When you build a new product or service you’ll have to decide what value you’re going to bring to your customer, what problem you’ll solve, and what that should be worth. As you bring that product to market, you will create value propositions that define your position across product planning, marketing messaging, and sales messaging. This simple framework helps to keep the product and messaging aligned, clear, and on track.

A sales leader shared his frustrations during a recent meeting.  “Our metrics are all on track,” he said.  “We made a huge push last year and we’ve finally gotten the reps to enter data into the CRM consistently.  We created a bunch of dashboards, and these all show the reps are consistently meeting their targets for phone calls placed, emails sent, and meetings conducted.  Our sales funnels look stronger than ever, and yet, a full year later, we’re not seeing any noticeable sales increase over prior periods.”    

In this fourth and final installment in our series on forecast accuracy, we’ll examine the forecast process itself to identify ways in which that process can foster - or hinder - forecast accuracy.   

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we discussed the importance of getting to know your client base from a variety of perspectives and using that knowledge to design a sales process that is aligned to their buying process.  In this part, we’ll discuss how to set-up your sales information system in a way that promotes forecast accuracy.

In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of getting to know your client base.  Factors such as the criticality of your product to their success, the buyer’s attitude toward sales and salespeople, the financial and personal risks they face both from buying and NOT buying your product and the way in which they want to buy all provide data points that should inform the sales process you deploy.   In this part, we’ll discuss how to avoid the pitfalls we see in many sales processes and help you design a sales process that appropriately leverages what you know about your client base.

As we enter the second quarter of 2019, many companies on calendar fiscal years are asking their sales departments for revenue forecasts that reach out to the end of the year. In this four-part series, we’ll provide suggestions on how to improve the accuracy of revenue forecasts and the issues that can influence it.

I have been truly humbled in my career, by working with and for amazing sales leaders. Even today in my sales consulting firm, Sales Result inc., I am constantly amazed at how these amazing individuals, men and women,  exhibit these behaviors and assets. I have not included in this blog assets like honesty, values, proven skills, trust, leadership and communication. I will leave these for another time. 

With under 5 weeks until EOY, it’s safe to say you’re insanely busy. Scrambling to close deals, worried about making the target by New Year’s Eve, and in the heat of it all, you need to make a sales plan. As you prepare your roadmap for 2018, make sure to avoid the following five blunders. 

Thanksgiving shares several parallels to sales planning. Behind the scenes, many moving parts lead up to the big moment when family and friends sit down to enjoy the meal of the year. The key elements that streamline an enjoyable Thanksgiving dinner also provide valuable lessons that you can apply to your 2018 sales planning.

Just like that, Q4 is nearly upon us! Hopefully you've spent the summer selling, or if things have been slow, completing sales-related projects and activities to prepare the sales team for a productive Fall. One task you should complete before summers-end is the review of your annual sales plan going into Q4.