I recently met with an EVP of a Fortune 25 company to discuss his growth strategy. Specifically, we talked about their expansion in a new market segment with a line of highly specialized products. As we discussed the revenue forecast, he became irate with the kind of companies the sales team had been pursuing. “I have no idea why we’re calling on many of these companies!” A lot of the targets did not fit the profile outlined in the company’s go-to-market strategy. Either they were the wrong kind of company or not the proper size and scale to generate significant business. Yet significant time, energy, and money was being wasted in their pursuit.
Senior executives build strategies for growth, including conceiving new products and services through research and development, integrated offerings, or acquisitions. But it’s easy for executives to forget that in each individual sales call, the strategy will succeed or fail. Every sales call represents the one moment where the core elements of a strategy are executed in real time. For many organizations, it happens hundreds, even thousands of times each day. This can become either a massive accumulation of wins, or death by a thousand cuts for the business. In this way, sales is fundamentally about the execution of strategy.
Consider the basic elements of most strategy frameworks, typically centered on the following areas of focus:
- Objectives: The overarching goals the organization intends to achieve with the strategy. Some of these goals are growth oriented like revenue, margin, products per customer, etc.
- Market: The primary base of potential customers to be pursued and won. This is frequently segmented by industry, geography, customer type, and other distinctions that define the “Ideal Customer Profile.”
- Competitive Advantage: The reason (or reasons) that customers will ultimately choose to work with you instead of competing options. This can include product superiority or functionality, price, ability to integrate, and unique or valuable processes or capabilities. All are examples of areas where companies invest to build an advantage.
The sales call is the one place where these elements of strategy all come together, and your employees connect with prospective clients to determine if you will win or lose in the market. Here is how this plays out in real time to either undermine or support your strategy:
1. Strategy element: Objectives
Your objective may be a revenue target, a margin target or perhaps you’re trying to sell a new suite of offerings. Your sales team has quotas to meet, but how they meet those quotas doesn’t always reflect your objectives. They may achieve revenue targets, but margin is sacrificed because there was little value conveyed in the sales process. Or price concessions that were avoidable were treated as a requirement to win the deal. Perhaps a sale was made, but rather than leading with your new higher-value solutions, the seller stuck with your company’s traditional offerings that felt more comfortable. That negates the objective of selling an integrated offering you’ve invested millions into developing or acquiring. And yes, that’s the sound of your strategy dying.
2. Strategy element: Market
Winning your target customer is a critical and well-considered piece of your strategy that is often left to chance in sales calls. Sales professionals frequently call on whoever they can meet with to demonstrate activity, rather than pursuing the bigger, harder-to-land fish that will yield more profitable and scalable business. Sometimes, they are approaching the wrong kinds of companies. More often, they are talking to the right companies, but meeting with the wrong people. It’s often a matter of sellers not having the skill or expertise to earn meetings with higher-level decision-makers who can authorize the kind of solutions your company is looking to sell.
3. Strategy element: Competitive Advantage
No matter where your competitive advantage lies, whether it’s a better product, better service, better combination of solutions, price or other edge you have in the market, it’s vital for your sales team to be able to guide conversations that identify client issues and business outcomes that will benefit from your company’s offerings. Too often, sellers provide laundry-lists of features, benefits, or the details and technical specs they’ve been taught by marketing. Instead, sellers need to clearly understand the decision-maker’s priorities and demonstrate how their desired business outcomes will be achieved with your company’s latest offerings. It’s that connection from how your competitive advantage helps the customer to achieve their desired business outcomes that make it come to life.
You can see how these factors fit together to determine the success or failure of the company strategy in each sales call. Meeting with a C-suite leader who is the decision maker at a large OEM is great, but if the seller can only deliver a capabilities presentation and fails to engage in any depth of conversation about the business outcomes being pursued, the sales call devolves to a simple pitch and close event. The seller may be passionately consultative, but not engaged with the right kind of company or the right level of buyer, leading to the wrong kind of sale. These situations are not just cases of sales tactics gone awry. It’s a matter of how company strategy is aligned and integrated from the CEO and senior leadership to permeate the very DNA of the Sales Organization.
When you recognize that sales is about clear strategy and execution aligned with that strategy, executives can shift their attention further upstream where strategy is formulated and execution plans are built. Revenue growth is a leadership issue, not a sales issue. That means carefully evaluating how the Sales Organization and the sales experience mirror the company strategy and how sellers are managed and led every day. Done well, every sales call should reflect the successful implementation of the company strategy. And making that happen is up to the executives in the C-suite.
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June 08, 2021 at 11:11PM
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Do Your Company’s Sales Calls Reflect Your Strategy? - Forbes
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