range from transactional to alliances. This course and the self-diagnostic enable you to sort your accounts into their relationship level and identify the type of value each is looking for.
Second, identify gaps between your customer’s desired relationship and your investment in that relationship. If you are investing in the relationship at a lower level than the customer wants, that customer is at risk. If your investment is greater than the customer wants, you are overinvesting. The self- diagnostic will plot your current and potential relationship on this grid for your chosen account and see if your investment matches what the customer wants—that is, if you are “on the diagonal.”
This course and the self-diagnostic survey will uncover opportunities for you to adjust your investment in your most important relationships to “get on the diagonal.” You will identify the specific actions you can take to reduce churn and increase revenue for your most important relationships for each segment of your customer base.
