Sales Growth – Workshop 2 (Territory Sales Planning)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Sales Growth is provided by Mr. Longstaffe Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
If you would like to view the Client Information Hub (CIH) for this program, please Click Here
Learning Provider Profile
Mr Longstaffe has over 30 years of global experience in Sales, Consulting, and Training. His extensive background is instrumental in enabling him to design and deliver well proven and effective sales training solutions which improve the performance of professional salespeople. His training programs provide an extremely relevant learning experience equipping participants with meaningful and applicable skills that result in their adoption, action and successful results.
Mr Longstaffe is the CEO of a company he founded in 1998. It is a sales consulting firm and training solutions provider. Mr Longstaffe specializes in developing highly effective, practical tools and processes to improve professional selling skills in B2B sales teams. In the Sales Growth Program he has built an entire portfolio of training modules, drawing on his expertise in Consultative Selling, Account Management, Channel Management, Competitive Selling, Negotiations and Tactical Selling Skills.
Mr Longstaffe has worked for large corporations and high-growth start-ups. He has led sales teams, built channel organizations and created highly effective training curricula. Mr Longstaffe also worked with Sir Winston Churchill’s grand-daughter to develop a unique training program based on the leadership principles of Sir Winston Churchill.
Mr Longstaffe has worked with clients across the globe from a wide range of industries including Information Technology, Telecoms, Aerospace, Financial Services and Healthcare. He has extensive experience in international sales, having worked in San Francisco, London and Australia.
Prior to establishing his training business, Mr Longstaffe worked at ODI as Managing Director of their UK operation. ODI was a leading consulting firm in organizational development, corporate alignment, strategy deployment, leadership, quality and customer care programs. There he led the turnaround of the UK operation, re-branding the company and launching their new software-based Alignment Diagnostic tool.
Prior to joining ODI, Mr Longstaffe was a Director of Esprit Consulting Ltd, a sales training company, based in London. He was critical in the expansion of international business and, as Director of Business Development, forged a Strategic Partnership with KPMG. He succeeded in winning significant seven figure training projects with many global IT companies, and he opened new offices in San Francisco. On his return to the UK, he managed the global operations of Esprit with responsibility for the network of Channel Partners both in the UK and Overseas.
Mr Longstaffe began his career in Sales and Management with Jardine Matheson & Co in Hong Kong. Following his graduate training program, he took his first sales role as a new business sales executive in the air cargo subsidiary, Jardine Cargo International. He won the prestigious ‘Freight Forwarder of the Year’ award in his first year in the industry and immediately became the top performing sales executive in the company, a position he maintained until being promoted to Branch Manager. He built the most profitable branch office in the UK and was appointed Regional Sales Manager on the West Coast USA.
Mr Longstaffe has an MA (Hons) and BA (Hons) from Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, UK.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
The mission for the Territory Sales Planning workshop is to help you develop a clear and well-reasoned strategy for how you can extract the maximum value from your sales territory to maximize revenue for your company, your team and for yourself. Your mission is to apply the new process and skills to build a realistic and workable plan which will see you increasing your success in your territory.
During the workshop, you will learn new techniques and be introduced to new process and analysis tools which are designed to help you achieve this goal. In this workshop we will focus on the creation of a Territory Sales Plan (TSP) which will also form a section of your Sales Growth Playbook from Workshop 1. (As we said, you will be adding to this playbook throughout the program so that by the end of the program you have a detailed roadmap to follow and a handbook to help you grow).
In simple terms, our mission here is to help you expand your presence in your territory so that you can grow more revenue, more profitably.
Objectives
In this second workshop, you will need to achieve the following objectives for each of the 12 modules. The specific objective for each module are as follows: By the end of each of the modules, participants will be able to:
1. Introduction to Territory Planning – make any changes that you feel are required to the Territory Sales Plan (TSP) to make the document more meaningful for yourself and your team.
2. Strategic Intent – define the Strategic Intent for your territory, describing what success will look like in 1-2 years from now.
3. Revenue Plan – create a detailed quarterly revenue plan based on the reality of your own specific sales revenue and unit sales objectives.
4. Go-to-Market Strategy – decide which key industry verticals you will target in your territory and define the relative percentage of business that you expect to achieve from each one.
5. Target Account Analysis – based on your GTM, define the most important target accounts for your territory, indicating the revenue potential and potential unit sales from each account.
6. Gap Analysis – develop your own GAP analysis using the guidelines in the workshop and define what gap you have to close in order to achieve your goals.
7. Virtual Team Leadership – identify the key members of your virtual sales team, make sure you have their contact information and have defined their roles.
8. Alliance Partner Strategy – if applicable, develop your channel partner and alliance strategy and define the partner QBRs that you intend to attend.
9. Marketing Plan – define a marketing plan, documenting the input needed from marketing and how you will implement this strategy.
10. Personal Professional Growth Plan – describe a plan for personal and professional growth, including the definition of key milestones.
11. Specific Action Plans – develop the detailed Action Plan for the next 30, 60 and 90-days.
12. Plan Reviews and QBRs – define a regular TSP review process and decide who needs to be involved in these review sessions.
Strategies
Throughout the Sales Growth Program we will be employing a consistent development methodology to provide you with the Strategies you need to accomplish the mission and goals for each workshop. This will include your active participation in the workshop combined with the required reading and preparation and a series of integrated exercises. These exercises will include:
• Individual Exercises – to challenge you to find innovate new ways to apply some of the new techniques and ideas to your own real-world situation
• Team Exercises – to help you work in small groups to solve problems together and select the best solutions and ways forward to implement the new tools and techniques
• Brainstorming exercises – using whiteboards and flipcharts to share information and ideas in a collaborative team activity
• Written tasks – to help you define and record detailed processes and document a plan for the implementation
• Role-plays – to enable you to practice new ideas and skills in a safe learning environment before you try them for real with customers
• Sharing experiences – to enable everyone to learn from each other and maximize the power of team cooperation
Tasks
In this first workshop you will focus on completing the following tasks at the end of each module and within the 1 month period before the second workshop:
1. Introduction to Territory Planning – review the sample Territory Sales Plan (TSP) and make any changes that you feel are required to make the document more meaningful for yourself and your team. Agree the format with your manager. 1 month.
2. Strategic Intent – define your Strategic Intent for your territory, describing what success will look like in 1-2 years from now. 1 Month.
3. Revenue Plan – create your detailed quarterly revenue plan based on the reality of your own specific sales revenue and unit sales objectives. 1 month.
4. Go-to-Market Strategy – decide which key industry verticals you will target in your territory and define the relative percentage of business that you expect to achieve from each one. 1 month.
5. Target Account Analysis – based on your GTM, define the most important target accounts for your territory, indicating the revenue potential and potential unit sales from each account. 1 month.
6. Gap Analysis – develop your own GAP analysis using the guidelines in the workshop and define what gap you have to close in order to achieve your goals. 1 month.
7. Virtual Team Leadership – identify the key members of your virtual sales team, make sure you have their contact information and have defined their roles. 1 month.
8. Alliance Partner Strategy – if applicable, develop your channel partner and alliance strategy and define the partner QBRs that you intend to attend. 1 month.
9. Marketing Plan – define your marketing plan, documenting the input needed from marketing and how you will implement this strategy. 1 month.
10. Personal Professional Growth Plan – describe your plan for personal and professional growth, including the definition of key milestones. 1 month.
11. Specific Action Plans – work with your virtual team to develop the detailed Action Plan for the next 30, 60 and 90-days. 1 month.
12. Plan Reviews and QBRs – define your TSP review process and insert dates in the calendar and send invites to the relevant people. 1 month.
Introduction
To be advised.
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: Introduction to Territory Planning
As salespeople we are continually trained and conditioned to maintain a ‘can do’ attitude and to see every obstacle as an opportunity. Given that positive, blue sky approach most salespeople take each new year’s annual quota in their stride and they simply go out full of energy and determination to exceed the target.
This module suggests that we start by being more analytical about developing a more strategic plan for the territory that we own. This is not to reduce our fervor and enthusiasm in any way, but rather to make sure that we are directing our efforts and focusing our determination on the things that will really make a difference to the outcome. This workshop is about maximizing the potential that exists in our territory and creating a plan for success.
Whether our “Territory” is defined by lines on a map, or by the definition of a sector of the market, we all have a defined territory from which we are expected to achieve our targeted sales number, or quota. There are some interesting statistics that show than most organizations will increase their sales revenue targets every year. Think about what that means. If the sales targets are increasing by a factor above the level of inflation (and most do) then it means one of two things: either the market for your products and services is growing at a faster rate than inflation, or your management team and investors believe that you have the potential to out-perform your competitors. This means you have to steal some of their market share in order to hit your number. But just think, they are trying to do the same too! That means one of you will win, one will lose. This focus on developing a more strategic Territory Sales Plan will help you ensure that you are in the former category.
Chapter 2: Strategic Intent
As with any plan, a Territory Sales Plan needs to start with a clear vision of what we are trying to achieve. At the most basic level, this is clearly the revenue number that serves as the sales target. But this section is all about defining what our long-term intent is for this territory. Sales targets are usually defined in terms of an annual target and broken into quarterly number. Your Strategic Intent is something which is more long-term and all encompassing. The metrics will be broader, the timeframe longer. In other words, your strategic intent for your territory should go beyond the sales year in which you are operating and describe your vision of success for your efforts in the territory.
This might include, for example, a market share goal. It might include the acquisition of a number of specified large accounts, it might include the introduction of new products or solutions. The Territory Sales Plan will provide the framework for establishing this over-arching goal. In this session you will define your Strategic Intent as the basis for what comes next.
Chapter 3: Revenue Plan
Your Territory Sales Plan is clearly going to need a clear definition of the sales revenue plan. This will be aligned to your company financial year and quarterly breakdown so that your Territory Sales Plan is aligned with the company key metrics. This also makes it easier for you to track and keep your TSP up-to-date.
We will explore not only the $ sales numbers that form part of the plan but other key metrics which contribute to that. For example, number of units sold and product mix. The revenue plan is the section in which you will start to define your ‘Land Expand Renew’ strategy. You will start by looking at what Renewals you expect to get. Then we will look at the opportunities for Expansion, above the basic renewal number. Having defined these key elements, we will be able to identify exactly how much New Business you need to Land in the year.
Chapter 4: Go-to-Market Strategy
In this section you develop and define your detailed go-to-market strategy for your territory. You will get to decide how you define the categories. For some people who are selling into multiple different industries or lines-of-business this might define the key verticals that you intend to focus on in order to achieve your TSP objective. For other people who sell into just one industry or marketplace, you will define how you are going to segment that market. For example, some people may segment by size of customer, others by discrete customer type. Size might be based on $ volume, or it might be based on number of employees, or number of locations.
The purpose of the go-to-market section of the Territory Sales Plan is to help you develop a plan which makes your planning and execution more manageable. In other words, like the Land Expand Renew focus, it will help you to see where most of your business is going to come from and also which markets or segments offer the biggest upside for current and future potential.
Chapter 5: Target Account Analysis
Everything you have done so far in the Territory Sales Plan is designed to help you more easily identify the Target Accounts from which you will secure your sales revenue numbers. Again, you will break these down into sub-divisions: for example, Your Top 5 Accounts, your 2nd 5 Accounts and your 3rd 5 Accounts. For some, this might be the start of an account-driven sales strategy. For everyone this will be linked to the account potential within the defined sales territory. It will also enable you to identify the shortfall that exists between the potential that you have from your top accounts, and the sales target that you need to achieve.
The purpose here is to create a map of the business potential that exists within the territory from an account perspective. As the well-known saying goes … how do you eat an elephant? … one bite at a time. Similarly, how do you achieve your sales goal? One account at a time. In this section we are really starting to define the full potential, and through that to give us confidence that there really is enough identifiable business potential in the territory to enable us to achieve the goal. Furthermore, this now starts to focus our attention on the key accounts which are likely to make-up that total revenue number.
Some salespeople might only have a few very large enterprise accounts that form their territory. That’s fine, the same applies. In this section these salespeople will simply divide that large account into meaningful sub-accounts, where the ‘parent-child’ relationship of the organization serves to define discrete sales opportunities that exist within that one large account.
Chapter 6: Gap Analysis
Having defined where we want to go, developed our Go-to-Market and Account Strategy, this session will focus on clearly identifying the gap between that long-term vision and where we are today. The session will help you identify gap that you need to close in order to achieve your goal. As we learned in the first workshop, finding accurate data can sometimes be a challenge, but
we cannot start to map a route to success unless we can clearly define our starting point and our objective.
In this session you will define the key measures of success which will form the basis of tracking your progress. You will decide which criteria are the most important and from that have a clear idea of what is required to hit your target. We will discuss prospecting, conversion ratios, timing and length of sales cycles. Part of the gap analysis will also enable us to check how realistic our goal is and how difficult it will be to close the gap.
Chapter 7: Virtual Team Leadership
So far, everything in your Territory Sales Plan has appeared to suggest that as a professional salesperson you are expected to achieve all this single-handedly. We all know that that is not the case. In every organization, the sales team relies on many other people to help them achieve their goal. This section focuses on how you will develop a strategy to include these people in your planning and execution.
You will start by defining all the people upon whom you will rely to reach your goal. We will challenge you to think about people that could help you, including those that you might perhaps have otherwise left out of your virtual team. If your plan relies heavily on renewals, or services sales expansion, you will want to make sure that your Customer Success and Professional Services teams are fully aligned with your plan.
We will also discuss your role as a team leader. These people might not report to you, more than likely they work in other parts of the company, but they will become key members of your virtual team. Therefore, we will explore some virtual team leadership skills and identify things that you can do to become a more effective virtual sales team leader.
Chapter 8: Alliance Partner Strategy
Just as we need to think outside the box in terms of those people in our own company that can help us achieve our goal for the Territory, so too we need to think outside our own organization. Most companies have external Channel Partners and Alliances which have been created to help maximize the opportunities in the market.
In some cases, these teams are completely separate from the direct sales team – in which case this section may not apply. But in an increasingly number of scenarios, companies large and small, are growing their market opportunity through a partner model. This may be clearly defined already. It might be in its infancy. But either way it forms an important part of our overall Territory Sales Plan.
In this section you will define who your key partners might be. You will ensure that you know the key contacts in these external teams and make sure that they become part of your extended virtual sales team. You will brainstorm ideas for closer cooperation and identify what you might need to do to make sure you are better aligned with their goals too.
Chapter 9: Marketing Plan
It is more than likely that key members of the Marketing and Product Marketing team will already have been identified as part of your virtual sales team. Their role is so important that it deserves its own section in your Territory Sales Plan. You and the marketing team need to be fully aligned on what they need to do to support your sales strategy. For example, they may need to develop special collateral to support your Account-based sales strategy. They may need to customize marketing materials and messaging to better target the industries and lines-of business which are critical to your success.
Getting input from the marketing team, making them part of your virtual team, is critical to your understanding of how you can better leverage local, regional and national marketing campaigns to help you reach your Strategic intent for the territory. So, this is a two-way street: the more you know about what the marketing Team is striving to do, the more you can leverage that activity to help you sell more. Equally, the more they know about where and how you intend to grow the business, the more they can align their marketing efforts to your sales goals.
Chapter 10: Personal Professional Growth Plan
So far, this Territory Sales Plan has focused very much on what you are going to achieve from a sales metrics and sales revenue perspective. But what about you personally? What are your own, personal, goals for your professional development?
Although you might not have thought about this too much, this section of the TSP is going to challenge you to think about the areas for professional development which will enable to you achieve the goals you have set for yourself. Just as a sports person might have personal goals for fitness. Salespeople need to develop personal goals for improvement.
Your TSP should include plans to stretch yourself personally and professionally. You will be encouraged to make sure you know what resources are available to you and how to access them. You will be asked to think about what else you might need, and to define which sales enablement opportunities you are going to take advantage of within the plan period.
Chapter 11: Specific Action Plans
As with any good planning process, the ultimate goal is to identify the specific actions that you need to take in order to turn the plan into reality. There is no point in having a great strategy if you don’t have a detailed plan for execution. This is where the rubber hits the road.
You will define a detailed 30-day, 60-day, 90-day plan for exactly who needs to do what, to achieve your objectives for the Territory Sales Plan. Not all of the actions will be things that you need to undertake personally. As we will have seen from the earlier segments, some of the actions might be required by other members of your virtual sales team, or by external partners and alliances. Your role, as the lead salesperson for your territory, is to define the actions required and to manage the team to accomplish the tasks. You will be the person to create a sense of urgency and to reward efforts along the way.
Chapter 12: Plan Reviews and QBRs
The Territory Sales Plan is intended to be a living document. It is not a ‘once and done’ exercise where the plan then languishes in a drawer or virtual filing cabinet. Your manager will want to review your progress on a periodic basis. The strong recommendation will be to use the TSP as a key element of your Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) which you will conduct with management and with other members of the virtual team.
This section will focus on how to run an effective review process and how to facilitate a meaningful QBR. More than anything, these reviews are intended to track progress, to give an opportunity to celebrate milestones achieved, to identify challenges and to develop plans to remove roadblocks. Handles effectively the QBR process becomes something which the whole team looks forward to because it keeps them personally connected to the outcomes and improves team spirit and morale.
Curriculum
Sales Growth – Workshop 2 – Territory Sales Planning
- Introduction to Territory Planning
- Strategic Intent
- Revenue Plan
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Target Account Analysis
- Gap Analysis
- Virtual Team Leadership
- Alliance Partner Strategy
- Marketing Plan
- Personal Professional Growth Plan
- Specific Action Plans
- Plan Reviews and QBRs
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Sales Growth corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Sales Growth corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Sales Growth corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Sales Growth program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Sales Growth corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Sales Growth corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Sales Growth Specialist (APTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Sales Growth – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Participants are not required to undertake any formal research prior to starting this particular workshop.
However, it will be useful if they are fully up-to-speed with as much information as they can obtain about the business potential for their territory. This would include clear territory definition – remove any ambiguities about whether a certain area, or type of business, is inside or outside the territory.
Sales Conversion Ratios
It will be useful if participants have a basic understanding of the current conversion ratios for their business. Conduct some preliminary analysis of your own sales performance over the last year or so. Talk to the Sales Ops team to get some additional insights. Here is some additional suggested reading:
Sales Ops Information
It will be useful if participants collect relevant data about trends in the territory. For example, has sales revenue been growing or declining? What type of customers have we been most successful in winning over? Who are the largest competitors? Are new competitors joining the market?
Partners and Alliances
Participants should try to learn about potential channel partners and alliances that might be present in the territory and understand the extent to which they might be able to work together., this could include finding out about the key people, their contact information and past contacts.
Key Accounts
Participants may wish to think ahead about which are the current key accounts that bring the majority of the business in this territory and then to analyze growth trends and changes in the make-up of business. This might include some research into account history and perhaps talking with other team members who may have owned your territory in the past.
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Introduction to Territory Planning
In the first workshop we discussed the key elements of what it takes to be a Consultative salesperson. One of the most critical aspects of that approach is to improve your professionalism by being fully prepared. In later workshops we will talk about what that means in terms of being better prepared for sales meetings with customers. However, in this workshop we are going to focus on what that means in terms of being better prepared to tackle the sales territory that you have been assigned to.
Every year most companies increase the quota, the sales targets, of their sales teams. As professional salespeople we have become accustomed to the quota increase and we ‘take it on the chin’ and simply go out and do our very best to hit, or exceed, that target. After all, as sales professionals we have that positive mental attitude that enables us to do a job that many people would find sole-destroying – namely going out every day knowing that we’re going to face rejection but doing it anyway. We are a special breed!
This module is where we start to do all that ‘smarter’. Yes, we will still need all the courage and determination that we possess, but we will add a measure of strategic planning that starts at the highest level, namely, our Territory Sales Plan (TSP). Before we even lift a finger to type an email to a prospect or customer, we will develop an over-arching strategic plan for how we are going to ‘blow away’ our quota this year … and next. For one thing is for certain, next year’s quota will be higher than this year too.
Research suggests that, on average, companies increase quota by 16% per year. Clearly this will vary widely from industry to industry and from business to business. So, if you’re in a position in which your quota has increased by less than that, count yourself lucky. If your quota has increased by more than that amount, it’s likely that you’re in a faster-growing market.
