Part 2 of Lisa Magnuson’s Sales Leadership Plays surrounds Sales Methodology. The piece that I believe is missed by most of the organizations that I work with is:
for deals FIVE TIMES the size of what your team is used to working on “The methodology and tools must be separate and distinct from your normal sales process,” (pg. 44)
This idea became even more significant in my mind with Barbara Weaver Smith’s Sideline Coach: Expert Opinion (pg. 49) “A complex sales process is rarely linear and doesn’t always follow a chronological timeline.”
There is so much information and so many ideas to implement in this section.
I think the key is in Play 6’s name
Commit to a Strategic Opportunity Model.
Your commitment isn’t going to be easy to keep along with all the existing daily activity and priorities of a sales leader or manager. To reduce the complexity Lisa has broken your commitment to winning strategic opportunities consistently into 11 Advances for your organization:
- scoring opportunities
- gathering insights
- assigning team and resources
- agreeing on team guidelines
- mapping relationships
- constructing a pre-strategy SWOT matrix
- charting strategy
- designing win themes
- engaging executives
- finding expansion opportunities
- tracking progress
As you can see – the commitment to a Strategic Opportunity Model may feel overwhelming.Don’t skip this step which I believe might be the temptation, you can’t pick and choose what you’d like to commit to; if you want repeatable and consistent outcomes that will transform your business, you MUST do it all.
The beauty of using Lisa’s model is it allows for you to customize the pieces and parts within each advance specifically to your business.
I’ll leave you with three things that struck me as so important I both highlighted the passages AND tabbed the pages for myself:
> “Scoring will help you decide if the opportunity warrants the extra attention and focus associated with TOP Line Account strategy planning. Scoring is one of the most important elements of the TOP Line Account Way” (pg 52)
> Internal Risk Assessment “Analogize the risk and return on investment for your sales efforts” (g 57) has you asking yourself: do you have the resources to compete? Are you in a position to win? Are the investments of people, time, and money worth the return? Can you support this business over the long term? What are the “show stoppers”?
> Executive Engagement “… many times they simply ratify decisions made by managers and stakeholders. In all cases, executives have a vision for where the company is headed.”
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