Congratulations!

Our first image goes over a sample of a detailed, sales pipeline process. This sample sales process includes the critical milestones in each stage of the sales process. It’s important to consider each critical milestone when approaching every new sales opportunity. Making assumptions and skipping these steps can result in lost opportunities and stalls within your team’s sales pipeline process.

The third image is a partially completed version of our Influencer Snapshot® tool, which will challenge your sales team to accurately identify the key influencers involved in the decision-making process, and assess their levels of influence and advocacy. This picture illustrates Mike’s first attempt at completing the tool for one of his opportunities. As you will notice, the tool only has three key influencers on it, which is far from a complete picture. This image illustrates the importance of identifying all of the key influencers who will be involved in the decision-making process.

Now that Mike knows who and where his key influencers lie on his Influencer Snapshot® tool, we see a few Movement Strategies that Mike believes can improve his chances of winning by addressing a highly influential adversary.
Movement Strategy #1 shows how Mike might improve the Advocacy of the influencer, making him/her less adversarial. Movement Strategy #2, depicts a strategy to lower the level of influence this individual has in the decision-making process. And Movement Strategy #3 illustrates a combination approach – where Mike attempts to make the influencer less adversarial and less influential. It will be up to Mike to determine which strategy has the best chance of succeeding and how he can go about executing the selected strategy.

Image #7 shows a complete Competitive Snapshot® for one of Susan’s opportunities. Now that Susan has a clear picture of her customer’s decision criteria and how she matches up against the competition, she can develop appropriate strategies to improve her position.

Our Value Snapshot® tool comes next. This image shows an initial Value Snapshot for one of Susan’s opportunities. Since the opportunity is early in the sales process, it is logical that Susan lacks a thorough understanding of the customer’s measurable and quantifiable goals. Instead, she’s populated the tool with what she’s heard – statements of needs and wants. Now it is up to Susan to convert those statements of wants and needs into a deeper understanding of the customer’s quantifiable and measurable goals.

The Situational Snapshot® tool will help you assess your strategic position, help with determining stregnths and weaknesses between the buying factors and how shifts impact the entire situation. This will ultimately help your sales people prioritize their actions within their sales strategies.

The green area = your most favorable position on the snapshot, while the red area = your least favorable position for each buying factor. Each of the buying factors rests on an axis ranging from low to high, short to long and weak to strong.

You’ll plot your position on each axis to create a picture of your strategic position. Once you have your strategic position, you can create a strategy that addresses each aspect of the customers buying factors.

It’s also time to complete your own competitive analysis using our Competitive Snapshot® tool. To fill this out, remember to answer the following questions:

1. What are the decision criteria? Identify the criteria your customer is using to compare you against the competition.
2. What decision criteria are missing? What criteria should you be adding?
3. How does the customer rank those criteria? What does your customer perceive as the most essential criteria to least essential?
4. How does that customer perceive the competition? Are you comparatively a good option or a bad option?