Obviously, there can be many reasons why a company will increase its sales quota. Unfortunately for us as salespeople, the most common reason is simply that the investors require growth! This is understandable at one level but this pressure to grow can put unrealistic demands on the sales team to continually find more and more new business. There are, of course many legitimate reasons why a company would increase its sales targets and quota. Let’s consider some examples and you can decide how many, if any, of these apply to your business. Understanding these might help you to determine how you might change your sales focus in the coming year:
New Product – Same Market
Most companies’ product strategy calls for innovation and growth. As a result, companies invest heavily in R&D in order to continually develop new products and services which they can bring to market. Their growth strategy is based on their ability to find more and more products or services that they can sell to the same and to a growing customer base. As we all know, it is much easier (for sales teams) and cheaper (for the company) to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to a new customer. Hence a growth strategy which focuses on selling more to an existing customer base is likely to lead to a lucrative business.
Your personal challenge in relation to this potential for increase is to use your territory definition analysis to identify those sectors of the market and those customers who might be able to benefit from these new products. It is possible that by introducing a new product, the company has opened-up a large new market within your territory that you have not been able to tap into before.
New Product – New Market
Unlike the first category, which involves selling new products to a known market or customer base, this category means broadening the overall target market by introducing a new product which will have a different, larger customer base and therefore presents the potential for business expansion. This might be in the form of product enhancements which make a product applicable to a different market, or it could be as simple as adding the support infrastructure required to enter a new geography. For example, many companies have products and services that can only be effectively sold and supported in a geography that is based on their own local-language. Simply by adding foreign-language support, the market can be increased.
If you have some new product launches coming-up this year, think carefully about how they might help you explore a new market area. This type of new product entering a new market can give you a significant competitive advantage. That might be short-lived because your competition will soon catch-on but seize the opportunity while it exists.
Mergers and Acquisition
A merger between two companies, or the acquisition of one company by another, can present another opportunity for an increase in sales targets and quota. The net potential sales increase can be supported by the fact that the two companies which come together may have access to a different customer base and therefore the sales potential grows. It might be that the strategy behind the merger was derived from a desire to broaden the solution offering and the sales team now has a broader product offering (a bit like the two examples above).
Inflation
Obviously, there is a simple logic that’s says that if inflation is going up by 6% a year, then the sales quota needs to increase by the same amount just for the company to stand still. Clearly this is true from a purely financial perspective, but it can also present a challenge for a sales team which will be facing pressure from customers struggling to come to terms with the increase in the costs of the goods and services that it needs to buy. In essence, this is what fuels inflation itself. It becomes a cyclical self- fulfilling issue where everyone is increasing prices because their cost of goods is itself increasing. Nonetheless, sales targets will increase as a result and the challenge for salespeople is to decide whether they can still derive the same revenue from the same set of customers or whether they need to increase the number of customers that they are doing business with. This all feeds into the Territory Sales Plan.
Pricing
In many cases, price increases are really a reflection of the inflationary pressures as described above, but not always. Companies can have a long-term strategy in which they offer a product or service to a market at a special low price in order to attract customers and grow their market share, and then they increase pricing once they have an established their targeted market share. This means that salespeople are expected to sell the same products and services but at a higher rate. Hence the increase in quota. As is often the case, companies are increasing the functionality of their new products and therefore the release of an updated version is reason enough for an increase in price. While sometimes the reverse is true, namely that as times goes by, the price of some products decline, this is because a company has decided that there is more money to be made by reducing the pricing in order to make the product or service more attractive to a wider audience, thereby increasing the potential customer base, which also results in an increase in the sales target.
Whatever the situation in terms of your own sales target, even if it has not changed, this module is all about being more analytical in developing a strategic plan for the territory that you own. It is about maximizing the potential that exists in your territory and creating a plan for success. Throughout this workshop we will give you the opportunity to fully understand each section of the Territory Sales Plan, and then spend time in individual and team activity to complete the plan itself. The goal is that by the end of the workshop you will already have a very well-developed draft of your TSP which you can complete in the coming weeks before the next workshop.
The problem with an ever-increasing sales quota is that salespeople are left feeling that they continually need to ‘do more’. The solution appears to be that you need to simply work harder, faster. The problem with this approach is that it results in ‘burn-out’ at an individual and team level. Your Territory Sales Plan will help you to work smarter, not harder. You will focus on the things that you should do in order to achieve or exceed the target with the greatest chance of success.
When was the last time you stepped back, took a breath, and really looked analytically at your Territory and how you could extract more business from it? That’s where we will start. Let’s make sure we really understand exactly what the territory consists of, so we can extract maximum value. As you think about this, imagine you were describing a business opportunity to a franchisee who was considering investing in this business opportunity. That’s basically the opportunity that YOU have been given by your company. As an Account Manager or Sales Rep in your company, you have the opportunity to derive a good income from the sales of your products and services within this territory. So, think about how you would describe that opportunity in a positive way. Imagine, if you like, that YOU are indeed basically a franchisee.
Territory Definition, TAM and Segmentation
As you will see, the first section of the TSP asks you to define the territory itself. This may sound very trite and simple at face value but let’s look a bit more closely at why this is a useful and important part of the process. As in any aspect of business, there is a risk that people become a little complacent. Just as we each become a little complacent about our driving skills and habits (not always looking in the mirror or checking the blind spot before changing lanes) so too the same applies in our work environment. As we start to develop our TSP we want to make sure that we know exactly what the business potential might be.
As we will see below, sales territories are usually defined by things like geography or vertical market orientation. At the other end of the scale there are a small number of salespeople whose sales territory is comprised of just one major account. Whatever the situation, your goal is to ensure you know exactly what the territory consists of, so you can aim to make the highest possible return in terms of revenue.
Case Study
As anyone who has learned about the storied history of one of the largest companies in the world will know, IBM has been through many changes. Back in the day, when we worked with IBM, they had a team of 50 people focused on selling to Bank of America. I am sure that the number is lower today but at the time BofA was one of their largest customers globally. The Senior Account Manager led that team, and their sales territory was defined by one company, in this case BofA. But even in this situation it is important to define exactly what the territory consisted of. Territory analysis was important because the territory was in a constant state of flux.
Bank of America would invest in new businesses and divest others every year. They would acquire smaller banks and merge with others. The bank began a focus on international expansion. They explored other business offerings. All these needed to be supported by Information Technology solutions form IBM. The sales territory for the IBM team was changing all the time. BofA would also re-organize their operations and segment their business in different ways at different times. The IBM team needed to stay on top of all these changes if they were to maximize the opportunity to sell more equipment and services to the bank.
It would have been very easy for the IBM sales team to become complacent, to believe that since they had done business with BofA for years that they knew the territory inside out and did not need to analyze the opportunity further. Clearly nothing was further from the truth. Indeed, it was exactly why the IBM Account Manager continued to be acutely aware of the constant changes that they were able to exploit the potential that existed within the ‘territory’.
As we said, having a territory defined by one account is pretty unusual. Sales territory definition normally falls into one of the following categories:
Geographic
For some companies, our “Territory” is defined by lines on a map. Management teams take a large piece of geographic territory and divide it up among the sales team. Normally based on size of business potential or ease of travel for the salespeople to cover the territory. If you are part of a small sales team in an international business, your territory might be marked by national boundaries. You might own one Country or several. If you’re working in a national company, or a division, your territory might be determined by State or County boundaries. Either way, the first part of the development of the TSP is to make sure that you fully explore the business potential for the entire area that you are responsible for. Leave no stone unturned, no area un-prospected.
Lines of Business
Many companies employ a line-of business focus when segmenting their sales territories. Some call these sales ‘Verticals’. This can lead to a few more ‘grey areas’ when it comes to accurately defining the territory because it may leave a few things open to interpretation. For example, is a Pharmaceutical company part of the Healthcare market? Or vice versa? Do we include Insurance companies in Financial Services, or are they different segments? How do you categorize a Bank that offers insurance products too? As you seek to answer these, and similar questions, you may start to realize that there are opportunities to broaden your view of the size of the territory that you have been given. The analysis may lead you to identify new corners of the market that have hitherto been unexplored.
Size
Many companies have sales territories, and even whole sales teams, divided according to the size of the customers that they deal with. When talking about customer size, companies typically focus on size in terms of Revenue, or number of Employees, or number of Locations. The real question here is ‘what data do you use’ for the definition of the territory. For example, a fast-growing business might have been considered to be a ‘small business’ last year but following a recent round of investment and growth, it now qualifies as a ‘Medium-sized’ business and therefore falls within your territory. Similarly, a company that is going through a downturn may have laid-off some workers, but does it still qualify for your territory?
This is where “data” comes in, and the importance of having data to back-up and define a sales territory. Look for relevant and meaningful third-party sources of data. You will usually find conflicting information, so be prepared to dive into the detail to reveal the true picture. Once again, as you do so, you will likely learn more about your sales territory and identify sales potential that you did not realize you had.
In the last module we talked about the work that your management and marketing teams may have done to identify the TAM or Target Addressable Market. You are effectively trying to do the same for your own territory. Don’t be afraid to go to the marketing team for help. They may well have access to information that you can use. After all, your Territory Sales Plan will ultimately roll-up into the overall company revenue plan and will form part of the business planning process for future years.
So how can you use all this to help you as you start to think about your own TSP? Whether or not your own quota has been increased, it is always a difficult and daunting task to think about how you will reach that intimidating sales goal. One simple first step is to make sure you have a good grip on the full size of the opportunity that you have been presented with.
Target Addressable Market (TAM)
Defining and describing the market is not simply a case of creating a bland description. The value of this exercise is in defining your territory in terms of the business potential that exists. Essentially this is all about defining your own personal TAM. As we learned in the last workshop, the company will certainly have a good idea of what the TAM is for the whole company. They will have based their targets on this analysis. In this module, your goal is to define this for yourself.
Let’s look at a couple of simple examples:
Example 1: A healthcare company in the US has divided their sales territories into geographic areas based on State boundaries. One account manager has a region in the north-west comprising 5 States. In simple terms this account manager could describe their territory as being Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. That’s one way to ‘fill-in the box’ on the Territory Sales Plan but that does not really help anyone. A better approach is to do some research that describes the market potential within those states. A quick Google search for “number of hospitals in the u.s. by state” quickly produces a hit with a link to the American Hospitals Directory which provides a detailed analysis including the number of hospitals per state, the number of beds, the number of patients handled per year, including the number of patient days and total revenue. Based on this quick research, any professional salesperson could start to extrapolate some TAM information. They can they cross-reference that first hit with one or two others and they quickly have a pretty good idea of the Total Target addressable Market for their products and services.
Example 2: A European Software company produces customized software for the Insurance industry related to EU Compliance issues. They have a team of 5 salespeople and have divided Europe into territories based on EU membership and Geography using national boundaries. One rep has ‘Scandanavia’. A quick Google search indicates that there are over 9000 insurance companies operating in Europe. There is a wealth of information on the internet. Statista is a good source of numeric and graphical information:
In each country there are some ‘domestic’ players and many international companies that operate within the territory. This means that the definition of the TAM starts to get more challenging, and a rep will have to work with their management team to define what exactly constitutes part of their territory and what does not. For example, a German insurer operating in Sweden may, or may not, be included in the potential for the Scandinavia rep. Best practice is also to look for market trend information to determine the likely changes in the potential for the coming few years. Again, the internet is rich in this sort of data and it does not take long to develop a useful picture of your potential.
There are 2 good ways to approach this exercise. Start either by imagining that you are moving-on to a new role and you had to describe and define your current territory to your replacement. Imagine all the questions they might have and how you would answer them. Alternatively, as we posed earlier, consider that you were a franchisor, and you were trying to ‘sell’ a franchisee on taking over a particular territory. Before they make their investment, they will want to know exactly what their territory is comprised of. Your task is to make that clear to them.
Exercise 2.1
For the MS Excel format, Click Here ***IT SAYS FILE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE***
Course Manual 2: Strategic Intent
The Territory Sales Plan (TSP) is intended to be something that you will refer to again and again on an ongoing basis. It is also something that you will review periodically with your management team. Probably quarterly, certainly annually. As such it is also something which should have a time horizon beyond the short-term here and now. This Strategic Intent section in intended to highlight this point. The goal is to describe some of your long-term goals and to add some qualitative targets and as well as the quantitative financial measures.
As with any plan, a TSP needs to start with a clear vision of what we are trying to achieve. At the most basic level, this is clearly the revenue number that serves as the sales target. But this section is all about defining what our long-term intent is for this territory. Sales targets are usually defined in terms of an annual target and broken into quarterly number. Your Strategic Intent is something which is more long-term and all encompassing.
One technique that can help you define this type of long-term goal is to consider how you would like someone to describe your achievements in this sales territory in a few years’ time. Imagine, for example, that your manager was presenting you with an award at a company sales meeting in a few years time. They are on stage, talking about your achievements since you assumed this territory that you own. They describe what you have accomplished. What would you want them to be able to say?
The answer will not simply be a one-line description of your revenue target and the relative achievements, although that might be part of it. It will include the key milestones that you achieved and the major breakthroughs that you were able to make. Think about what you would like these to be.
Given this approach, your completion of this section of the TSP might include a run-down of the current status. A check-point, if you like, describing the company status in this territory as of today. How would you describe the current status?
For example, you might start by noting the sales revenue for the last few years and map-out the growth trend. You might start with a description of where you rank as a provider of your products and services in this territory.
Consider what type of metrics you might use to describe your strategic intent?
Market Share
As we have seen, there is plenty of available information on the internet to give you a good idea of the total spend by your target customers on the goods and services you provide. If you know this and you know your company revenue for the same period, you can quickly calculate your approximate market share. Most likely you will find in hard to get exact, definitive data relating to exactly what you offer, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you identify some numbers that you can use each year to provide a benchmark. If you use the same data source each year, you can derive a worthwhile goal for improvement.
Therefore, if you are going to take this approach, try to use a data source that you know produces the same information on an annual basis. Good examples of this are government statistics, or research conducted by industry publications. (For example, in Healthcare in the US, there is a the Beckers Hospital Review. This source produces detailed information on market size and spending by hospitals in the US). Another good source of information are the major market research agencies and accounting firms. These include companies like Forrester and Gartner, Accenture, Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KMPG, CapGemini and PWC.
Growth Rate
Another possible metric is to compare your growth rate to that of the market in general. You can set yourself a goal to out-perform the market and track your progress. You can use just general market growth since there are plenty of data sources which provide GDP data and much of this is tracked monthly or quarterly. However, if possible, search for reference points which more specially address the market in which you operate.
For example, if you were working in the cyber security industry, and your territory was the United kingdom, you would be able to ascertain from a report from Mordor Intelligence that states “The U.K. Cybersecurity Market size is estimated at USD 14.24 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach USD 23.37 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 10.42% during the forecast period (2023-2028).” Armed with this information you can decide that your own strategic intent should be to grow by at least 11% per annum, just to keep your place in the standings.
Renewal Rate
Another worthy goal would be to increase the renewal rate among your customers. This would indicate a higher level of customer loyalty which would in part be as a result of your effective account management. It would also help to make your own annual sales quota easier to accomplish by steadily increasing the percentage of your sales that could be derived from renewals as opposed to new business. This is a metric which you can obtain using internal data and is therefore fully within your control. If you need help, talk to your marketing or sales ops team.
Expansion
As above, you can use the rate of expansion of your existing business as a key goal for your Strategic Intent. This would reflect the level of success of your land and expand strategy and provide a measure of how effective you are growing business within your key accounts. As with so many metrics, one indicator is indicative of another. An improvement in customer satisfaction results in higher customer loyalty which leads to greater renewals and higher levels of expansion.
You can measure expansion in terms of the percentage increase in contract value from an initial contract to the present day. You can also measure it as a percentage of the total customers that you have which chose to expand their business before the end of the year. Again, the expansion rate is something which you should be able to ascertain using your own internal company data. You might also be able to research some market averages. In different industries there are researchers, analysts and publications that track typical expansion rates.
Beating the Competition
You might be in a highly competitive marketplace where your strategic intent might be to improve your win:loss ratio in securing new business opportunities. Naturally, part of this might relate to many, many other factors such as company pricing policy, branding effectiveness, social media strategy etc. However, others relate to own sales effectiveness, things like your qualification skills, proposal writing, questioning skills, closing and negotiations skills.
Again you can determine this measure yourself and for most companies the data will be accessible in your CRM system. Simply take a look at your sales opportunity history and look at the muber of sales opportunities that you opened in the last year or two and how many you successfully closed. Use that as a baseline and establish a goal.
Winning Key Accounts
Although your goal is to achieve your sales quota, another measure of strategic intent might be to do so by winning business with a number of important large accounts. This might be 1 or 2 very large ‘marquee accounts’ or perhaps an account that you had previously done business with, but which was lost over the years.
Case Study – Costco
Visa is the largest credit card company in the world. Their retail account team had a Strategic Intent to win the Costco account. Costco have famously maintained a relationship with only one credit card provider at a time. This means that everyone who is shopping at the 3rd largest retailer in the US can only do so by having a credit card with that chosen provider. At the time, Costco was contracted with American Express, and had been for several years. The Visa account team certainly needed to grow their overall retail revenue, but winning Costco was part of the Strategic Intent.
After several years the Visa account team were able to persuade Costco to make the change. This would represent a huge change, for Costco and also for all of their customers. Visa would become the only card accepted at Costco stores. People who had chosen to maintain an AMEX card because they wanted to buy from Costco were now required to get a Visa Card. Many customers simply closed their American Express card accounts and obtained a Visa. Of course, the goal of the Visa team was to have these people not only use the card at Costco but also to use it for all of their other shopping needs.
Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Score
As we learned above, customer satisfaction can be a key measure in itself or it can be an indication of progress in other areas. While it is not a metric which you can use in isolation, it can be a significant element of your Strategic Intent. In many markets, companies have adopted a Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a more accurate measure of real customer satisfaction in terms of its likelihood to contribute to increased sales revenue. Traditionally the measure of customer satisfaction was derived from a post-purchase questionnaire in which the customer is surveyed and asked to respond to a series of questions about their experience. The issue here is that many customers may report that they are ‘satisfied’ with the service that is provided, but that does not always mean that they would buy again or that they would recommend a particular supplier to other prospective customers. The higher a company’s NPS score is, the more likely it is that their customer referrals will convert into new leads, hence into more revenue for the company.
The Net Promoter Score was introduced some years ago by Bain and Company. It is a score based on a response to just one question which relates to the likelihood that they would recommend the supplier to a friend or colleague. Any score above 0 is deemed to be positive, above 20 is great and above 50 is exceptional. A score above 80 puts companies in the top percentile. You can use this simple metric as a key element of your Strategic Intent.
Consider the fact that in Financial services, according to research by enrichceo.com “The average NPS score for the financial services sector is 34. Happy customers can take it all the way to 60 or even 70. A high score means deep engagement between the bank and its customers. This, in turn, correlates to higher sales and profitability.”
You can use these industry averages to determine where you rank as an organization and set yourself a viable goal.
Having understood some of the basics here, let’s look at a couple of examples which might help you in developing your own Strategic Intent. Sometimes the most difficult task is if you are already in a market leadership position. Some people feel that they have already obtained everything that they need to do. Others feel that once you are #1 there is only one direction to go and that is down! The reality is that there are always ways to improve. Having a daily, well-considered paranoia of the competition is what kept Bill Gates motivated to build Microsoft into the industry giant that it became. So, what’s your Strategic Intent for your sales territory?
Example 1
I have recently taken-over this territory. Over the last few years our company has seen a decline in the revenue from the region, due in part to frequent personnel changes and lack of account coverage. My goal is to reach the 100% Club within my first year and to start a significant turnaround in our company fortunes. I will accomplish this by focusing on the win-back of 2 strategic key accounts (ABC Company and Acme Enterprises). My goal is to grow our market share back to 6% this year (from the current 5%) and to target 8% share within 3 years. Much of this will be achieved by expanding our services business and increasing services sales to become 25% of the total business portfolio within 2 years.
Example 2
To grow the Revenue and Profitability of this territory at rates above the industry and company average. Deloitte’s report that the average industry growth for our sector has been 6.2% for the last few years and is expected to have a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 7.25% over the next 5 years. My goal is to achieve a 10% CAGR.
I will accomplish this through the achievement of the following key metrics:
1. Increase average deal size from $50,000 to $60,000 by the end of this year.
2. Secure new business with XYZ Inc to a value of $250k by year 2.
3. Reduce the churn in our current customers by 10% through an improvement in customer sat and NPS by improving relations and cooperation with our customer success team.
4. Focusing on better deal qualification so I spend less time on non-productive opportunities and focus my time and attention on the deals that I can win.
5. Reduce deal cycle time by aiming to achieve more in each customer sales meeting, thereby maximizing each and every sales opportunity.
