Systems, Skills & Strategies
Introduction
We all want shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. If you sell software, SAAS, hardware, consulting services, or custom software projects in a complex sales environment (multiple people involved in the process), the way you do that is by optimizing 3 major areas of focus. They are systems, skills, and strategies.
Systems
Systems are sets of step-by-step processes that help you achieve your sales objectives. Great systems improve your probability of success in getting to the next step. They are repeatable and they save you enormous amounts of time because you’re able to execute them with minimal thinking. And because of that they preserve precious and limited energy.
There are about 20 systems you want to utilize and each one of them needs to be optimized. They vary based on whether you sell to prospective clients or work with current clients.
Here are some examples of systems you’ll want to optimize:
- Making connections on LinkedIn
- Researching an organization & stakeholders before making contact
- Negotiating a complex deal
- Building influential team presentations
- Post-call follow-up emails
...and, many more
We provide these systems for sales executives, relationship managers and sales managers via our premium signature courses (like All-Win Negotiating System & Developing & Delivering Great Presentations) as well as our premium on-demand, mini-courses (like Client Conference Presentations, Selling Early Adopter & Beta Sites).
Skills
In order to execute your sales systems, the following big categories of skills you want to master are questioning, listening, and presenting. Chances are you’ve taken courses in all of these. What we focus on in our courses and coaching are advanced levels of these, specific to the systems.
For example, how do you listen between the lines for needs and wants that you can do something about that they want to do something about? How do you reframe negotiating demands into needs & wants that you can address? How do you explain very technical concepts to a non-technical decision maker?
Skills are taught in specific mini-courses as well as big signature courses and in group-coaching sessions that accompany the courses. One last thing on skills: improvement (even just maintaining your skill level) requires practice. We provide multiple ways to do that in a fun, non-boring way.
Strategies
A strategy is your plan to achieve a goal. It’s the how. And you can see how it’s an important part of a system and how it’s integrated with skills to execute the strategy. They’re all connected. You need a strategy to achieve your yearly quota and to win a particular deal.
Getting more granular, you need a strategy (and system and skill) to probe for pain and impact, to build a client stakeholder as an inside information source and to respond to an RFP you didn’t know was coming and uses language from your chief competitor. And you need strategies for when you’re ahead and when you’re behind, when you’re presenting first and when you’re presenting last. You need them when you get into a deal late and how to follow-up on a proposal without being a pest. Or what to do when you’re replacing a well liked account manager.
Most sales training provides simple head-on or flanking strategies as part of their courses. But precious few give you specific, step-by-step recommendations for the scores of situations you face in your job, when things don’t go according to plan. But we do. Not only are strategies a part of every course we provide, we’ve gone further and provide a private, members-only offering where dozens of specific “what-to-do-next” strategies are provided for the most challenging competitive sales situations.
The return-on-investment on even one deal turning around in your favor is outrageous. Like everything we do, it is specifically designed for those who sell technology-based solutions in a complex environment. No other sales training company offers this. Learn more about this here.
