The secret of making the company's business better is that every aspect of the sales model must adapt to the target customers. To forge an efficient sales model, you have to have three hammers: making sales strategies; Establish a sales process; Manage sales channels from the customer's point of view.
These three steps include several interrelated parts. For example, unless you have established a sales process, you will not be able to accurately determine expectations, goals and salary plans. Similarly, if you don't plan the size and structure of the sales team, you can't implement the personnel strategy. Companies that encounter sales problems mistakenly believe that fixing one part can solve global problems. For example, they will adopt a new salary plan as a solution. In fact, the correct measure is to adjust expectations and correct the wrong sales management practices.
The first hammer makes a sales strategy
The first hammer of a successful sales model is to formulate a target customer-centered strategy. It helps the sales department to do everything around winning, retaining and developing the target customer base. The sales strategy should formulate the information summary of the target customers, describe the customer's buying process and determine the value proposition that can attract customers.
The second hammer established the sales process.
Implementing the standard sales process is the second hammer to build an efficient sales model. A successful process should not only adapt to the buying behavior of target customers, but also provide a framework for regulating all sales activities. It includes many components: expectation, scale and structure, target and salary, potential customer development and sales materials.
First of all, you should determine your expectations of the sales team and ensure that they are unified in all sales channels. With the continuous updating of expectations, job description is the most effective way to convey expectations. A recent evaluation of a poorly performing sales team found that the expectations of senior management for the sales team were quite different from the actual work. Further investigation found that the expectations of the management and the work of the sales team were not in harmony with the customer's procurement process, which led to internal contradictions and customer confusion. After the company redefined and conveyed expectations, all employees understood their roles and closely integrated their work with customers. Therefore, the sales performance increased by 15%.
It is also important to check the size and structure of the sales force. In the life cycle of a product, many factors will change, including purchasing process, price level, profit rate and customer requirements. Therefore, the company must evaluate and adjust the size and structure of the sales team at each new stage. A company expands its business into more fields, increases telemarketing and telemarketing, establishes strategic partners, and sets customer penetration indicators for customer service departments-all of which are completed on the basis of maintaining the existing number of front-line sales staff. As a result, the company's sales increased by 30%.
A successful sales process is inseparable from goals and salaries. The sales target must be measurable, challenging and achievable, and adapt to the sales plan. When setting the company's sales target, we must consider the past sales performance, market and regional opportunities, sales cycle and forecast growth rate. At the same time, let sales people participate in setting goals. They can provide valuable information about opportunities, competitive situation and regional potential. Their participation helps them to accept the set goals.
Your salary plan should reward the best employees, encourage the average employees to improve and eliminate the poor employees. It should be consistent with the company's goals and can bring profits to the company, including fixed indicators and variable indicators. Changes in competitive conditions, talent market and channel strategy will make the salary scheme obsolete and ineffective. Therefore, when the company's goals change, we should make corresponding adjustments.
Another major component of the sales process is the continuous implementation of the potential customer development strategy. When formulating the development strategy of potential customers, we should consider the monthly sales revenue target and the total sales cycle in the sales plan. It is very important to measure the impact of potential customers' development plans on sales, so that you can effectively decide future investment plans.
Sales materials also play an important role in the sales process, but in most cases, the company does not give full play to the role of sales materials. According to the Customer Information Management Forum of American Marketing Association, more than 90% of sales materials are not used as planned. Usually, salespeople make sales materials according to their own needs on the basis of advertising bombing. Therefore, these materials are not aimed at the target customers, nor are they applicable to all stages of the sales process. The company's information is inconsistent, which confuses customers.
Effective sales materials should be up-to-date and easily available. Like the sales strategy, it is customer-centered, conforms to the purchase process, and conveys a consistent value proposition. Sales materials are printed in written and electronic documents, including leaflets, product introductions, prices and customer success stories.
The third hammer-managing sales channels
The third hammer to forge a successful sales model is channel management to ensure that the company implements enough sales activities to achieve the sales plan. Effective channel management uses the same language to discuss sales opportunities and implements consistent forecasting standards. They include formal, frequent and continuous evaluation of sales activities, confirmation and elimination of sales bottlenecks, formulation of strict strategies and rejection of inappropriate opportunities.