Example 3
Within the next 3 years I will grow our revenue in my territory and become the number 1 provider of our logistics services in this region. I will ensure we become the #1 player through a focus on business growth in the largest metropolitan areas and with all 10 of the biggest accounts. This will require a total focus on successfully winning new business from these large customers. To do this I will need the support of the marketing team to develop an Account-based marketing strategy for each of these accounts. For my own part I will focus on broadening the level of my account exposure and developing solid business relationships with the key people in the buying process.
However you choose to define your own Strategic Intent, make it challenging. As the Association of Project Management defines it, “Strategic intent is the term used to describe the aspirational plans, overarching purpose, or intended direction of travel needed to reach your vision. Real change results from your strategic intent, ambitions, and needs”.
Exercise 2.2
Course Manual 3: Revenue Plan
A clearly defined Revenue Plan will be instrumental in helping you to develop a realistic Territory Sales Plan. This needs to be aligned to your company financial year and quarterly breakdown. In so doing, you can ensure that your Territory Sales Plan aligns with standard company reporting. This will make it much more meaningful and useful to your managers and yourself. It will also make it easier for you to track progress and to keep your TSP regularly updated.
Just to be clear, most Territory Sales plans will therefore be aligned with the Calendar year (ending December 31st) because that is the most common Financial or Fiscal Year. However, if you operate in a market where the financial year is typically linked to a Tax Year, for example ending March 31st, then you should align with those dates. Equally, if your company has a Fiscal year that ends on July 31st, or you are selling into Government markets that end their year on September 30th, then you should adopt that same timeframe. Whatever you do, don’t make this decision in isolation. Make sure the whole team is aligned and discuss this with your management team before committing numbers to paper!
In almost all cases the Revenue Plan will start with a definition of the current state (i.e. where you finished last year), and a record of your target or quota for this year. We encourage you to add one extra piece to this; create a Personal Stretch Goal for yourself. In other words, don’t just have a vague plan to ‘exceed quota’ but put a clear stake in the ground to define exactly what you personally hope to achieve. This should take you some way towards your Strategic Intent. Meaning that if your Strategic Intent expresses a longer-term over-arching goal, your Personal stretch goal for this current year should provide a marker for how far you expect to get towards that goal in the current year.
If you think about almost any athletic sport, you will see that the people who compete at the very top of their sport all have a similar desire: they all want to win. Every athlete who qualifies for the Olympic Games, for example, has a goal and a desire to win a medal, some strive for gold and nothing else. But in reality, they cannot all make it to the top step of the podium. Their strategic intent might be to win an Olympic medal but along the way they set personal goals to always seek a small improvement in performance. They seek to achieve a ‘PB’ or Personal Best in whatever sport they represent. That way they can always be focused on achieving a realistic personal goal. The same applies for you in sales. Don’t just say you want to get to the 100% club, say exactly what revenue target you want to achieve. Then measure yourself toward that personal goal. Chances are that if you aim higher you will achieve at a higher level too!
Start by inserting the results from last year. This should be fairly straightforward. If you were not in charge of this territory last year, no problem. Insert the actual numbers anyway. You may need to seek the help of your Sales Ops or Finance team to find the growth rate from the prior year.
Then add your target/quota for this year. If you are part-way through the year, no matter, just insert the quota that has been assigned to this territory and if needed you can calculate the growth rate from last year. You should calculate this growth rate based on actual revenue numbers achieved last year (not from last year’s quota).
Thus far you have been dealing with numbers that exist or were assigned to you. Now it’s time to think for yourself. What do you want to achieve this year. How much above quota do you want to set for your personal target? You can do this one of two ways: either you can decide a financial $ value for the revenue you aim to achieve, and then calculate the %; or you can decide that you are going to aim for, say, 107% of quota, and then calculate the revenue number that that creates. Once you have done this, you can add the % growth that this would represent over last year.
Finally, just to complete the more long-term picture of the TSP, you should add your current expectation for what you think the following year will look like. Again, add a $ revenue number and a growth % for next year. You know that the quota is likely to increase, it nearly always does, right? What do you think you could achieve in the following year if all goes well this year?
Having added these numbers, you should re-look at what the annual growth rate tells you. Remember two things:
1. The growth rate really should match or exceed the growth of your market overall. Unless you have some real extenuating reasons, you should always aim to exceed the average.
2. We said the process was iterative. So, if you see a numeric target that is widely out of sync with the growth rate, in other words your $ revenue goal creates a requirement for an unrealistically high growth percentage, you should adjust accordingly. Similarly, try to have a reasonably even growth rate, 15% per year, not 2% in one year and 28% in another.
Having entered the numbers, you should always then re-look at each line and ask yourself:
• Is this realistic? Do I honestly think this is achievable? … and then
• Should I change any of these numbers before I base the rest of the TSP on them?
Remember that as you add more information in the following sections of the plan, you may want to come back here and re-visit some of these assumptions, but you will have made a good start.
Having defined the Revenue Plan from an Annual perspective, now it’s time for you to break-down this year’s revenue into quarterly numbers. The quarterly totals should add-up to your Personal Stretch Goal. This is important because it helps you to keep your find focused on how you will reach that goal. It won’t happen by accident; you will need to work toward it on a quarter by quarter and monthly basis. We will explore several different ways in which you might do this. The exact framework that you select will depend on your company and the business you operate it. It may be defined by the way your company already measures your performance or you may have the opportunity to define this for yourself. Either way, the goal is to create a meaningful breakdown of your Territory Sales Plan that will ultimately help you to focus on the specific actions that you need to take to make this a success.
As with many financial models, you can elect to build this “top-down” or “bottom-up”. Top-down planning means that you start with the total revenue number for the year and you divide that into quarters. You then break-down the quarterly numbers into meaningful sub sections. Bottom-Up means the opposite, you start by determining your different sections or categories of revenue, you build each one for each quarter and then you create the totals. There is no perfect way to do this, but here’s what we would recommend:
1. Top-Down – Use this approach when you have already been assigned quarterly revenue targets by your management team. In other words, your quota is already divided into discrete quarterly goals. In this case you will start here and work backwards to divide the quarterly numbers into an appropriate break-down.
2. Bottom-Up – Use this approach when you’re not really sure of how the year will pan-out from a timing perspective. In this case, focus on what is realistic and achievable each quarter and build the plan from there.
3. Top-Down – If you sell into a market that has clear seasonal buying cycles you may want to start by taking these into account before you build a plan. For example, some industries are governed by a budget spending cycle that means that there is disproportionately high level of spend at the beginning of each budget cycle and then the funding dries-up and spending tails off. Conversely, some industries work on the basis of a budget which is tightly controlled throughout the financial year and then it creates a ‘surplus’ at year end which has to be spent before the next budget cycle.
Case Study
As any company selling into the US Federal Government will know, the government’s fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 30th each year. What this means for companies seeking to do business with any decisions within the government, including, for example, Defense, Education or Healthcare, the government budget does not become available until October.
However, due the recent trend toward legislative stalemate resulting from the lack of bi-partisan support, it is increasingly likely that the budget will not be approved by Congress and the government and the country lurches each year toward a potential government shutdown. This effectively means that government departments, all of whom have spent many, many months building and fin-tuning their annual budgets, find themselves unable to actually send any of that money until the final budget package is agreed.
In normal circumstances this would mean that a salesperson selling into the government market would expect to see an increase in their sales potential in Calendar Q4, Government Q1, after the funds are released. Increasingly, the lack of agreement has meant that funding is not clear until January or February of the following calendar year which pushes revenue potential for these sales teams into that following year.
Equally, many government departments work on the basis of a “use it or lose it” mentality when it comes to spending. Therefore, if they find they have unspent budget dollars towards the end of their year (in this case July-September) they might be more likely to purchase new solutions form vendors in this time period.
Once you have determined the quarterly total revenue numbers it is time to break these down into more manageable, specific goals aligned with your overall battle plan to win more business in your Territory. There are numerous options for how you can do this, and this decision is really up to you and your management team. Here we will explore 3 such options to give you a feel for how you might want to customize this section of the plan to suit your own particular company situation.
Option 1 – Align with your Land, Expand, Renew Strategy
As we discussed in the previous workshop, many companies, especially those involved in the sale of software, SaaS or other Subscription-type services, will orient their revenue planning around a Land Expand Renew model. To use this approach in your TSP Revenue Plan you should start by looking at what Renewals you expect to get. This should be a simple case of analyzing your customer base and identifying the contracts which will become due for renewal in each of the coming quarters. If needs be, seek the help of your CS, Finance or Sales Ops team to complete these numbers. You should record both the revenue number and the number of sales, orders or units required.
Next you will look at the opportunities for Expansion. These will identify which contracts you expect to renew but which have the potential to grow beyond the basic renewal figure. In most cases you will be rewarded at a higher level for growth or expansion business than you are for straight renewals. Again, record both the revenue number and the number of sales, orders or units required.
Having defined these two key elements, you will be able to identify exactly how much New Business you need to Land in each quarter. This will be the difference between your quarterly target and the amounts you expect from renewals and expansions. Therefore, this becomes your quarterly New Business target.
One of the most likely alternatives to using a Land Expand Renew approach is to develop your plan based on your plan to sell the different Products in your company’s product range. You can categorize these by individual product names or by product families. The decision is yours. As per previous guidelines, the best approach is to use whatever data reporting your company has in place and whatever you and your manager is used to reviewing.
The more granular, the more useful, but don’t try to list every single product by name, unless that is what is expected by your management team in your quarterly reporting. Pick something like the top 5 and include the rest in ‘other’.
Option 3 – Align according to customer size
Some companies are not operating in a recurring revenue model (like SaaS or subscription) and they only have one main product or service to offer. If this is your situation, then you might consider developing your plan based on customer size.
You can decide how to determine the categories. Again, follow your company definitions if they already exist. Typically, you will segment the customer size based on their Total Revenue, or Number of Employees. You can also use the number of business locations if that is a more meaningful factor for your sales process.
If none of the above ideas are relevant to you, you could decide to segment your Territory by smaller geographic areas. You could have a detailed quarterly plan for each Sate, or County or major City. It’s up to you to decide what mechanism makes most sense to you.
In each of the above scenarios you will see that we have suggested that you calculate not only the revenue figure but also the expected number of sales, orders or units that you would need to sell in order to reach that goal. This will help you a great deal when you start to develop your Gap Analysis and action plan later in the process. In terms of the currency for the revenue numbers, you should change the $ figures in the spreadsheet to whatever is the actual currency that you use for your company in your sales reporting. Always strive to make everything consistent. Another consideration is to use whatever currency you can obtain the other data and information in. If you are in Europe but your sales reporting is made in $ back to a US parent company, use whatever currency your management and finance team require.
Exercise 2.3
Course Manual 4: Go-to-Market Strategy
In the first workshop we discussed the Go-To-Market Strategy at the company level. No doubt your company has a strategy at the corporate level to penetrate different market segments. In some of these they may already have a strong market presence, others may be nascent. The focus on this section in your own TSP is to determine how closely your specific territory will map to this strategy and what, if anything, you need to do differently.
Your focus should be on two things:
1. Learning – what do you need to know in order to better capitalize on a market specific GTM strategy to help you sell more, more easily?
2. Analysis – do you know enough about each specific GTM segment and the likely potential impact of applying the company GTM strategy in your territory?
In terms of the former, you can start to develop an Action plan to learn more. This is perhaps the first time in this module where we can draw attention to the fact that at the end of the TSP there is a section for Action Planning. We will discuss this is detail in a later module but suffice to say at this point that you should use it now to make any notes of likely or potential actions that come to mind. There is a “Notes, Actions, Information Needed” column to the right of the excel spreadsheet. You should use this as a ‘parking lot’ for ideas as and when they surface. If, for example, you realize at this point that you need to learn more about a specific line of business, note-down an action to go and find that information, before you forget to do so.
In regard to the latter, be honest with yourself about whether you really have the information you need. Do you need to do more research? Do you need help from other people (again you can make some notes in the Action Plan if needed). It is not uncommon for the company to have a corporate strategy to develop business in a specific market area but for that strategy to be inapplicable in your particular territory. For example, a company GTM which focuses on the Financial Services industry may have relevance if your territory is more rural and less metropolitan.
But don’t jump to conclusions. This is another time when it makes sense to use this strategic planning exercise to step-back and reconsider your territory, looking at things through fresh eyes.
This is exactly why we have included a line in the plan here that relates back to your TAM analysis. Whatever your current sales record, this is an opportunity to re-analyze the potential in relation to the total addressable market data. You might be surprised to find that certain markets or lines-of business are more significant in your territory than you thought.
The purpose of identifying both your planned focus and the percentage of your TAM is to highlight the extent to which the ese two things are aligned, or non-aligned. A lack of alignment does not mean that there is necessarily anything wrong, but it should be a cause for a pause for thought if nothing else. If your TAM indicates that the largest market opportunity lies in Healthcare and that only represents the 3rd largest vertical in terms of your focus this year, perhaps there is a need to re-evaluate your plan. Once again, this is an example of how building this TSP is a highly iterative process. It’s also another good example of why this process is so valuable because it causes you to question and perhaps re-think your strategy … and thereby achieve better outcomes.
The easiest way to start this section is simply to extrapolate your results from the prior year and to record the relative percentages of sales that were made in each category. Then you can study the TAM and record the results from that. In some cases that is as far as this analysis needs to go. It will serve as a statement of intent and you can move-on to the next section. However, it often transpires that there is a mis-alignment between these numbers and possibly a further misalignment with the company’s chosen LOB focus. In that case you need to have a conversation with your manager or with the marketing team to discuss the differences.
It will always be better for you, as a salesperson, to align your focus with the corporate strategy. This is because all of the wight of the marketing machine and product strategy and R&D are to be aligned behind a focus on a particular market. Although of course it is possible for you to go out and sell to different types of customer, you are making your life more difficult and ultimately you may be adding time and cost to the company and to the customer. For example, if you have a product which has been fine-tuned to suit the needs of the transportation industry, it might well work for a manufacturing customer but there may be requirements that they have which the product does not support. The risk is that they become a less than happy customer. This leads to an excessive demand for customer support on their part and an increased service requirement for your service/support or Customer Success team.
Once again this is a section where you can decide how you want, or need, to customize the TSP to suit your company’s needs. For example, if your business does not have a Line-of-Business, vertical focus, you could decide to segment your market by key Alliances. For example, there are many high-tech providers who base their sales strategy on their key corporate alliances with companies like Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud), and Microsoft (Azure) these might be the categories their salespeople choose for this section.
Equally, don’t feel that you must have 4 or more categories. We recommend highlighting your top 4 and then including the remaining verticals in the “other” box.
Case Study
Back in the day, perhaps ‘ancient history’ for most people now, there were some small ‘techy’ companies looking to develop something new for the ‘Computer’ market. Yes, it was called ‘Computer’ in those days, the term ‘Information Technology’ had not been coined. One such company was called Digital Research. They had developed an operating system which they were designing for use on a future-planned product that we know as the PC today, the Personal Computer. There were a few PCs in existence, but they were not common.
Digital Research had developed what they called DR DOS. DR stood for Digital Research and DOS meant Disk Operating System. They were doing well, they had developed a strategic relationship with IBM. They were shipping large volumes of ‘software’ – which at that time meant shipping a Box the size of a very large textbook, containing a 5 1/4” floppy disk and a technical user manual.
Digital Research was selling their software to IBM and IBM intended to use this as the operating system for their ‘soon-to-be-launched’ PC. What became known as “the” PC and the format by which all others would be described (hence the IBM Compatible PC). However, Digital Research failed to close the deal with IBM. Instead, they felt their market lay, not with the hardware manufacturers, but with the customers who would buy the PC and then load their own software afterwards.
Another company (Microsoft) took a different approach. Microsoft made a deal with IBM to load MS-DOS onto every IBM PC that was shipped. It wasn’t exactly overnight, but pretty much Microsoft became the Operating System that everyone was using, and the rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft had seen where their market lay, and they went all out to secure sales with all of the major hardware manufacturers until they were really the only software operating system in town for IBM and all IBM-compatible PCs.
We will start by assuming that the GTM strategy will be defined by Line-of-Business or market Vertical. Let’s be clear about how we would use this section and what a GTM strategy might mean in this context. We will explore Healthcare, Financial Services, Transportation, and Information Technology. Your own version of the TSP should be based on the Verticals which are important for you. The purpose is to help you develop a focus on what you need to do to sell effectively to your chosen verticals.
As you will recall from the first workshop, the secret to a consultative sales approach is to get involved early in the customer buying cycle. One of the keys to that is to develop some subject matter expertise, relevant knowledge, and insight that you can use to differentiate yourself from other salespeople. You cannot be an expert in every line-of-business, so you need to select those which you will focus on. It will be up to you to determine which verticals are relevant for you. You also get to decide whether you want to sell into several different verticals or just one. If you choose just one, you can then segment that into sub-categories.
The Government sector is always an interesting market to define. There are many different types of government agency. You might segment these by size or geography (for example National, State, County, City) or you might choose to segment by service category (such as Law Enforcement, Taxation, Social Security etc).
In essence, this section is all about sharpening your focus to better target your activity towards the important target accounts and customers that will enable you to achieve or exceed your sales growth targets. Let’s consider a few examples:
Healthcare
The healthcare vertical can be a very complicated industry to categorize. In some countries, like Canada, healthcare is provided through a national system, sometimes referred to as a National Health Service (as in UK, New Zealand or Australia) and other times referred to a social or socialized medicine. In these countries the majority of care is provided through one government-run system, perhaps we a supplemental private system in addition. In other countries, like the USA, healthcare is privatized and there are hundreds or thousands of different private suppliers.
There are several verticals, and healthcare is one, where the vertical can also be divided into a number of sub-categories. This is useful, for example, if 100% of your sales are to healthcare companies but you want to segment the market into a number of categories. For example, these might be things like:
The point here is that it is entirely up to you and your company how you choose to segment the market. Choose categories that make sense to you, and which will give you the best way to start to define the market more narrowly. Based on these major headings, in the next section you will start to identify the largest accounts or business targets in each category. All this will help you to develop a more meaningful TSP.
Financial Services
For some people, Financial Services is just one of several markets that they sell to. For example, a software company might sell the same basic ERP software to companies in Healthcare, Finance, and any other vertical for that matter. However, a company that sells security equipment might sell to the Finance Sector, but for them this excludes insurance companies because they focus purely on locations that require physical security solutions.
So once again, you need to define what this might mean for your company. Here are some examples:
Transportation
There are companies that sell into the Transportation sector in which they are really referring to freight only, or passengers only, and in some cases both. Airlines, for example, all carry cargo in the belly of their aircraft. Some derive all their revenue from cargo. Their needs are different. The trends in their markets are different. So, you need to adapt your sales messaging accordingly. This transport market can be a domestic market or a local/regional market. With the growth of global trade, globalization if you like, it is more often an international market. It can include companies that provide transportation itself, and it can include companies who manufacture equipment for the transport sector.
Understanding these issues is important to anyone selling into this line-of-business. As you start to define the way in which your own company views this market, you might start to open your eyes to a greater sales potential than you had first identified. This again is one of the ways in which a TSP will help you to sell more.
Information Technology
Information Technology or IT has come to mean a multitude of things. It is another sector than often requires further segmentation or definition. For example, some people might refer to the market as IT and Telecoms. Other people will consider Telecommunications to be a sector in itself. Some people will consider that Media and Entertainment companies are now part of the IT sector because they provide their services through an IT solution. The market has seen a great deal of merger and acquisition activity. This has led to a growth in vertical integration of companies which has blurred some of the traditional classifications of what a company’s core business might be and which market vertical it belongs to. This has happened all over the world. In Europe for example, companies like Orange and Sky are IT, Media, Internet and Mobile Phone companies. The same is true in the US with companies like AT&T growing beyond their Telco focus to be Entertainment companies through their purchase of DirecTV and for Comcast to become a major player in the internet and mobile phone market as well as owning film studios and entertainment parks.
By now you should have developed a good idea of how you are going to define your own particular market. Having done that, the next objective in this section is to determine how much each category is going to contribute to your total sales revenue for this year.
This is not something that you should simply guess at. You should start by looking at the prior years and develop as good a picture as you can of the relative revenue from each segment in the past and perhaps some trend information to help inform the numbers for this year.
You should also take another look at the Target Addressable Market (TAM) for your territory to see to what extent you are aligned with the theoretical potential that exists. Simple ask yourself whether there is a valid business reason for their being a disparity between the relative % TAM and the relative % revenue that you expect to achieve.
There can be many reason to justify this. For example, you may be only just starting to penetrate a particular market. Your company may only have just developed a new product that opens up potential in a new market sector.
