#sales engine

Buyer Persona - Consistent Sales Engine Blog Series

Is your company a sales or a product organization? 

The ability to get what you want comes down to your ability to negotiate. How does one become good at that? 

Know what you want.

Know what is important to your counterpart. 

Know how manage the conversation. 

Know how to execute a verbal agreement. 

Negotiation is not a zero-sum game, but it is often approached that way. When two parties exchange goods or services both parties benefit. This additional surplus will be shared by parties to the deal. How you approach this matters. 

Know what you want.

It's an often overlooked exercise but you need to pause and clearly define what is your goal. Often people say money but that isn't really a goal or a clear objective. You may want to save on current costs, you may care about future costs, you may want a lot of cash, you may want a lot of potential for cash, etc. Work hard to map out what it is your want before you begin. In a recent negotiation I wanted to minimize our cash out the door and I wanted to start lowering our cost per license. I was ok with growing the total dollars we were going to spend but wanted to do that at an affordable price. 

Know what is important to your counterpart.

This is harder to know because your counterpart is not you and there isn't a reason that they should be transparent with you. If you are attentive to your counterpart, the business they are in, the reasoning behind people's decisions, and the information in their expressed words and gestures you can start to build a picture of what matters to your counterpart. In that same example as above my counterpart cared a lot about how much of a discount he could give without having to get approval from managers. 

Know how to manage the conversation.

The main difference between inbound and outbound sales is activation energy. An inbound sale has a lot of potential because a person is reaching out to you and is revealing a preference or interest in what you offer. They are not only interested but at that exact moment in time they are reaching out to express their interest.  An outbound transaction requires more steps.

When you are looking to add new accounts or generate new customers for your business you can approach those relationships in one of two ways:

1. Lead them to a better solution for themselves - whether that is your solution or another OR

2. Follow them.

Running a sales system excellently requires several things: the ability to design a good engine, operate it, and constantly improve it. No different than building the greatest airplanes in the world, you want to make sure your sales system is the fastest, highest quality, most reliable, and smoothest operating.

As you get bigger the ways that the engine can break or fail to evolve increase. It's critical to have good people involved in managing and monitoring this or you will fall into disrepair or worse; lose your competitive edge. 

The manager of your revenue engine needs to be capable and think of all of these things. One way to keep your system in check and to make sure your manager is on top of your sales is to look for the canary in your coal mine - what errors or warning lights indicate that the system is failing or is on the verge of danger.

For me most recently it has been a set of leads that the sales team and supervisors have failed to manage tightly. It's a quick way for me to remind myself we still have to keep evolving and to hold people to a high standard of performance.