In a project to improve sales efficiency, the average deviation of a listed medical device manufacturer's forecast is 20%, while the deviation in some months exceeds 50%. Although the company has established a forecasting process, the implementation process is influenced by human factors and is not suitable for the procurement process of target customers. Senior management relies on this information to predict cash flow, make financial budget and production plan, arrange personnel and communicate with analysts. This wrong forecasting process has caused serious consequences, including the decline of investor confidence, which is expected.
In order to solve this problem, the company implemented a set of channel management and forecasting models to help compare the sales plan with the company's plan execution ability. Now, channel management directly matches the sales process and can predict and evaluate every sales opportunity. There are formal procedures at all levels of the company to collect, analyze and manage expectations at all stages. In addition, the company regularly evaluates the accuracy of forecasts and punishes those who perform poorly. These measures improve the accuracy of prediction from 80% to 95%.
A successful channel management and forecasting scheme includes the following components: personnel arrangement, training, sales management, performance management, work report and communication.
Personnel arrangement is an important factor in channel management. It directly affects the company's ability to maintain the continuous flow of opportunities in the sales channels. Companies usually lose about 20% of their sales staff every year, and it takes 6 to 12 months for a new sales representative to be competent. If the sales staff arrangement plan falls behind the target, it will seriously affect the current and future sales performance. An effective personnel arrangement scheme can coordinate the recruitment strategy and sales plan at a very low cost, and determine, evaluate and select candidates through a stable process. The goal of staffing plan is to provide timely staffing when needed, and it is the most suitable candidate with appropriate cost.
Training plans are also a basic factor in channel management, because they can ensure that the sales team has the right technology to implement the sales process. An effective training plan can bridge the gap between the current technology and the required technology. In the training plan, it is necessary to track and measure the impact of various training activities on employee performance.
The sales management model promotes the improvement of performance by promoting the continuous implementation of sales and channel management processes. An effective plan is not only beneficial to the performance management system, but also can implement the communication process to ensure that all key measures are implemented. The sales management model is the adhesive that binds the company together.
Performance management plan plays an important role in giving play to the role of sales channels. It includes the continuous process of communicating expectations, evaluating employees' willingness and ability to perform tasks and providing feedback. The company should give positive feedback when employees meet or exceed the performance standards. Instead, companies should criticize. You must send a message that performance standards should not be vague at all.
Reporting and communication planning is another important tool for successful channel management. The report should measure the gap between the expected value and the actual achievement. Various indicators can be used, including cost of sales, per capita sales, success-failure ratio and average discount rate. Through regular reports, companies can make correct decisions by using current sales channels, finance, marketing and customer information.
Note: Don't just focus on the final result. In the recent three sales performance improvement projects, one company did not follow up any situation in the process, so the performance report did not reflect the reduction of opportunities in the company's sales channels. By the time this problem broke out, it was too late to remedy it, and as a result, the company failed to achieve its sales target.
The communication part of the channel management plan should be reliable, mandatory and relevant. Communication methods should include meetings, briefings, webcasts, e-mails and voice mails. Among them, team and one-on-one meetings should cover the latest business information, achievements and existing problems, and should be held regularly at all levels of the company.
Quenching-using information technology
In countless business cases, the starting point of choosing technical considerations is the needs of top management, not the needs of front-line sales teams. For example, a company chose a web-based customer relationship management system to provide better reports to senior managers without the need for the sales team to input data. Through in-depth investigation and evaluation, it is found that the existing sales process is not consistent with the actual customer purchase cycle, and the most used customer relationship management system is only forecasting. Therefore, the customer relationship management system can't provide the top managers with the basic business information they need. Finally, the company adopted the strategy of fully applying the customer relationship management system, which increased its utilization rate from 30% to almost 100%. Now, the customer relationship management system has become the source of value for the whole company.
The performance of a sales department is directly proportional to its ability to pay attention to target customers, apply sales resources and arrange sales measures according to the needs of target customers. A good sales model will bring real progress in all aspects of sales performance: reducing sales and management expenses, reducing the loss of sales team and enhancing market penetration. With the increasingly fierce market competition, any company must establish a good sales model, otherwise it will suffer unbearable losses.