The key is to check that your assumptions make sense and to cause you to question whether or not you are planning to capitalize on the true potential for your territory. Remember, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, and your TSP is not intended to suggest that you will accomplish everything in the first year. It is perfectly reasonable to have a potential TAM and a probable revenue that is out of sync. Equally, if you are the dominant player in a particular market, it is fine for you to base a higher percentage of your revenue plan on sales into that sector. The whole point here is to make a well-considered, meaningful decision about where you will focus your sales efforts.
Exercise 2.4
Course Manual 5: Target Account Analysis
Having completed the modules o far today you have a very good strategic view of your TSP. Now it’s time to get a bit more tactical and to start to identify the Key accounts which will give you the revenue you need to exceed your quota. If you are one of the lucky few, you will be able to identify all the revenue potential you need within a handful of accounts. More likely you will need to identify where the biggest potential exists and then in the next module, we will look at how to close that final gap.
So, in this module we will focus on your biggest accounts. Note that we are talking about “Accounts”, this means that they can be existing customers or prospects. They are both Accounts, and the largest ones will require a detailed Account Plan – more on these in the next workshop.
There are two key things to consider in identifying these accounts, firstly their overall potential in terms of revenue, and second, the likely timing of that revenue. Remember that the TSP has a multi-year horizon. This means that there may be Large Accounts that you identify here which will provide little or no revenue in this year, but which will provide a huge chunk of your revenue in future years.
However, you may be yet to have identified any specific sales opportunities. For example, it may be that you need to develop a strategy to break-in to a particular account where you have zero business today. It is likely that it will take you weeks or months to start to develop relationships with the right people before you are even in a position to know exactly what they need and where your first opportunity might be. The if you factor-in a lengthy sales cycle (sometimes 6-12 months) you could be in a situation where you need a strategic plan for this account, even though it will create no income for this year. But you must do this, and you must start now. The longer you delay making these strategic investments of time and effort in your territory, the longer it will take you to achieve your goal.
So where do you start?
Well, the whole point of conducting the detailed territory analysis in the previous modules was to give you a clear view of where to look for your target accounts. Obviously for many people, several of these accounts have already been identified. You may even have been assigned them by name as part of your territory and some of them will hopefully already be in your customer list and will be a key element of your Renewal revenue and your Expand strategy. The task in this module is to identify each of these and define how much revenue you expect to get from each of them in this first year.
Start with what you know. Make a list which ranks all of your current accounts by revenue achieved in the last 1-3 years. Then add columns which show your view of the potential revenue in the years ahead. You should a table which looks something like this (and most likely you should be able to simply download the first part of this as a report from your CRM system):
We suggest you build this table in Excel and create ‘Filters’ for ach column so you can adjust the ranking according to different criteria.
1. Last year – your first ranking should be based on Last Year’s revenue. This is likely to tell you which accounts may provide the best and easiest source of revenue for this year through Expansion opportunities.
2. Annual Total – having built your list, you should then Rank them either by total overall potential or total annual potential. This may well require more detailed research and analysis to make sure that you identify the real potential, not just what you think you can achieve today.
Be aware that of course the way you choose to build this table will be guided by the compensation and measurement model within your company. If you are not measured and incentivized on renewals and expansions, you should base this ranking totally on future new business potential that will contribute your quota.
This initial tranche of accounts is of course totally based on your existing customer’s prior revenue and their future potential. Having completed the above exercise, you should now turn your attention to the accounts which you have not yet secured any business with. What about your Prospects?
It will be more challenging to get a good view of the account potential for your prospects without some further detailed analysis of their company structure and what opportunities might exist. You should have some pretty clear indicators from your TAM analysis. You also extrapolate some numbers based on what you do know about the account.
There are a number of ways to develop a view of the account potential. The might provide a rudimentary initial analysis that needs to be validated through proper research, qualification and discovery. They include:
Account Revenue – you can determine the accounts’ potential spend with you based on a percentage of their total revenue (remember this is their revenue, not yours). In other words, you extrapolate some numbers based on known information. For example, if your company has secured all the business that it can from a particular account, you can determine what percentage that sales revenue represents for a business of that size. Then you can use this number as an indicator of potential were you able to grow your business with every account to this same level.
Number of Employees – you can conduct a similar analysis to the one above by using number of employees as a key metric (as opposed to company revenue). This might be a more relevant metric for your business if you are selling good or services which are bought on a per head basis. For example, in the IT industry the potential is often measured by ‘number of seats’, meaning the number of software licenses that might be required to equip everyone with the software. In the insurance industry it might be based on ‘Number of Lives’ for life insurance, an so on.
Number of “XX”? – similarly you can conduct the analysis based on some other key metric. In Healthcare for example, many times a company will gauge its sales potential based on the size of a hospital measured by ‘Number of Beds’. Other example might be ‘Number of Surgeries’, or ‘Number of Procedures’. If you are selling transportation services, it might be based on ‘Number of Shipments’ or ‘Total Value of Exports’.
The key point here is that you need to start to zero-in on the metrics which will give you the best indication of the potential revenue that exists for your business. This might require further analysis. In many cases your marketing or finance department may have completed some of this work when they conducted the TAM analysis for the company as a whole, so don’t be afraid to seek out and hunt for this data internally before you invest too much time trying to do it all on your own.
There are many sources of company statistics that can provide you with the answers you need to questions posed above. The key is to try to be as objective as possible. Too often, too many salespeople conduct this analysis solely from what they already know, and they skew the data by excluding accounts which they feel ‘they will never win’. Your chances may be slim, but the exercise is worth doing anyway. That is the only way that you can then make a conscious decision to exclude one of the biggest accounts in your territory because you feel they will never buy from you.
There might be many reasons why that might be true. Perhaps a company has had a bad previous experience or perhaps there is a key person who is very much against your business because of where they worked previously. These things happen, but things also change! People change, company circumstances change. And your opportunity and your Account analysis should change as a result.
Case Study
Some years ago, at the height of what was referred to as the dot.com crash, many IT companies filed for bankruptcy. Customers became nervous and it was not uncommon for business to change their IT purchasing strategy to try to mitigate the risk of being too dependent on any one supplier.
It so happened that American Express had, up to that point, bought their big computers and servers from one company, IBM. It was a great partnership. AMEX bought all their computer equipment from IBM and IBM used AMEX as the Corporate Credit Card for all of their company purchases and all employees were given company AMEX cards for their business travel expenses
One day the CEO of AMEX asked for a meeting with the CEO of IBM. He went to his palatial corner office in their Armonk, NY headquarters. He explained that AMEX had introduced a policy company-wide that they would no longer sole-source any product or service. He explained that it was ‘nothing personal’ but it meant that they would be buying some Hewlett-Packard computers in future, and he hoped that that would not be a problem.
The IBM CEO opened his desk drawer and took out a pair of scissors. “Certainly not” he said, “we completely understand and I think it is a sensible policy”. With that he took out his company AMEX card from his wallet and he cut it in 2. “Henceforth, we will be doing the same!” he said. Word has it that the AMEX CEO almost had a heart attack on the spot and had to get medical attention.
The moral of the story is that in a split second the account potential for MasterCard and Visa went through the roof. The company that would secure that business was the company whose Account Manager never gave up on that account, even though they had been with a competitor ‘forever’. Of course, the other victor was the H-P rep, for exactly the same reasons.
You will see that in this section of the TSP you are required to enter information on the top Accounts that you have identified. For each Account, make a note of the potential that it represents to you in this year. This is important because ultimately the total of the potential from these accounts, and the amounts you may have in renewals and expansions, will inform you as to how much other business you need to find. This will form the bulk of the Gap Analysis in the next module.
As you can see in the example above, you should add whatever information is important or valuable to you and your management. The data should certainly have the $ revenue potential, and you can add other information if relevant. In this case, we have included the # of seats, since in this case, a software company is interested in how many seats they sell as well as the actual $ revenue. This is partly because in most cases the price per seat goes down as the number of seats goes up. Therefore, there is not a direct correlation between # seats and revenue, or at least that correlation is skewed by volume discounting strategy.
Your goal here is to create a map of the business potential that exists within the territory from an account perspective. The aim is to build your confidence that there really is enough identifiable business potential in the territory to enable you to achieve your goal. Perhaps the identified potential already exceeds the target, perhaps there is a shortfall. Either way we will need to factor-in a Gap Analysis because although you have identified “potential” business, this does not mean that you are going to win 100% of that potential. It is intended to focus the mind and inform your best strategy. You will still have plenty of other work to do.
At first sight you might consider that this analysis does not apply to salespeople who are responsible for just one very large Enterprise Account. But that is not the case. It works just as well in this situation and is just as important. It is simply as case of segmenting the ‘market’, in this case the Account, into appropriate pieces. If you are dealing with a Global account, the breakdown might be based on national subsidiaries of the parent company.
Alternatively, you may decide that it is more appropriate to base your ‘account’ breakdown on company divisions. This would be appropriate for a large multi-faceted company that operates very different businesses with different business needs organized into separate operating companies. Think for example of an account manager who owns GE or Siemens as their territory. Each of the different operating companies could be regarded as a separate account in its own right. It is not uncommon for people to have the majority of their business potential already sewn up in one division but to be doing zero business in another.
As you can see, it really is up to you to determine how you want to segment this account strategy. We have suggested that you identify your Top 5, Top 10 or Top 15 accounts. We would not suggest doing many more than that. As we will see when it comes to developing the detailed Account plan strategy for each of these key accounts, doing so for 10-15 companies is likely to be too much of a challenge for most people. It is fine to keep this below 10 if that makes more sense to you. Essentially whatever you identify as the key accounts you will have a gap to close to hit your quota. In that sense the more you can identify in a small number of large accounts, the better. However, you must have due regard to the likelihood that you will be able to secure business with these players.
If you are in a business where you typically sell a large number of smaller orders in order to make your quota, you will likely find most of your business elsewhere. But even in this situation, don’t dismiss this exercise. It could be incredibly valuable for you to consider a new strategy wherein you secure a higher percentage of your business from a smaller number of accounts.
If you feel that having a detailed “Account” strategy is not so relevant to your business, you can adapt this section and the ‘Account Planning’ workshop which follows next. Both of these could be adapted to focus on a more granular segmentation of the whole market. This would see you defining the Territory in terms of 4-5 over-arching markets (as discussed in the last module) and then segmenting these into further sub-categories here.
Exercise 2.5
Course Manual 6: Gap Analysis
In the modules so far today, we have focused on the strategic and tactical analysis of the territory. Now we shift our analysis towards the gap that remains between the business that we have identified (in our selected verticals and key accounts) and our Target Revenue. This module will be divided into two parts, firstly the GAP analysis and secondly the development of ideas to close the gap.
Defining the Shortfall
If you think about this for a second, every salesperson should be seeing a gap between the business that they can realistically expect to close within the plan period, and their sales target or quota. Essentially, if they were already able to identify all the business they need, it would imply that the quota was too low.
Now, once you start this type of analysis the key factor is the level of confidence, or over-confidence, or objectivity with which you look at the business potential. What we will aim to do here is to bring some more scientific analysis of these numbers to help you not only identify the gap more accurately but also start to develop logical, well-reasoned changes that you might need to make in your sales behavior in order to close the gap more quickly.
There are 4 key revenue numbers that you need to start the analysis:
1. Personal Stretch Goal (this should be the number that you entered in the spreadsheet in the exercise in Module 1 today).
2. Identified Potential – The total value of the business potential identified within your selected Key Accounts (this number comes from the previous module)
3. Business Closed – What you have already closed in the year so far (i.e. assuming that you are doing this exercise part-way through a year, this is your YTD sales achievement. If you are developing a plan for the coming year, this number will be zero, unless of course, you already have some known renewals which you know are going to be credited to your sales revenue number).
4. Pipeline – The total value of your current sales pipeline for this year. (i.e. the total revenue potential from your currently listed sales opportunities. Even if you are doing this analysis for the coming year, you should have some opportunities in the pipeline, all be they at an earlier stage in the sales cycle).
If your company has an effective, well-managed and consistently used CRM system, most of this information should be readily available to you. If you are not so lucky, you will need to go hunting for it. The time invested is well worth it because it will save time and energy in the future. It is an essential part of the process, and it is good practice to ‘second guess’ all of the assumptions as you build this gap analysis. As we have said already, it might mean that you need to be bit more realistic about your stretch goal if this analysis shows that you have too big a gap to bridge. Equally, it might make you realize that you were being a little too pessimistic and actually things are better than you thought.
Let’s walk through the step-by-step process that is involved in defining your sales shortfall. You will need a Gap Analysis Calculator, best done using an Excel spreadsheet. We will provide an example version here, but you should be ready to customize this to suit your own company specific situation.
1. Start with your Personal Stretch Goal, insert this in the top line. If you prefer to be more conservative, you can use the Quota (assuming this is a lower number). Again, we recommend using the higher figure to help you ‘shoot for the stars’.
2. Insert your WEIGHTED Identified Potential. To do this you will take the total value of the potential revenue from your selected top 15 accounts, from the previous module, and apply a weighting to this number. Now, this is where you have to start to be analytical. What weighting factor should you chose? Remember that this total value includes ALL of the potential that exists. It assumes that you could win 100% of the TAM for each account. That is rarely a realistic assumption. More likely you will only be able to win a certain percentage. Therefore, you need to apply a weighting percentage to the total. Having done that, you need to ‘weight’ it again to create a value for the revenue that you expect to achieve just in this year.
3. Insert the total value of all the business that you have already won in the year so far. This should include all the existing billings/invoiced business, and the business which is ‘closed-won’ even if it is not yet shipped.
4. Insert the WEIGHTED total of your remaining sales pipeline for this year. Remember that this should only include the sales/orders which you expect to close, and which are billable from a revenue recognition perspective in the current year.
5. Calculate item 1 above less items 2-5, and insert the GAP or SHORTFALL. This is essentially the total value of sales revenue that you still need to identify and close within the year, in order to achieve your goal. If you are using a spreadsheet, this will be a calculated value based on the above information.
Now we shift to the part where you start to break the gap down into some more manageable, meaningful numbers …
6. Average Sales Value – insert your average deal size. You should not guess this number but calculate the actual figure. How? Simply take the total revenue from each of the prior 2-3 years and divide this by the number of deals closed. You should be able to extract this information fairly readily from your CRM system. If not, ask your sales ops team for some help with this. If you are new, talk to sales ops or your management team to get their recommended input.
7. Number of new deals required – divide the total gap or shortfall by the Average deal Size above to show you how many new deals you need to find outside of your identified key accounts. Again, this will be calculated value if you are using a spreadsheet here.
8. Length of Sales Cycle – do you know how long it typically takes for you to close a deal. Most salespeople have some idea, usually a pretty vague and varied number, like 3-9 months. No of course there are some deals that close quickly and some that take forever. That’s perfectly normal but what’s the actual number? You can do some research on all the deals you closed in the last few years and analyze the date they entered the sales funnel and the date they closed. Create a list and then calculate the average. Insert this as a figure based on actual number of days.
Case Study
A high-tech start-up company had done an excellent job of creating an innovative new solution for improving health and people performance. It was designed in partnership with top athletes and quickly became a standard implementation in the gyms of top teams. When a sports coach saw the system, they wanted one. Professional sports spawned interest from College teams and the sales grew. The typical sales cycle was 1-3 months, sometimes longer because it might be linked to the seasonal nature of the particular sports team.
The company then realized that there was a huge market opportunity in the Government sector, particularly with the armed forces. The solution could help bring soldiers, sailors and airmen and women back to operational fitness more quickly. The company invested heavily in this market and based their business plan on the same length of sales cycle that they had seen in the Sports market.
But they soon found that dealing with the government was different. Sales cycles became longer. Much longer. Often it only took a couple of months to get a ‘verbal order’ but then a year, or longer, to get a billable PO or ‘color of money’ that they could ship and invoice against. As more and more of their sales pipeline became government focused, so their average sales cycle became longer and longer until it was no longer sustainable. The impact of the US Government shutdowns and political wrangling to finalize and confirm a Budget resulted in this small company having to lay people off because they could not close the sales in time. The Sales pipeline had never been stronger. The opportunities were there. But the sales cycle was too long for their cashflow to support without further investment.
Now let’s start to look at your typical business conversion ratios. This part of the exercise might be a bit of an eye-opener (and it will certainly vary depending on your industry sector, and numerous other factors such as brand recognition, marketing effectiveness, etc). You will need to research your current sales effectiveness in terms of your ability to convert leads into opportunities and opportunities into closed deals. You may need the help of your marketing and/or sales ops team again here.
9. Win ratio – what is your typical ratio of wins from submitted proposals? In other words, once you get to the proposal stage, how many deals do you typically win (i.e. close-won) at your forecast value and in the forecast timeframe? Some salespeople may say they win 1:2 or 1:3 deals at this stage, but do they close these deals within the forecasted time period and at the forecast value. You need to consider the implications of these last 2 questions. If a salesperson ends-up winning the deal but at a discount level which is typically, say 20% below the forecast amount, that is the same as winning just 4:5 deals. Equally, if these deals typically take longer to close than was expected, they ‘slip’ into the next quarter or the next year. In this case, if 50% of deals slip, then that’s the same as having a 50% loss rate when you factor-in the timing element. These issues are critical when it comes to understanding how best to complete this part of the exercise, so be honest with yourself. You are not fooling anyone else if you over-estimate your own true ability here.
10. Discovery – how many of the sales opportunities that you enter into your personal sales pipeline convert into really serious sales opportunities which result in you submitting a proposal, as outlined above. Pause for a moment, there is no point in elevating the number of proposals you submit just to elevate this number. All that will do is to reduce your success rate in the ratio above. Again, the best approach is to try to calculate this number based on your own past experience or the averages for the sales team in your company. There will always be deals that ‘fall by the wayside’, perhaps because the customer changes their mind, perhaps due to economic factors. As we will discuss later in the Sales Growth Program, it is better to realize that you are wasting your time before you invest a great dela of time and effort in submitting a detailed proposal for a piece of business that you are never going to win anyway.
11. Qualification – clearly, it is preferable to exclude these ‘bad’ deals earlier in the sales process. Bad deals is perhaps a misnomer but we are referring to sales opportunities which are kept alive throughout the sales cycle in the ‘hope’ that they might, just might, have a positive outcome. This is one of the biggest time soaks for any sales professional. Better qualification skills lead to higher sales revenue. It is better to ‘qualify’-out’ of a deal early than to invest ongoing time and effort to no avail. So what are your stats? Do you know how many qualified leads you need in order to generate just one valid sales opportunity that will continue through the discovery process? Again we are looking for a simple conversion ratio here. Take a look at how many qualified leads you had last year and how many sales opportunities those generated in the CRM.
12. Lead Conversion – now we are closer to the top of the funnel. This last conversion ratio relates to how many marketing leads are required for the marketing or SDR team (Sales Development Reps or Inside Sales Reps) to convert to viable sales opportunities that you accept as a Sales Professional and enter into your system as a Qualified Lead. Now, if you prefer, you can try to find industry benchmark information to determine the typical ratios here. This part of the sales funnel is mostly out of your control so you will need generic data or detailed information form your marketing or SDR team. According to Demand Science, “Most lead-to-opportunity conversion rates hover around 12% on average. The formula to compute is pretty simple. Divide the leads converted into opportunities by the total number of leads and multiply it by 100. A “great” lead-to-opportunity conversion rate varies by industry, business, and even marketing strategy.”
This is the conversion calculator that you can use as a framework for calculating your numbers. We will provide you with an Excel version too:
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Gap Analysis Calculator
Having identified the actual ratios for the number of leads and opportunities required you can then take this one level further. This final, more granular view will focus on the actual sales activity required on your behalf. As you consider the number of opportunities required above, consider two key factors that relate to your own time and energy. There are three key activity questions to consider, and then there is the time factor to take into account:
A) Customer Meetings – how many face-to-face in-person or online meetings will you need in order to close a qualified sales opportunity? You should consider the fact that in most B2B sales campaigns there are 10-20 people involved in the buying decision. If that is the case, how many of these people do you need to meet with? How many other people in your team need to have customer visits too. The answer to this ‘number of customer meetings required’ is a function of both the number of the meetings and the number of people involved.
B) Telephone Meetings – You should consider roughly how many telephone interactions you may need to close a typical deal. This will include phone calls whose aim is to secure a face-to-face meetings and phone calls to advance the sale by answering questions and providing information.
C) Phone Attempts – how many phone calls, including failed attempts and leaving of voicemails, do you typically require in order to get a phone meeting/connection with a customer?
