How many times have I heard from clients and prospects alike that one of their main wishes is that they could rely upon sales forecast month after month rather than have to second guess what is likely to happen?
There are four key steps that I consider a B2B organisation should carry out that will help them establish consistency, accuracy, and trust in future sales forecasts.
Register and as a taster you will be sent a couple of free sample detailed process charts. In the coming weeks I will be issuing a data sheet explaining how to work through each of the steps.
Step 1 - Define your sales process. Build a chart of what your customer is likely to do throughout the sale and what you have to do for success. Identify all the key players and map out how they interact. You are looking to define and align the buying cycle and the selling cycle.
Step 2 - Identify the criteria within the selling and the buying cycles such as availability of budgets, understanding of the decision making process, identification of pains, solution fit, competition, etc. We then have to define the status for each of the criteria as you move through the sale and the timescale as to when that status will be reached, e.g, the criteria is 'Contact with the decision making team', and the status could be 'One'- at the start, 'Some'-15 days, 'All'-30 days.
Step 3 - Decide on your milestones, e.g. 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, or Red, Yellow, Green, etc. Now plot what status of each criteria will have been reached for each milestone. You now have a model that all can use to identify the status of each of the sales opportunities, which will bring consistency to the proceedings. We will all mean the same thing when we say 40% instead of our interpretation of what is 40%. I believe that if this model is missing then the sales person is justified in using his personal interpretation. Accuracy will come from reviewing the results we get from using the model and making the necessary refinements to give us better results.
Step 4 - We have to substantiate our position within each of our sales opportunities so we need to develop a suitable sales plan aligned to the model that allows us to document evidence that will back up our position with each of the opportunities.
Register and as a taster you will be sent a couple of free detailed sample process charts. In the coming weeks I will be issuing a data sheet explaining how to work through each of the steps.