By now you will surely be starting to get rather overwhelmed by the amount of activity involved. The objective is not to depress you but perhaps to jolt you into the realization that time is precious and every one of your customer interactions and 100% of your sales effort needs to be focused on doing things which will advance the sales process. You cannot afford to waste a second on things which will not help you close a deal or on customers who will not buy.
This brings us to the final dimension that you need to add to complete this Gap analysis, YOUR TIME. How much selling time do you really have to undertake this critical sales activity? You may not have considered it this way before, but your time is much more limited than you might think.
Let’s start by considering a typical Sales Year:
Based on this, most salespeople have about 210 days available for actual selling time. That’s less than 1700 hours per year which can be devoted to actual selling time. So, effectively you have already lost 40% of the 365 days a year. Now let’s consider what else needs to happen in these remaining hours to arrive at a number that indicates how much actual potential face-to-face selling time you have.
You can calculate your actual customer-facing selling time a number of different ways.
1. Your Diary – you can look back over the last year and add-up exactly how many customer meetings you had.
2. Availability – you can calculate the time you have available for these meetings taking into account all the other work that you also have to do. We will provide a simple spreadsheet for this too. Here’s an example:
Clearly there are some things you can do to change the above numbers. What most of us end-up doing is working longer days. Perhaps a 10-hour day is more realistic if we factor-in travel but it still leaves precious little time in front of customers.
Ideas to Close the Gap (Developing Change Initiatives)
Having done the above analysis, you will have a good idea of the gap that you need to close in terms of sales revenue. As a professional salesperson you do have a number of levers that you can pull to give yourself a better chance of achieving your goal. The analysis might have highlighted the fact that you need to do much more prospecting for new business, outside of the key accounts that you have identified, in order to reach your sales goal. But other than ‘work harder’, ‘run faster’, ‘close more deals’ etc, what else can you do to work smarter?
Here are some ideas for you to consider:
• Increase Deal Size – one clear way to reduce the number of deals that you need to close, and still hit the revenue goal, is to focus on closing larger deals. Within reason, the effort required to close a large deal is the same as the effort to close a small deal. So, if you put the same effort into chasing larger sales opportunities, it stands to reason that you will achieve a higher overall revenue number. Perhaps you can also grow the size of the deal by always selling add-on services (like extended warranty, higher levels of service etc).
• Lower Discounting – improving your negotiation skills can help to retain more revenue from each opportunity, thereby raising margins and revenue through not ‘leaving any money on the table.
• Reduce Length of the Sales Cycle – by being more strategic, deliberately aiming to achieve more in each customer interaction and by identifying all of the buyers earlier in the sale cycle, you can save a great dela of time an wasted effort
• Create More Time – this might sound impossible, but we are not talking about time travel or bending time! You can actually create more selling time for yourself in a number of ways that don’t involve working longer hours:
– Better qualification – so you focus more of your energy on deals in which you have a greater chance of success
– Sales Meeting Planning – to maximize what you are able to achieve within each customer meeting and thereby reduce the number of meetings you need in order to close the sale.
– Use the virtual team – don’t try to do it all on your own, learn to use the other resources that you have available, like product support, service teams, technical support
• Win Rate – grow the revenue by improving the win rate through developing a better competitive selling strategy and be more aware of the internal competition or the internal inertia to ‘do nothing’.
Remember, everything we are doing in this Territory Sales Plan is intended to help us be more successful, more quickly. Hence this module is about opening our eyes to the challenges that face us. In the remaining modules today, we will start to develop a process for helping us to be more efficient with our time and to be more laser-focused on activities to help us reach the goal.
Exercise 2.6
Course Manual 7: Virtual Team Leadership
Some salespeople feel that they operate most effectively when they are working alone. Other people see themselves more like the conductor of an orchestra, keeping lots of different people on track. You might be in a sales role where you are officially the Account Manager and as such, you are a true team leader with both the advantage of having a team around you and the responsibility of managing that team too.
Whatever your precise situation, as a sales professional, you are effectively a virtual team leader. You need to be able to identify the people in your team and motivate them to do what you need them to do. One of the benefits to you of having a well-documented Sales Territory Plan is that you have a document which you can share with the virtual team to make sure that they understand the plan and are clear about their role within it.
We will refer to the ‘Virtual Team’ because no matter whether or not you actually have other people reporting to you, all salespeople need to rely on other people from many different parts of the company at different times. We are going to refer to all of these people as being members of this virtual team. Some of them will be permanent members of this team, others will join the team only fleetingly. Some may officially report to you, most will not.
We will start by identifying the people who are most likely to be members of this team and then we will move-on to discuss how you, as the Account or Territory Manager, can get the best from each of them. The key point here is that:
1. You need to see each of these people as being critical to your success, and
2. You need to work to get them involved and keep them involved in supporting your TSP.
In the sections below we will use commonly used terms and titles to describe the role of these different people. Your company may use slightly different terminology, but the learning point is the same. Focus on what they do as individuals, what they can do for you, and how they can improve the customer experience.
Sales Engineers or SE’s
In almost every high-tech sales team, and indeed in any company that is selling any type of complex, systems-based, or technological solution, the Sales Engineer or SE, will be a key member of the sales team. Some companies will refer to these people as Pre-Sales Engineers. There may also be Post-sales or Implementation Engineers too. They might be referred to as Systems Engineers or simply pre-sales technical support.
Whatever the title, the function is similar, and it is critical to the success of the salesperson. In any type of complicated solution sale, there will be a need to secure the ‘technical buying decision’ as well as the business or commercial buying decision. Your SE is essential in your ability to win-over the technical team in the customer. As such it is essential for you to make sure that your SE fully understands the strategy. This is clearly important when you get down to the opportunity level, in other words once you have identified a specific sales opportunity, you will clearly get the SE involved – but too many salespeople fail to get their SE’s engaged early enough in the process.
Having said this, don’t fall victim to the other trap, namely wasting the SE’s time on strategy development when they need to be focused on solving urgent customer issues. You are now starting to face the reality that, as a virtual team leader, you need to recognize and understand that these other virtual team members also have goals and objectives of their own. Everyone is going to be measured according to their own specific job objectives and these may not always have ‘sales’ as their number 1 goal. Now, of course, you might think and believe that there is nothing more important than sales – and you are probably right in most instances! However, other people also have a responsibility for things like the post-sales success of existing customers, and these might be first and foremost in their minds.
In most companies, resources are limited and often people are being asked to do multiple jobs. Be cognizant of what this means for your virtual team members and engage with them to understand their priorities and time restrictions.
Many IT companies will have “POD’s” of three people for a Territory. In this scenario there is a 1-to-1 relationship between the number of sales professionals and the number of SE’s and Inside Sales Reps (ISRs). Therefore, the SE (and the ISR) are an integral part of the territory team, and they should be involved at every stage of the territory planning process. In other scenarios, the SE’s might be supporting multiple Account Managers. If this is the case it behooves the salesperson to develop a very good, close working relationship with the SE to ensure that you can get the help you need, when you need it. The more that the SE knows about your plans and strategy, the more they can help support that strategy. Keep them informed, make them feel involved, and don’t forget to ask for their input too.
In many cases the SE’s can be your ‘eyes and ears’ in the territory. They may well be involved in post-sales as well as pre-sales support and they pick-up a great deal of information while they are visiting different locations. They can be an excellent source of competitive information because they see and hear about which competitors are active in the territory, sometimes before the salesperson is aware.
It’s a great idea to develop a really good, trusting relationship with your SE, not just because you need this in a sales meeting, but because they can help you develop your strategy. They can also be a useful sounding board. You should share ideas, discuss strategy, and ask them for their input and recommendations for changes. SE’s tend to be more pragmatic than salespeople. It’s in their technical, engineering nature. Don’t mistake this down-to-earth pragmatism as negativity, take it for what it is, perhaps a more conservative, objective view of what is possible and what is realistic in the territory. And at the same time, don’t forget to ask them for input and ideas about expansion opportunities and potential upside that you may not have considered and may have missed from your plan.
Inside Sales Reps or Sales Development Rep
An Inside Sales Rep (ISR) or Sales Development Rep (SDR) is a salesperson who is focused solely on selling from an office or home base. They rarely, if ever, travel to visit customers. However, this role is expanding all the time as more and more companies realize the full potential of what a good ISR is capable of doing. Increasingly, they are successful in managing the entire sales campaign, making sales via online meetings, as well as purely in telephone calls. In the past, this group would have been referred to as Telesales people, highlighting the fact that their contact with customers was solely by phone. Since the advent of the online meeting, and particularly enhanced since the changes in work practices brought on by the Covid pandemic, the role has expanded and increasingly the ISR is seen as an integral part of the sales team, and a critical element in the virtual sales team.
There are usually two distinct business models that companies employ when they deploy ISRs:
1. Securing Meetings – the ISR role is to take the Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from the marketing development reps (or any other leads for that matter) and to nurture those leads until they can secure a meeting for the Account Manager to visit the customer. As such, the ISR’s are focused on getting appointments, not selling solutions.
2. Sales – as the terms ‘inside sales’ suggests, their role is actually to sell. This can mean managing the sales process from lead to order. This tends to be more applicable in the case of a transactional sales of a product or service and in situations with a relatively low level of customer investment – the logic being that the higher the value of the order, the more likely it is that a customer will want to meet with an Account Manager and actually will be more likely to meet with several people form the sales organization.
Now of course there are hybrids of the above simplistic categorization. For example, ISRs might be focused on getting the appointments for the Account Managers but then they sell directly if they identify an opportunity that lends itself to more simple, transactional sale. Equally, they may be involved in nurturing the prospect after an initial call. In cases of particularly long sales cycles, it may be that someone, usually an ISR, needs to maintain contact with multiple buyers as the Account Manager develops the value proposition with senior people. Equally, in some cases, the ISR might be involved in the post-sales Expand strategy and in the Renewals process.
As we have explained in the case of the SE’s above, you may have a situation where every account manager has their own ISR, or you may find that one ISR supports multiple Account Managers. In the past, most ISRs would be based in a company call-center location. In recent years this has evolved significantly so that ISRs are now more likely to be home-based. They can be based within the sales territory itself or in a geographic distant location. So long as they operate as if they were in the same time zone as the customer and the sales team, no problem.
The ISR role is often seen as a junior sales role. It becomes a graduation role from which new members of the sales team need to graduate as they develop in their career to be fully fledged account managers. Again, this is changing because more and more ISRs realize that they make a very good living as a successful ISR without the needs to travel an spend time ‘on-the-road’ and away from their families.
As you develop your TSP you should include the ISR at every step along the way. It is critical to your success that they understand the strategy and the rationale behind it. It is critical that they know which are the key accounts that you want to develop and how much of the team, and your personal compensation is linked to the success of the TSP. Therefore, you need to make sure that the ISR feels as though they are an integral part of the team.
As the Virtual Team Leader, you also have a responsibility to lead these people by example. Take-on the role of the coach to help them improve. The more effective they are in their role, the more appointments you will have, the higher the revenue from your key accounts and from your territory as a whole.
Sales Specialists or Product Specialists
If you work in a company that has multiple different products and solutions, you will likely have some Product Specialists. If you sell to many different Lines-of Business, it is likely that you will have some industry specialists. In each case these specialists have knowledge and expertise which is valued by the customer.
These people are in place because they possess specialist skills, knowledge and experience which can help you as the Territory Sales Rep to win more business. You must remember that once again, they may have their own agenda, and they will certainly have their own goals and metrics. These folk are much more likely to have a remit to support many different Account Managers. Usually there are only a handful of these specialists to support the entire country.
Your role as the Account Manager and manager of your territory is to make sure they understand your goals and objectives and to seek their specialist input. In your TSP, if you have segmented the market according to Line-of-Business, then solicit the input of the relevant specialists. If you have based your TSP on the sale of different product lines, get aligned with the relevant Product Specialists.
As you can see, once again, the more you involve these people, the more value you get from them. The more they understand your strategy and how they can reach their own goal through selling their specialty into your territory the more they will support you. So you have to make them feel like they are part of your teams and that you value their input and involvement.
Case Study
Jardine Air Cargo, a global air freight forwarder and logistics company operated worldwide from its headquarters based at London’s Heathrow Airport. The sales organization as distributed throughout the globe with many office throughout each major country. In the UK for example, there were offices at each of the major airports, as there were other major industrial centers in Europe, Africa, Asia Pac and the Americas. Shipping air freight from UK to South Africa is not the same as shipping to the US or Canada.
To support the sales team when they were selling to exporters, Jardine’s developed a team of specialists. These people were all experienced ex-salespeople in their own right but they had developed some specialist technical skills in the intricacies of imports and exports to a particular market. They were known as Route Development Managers (RDM’s) and they were incentivized according to the volume of business that was generated on a particular route.
They would help the Account Managers when they were bidding for freight on a new route. They would work with the airlines to fine-tune the services to suit Jardine’s customers. They would go on sales calls with the sales reps when there was an important customer or prospect with significant trade on their route. The best salespeople learned how to use this rare and special resource to help them close deals and expand their business.
For example, the salesperson in charge of the UK Thames Valley office identified an opportunity to grow more business with the many US-based high-tech companies who were using the Thames Valley as the base of their European operations. The freight on the route between London and San Francisco (Silicon valley) was significant and he worked with the RDM for the US to develop state-of-the-art logistics to maximize the development of just-in-time shipping solutions for these high-tech companies, thereby significantly growing the revenue in the Territory and the volume of business on that specialist route.
Marketing Development Reps (MDR)
These people are fulfilling a role that is similar to the ISRs in the sense that they are home or office-based and their focus is on developing sales leads. These people focus on the top of the funnel. They are tasked with turning raw leads into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). These MQLs are then passed to the ISR for initial sales qualification.
Raw leads might be in the form of ‘web leads’ (i.e. leads which have resulted from a prospect ‘clicking’ on a webpage or dwelling on a video in the social media stream. The leads might have been acquired as a result of the purchase of a ‘mailing lists’ which now usually takes the form of an email and/or a phone number. The leads could also have been the result of people responding to a promotional campaign or people who attend a conference or exhibition.
The point here is that the work these MDRs do is to ‘weed-out’ the leads which are not valid, and if possible, do some basic qualification to determine whether or not the lead warrants a call from an ISR.
So, imagine for a moment a scenario in which a salesperson has developed their TSP on the basis of expanding sales into a new line-of-business. But they have not communicated this to the MDR. The MDR is still excluding leads from this vertical because it is not (as far as they know) in the target area. Once again, this is not the fault of the MDR, it is up to the sales professional to make sure everyone in the Virtual Sales Team has a clear understanding of the goals and the strategy. I’ve said it before, but the more they know, the more they can help you.
Customer Success (CS)
The Customer Success team should be your partner throughout the development and implementation of your TSP, especially if they are going to be responsible for any Renewals. The extent of their involvement in the sales process as a whole will depend on your own company specific Go-To-Market model. In some instances, the CS team will get involved towards the end of the buying cycle before the sale has been finalized. They will be involved in the final design and scoping of the Statement of Work, and they will be starting to develop the relationships with the customer’s implementation team so they can assume control immediately post-sale. For example, in the sale of Imaging Equipment to a Hospital, the CS team will typically be involved to map-out a training plan to train the Radiology staff in the use of the new equipment. In software sales, the CS team might be engaged in the development of the IT integration and will be working closely with the customer IT team.
As we saw in the first module, the essence of adopting a Consultative Selling approach is that the salesperson should still stay involved and remain engaged with the customer team after the sale is concluded to look for new opportunities to add value and start another sales opportunity. Irrespective on when the CS team gets involved, they are still a key element of the Virtual Sales Team and therefore should be fully briefed on the TSP.
If the CS team are effectively the ‘owners’ of the renewal process (and in many companies they are), then they need to be involved in the TSP planning to the extent that the Renewals element of your GTM plan is dependent on them. Even if CS does not ‘own’ the process, salespeople should work closely with CS to develop the process for renewal, and, for that matter, Expansion. Regular dialogue between Sales and CS is essential to capitalize on all the Expansion opportunities that exist.
Service Engineers or Support Engineers
Depending on the nature of the products and solutions that you are selling, you will have either a team
of Service Engineers or Support Engineers. These will usually be the people who are called upon to provide the warranty service and perhaps later to sell extended warranty or service plans. If your TSP GTM relies to some extent on Service Revenue then you clearly need to have the Service Engineers involved as a key part of the Virtual Sales Team.
More than any other group, these people are wonderful sources of help and ideas in terms of potential expansion sales, as well as service plan sales. Perhaps they are motivated to sell these plans, perhaps not. Either way they can help if they believe that doing so is in the customer’s interest.
Marketing Team
It seems almost fashionably popular for there to be a rift between the Sales and the Marketing Departments. There should not be. Whatever the story in your company, you need to see your marketing colleagues as being instrumental to your success and to the success of the TSP.
We don’t need to say much more than that here, because will talk in detail about marketing Plans for your TSP in a module later today. Suffice to say that you need to know who the key people are and especially those who may be needed to support your TSP marketing activities directly.
In addition to being a partner in marketing activity, the marketing Team can also be the source of the data and market research information you need to create your TSP.
Finance Team
Do you see the Finance team as a help or a hindrance when it comes to Sales? Perhaps the answer depends on the way you look at them and the job that they are tasked with doing. Sure, there may be times when they appear to be the people who are standing in the way of ‘just the right discount deal’ that will enable you to close a deal. But like the other departments, these people have job to do too their goal is to ensure consistency, predictability and to preserve the gross margins on the sales that are concluded.
Finance is also a customer; they consume your Sales Forecast information, and they make predictions based on that. Their predictions inform other departments, such as Production and manufacturing.
What about Sales? Can they really help there? Yes! Yes, they can if you see them as part of your virtual team. They can help directly with a customer’s finance team. As we will see in a later Workshop, they can help to build the Financial Value Proposition for you. In addition, they can be a source of help and advice to enable a customer to make an investment in your solution through the provision of financing options. I have seen Finance teams work directly with customer finance folks to help them see a way to finance a new investment based on how other customers have done the same thing. They can be a help, especially since they ‘talk the same language’ as the customer finance team.
Sales Operations
Most salespeople already work closely with the Sales Ops team. After all, they are part of the same overall team, and they report to the same senior executive. However, many salespeople underestimate the extent to which the sales ops people themselves can be a source of help in the TSP. Like the marketing department, SalesOps has access to a wealth of data and analysis which can help you. This information can make the difference between your having a plan that works and one which is based on false assumptions.
The Sales Ops team may well be the custodians of the TSPs. They certainly have access to all of the TSPs for each of the Territory managers and therefore they can be help through sharing good ideas and examples off best practice. Again, use this resource, engage with them, get them to feel involved.
Sales Managers
It should go without saying that your manager should be considered a valuable part of your virtual team. They are your coach and your leader. But they can be a valuable ‘player coach’ too, accompanying you on sales calls and helping to close deals, negotiating with management for resources and discounts etc.
But more than that, they can help you develop the TSP, and they can be a sounding board to check assumptions and provide a reality check.
Executive Leadership Team or ELT
In some companies, the ELT already have a formal list of Key Accounts for whom they are an Executive Sponsor. If not, this is something you could suggest, or at the very least suggest that an Executive support you on a Strategic key Account.
These ELT members may well be part of a formal Quarterly Business Review (QBR) process. More on this in a coming module.
Partners
If part of the go-to-market strategy for your TSP relies on your third-party channel alliance partners then clearly they should be seen as part of your virtual team. It can be difficult to get them engaged if they are working with a great many vendors, but this is another case of ‘the more your involve them, the more they will help’.
The key is to get them aligned on your TSP. They can’t, or won’t, do that if they don’t know what it is and why you have chosen the strategy that you have. We will devote another module to this later today.
Exercise 2.7
Course Manual 8: Alliance Partner Strategy
This module (and this section in the Territory Sales Plan) is clearly based on developing your strategy to do more business with and through your third-party Channel Partners and Alliance Partners. Try not to get too hung-up on the terminology. If you feel that your organization uses slightly different terms, simply change the headings in this section.
If you really feel that this section is not relevant to your business, because you do not have any third-party partners, then by all means delete the section in the Excel document and move to the next module. You can use the extra time gained by extending the 11th module on developing your Action Plan. This will save you time in the Project Study.
However, perhaps not so fast! Before you dismiss this section out of hand, take a moment to reflect on whether or not you could enhance your changes of hitting your target if you were able to develop a more productive and meaningful partner strategy. In reality almost every company in the world works with and through a series of Business Partners. Perhaps, for some salespeople, these partnerships are managed by someone else and therefore an Account Manager might feel that their “Direct” sales function has nothing to do with the “Third-Party” sales function which is managed by the Channel team. In fact, in some cases, the two functions are seen to be operating in competition with a great deal of ‘channel conflict’ as a result.
We are going to look at all this from a slightly different perspective and to challenge your thinking a little to really see if there is a way that developing a better third-party strategy might help you increase your revenue and enable you to achieve your goals.
Let’s start by considering the more obvious sales-related channel partners. We are going to focus on the supply-chain model for B2B sales since that is the focus of the Sales Growth Program. We therefore will not consider the wholesale-retail side of the distribution chain. In B2B third party sales the players usually fall into one of the following categories:
1. Distributors – these partners usually have the right to sell or distribute your company’s products within a specific territory, mostly based on a geographic or vertical market segment. They tend to be larger companies with the ability to hold inventory of product. They buy the inventory form the vendor and therefore they are entitled to sell the products at whatever price they choose. They usually do not (although they might) sell directly to an end customer. More commonly, they sell to Resellers (hence their name) because these companies buy from Distributors and sell to end customers.
2. Resellers – these tend to be smaller businesses. They conduct the sales campaigns on behalf of the vendor/distributor, and they earn a commission for doing so. Usually, they do not hold inventory. They buy the products they need at the time of the sale and often have them shipped directly from the distributor or vendor straight to the customer.
Then there are the more focused types of reseller partner:
3. System Integrators (SI’s) – most prevalent in the case of high-tech sales, SI’s are the large consulting/service organizations who act as the third-party sales agent for a complex group of products which need to be integrated to form a total customer solution. The SI’s will usually control the entire customer relationship and will call upon manufacturers/distributors/resellers to provide the products when needed. Crucially, these companies will typically charge for the integration and installation and implementation service itself and they are more interested in making a healthy margin on this business than they are in earning a commission on the sale of the product itself.
4. Value Added Resellers (VAR’s) – in reality, most resellers in the IT space have evolved to become what the industry calls VARs or Value-Added Resellers. Like the SI’s the VAR’s wrap other service around the sale of the product to earn revenue above and beyond the value of the product sale. VARs and other Resellers will often sell for different vendors. Their value proposition to the customer is that they can offer ‘the best’ solution from a variety of manufacturers, the downside for the direct salespeople is that they perceive this as being disloyal because they risk losing the deal to a lower priced competitor if the VAR gets involved. Hence the channel conflict begins.
Finally, there are the much larger partners, often referred to as:
5. Alliance Partners – these tend to be the large players in any particular industry or line-of-business. They dominate the market in the goods or services that they provide, and they partner with many (often hundreds or thousands) of partners. In the IT space for example, almost any software company that is involved in any type of cloud-based software solution will need to count Google, Microsoft and AWS as one of their Alliance partners.
Case Study
Rhythms was a fast-growing Internet Service Provider (ISP) operating throughout the US. They had developed a strong market position, out-growing many of their competitors and securing significant funding for growth. Their investors were impressed by the management team’s ability to grow and were willing to fund more of that growth.
ISP’s need to work with a Carrier (a Phone Company) in order to offer the internet/data services that they sell to their target market, mostly small-medium sized businesses. The Carriers themselves kept the large business Enterprise sales to themselves, leaving the ISPs to service the smaller sized business market.
Rhythms had worked hard to develop their relationship with AT&T. As the biggest carrier in the US market, AT&T was seen as the key to unlocking huge future potential. Having concluded the deal with this new Alliance Partner, the Rhythms sales teams were told to stop selling direct and to sell through and with the AT&T sales teams who would help open doors with a huge number of medium-sized businesses.
The problem is that nothing happened. Although the agreement between senior execs in both companies agreed that they would work together, the reality on the ground was very different. It emerged that the typical AT&T Account Manager had 231 different products and services that they could (or should) sell. Now they had 232. No surprise that they knew little or nothing about the value proposition of Rhythms. They continued to sell what they knew and the new business for Rhythms started to dry-up. Instead of the AT&T being the panacea for them, it became a poisoned chalice. Not long later Rhythms could not service their debt and they were forced to close their doors. What if the sales teams had done a better job of working with their AT&T counterparts? We will never know.
As you will see from the layout of this section of the TSP, we have divided the section into two areas to distinguish between the Alliance partners and the other channel partners. You must decide how you want to categorize this. There are no rights and wrongs. It’s up to you to decide. Our strong recommendation is that you do not delete anything until you are 100% sure that this does not apply to you, and that there is no way in which this can help you achieve your goals.
Other than inserting the names of the companies and the names of the appropriate contacts, the real value of this exercise is to develop ideas for how they might help you achieve your target. You will certainly find that these third-party companies have their own goals too. Success lies in understanding how you can help each other and leveraging their skills, experience, and resources to help you achieve your goals. If you can find the win-win, you will have found a very valuable partner because you will have created leverage. After all, the real reason that most companies embark on channel strategy in the first place is to increase the number of ‘feet on the street’ that they have. You have the opportunity to make that a reality in the territory that you own.
Let’s not forget your own internal channel management team who are similarly motivated and measured on increasing the sales through each and every channel partner. If you can help facilitate that, you create the win-win-win. You should therefore have included their name in the list of the Virtual sales Team members in the last module.
You will notice that in the Channel Partner section there is a focus on the dates and locations of the Channel Partner’s QBRs. This is one example of a strategy that you might employ to draw your two companies together and to explore the win-win. If you can get yourself invited to, and included in, the partner’s QBR, you have the opportunity to learn more about their strategy and also to explain your own. If you can explain your ideas and rationale, you have a greater chance of being able to influence them to try something new, or better still, work alongside you to help you achieve your goals while also increasing their own revenue.
In the IT industry there has been a major shift in recent years, a shift toward what is known as a “Direct-Touch, Partner Fulfill” model. Under such an arrangement, the vendor might completely cease all direct sales in order to grow partner loyalty. But they don’t stop selling. Confused? Let me explain. A direct-touch model means that the vendor sales team will do the majority of the heavy-lifting when it comes to sales. In other words, their salespeople will be involved throughout the sales cycle to make sure that the customer understands the value that they offer and how they are differentiated from other companies. But they promote the channel partner and the company through which the business will be conducted, and the partner will service and support the customer. They handle the implementation. The partnership works because the vendors direct sales team are paid and rewarded based on all sales in their Territory, regardless of whether or not the sale is made by a partner. In fact, when fully implemented, this strategy means that the vendor will never take any business direct. Everything goes through a partner.
Now your organization may not be ready for this model but try to think about how you can leverage the channel partners to help you achieve your goal. Let’s consider a few examples:
New Business Focus – let’s assume that you are happy with the strategy that you developed earlier today in relation to your chosen key accounts but that this still leaves a large gap to close. One solution is to secure new business, but this means finding lots of new contacts and the sales cycle may be too long to enable you to hit your goal. What if a partner could help? What if a channel partner already had contacts with, or better still, business with a large number of smaller businesses. You can still focus on your large accounts, but they can help you to get into the smaller business. You just need to equip them with the knowledge and skills that they need to articulate the value of your solutions. You therefore develop an action plan to do just that. That’s what you write into this section for 1, or a number of different partners.
Large Accounts – your TSP has identified a number of Large Account prospects with whom you currently have no business. But your Alliance partner does. They are looking for ways to extend their partnership with this large customer. You have part of a solution. What if you could get them to see the value of including your products and services as part of a solution that they can offer to the customer? What if you could show them how your solution will also drive more business for them? You develop a plan and propose it to them in your next meeting.
Mutual Gain – can you find a way to show reciprocity. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. In other words, develop a plan to learn more about what your channel partner is trying to achieve and see if there is a way for you to help them while at the same time securing their commitment to help you. For example, an SI partner might be looking for ways to extend their business relationship with a key customer, one with whom you want to do more business too. You can demonstrate that the SI can start another large integration project on the back of the implementation of your solution. Yu product sales might be relatively unimportant to them and taken in isolation it is not sufficient to get them interested in helping. But taken together with the large consulting and services opportunity it becomes something worthy of their time and resource. Together you win.
Having developed some thoughts and ideas you should explore them further through discussion with the rest of the team. Your Channel Account Manager or Channel Development Manager will be a key resource, but so too will your manager and perhaps other people too. Have you considered the Channel marketing team? What could they do to help further? The more you brainstorm, the more likely you are to find some worthwhile actions. The key is to find things which take advantage of the key attributes of both teams. Partners may have contacts and relationships; you have innovative products and services.
Exercise 2.8
Course Manual 9: Marketing Plan
You will have noticed that there is a whole section in the Territory Sales Plan (TSP) devoted to Marketing. This is because the support that you get from your own marketing team, and that of your Channel Partners, is likely to be instrumental in whether or not you will hit your target. The more aligned you are with the Marketing and Product Marketing team the better. If you know more about what the Marketing Team has planned, you are better able to leverage that to sell more. If the Marketing Team knows more about your strategy, they will be better able to develop a plan to support you.
Just to be clear, we are not suggesting that you, as one salesperson, can influence the direction of the whole Marketing department, but there may be opportunities for adaptation or customization. One such example, which we will discuss below, is the development of an account-based marketing strategy. This might involve taking some of the more generic initiatives that they already have in place and customizing these more specifically to suit the needs of one of your biggest accounts.
This section in the TSP is divided into 5 parts:
1. What marketing activities will you leverage? And How?
2. What Alliance Partner National marketing activities will you leverage?
3. What Alliance Partner Regional marketing activities will you leverage?
4. What Channel marketing activities will you leverage?
5. What Ideas to you have or Needs to you have for your own Marketing Team?
There are some assumptions here, namely that you do have a third-party strategy which involves your channel partners. If that does not apply to you for some reason, you can delete the references to this. If it does apply, then clearly the first step is to find out what activities they have planned. This is where you would start by making some notes to remind yourself to go and find out. Most likely you don’t know exactly what these things are. Most likely the people in the Alliance or Channel team that you regularly speak with will not know either. This will prompt you to go and seek out their marketing folks to learn more. That activity in itself will bring you closer together and may spawn other ideas.
In addition, there is an assumption that you will be doing some joint marketing with your partners. This may, or may not, be the case but again it is an opportunity to find out (and possibly to start something new). Most strategic partners will engage in some level of joint marketing activities. This might range from joint advertising to shared booths at a trade show. It might be jointly sponsored promotional campaigns or shared mailing lists.
There are really two parts to your strategy in this section, one is to learn more about what the marketing teams have planned, and the other is to be creative yourself and suggest things which you believe will be useful to you. So what might be some of these ideas? This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but we will outline below some thoughts and ideas that you may want to consider. How much of this is relevant to your own market and your situation is up to you to decide but, as before, try to think outside the box – what might you be able to do that will make your task of growing sales revenue a little easier?
We will start by considering some of the more traditional marketing activities and then move to some of the more up-to-date and innovative.
Corporate Marketing – let’s start to calling-out the fact that some marketing activity may be focused on the goal of raising awareness of the company and the breadth of solutions that it offers. This might include a corporate marketing program designed to raise awareness that the company is now adding a focus on a specific Line-of-Business or business vertical. You can see immediately how this might align with part of your own segmentation strategy; indeed the two things may go hand-in-hand. This is another example of how “messaging” is key to helping you understand the company positioning toward a particular market and how you can use that same messaging in your sales campaigns. Getting better aligned with your marketing team on this type of activity really makes a difference.
Brand and Image – If you are working for a business that already has a very strong Brand image then you are fortunate. The fact that customers and prospective customers can immediately identify the brand and what it stands for can make a big difference to their initial receptivity to your sales messages. Of course, it can count against you too. If your Brand is very and associated with a particular product or market, that can make things more difficult when you launch a different product or want to move into a new market. Again, this comes down to messaging and getting better aligned with the marketing team to leverage their strategy to help you.
Product Marketing – beyond the all-encompassing marketing activity associated with the company and its image, product marketing is more focused on specific products or product lines. It tends to be oriented more specifically to promoting specific solutions towards specific markets and type of customer. It is important for you to understand what this is today and where your Product marketing is taking things in the future. This might relate to marketing activity which is related to specific new product launches. This can be a great benefit to you, but it can also be a hindrance. It’s a benefit when it raises customer awareness of a specific new product coming to market. It can be a hinderance if that messaging causes existing customers to postpone a buying decision until they see the new version. You can sell around these issues, but you should be aware that they might become an issue.
Case Study
A large global high-tech company operating in the Healthcare industry went through a challenging transition. They had embarked on a major change management program to help their sales teams to adapt from being a product-led, technology-focused sales team to become more customer-focused and consultative in their approach. This involved a radical change in sales technique for many of the salespeople who had been brought-up on a very transactional sales model focused on differentiation based on their products. Most of the training they had received in the past had been product-focused.
The product sales training was usually led by the Product Marketing team and this same team tended to lead the effort in terms of the design and delivery of the company’s marketing programs. The marketing team was busy trying to raise the brand awareness of their products in the marketplace. All of the supporting marketing and sales collateral was product-focused. Their product sheets were designed to tell customers all about the product feature-function.
A particularly savvy and successful sales account manager started to question the marketing strategy. They started to ask searching questions about how and why certain marketing materials were developed. This prompted the marketing people to wonder why they were being asked these questions. They sought more information and learned that the sales team had been working to differentiate themselves through the ‘way they sell’ not just the products that they sell. No-one in the sales leadership had thought to share the change management strategy with the Head of Marketing.
Once they became aware of the new strategy, the marketing team asked to include their staff in the Consultative Sales training. Special sessions were set-up for the marketing teams. Marketing folks joined the sales teams in others. As a result, the marketing messaging and company positioning changed. Customers commented on the change in approach. The sales teams welcomed the better aligned sales collateral and customer-focused product data sheets.
Whether we are talking Corporate marketing or Product marketing there are likely to be a number of things that your marketing teams are doing that you could leverage. Typically, these will include things like:
Website – The marketing team will have group of people focused entirely on the development and update of the corporate website. This will usually extend to links to other external sites including, or course, the Channel Partners and Alliances. It will likely extend to Social Media links, may include Blogs and Videos, and will be the place where PR content is posted in the form of Press Releases. Most corporate websites will have a Product and Solution section where customers and prospects can download PDFs of Product Brochures, White Papers, Customer Success Stories, and other interesting articles. We know that customers will conduct 57% of their buying journey before they engage with a salesperson. If they are interested in your company as a potential supplier, they will certainly have checked-out your website. Any prospects who have clicked on the website may have had their information captured for targeting purposes. Those who have entered their data tin order to download a Report or White Paper will certainly have done so. These will become ‘web-leads’ for your Marketing Development Reps. Based on all this, here are a number of thoughts to consider for your action plan:
• Check your own company website regularly, at least once a week, to make sure you are clear about how it is organized and what is being said.
• Do the same for your key competitors’ websites, so you know what your customers may perceive in terms of similarities and differentiation.
• Copy weblinks to a Drafts folder in your email application so you have easy access to these when you need them for emailing to a customer or prospect.
• Download the latest PDFs and Whitepapers so you can share these easily when in a meeting with a customer and you may not have internet access.
• Get familiar with the best video testimonials so you can direct your prospects to the most relevant information.
• Learn about the web-lead to qualified lead process so you understand exactly what happens to potential leads within your territory. For example, what happens when an employee, working for a prospective company, but working from home in Georgia becomes a web-lead? If the HQ of the company they are working for is based in your territory, where does the lead go?
Direct Mail/Email – Print mail by traditional mailing might be ‘old hat’ to many companies today but there is still a great deal of marketing and promotional activity which is dependent on a Direct Mail campaign or more likely an Email Marketing campaign. With the advent of robot-mail servers and AI (which we will discuss later) the volume of email marketing has exploded. Some questions to consider as you think about you might leverage this with your marketing team:
• Do you know what campaigns are planned for this year?
• Who is targeted?
• Do you know the nature of the content/messaging?
• What is the call to action in these mailers?
• How are they being followed up?
• Have you thought about adding some names from your personal database, so you know that your prospects receive the mail?
Press Relations (PR) – Most marketing teams will have a whole group of people focused on external communications and press relations. Much of this will be directed toward web and social media. Some will still be targeted towards traditional press (albeit ‘printed’ on their website). Ultimately most of this content will also be posted on your own website. Much of this content tends to have a limited shelf life in terms of its interest to the media, however, it could be useful to you over a much longer period. Also, consider the fact that these PR articles which are actually printed in a relevant newspaper or industry periodical will carry much greater weight than those simple releases as Press Releases from your own Marketing department. Thoughts and ideas:
• Download Press Releases that you think might be useful to you or save the links in your Bookmarks.
• Download Printed Articles and save them as PDFs for easy emailing to your customers and prospects.
• Don’t rely 100% on the links to these documents, PDFs are better because the links may be deleted over time.
• Talk to your PR team about articles they have planned.
• Suggest topics and talk to your customers about their interest and willing ness in being the subject of a success story. These are much more useful to you later if you can explain first-hand the background to the story when talking with a new customer.
• Make sure that the PR team are targeting the most appropriate Journals and publications for your territory. Remember that this includes Regional periodicals and also Line-of-Business, industry specific journals.
Advertising – How much do you know about the future planned advertising that your marketing team are planning? Advertising is something which takes a great deal of planning. There is a long lead-time due to the nature of ad design, copy-checking, and placement. This means that your marketing teams are working on advertising campaigns months in advance of when they are released. If you know about these, you can be better prepared to capitalize of them when they happen. Even better, you may even be able to suggest adaptations for region-specific advertising which aligns better with your TSP. You can certainly use screenshots of your print advertising to enhance your sales pitches and PowerPoint presentations. Hence a few ideas to consider:
• Find out about future advertising bookings and align a personal email outreach to that.
• Suggest places for your marketing team to advertise in your territory.
• Do the same for your Partners’ advertising plans.
• Suggest that you might be able to help negotiate a joint campaign with the marketing team of a Partner with whom you have a good close contact.
• Think about your biggest customers … are there any opportunities for joint advertising?
Promotional Campaigns – Everyone likes promos. These might be associated with one the other marketing strategies, or they may be standalone. They are likely to be market or product specific and will usually have a limited time period of validity. Marketing promotions can be integrated with activity at a Trade Show or combined with an Advertising or PR campaign. They might be promoted via the website or in combination with a direct mail, email or Social Media campaign. Like many of the things which the marketing department can do, or assist with on your behalf, much of it depends on whether or not you keep your database of contacts up-to-date. This is important for data tracking and also for the marketing team to test and measure the effectiveness of different campaigns. To get the best from these you should:
• Find out in advance about what is planned.
• Think about how you might be able to customize or fine-tune the promo for your territory.
• Update all your contacts in the CRM before the promo starts.
• Make sure your partners are aware and talk to them about whether they want to do some combined promotional event too.
Trade Shows/Exhibitions/Conferences/Events – There is almost certainly one or more major trade shows covering your industry. It is likely that your marketing team will be heavily involved in the planning and implementation of these major events. Most of these will be geographically focused, some might be global in their reach. In most cases these trade shows will be combined with Exhibitions and Conferences. They are therefore an opportunity for you to meet with existing and new customers. They provide an opportunity to meet senior people in your prospective accounts, especially if they are speaking at the conference. You should also consider trade shows which are the key events for your target industry sectors, based on the segmentation in your TSP. For example, if you are selling transportation services to the high-tech market, go to the big shows for the IT industry. They will be different from the ones for the Logistics industry. If you are selling Telecom systems to hospitals, think about attending Healthcare events, not just Telecom events. Some ideas therefore:
• Go to events for your target industry verticals, not just your own industry.
• Encourage your marketing team to consider investing in a booth at these other events.
• Suggest that some of your best customers might like to speak at the major industry conference, and better still, suggest a joint presentation.
Account-based Marketing – Most marketing departments, like everywhere else in the business, are trying to do a great many things with limited resources. Their budgets are limited and they always want more people resources. Therefore, it is not surprising that they will tend to focus on doing things which they believe will provide the best ‘bang for the buck’. This results in campaigns which are designed to appeal to the widest audience possible. Of course, the risk is that they spread things too thin. There is a growing trend toward ‘account-based’ marketing, especially in scenarios where a company is looking to sell its products and services to very large enterprise accounts. Account-based marketing, also known as ABM is difficult for many marketing departments to embrace because it requires a much greater understanding of target accounts, including insights into their specific needs, and likely pain. It is difficult to do this for very many accounts, but it’s worth it. According to Postal: “87% of B2B marketers agree that an ABM strategy delivers a higher ROI.” They go on to say that “ABM is becoming the preferred framework in the enterprise B2B market because the value of these key accounts need to be nurtured with a level of care and personalization that traditional campaigns lack”. So, what does all this mean for you?
• You should do your best to encourage your marketing team to develop an ABM strategy for your largest accounts.
• You should provide the insight and data they need, after all, you should know the customer and their competitors.
• You should seek input and ideas from the marketing team too, they may have access to better research and data that twill create a messaging and positioning strategy that you have not considered.
Social Media and Social Selling – In much of what we have considered so far we will surely have been considering all of these marketing efforts within a social media umbrella. This is not to say that traditional print and other media is dead, far from it, but ‘social’ is where it’s at today! Everything that you and your marketing team do together must be constructed in such a way as to leverage the opportunities presented by social media. There has certainly been a great deal of flux in this arena and no doubt this will continue. LinkedIn probably presents the greatest value in terms of B2B sales but there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that this is changing. Each demographic cohort has its own different preferences. What worked for baby-boomers is becoming less relevant as more people from the GenX, GenY and now GenZ groups become increasingly important in the buying process. This all means that although you might not be a big TikTok user, your customers might be. You need to be where they are. Things about some potential actions here:
• Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and interesting for a customer to read.
• Follow your customers and learn which media platform they are using, join the same Groups.
• Link your social media platforms and re-post content from your marketing team.
• Talk to your marketing team about how the lead-flow process works for social leads.
• Comment on your customer’s posts and be seen to be engaged and interested.
AI – Artificial Intelligence and new AI-based marketing tools are already making a big impact on the industry. Perhaps it’s too early to assess the value of these tools in terms of their effectiveness in generating leads but they are already making an impact on potential for reduction in marketing costs and perhaps fewer people resources needed. This might result in fewer people in the marketing department, or it might mean that these people are freed-up to do more ABM. Much of the leg-work in developing ABM will be enhanced by AI. Some actions might include:
• Talking with your marketing team about their plans for AI.
• Understanding what they are doing today and how AI enhances their activity.
• Using AI yourself (via ChatGPT or Bard) to help you develop some ideas for marketing to your targeted industry verticals.
Finally, in addition to all of the above, remember that your marketing partners may be most valuable to you as a source of data and information for your TAM and as input for your Strategic Intent. You will find that the marketing team may have subscriptions to key research providers that would be useful to you. These providers will vary by region. Some are better than others in specific markets. Ask your marketing teams what they use and why they think those are the best. They include things like:
• Statista
• Hoovers
• Dunn&Bradstreet
• ZoomInfo
• Cognism
• GlobalData
Each of these providers, and many others, can be an invaluable source of information to better inform your Territory Definition and your Go-To-Market Strategy. Many of these providers require a paid subscription in order to get the really useful information. Your marketing teams may have access already. Your channel partners may have access to others and will share the information if you just ask them.
Exercise 2.9
Course Manual 10: Personal Professional Growth Plan
Your sales success is not solely measured by the standard metrics of money and quota achievement. Obviously, these are important, that’s why we have devoted so much time to them in the TSP. But they are not everything. And to measure yourself by these alone will be to miss an opportunity. An opportunity for yourself and for others. In addition to the pure sales metrics and sales revenue, what else do you want to achieve for yourself? It’s beneficial to add your own long-term personal goals that will help contribute to your on-going sales success. All professionals, be they professional athletes or sales professionals, should have a personal goal for continuous improvement. Many other professionals have this mandated by their industry, take for example Accountants, Architects, Doctors, and Lawyers. Their ongoing qualification requires that they undertake some form of training which qualifies toward their CPE (Continuing Professional Education). Each thing they do counts towards their CPE credits.
Hence your TSP should include plans to stretch yourself personally and professionally. This is the section where you will consider ideas for this personal and professional development. We will provide some thoughts, ideas and examples, then it’s up to you to develop your own personal plan. Everyone’s plan will be different because you all have different backgrounds, different levels of experience and different things that you feel confident about … and other areas where you feel less so.
No matter how experienced you are, things change. In fact, as people say, “Change is the only Constant”. Your company is changing, your products and services are evolving. Your customers are changing, companies are merging, regulations are changing. Industries change and external pressures force unforeseen change. There are macro-economic trends and geopolitical changes which impact business. If you stand still, you fall behind. You have to be thinking about your own ongoing development.
You will see that this section asks you to set yourself a clear, SMART objective. This should describe your goal and say something about how you intend to accomplish this goal. We recommend that you start to write this with the words “By the end of this coming year I want to have …” – and you insert the ‘what’.
When you look back on this upcoming year, what would you like to have accomplished for yourself that will contribute to your future sales success?
Let’s consider some examples or potential ideas to help you. We will categorize these under three key headings:
Education
Under the ‘education’ title we will include all those things that you could do to better educate yourself in order to make you a better salesperson. This education might be to update yourself on things that have changed, or it might be to learn from scratch about an aspect of the business or the industry that you have not yet been well-informed about. How will you go about educating yourself?
Reading – you might start by developing a Reading List. This might include books on your profession. There are a multitude of sales related books on the market. Some are available in local language versions, others will be in English language only. For some of your, learning a new language might also be part of your goal, or for others it might be to improve your English language skills. Here’s a starter list of potential reads to enhance your general knowledge of selling:
• SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham, Eli Woods, et al.
• The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman
• Hope is not a Strategy by Rick Page
• The Trusted Advisor by Maister, Galford and Green
• Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan
• Solution Selling by Michael Bosworth
• Power Base Selling by Jim Holden
• The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
• The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
You might also consider some books on specific aspects of selling, for example:
• To improve your Negotiation skills, try “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury
• To help Close deals try Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
• For more on Competitive Strategy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• To improve communication skills, Crucial Conversations by Joseph Grenny and Kerry Patterson
Of course, you could add some generic business books to this list. Things like:
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Whatever your list, try to set a goal to read 1-2 of these books in the coming year.
Research – another way to enhance your education of a particular sphere of business or a specific market, is to undertake some focused and detailed web-research. You can start by simply web-searching for a particular subject. You can now get the newly emerging AI tools to help you.
As we saw in the earlier module, researching industry Trends which might be impacting your customers is very important. You should use internet business tools such Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.
You might consider taking out a subscription to a publication, most likely available in an online format. One of the best of these is The Harvard Business Review, but also consider The Economist, as well as Business-oriented newspapers like The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Case Study
A training company had been working for many years for a leading Medical Imaging company. The company operated worldwide and manufactured X-Ray imaging systems which it sold to hospitals, health centers, clinics, doctors’ offices and dental practices. The company had customized the training materials to reflect exactly the customer’s sales process and the solutions they sold. They developed role-play exercises and training materials which were very focused on the sales environment in which the sales team operated every day.
The training was very successful, and the results were impressive. The return on investment in the training was clear, it was renewed annually, and it continued for many years. Now, this customer had another division which the training company had not yet done any business with. This division was selling X-Ray systems to Industrial companies for an entirely different purpose. It was referred to as ‘non-destructive testing’ or NDT. Their customers were in industries like Oil and Gas, Aviation, Security, and Manufacturing, not Healthcare. These customers were using x-ray imaging to check for product faults and to conduct preventative maintenance.
The training company was asked to develop and implement similar training for this new division. They had to learn a whole new industry and a different application for the x-ray systems. So what did they do? They researched the marketplace; they identified and profiled their customers’ competitors. They researched product information to learn about differentiating value. And they customized all of the materials for this different group of salespeople, even though they were from the same company as their existing customer. The hard-work paid off. Not only did they have a very successful training program but they were able to leverage this new-found knowledge to develop new business with other companies operating in the NDT and Industrial Imaging space. They did well in this segment too because they arrived with instant credibility and won the respect of the new NDT salespeople.
Knowledge – as you consider the topics that you feel you may need to be better educated about; I would recommend that you think about this in terms of how they may enhance your:
• Knowledge of your Company – its history, financial performance, brand equity, the executive team, organization, alliances and channel partners, the website and intranet, and social media involvement.
• Knowledge of your Products – their features, functions, advantages, and benefits. Differentiating factors, pricing and implementation issues, success stories and references.
• Knowledge of your Market – industry trends, regulatory and compliance issues, macro-economic factors and geopolitical pressures.
• Knowledge of your Customers – their history and goals, their strategy and financial performance, their key executives, organizational structure, partners, their website, social media presence and which competitors they already do business with.
• Knowledge of your Competitors – their history, strategy and financial performance, their key executives, organizational structure, products, services and their partners, their website, social media presence and which of your target customers they are already doing business with.
Training
Your undertaking this Sales Growth Program will likely be a large part of your investment in your training for this year, but what about any other extra training that you might need or want. If your company provides you with the ability to sign yourself up for other extra training, consider what type of courses you would like to undertake. There is no shame in admitting that you may need extra help in certain areas, far from it. It shows your interest in self-development and your desire to improve. These are qualities that will always be respected and admired by your managers.
Skills – sales skills training might include things like Qualification skills, Telephone selling, Questioning and Discovery, Listening skills, Negotiating, Presentation Skills, Closing Skills and Proposal Writing. We will cover some of these things in this curriculum. Some of them may be outside the scope of this program. When it comes to skills development, some skills are generic and can be learned effectively in an open, public course environment. Other skills are likely to be specific to your own industry and your company way of working. These will require a more customized, in-house approach. If you want to develop skills specific to the sale of your company products and services these courses will most likely come from your own internal team.
Another idea, which does not require formal training as such, is to ask for help and coaching. Many companies set-up a formal ‘buddy-coaching’ or mentoring system. You should take advantage of these opportunities since they are all focused on helping you to be more successful by learning from other people’s experience and improving your own skills.
Process – your options in terms of finding solutions for sales process training will be similar to that for the sales skills. These might be things like Sales Forecasting, Funnel Management, Channel Development, Account Management, Account Planning, Sales Opportunity Planning and Call Planning. They might include Lead Management and using the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Once again, the good news is that many of these things will be covered in this Sales Growth Program, and there will be some that are outside the scope of this course, or specific to your company and therefore offered y your own in-house sales enablement function.
Sales Tools – every company’s sales tools are different. No doubt, as you have progressed through your sales career, you have already seen many different systems being used by different companies. In most cases the tools themselves are designed to accomplish similar objectives but the nuances of the way they each work, and perhaps the way in which they have been customized by different companies, means that extra training is required.
You have most likely received some basic training in these tools as part of your new-hire training process. Other times, the tools will have been added and implemented after you came on board. Again, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Something as simple as getting some extra training on, for example, the Expense Management tool can help you save a lot of time later in the year – and free-up more time for selling or enhance the time available to spend with your family and friends.
Personal
This also brings us to the section on your personal goals. What do YOU want for yourself?
“If you don’t know here you are going, how will you know when you’ve got there?” Anon
Perhaps you have crystal clear clarity on this, many people do not. It helps if you set goals and write them down. The action of putting things in writing helps you become clearer about what you want to achieve. It moves your goals from simply being thoughts, ideas, or dreams, and makes them visible and thereby more real. This section will help you to clarify your future by writing down some of the things that are important to you personally.
By now, you should be very clear about your goals for the business, the territory, and the sales revenue that you are targeted to achieve. In this section you will try to become just as focused on your goals for yourself. Think of these in terms of:
Career – we’ve all heard someone say those words “Where do you want to be in x year’s time?”. We all probably have some vague notion of what that might be but just like having a TSP for the Territory, if we don’t have a plan to achieve the goal, we are likely to fall short. We have already looked at what you can do to enhance your skills and knowledge. What about your goals for promotion and career development? Do you see yourself moving into a sales management role? What extra experience would you need? Do you need to broaden your exposure to new things and new people? Think about what you would like to do to enhance your resume. Not because you are looking to change jobs, but because you are interested in growth within your existing business.
Family and Friends – do you feel that you get to spend enough time with the people you love? What can you do about that? What are you actually going to do about it? It will help if you start by setting a simple goal to set aside more time to focus on family and friends. This might be aiming to get home by a certain time. Determining not to work at weekends. Reducing travel and time away from home. You may feel that it is impossible to change things but just setting a small, achievable goal can help.
Community – would you feel better if you had done more to help other people in your community? What goals do you have for philanthropy? These things don’t have to mean financial outlay and donations. In most cases people and organizations would be more grateful of your time. Your personal help and assistance would be much appreciated. One salesperson volunteered her time to provide a free taxi service for young women in a college town to get home safely late in the evening. Another got so much satisfaction from helping at a local foodbank during a corporate giving day that they volunteered once a month thereafter. You might want to do more for your children’s school or sports team but work always seems to get in the way … until you set a plan to change things.
So, in this section of the TSP, write down these goals and aspirations for your own personal development. Make them associated with your professional development but don’t forget to include something for your own well-being too.
Make notes in the column on the right of the TSP about any questions or thoughts you have relating to what resources are available to you and how to access them.
Exercise 2.10
Course Manual 11: Specific Action Plans
So far today we have focused on the development of your Territory Sales Plan. There are a number of objectives in having you undertake this process:
1. Vision – To make you step-back and take a look at your territory objectively so you can set some longer-term goals. This involved looking further ahead than you might do normally to help you ‘see the wood for the trees’ so to speak. As salespeople we often get too narrowly focused on ‘this quarter’ or ‘next quarter’ or ‘year-end’. As a result, we can lose sight of the bigger picture and sometimes we fail to see our true potential.
2. Strategy – To help you develop a clear strategy for how you will accomplish these long-term goals. The TSP is not intended to be a ‘blue sky’ or ‘pie in the sky’ unobtainable plan but rather a very well though-out, pragmatic plan which you can have confidence in achieving.
3. Action – In order to accomplish the first 2 items here, you will need to develop your plan, right down to the individual actions that need to be taken in order for you to accomplish the goals you have set for yourself. That’s what this particular module is all about.
As with any plan, the primary objective of the planning process is to develop a strategy for what you want to achieve and a roadmap for how to get there. In this module we are going to develop the detailed actions that you need to take in order to turn the plan into a reality.
First though, it is worth reminding ourselves that the TSP is intended to be “living document”. What does this mean? It means that the TSP will be constantly updated and, as a result, the action plan section will need to be constantly updated too. As you move through the year, and from this year into next year, you will accomplish some of the things on your action list, you will change others and some you may need to delete or amend as circumstances change. We highlight this fact again here because it is important to remember that you are not developing a list once, but rather you will be undertaking an on-going process of defining and taking specific actions that will help you accomplish your objectives. This list is for YOU, not for your manager or anyone else. It is certainly a list which everyone on the virtual team needs to be aware of. In that sense it is a list for everyone, but the real beneficiary is you, yourself. This is how you will keep yourself on track with your TSP once the usual busy hustle and bustle of life resumes.
Action Planning Process
As you will see as we progress through the different workshops, we will be using the same basic process for the action planning section in several of these tools. Therefore, it behooves us to take some time here to explain the process and the rationale for how to use this section, and especially how to use it best for the TSP itself. The process is as follows:
1. Re-read the entire TSP. Read slowly and, as you do so, make some extra notes in the column on the right: “Notes, Actions, Information Needed”
2. Then read the Notes, Actions, Information Needed that you have and convert these into SMART actions by writing in detail what is required. Resist the temptation to add the dates and people, we will come back to that shortly.
3. Prioritize the Actions based on their urgency and importance. Some actions may have a sequential element to them, sort them into a logical sequence.
4. Having created the sequence, add the dates by which you want, or need, them to be accomplished. Remember that a SMART action is also realistic and achievable.
5. Decide who is the best or most appropriate person to undertake the action. That person should not be you for everything. Yes, you may have to do the lion’s share but delegate what you can to other members of your virtual team. Seek their input and their ideas. Make sure they take ownership for accomplishing the action by the agreed deadline.
30,60,90 Plan
We recommend that you employ a 30, 60, 90-day approach to this planning. In most cases there should not be many actions that require more than 90 days to accomplish. The process of prioritization above will help you develop the basic structure. This can then be integrated with the plan review process which we will discuss in the next module.
For yourself, you should establish a discipline of formally re-visiting your TSP on a monthly basis. Of course, you may glance at it regularly, but you should review the actions at least monthly. This will help you with the status reporting and will enable you to see very quickly whether or not your timing estimates were realistic. If you notice a pattern of constantly feeling like you are behind, you have 2 choices: to be more realistic with your deadlines or alternatively to make more time for this important strategic work and to spend less time on other ‘busy’ work.
If you have a formal extended team, you can establish a short monthly review of the actions outstanding. If your team is virtual, you can encourage a monthly update by emailing copies of the TSP on a set date each month.
Don’t feel limited by the 90-day time period. It is intended as a guideline, not a limit. If you genuinely have some actions which will take more than 90-days to complete, that’s OK. Better to record these long-term, more strategic actions than to forget about them entirely. For example, there might be some things which you will prefer to push until later in the year. For others, where you depend on other departments for the answers, they may not be able to accommodate your short-term sense of urgency. Don’t let these issues prevent you from recording the important actions that need to be undertaken in order for you to accomplish the TSP objectives.
Traffic Lights
You may well be familiar with the idea of using a ‘traffic light’ system to color-code the actions and illustrate how progress is being made. If not, let me explain the concept and help define some rules here:
Green = We’re on track, things are going according to plan
Yellow = Caution, there is some concern
Red = We’re behind where we need to be, there are problems or delays
Let’s consider how we might use each of these steps in our action planning process:
Everything should be GREEN at the outset. In other words, you should assume that as you embark on this new TSP, you have allocated the right amount of time to each action that needs to be accomplished. Some may require hours of work, others maybe days or weeks but they each have their time allotted and you should therefore start with an all Green list. Once you accomplish an action, it should automatically become Green.
Use RED for any items which have not been accomplished by the agreed deadline. It should go without saying but if you missed a deadline, the action should be highlighted as being Red, but it should not remain red for long. You should re-assess the timeline and change the action to a green or yellow status once you have undertaken the review and update.
YELLOW or Amber should be used to highlight those actions which are not yet overdue, but for which you have some concern. The concern may be due to an impending deadline, or it might be because you are aware that insufficient effort has been made towards the goal and therefore things are at risk. This can be a useful reminder to people who are tasked with accomplishing the action by a specific date. It can also be used to highlight concern for some actions which are dependent on others. For example, if there is dependency on having achieved an earlier action, and this is late, then it follows that the following actions may also be late.
Much has been written about the overuse of what some people call “RAG” reporting, this stands for the Red Amber Green color scheme. Some people are inclined to steer away from using Red because they want everything to look better. Some people only ever report something when everything is green. When used properly the colors can be useful to simply highlight areas that need your attention. But remember that something which is green may not have been completed, it just means that we are on track to complete this action on time. Something which is red is useful to you, because it shows you the things that you need to re-evaluate.
Time to Hide?
Since you will most likely be developing and updating these actions in your spreadsheet version of the TSP, you have the option to ‘hide’ the actions which you have already achieved and only keep visible those which are current.
We would encourage you not to delete and remove the actions that have already been completed. Better to keep them in the spreadsheet but hide them rather than delete them. Sometimes it’s useful to have a record of what you have been able to do and to reflect on what you have achieved. We will talk more about celebrating successes along the way, and one way to do this is to keep an eye of the progress that you are making by simply ‘hiding’ and unhiding’ the action plan list.
Case Study
Nortel was a massive global telecoms provider, headquartered in Canada and previously called Northern Telecom. At the height of its success, it employed nearly 95,000 people and its value accounted for almost a third of the entire Toronto Stock Exchange. However, in 2009 Nortel filed for bankruptcy. What happened? There were many theories and blame was attributed to everything from poor products and changes in IT which the company failed to keep on top of. There was even some suspicion that industrial espionage and copycat products from China brought down Nortel or at least accelerated its demise.
Certainly, when I was working with them, they vastly underestimated the emerging competition from Huawei. But Cisco did the same thing too. A detailed post-mortem on the company placed the blame mostly on strategic mistakes and poor management at the company. One of those strategic mistakes was the development of a culture in which everything was important. Everything was urgent. Everything had to be done yesterday.
For the sales teams this meant constantly chasing the most urgent requirements. Constantly fighting fires. Every company, and every individual needs to recognize that there must be some prioritization. Not all actions can be accomplished immediately, nor should they be. If you are constantly rushing from one activity to the next, you quickly lose sight of the big picture. Unfortunately for many teams, and/or companies, like Nortel, this means that you lose sight of what is really important … until it is too late.
Salespeople who are always chasing this month’s numbers will eventually lose sight of the true potential for themselves, their territory, and their company. Hence, we emphasize the importance of a more methodical action planning process which includes regular reviews, monitoring of progress and celebration of the small victories along the way. In sales, not all victories must be a win in terms of a sale being closed. Small wins can include identifying all of the buyers, defining the TAM, or getting a meeting with a new target account.
Teamwork
As they say, ‘teamwork makes the dream work’, and this is certainly true when it comes to the development and execution of your Territory Sales Plan. As we saw in an earlier module, you will be reliant on various members of your virtual team at different times. Therefore, you should include them in the action planning process too.
Once you have developed your initial action list, seek input from the team. Don’t just give them an empty sheet and expect them to add actions for themselves. Sharing involves you providing them with your draft actions and asking for their specific input:
• What have I left out?
• What needs to be changed?
• What should be added?
• Is everything clear?
• Do you understand what is expected of you?
Ask them to confirm their ability to accomplish any actions for which they are responsible. You cannot hold people accountable for doing something that they are not aware of, even if you think they should be aware. It is your responsibility, as the virtual sales team leader, to make sure that you let them know what you need and expect from them and keep them informed of progress and changes.
In the next module we will discuss the review process itself and how you can lead the more formal quarterly review process.
Exercise 2.11
Course Manual 12: Plan Reviews and QBRs
We have already discussed the fact that The Territory Sales Plan is intended to be referred to on a regular basis and kept alive as a living document. Don’t make this a ‘once and done’ exercise where the plan then languishes in a drawer or virtual filing cabinet until you are prompted to create another plan in a year’s time. It is much easier for you if you keep the document current. It will be much more useful to you if you keep it alive by constantly referring to the TSP as a ‘roadmap’ to guide your success in your territory.
We recommend that the best way to do this is to keep this document on your Desktop for easy and regular access. You can even consider setting aside time every two weeks for a 15-minute review of the document and to update the Action Plan.
Most likely your manager will want to review your progress on a periodic basis. For most companies this is likely to be Quarterly and perhaps have this associated as a key element of your Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) which you will conduct with management and with other members of the virtual team. You will need to be guided by your management team on the precise timing. Some companies may elect to have a formal team review twice per year, most choose the quarterly approach. Whatever your company policy, there is nothing to prevent you from having your own monthly update with members of your virtual team if you think this would be valuable. Some salespeople decide to start with a monthly review process in the first quarter and then to move to a quarterly approach thereafter.
In this module we are going to focus on how best to run an effective review process and how to facilitate a meaningful QBR. The more professional you are in managing these meetings, the more support you are likely to engender from the virtual team, and the more respected you will become. The QBR process is intended to help you to track progress and to give you and the rest of the team an opportunity to celebrate milestones achieved. The review will help you to identify challenges and together to develop plans to remove roadblocks.
Before we look at the format of the meeting itself, let’s consider some of the things that you should do before the meeting takes place:
Meeting Preparation
1. Review – if you have not done so in the recent past, conduct a thorough review of the TSP yourself. Look for things that need to be changed or amended. Update the plan with the progress that has been made. Add new information that you have received. Check the Action Plan and update the color status on all actions.
2. Clarify – based on the above, reach-out to any of the virtual team members to check on their progress regarding the action plan. What have they completed? Are some things taking longer than expected? Make sure you know the current status and seek their input if dates need to change.
3. Update – based on the 1-on-1 clarification and other input received, update the Action Plan. This can involve adding some new actions to be discussed during the QBR even if you are not yet able to assign dates and people to those actions. You will do this in the QBR meeting itself.
4. Invite – decide whether the QBR/review meeting will be in-person or remote and send a meeting invite to the entire virtual team. Make it clear that you need everyone in the meeting to have read the latest version of the TSP. Include the current version of the TSP as an attachment to the meeting invite. It is best if this is a collaborative document, so consider sending the TSP as a link to a shared Excel document.
5. Agenda – prepare a detailed agenda for the meeting and circulate this one-week before the meeting. The agenda should include all of the key topics, including how much time is allocated to each topic and who is expected to deliver each part of the meeting. In other words, it is up to you to let people know ahead of time if you expect them to speak to specific sections of the TSP. Remind people that they need to read the TSP, send the link again, and inform them that you will not be taking up their time during the meeting to review the entire document. Rather the meeting will be to discuss key issues, not conduct a group review of things that can be read in advance.
You will see below a suggested structure for how you should run these meetings, including a template for an agenda too. Of course, it is really up to you to decide exactly how you want to facilitate your meetings, so this is intended to provide a suggested structure that may help you facilitate a more positive and productive meeting. As you will see in other parts of this program, we always recommend that you start off with a clear (SMART) Objective. This applies to an internal meeting as well as for an external, customer meeting. The smart objective will help you, and the rest of the team, to focus on ‘outcomes’ i.e. what do you want to achieve as a result of this meeting. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to start the meeting objective with the words “By the end of this meeting …”. This will enable you to focus on a productive outcome, not simply a meeting to “discuss” or “review”.
You might be thinking that the purpose of the meeting is to ‘review the TSP’ or ‘discuss the action plan’ … but that is not an objective. These phrases simply describe what you may actually ‘do’ within the meeting, but the objective is different. For example, you may review the TSP in order to “Agree next steps”; or you may discuss the action plan in order to “Update the Action Plan with revised dates and deadlines”, these are the phrases that better describe the actual meeting objective, the purpose of having the meeting. You don’t need to pull other people away from their work in order to ‘review’ and ‘discuss’, but you do need them in order that you can ‘decide’, ‘agree’, ‘change’ or ‘update’ a plan that they are all a part of.
Case Study
‘A Tale of Two Companies’ … it is certainly not uncommon for businesses to have a system of conducting Quarterly Business Reviews. What is different however is the way in which these reviews are conducted and how people feel about the meetings and the process. This is a tale of 2 such companies, at both ends of the spectrum. You can decide which you would prefer to be a part of.
Company A invested a great deal of time and energy in their QBRs. They mandated attendance by all salespeople, and everyone flew-in to a central location for 2-3 days of meetings. Each Account Manager was tasked with preparing about 20 slides, using a pre-defined format. They each had their 60 minutes in the spotlight and were grilled and questioned about their strategy and their rationale. They then sat for the remainder of the time and listened to the QBR presentations and grilling of their peers. Other heads of department from other functions like Customer Success and Marketing were encouraged to attend, inevitably these leaders were able to join some sessions but missed others. Everyone was exhausted by the end of the 3 days, but they also enjoyed the evening dinners, the social hours, and the opportunity to mix with friends and colleagues.
Company B took a different approach. Their QBRs were mostly virtual, online meetings. They did not require Account managers to prepare any presentations, instead they expected them to be able to use the CRM systems to navigate through a number of key reports and to use the sales process tools, like Territory Plans and Account Plans to provide the structure of the meetings. Each Account Manager would conduct a summary of performance and use the time to focus on the help they needed from management and the rest of the company. For the sales managers the whole process still took several days, but for each Account Manager it was only a 1-2 hour commitment. They spent an hour with senior leaders and another hour with members of their virtual team. Then they got back to the business of selling.
Company B went on to thrive and people looked forward to the opportunity to talk about their successes and felt buoyed by the promise of help and the ideas they received in the QBR process. In turn the company leadership team developed an improved level of trust in the sales organization, and they provided additional tools and support when needed.
Company A were not happy with the progress being made by the sales team. The QBRs became lengthier affairs as more leaders wanted to weigh-in. The travel budget was cut and in-person QBRs became a thing of the past. The format remained the same, which meant a grueling 3-day series of non-stop online meetings in which most people were ‘multi-tasking’, aka not paying attention. Gradually salespeople were asked to leave and eventually the Head of Sales was let go. Of course, the epilogue is that Company A recruited the VP Sales from Company B and things started to change, for the better.
TSP/QBR Meeting Structure
As you think about preparing for the TSP review or QBR meeting, focus on your role as a facilitator, not a territory manager. Yes, you might be the virtual team leader, but this should be an opportunity for you to seek input and insight from your colleagues. The intent of the meeting is not to demonstrate how much you know, and to impress people with your presentation skills, but rather to solicit ideas and input to help you achieve your Strategic Intent for the Territory.
Therefore, you should be open to ideas. Try not to be too defensive. Welcome comments and criticism. These are what will make you stronger, they will help you to stay focused on the things that are important to the accomplishment of your objectives.
Secondly, don’t fall into the trap of spending time creating PowerPoint slides for this meeting. Use the TSP document itself. That is all you need. Do not transcribe sections to make things look pretty. You do not need to be in “presentation mode”. Simply use the document itself in MS Excel or Google Sheets format and, in so doing, you will get everyone more familiar with its content and its use.
Introduction and Objectives
In the first review meeting you may need to allow some time for team introductions. You may have several members of your virtual team who have not had the opportunity to work with each other in any other situation. Your Territory Review might be the first time. Encourage people to say something about themselves. Introduce each person to the rest of the team with some words about why you value their input. Tell everyone something about the contribution that each person has already made. The more you can encourage people to feel that they are part of a real team, the more they will feel inclined to help you and each other.
Progress since last meeting
Although you will hope that everyone has read the latest updates in the TSP, use the opportunity to explain something about the progress that you feel has been made. It might be there in black and white already but add your own color to the story, explain to the team what you have been doing personally. You might share something about what you are particularly proud of, or something that was especially challenging to overcome. You might tell people about some new ideas or share some insights that you have learned. The more you can bring the TSP to life, the better. Encourage some other team members to share their stories too. (You might even ask 1 or 2 people in advance to be prepared to enhance a little about a particular event for milestone).
Highlight Team Accomplishments
You might choose to start with a quick update on the financial performance. Afterall that is going to be a key measure. Remember that other team members may not be aware of the numbers and may not recognize the importance of them. Share your views. Thank individuals for the contribution they have made. If you can, try to ‘join-the-dots’ between some help that they provided and the outcomes that resulted. For example, some help from marketing on defining the TAM might have helped you to create some new sales opportunities in a new line of business. Although the actual sales revenue might not yet have been closed, you can talk positively about the increased value of the sales pipeline. People like to feel valued, and they like to know that the efforts they made have been worthwhile. Seize the opportunity to celebrate any sales successes and achievement of milestones.
Identify Problem Areas
Be realistic. This is not a time to gloss-over problems. There are likely to be challenges along the way. Part of the reason to get together is for the whole team to be aware of issues and to brainstorm solutions. Don’t feel that you, as the virtual sales leader, need to have all the answers. Try to keep your thoughts to yourself until you have heard from other members of the team, encourage them to offer suggestions. Be open about your own failings. People will naturally want to help. Equally, don’t shy away from issues which increase the risk of underperforming your territory target. You don’t want to use the open forum as a place to address blame to any individual, but you should take the opportunity to hold people accountable for things they promised to the team. Everyone understands that things might not go according to plan, but you should expect that people will take ownership for getting things back on track. If there is an individual failing, address this outside the meeting, preferably before the meeting, and use the meeting to present ideas and solutions that you have both worked out. During the meeting itself, use the power of several brains to find solutions to the problems. Look for other people to step-up and work on a solution for, or with, you.
Update Action Plan
As you go through the meeting, make notes of any new ideas and start to develop a list of actions that will be taken outside the meeting. These will become actions in the updated Action plan for the next quarter. You can revisit these in the meeting summary and ask people to volunteer when they can accomplish a specific task. If they need more information outside the meeting before they can commit, at least make sure they take ownership for the action itself and to getting back to you with an agreed completion date. Remember that you can always circulate just part of the TSP in a post-meeting email. Depending on the number of people involved and the number of actions identified, you might even consider developing a short email to remind people of what they agreed to do. The best way is to keep people focused on updating the TSP directly. Peer pressure and the feeling that they might be letting-down the whole team can be a powerful motivator for people who don’t report to you directly.
Next Review Date
Before the meeting ends, make sure everyone knows when and where the next review will take place. Inevitably there will be other priorities, vacations and sickness which might prevent people from being at every meeting. Where possible, establish a commitment that if someone form the virtual team is unable to attend then they send a ‘deputy’ – someone who can represent ‘marketing, or ‘service’, or at least take messages back to the appropriate people.
Sample Agenda
Whenever you create an agenda for a meeting, and this applies to a sales meeting with a customer and also to these TSP review meetings, always have 4 columns:
1. Time – specify exactly what time you plan for this item to start.
2. Item description – describe the topic for discussion.
3. Minutes – how long do you think this segment will take.
4. Who – explain who will lead this part of the discussion, specifying that you intend other people to be responsible for presenting this agenda item, or at least contributing to it.
When planning your first TSP QBR you should probably allow 2 hours. Once you and the team get familiar with the process, you should be able to get this down to one hour. This depends on everyone having been kept up-to-date on the TSP progress and having read the latest version prior to the meeting.
While on the topic of timing and the setting of dates of the next meeting, we would recommend that you actually calendar these meetings 12-months out, and that you add another meetings to the calendar at the end of each meetings. In other words, you have a rolling list of at least 3-4 meetings dates for future quarters. Firstly, this means that you are sending a clear message to the entire virtual team that is part of an on-going process and that you need, and expect, everyone’s ongoing involvement and contribution. Secondly, although other things may arise which conflict with the diary plans, these can be dealt-with in subsequent meetings, at least 3 months ahead. You might plan for 1 of these meetings each year to be in-person and the remainder to be via online meeting.
Handled effectively the QBR process becomes something which the whole team looks forward to because it keeps them personally connected to the outcomes and improves team spirit and morale.
Exercise 2.12
Project Studies
During this second workshop participants were introduced to the template for a Territory Sales Plan (TSP). In each module the intent of each section of the TSP was explained. This Project Study is designed to enable you to apply the new process and skills to achieve a lasting change in process and behavior which will help you and your team to sustain the performance improvement long-term.
The project study, to be completed before the next workshop, is to finalize the Territory Sales Plan for the territory for which they are responsible and to get ‘sign-off’ from their manager. Note that this is a Project Study which can be completed independently, with individuals working alone, or it can be completed as a team project. There is an inherent assumption that each participant in the Sales Growth Program is responsible for their own sales territory, but this may not, and need not, be the case. Participants can work together on a TSP in situations where they are effectively co-members of a virtual sales team, focused on enhancing sales in a particular territory. In some situations, there may be participants who support multiple other people in the sales team, in this case they may be the supporting team members to help the Territory managers to complete their TSP.
Participants will have started to create some of the content for the TSP during the exercises at the end of each module. This Project Study is intended to the time when they finalize the content, ready for sharing with the entire virtual team. Participoants should also plan that the TSP format, once finalized, will form part of the Sales Growth playbook which they started to create in the first workshop. If necessary, this playbook will need to be updated to reflect the changes made in the TSP.
Project Study (Part 1) – Territory Sales Plan (TSP) Framework and Structure
Ideally participants will be sharing their TSP with a wider group of co-workers, people who we refer to as the Virtual sales team. To make this sharing easier, it is recommended that participants formulate their TSP using MS Word, or Google Sheets, or whatever type of digital spreadsheet that allows them to share and collaborate with the rest of this virtual team. During the workshop we provided a sample structure. We included 3 different versions to provide illustrations as to how some sections could be adapted to suit the go-to-market- needs of different types of business. Ultimately it is up to the participants and their managers to determine a format that they feel works best for them. Therefore, the first [part of the Project study is to define this format and to seek agreement so that every territory manager is using the same template and format. The suggested sections for the TSP included:
• TERRITORY DEFINITION
• STRATEGIC INTENT
• REVENUE PLAN
• GTM AND CUSTOMER STRATEGY
• TARGET ACCOUNTS
• GAP ANALYSIS
• VIRTUAL TEAM
• PARTNER AND ALLIANCE STRATEGY
• MARKETING
• PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• SPECIFIC ACTION PLAN
• REVIEW SCHEDULE
Start by customizing the template to suit your needs and then write the Territory Definition. Your definition should include:
• Detailed description of the territory
• Territory potential i.e. size of revenue potential based on a TAM analysis
If you are developing this playbook individually, for your own benefit, get your manager involved early to act as a sounding-board for your thought s and ideas on size and potential. If you are working on this collaboratively, work as a team. You can decide to ‘divide and conquer’, having some people look at territory definition, working on what is included and what is not; and others working on the TAM analysis.
Project Study (Part 2) – Current Situation, Goals and Target Accounts
Use the first 4 sections of the TSP to provide a detailed overview of where you are today and where you want to be in the next 1-2 years. Start by collecting all the data you need on the current status. Blend this with the TAM analysis to decide what is possible, and then break this down into a more manageable strategy using specific customer markets and target accounts. The flow will look something like this:
• TAM and Strategic Intent – imagine you were presenting to a future sales meeting and describing how you had become so successful. What did the territory look like earlier and how did you build your success? You will include a detailed list of the biggest accounts that you intend to develop.
• Gap Analysis – this is where you start to get real about the work and effort that will be required to get from where you are today, to where you want to be. Yu will define the gap, not only in terms of revenue, but also what this gap means in terms of new accounts needed, new opportunities identified, and new leads converted.
• Sales Job Roles and Job Descriptions – include these to provide a clear definition of who is responsible for what within the sales organization.
Project Study (Part 3) – Help and Support
In this section of the TSP you will think outside the box to identify people, departments and businesses who may be able to help your achieve your objectives for the territory. You cannot do it all alone. You will build a virtual team of helpers; you will leverage business partners and work with marketing to help you develop more business potential within the territory. Be sure to include things like:
• All the people who could become part of your team. Think how you might leverage other departments in the company to make your life easier and more productive.
• Third-party partners – how might some of the company’s major alliance partners or regional channel partners help you develop the business potential for your territory?
• Marketing – your marketing team’s objective is to help Sales to grow revenue and expand market share. This applies to your territory just as it does to pother territories too. Think about how you can leverage this joint energy to maximize your success.
Project Study (Part 4) – Personal Plan, Actions and Reviews
During the workshop we explained that the TSP is a living document to be checked, updated, reviewed and changed on a regular basis. Through this process you will be able to see the tangible progress that you are making. Take some time to ponder what you want to achieve personally. Set aside some time to develop a detailed plan of specific actions, otherwise everything will seem important and trying to implement the strategy in your TSP can seem too daunting.
There is nothing worse than investing a great deal of time to create something like a TSP and then leaving it in a virtual filing cabinet to wither and die. Create a formal process of reviews that includes other people. The number of people involved in this review will depend of the size and structure of your company but seek to get input from as diverse a group as is feasible for you.
• Personal Plan – As we discussed in the workshop, you need to take some time to develop your own skills and knowledge. Undertaking this very program is part of this. What else do you want to do to develop yourself and feel more fulfilled?
• Action plan – literally the point at which all this planning meets ACTION. Prioritize and manage the action list, starting with the activities needed for the first quarter of this plan. For this you will need to involve other members of the virtual team. Use the opportunity to get their input on a review schedule too.
• Reviews – during the workshop we suggested monthly or quarterly reviews. Decide what you are going to do and determine a format for these meetings.
Project Study (Part 5) – Circulate and Invite
You have now invested a great deal of time and energy into developing a good plan for how you intend to grow revenue in your territory. You have created a draft plan and developed a review schedule. Now it’s time to share the document with everyone in your virtual sales team and especially with anyone in the virtual team that you have not yet involved in developing the draft.
• Distribute – you may have created all this in a vacuum but for the TSP to be the best it can be, you need external input. As part of this Project Study, you should formally distribute the plan to everyone who needs to see it. This is also your opportunity to explain what input and involvement you want and expect from them. Use this as the opportunity to explain the review process and to invite people to the first team review. Remember that many of these people will have no idea of what a TSP is, or why they should be involved at all. They all have their ‘day jobs’ to do. So it’s up to your to be persuasive in your outreach.
• Invite – No doubt you will probably invite people to a formal review through an online team meeting invite. This first session is most likely to be a Zoom or teams meeting but if you can do this in person, that’s always much better. But be respectful of other people’s time and don’t ask for too much too early in the process. You should think about the fact that it might be best to approach each person individually by phone or face-to-face meeting in the first instance. That way they will not be blind-sided by a team invite to something that they don’t yet understand. If in doubt, ask you manager for help and suggestions.
Program Benefits
Marketing
- Achieve quota
- Revenue growth
- Consultative selling
- Better strategy
- Market share
- Improved loyalty
- Shorter sales-cycles
- Market expansion
- Bigger deals
- Land and Expand
Management
- Hit targets
- Predictable growth
- Accurate forecasting
- Better image
- Increased valuation
- Customer satisfaction
- Team alignment
- Global growth
- International expansion
- Expand services
Human Resources
- Organizational alignment
- Consistent processes
- Sales training
- Employee development
- New-hire onboarding
- Achieve goals
- Faster ramp-up
- Employee satisfaction
- Training enablement
- Improved hiring
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.