Question 1

What are you going to do, to create a “STORYLINE” about your business?

As you know, success in sales is “NEVER” about delivering an ineffective message, about the “FEATURES” associated with using your product or service.

Speak to your customers in terms of “POSITIVE TRANSFORMATION“

Any message, no matter how it is delivered, needs to speak to your customers, in terms of “Positive Transformation” or it must offer a detailed description, about what our products and services will do to for your customers.

Action Idea:

Remember that your customers, do not buy what your product is. They buy what it “DOES FOR THEM“. Namely, improve efficiencies, optimise their bottom line, offer a better solution, reduce costs or to eliminate a challenge.

Research shows that your customers and prospects will remember only 10 % of any statistics and 25 % of any images you share with them. Retention increases to a remarkable 60 – 70 %, when meaningful stories are used, to convey your sales information.

Encore Storyline

Our new storyline has helped us to enjoy success with both our existing and new customers. We have created a storyline, around how we can support our current and future customers to “Enable” their entire sales team to optimise their sales performance and results, by creating a winning sales process. Since doing this, we have seen a massive increase in sales. I know that you will enjoy the same level of success, when you make the investment towards building your own Storyline.

The secret to make your Storyline work for you, is to make it as compelling as possible. An effective storyline will help you to support your customers to appreciate the “Value” that you offer. When you have a great storyline and you deliver a powerful narrative, your customers will feel engaged and connected and they will see, how both you and your organisation, will add meaningful VALUE to them.

Keeping this in mind, please describe your organisations storyline below:

Example:

People don’t always remember what you told them, but they always remember, a story that you told to them, about how you can support them and they will always remember, how you made them feel.

So keeping this in mind, I will describe the storyline behind my organisation below:

We are a customer centric organisation, who tailors all our products, to be an optimal solution for our “TRIBE“.  This makes our customers the central focus of everything we do.

We understand that you are the reason we exist and we do everything in our power, to provide you with everything, you need to:

• Optimise the sales perfromance and results of your sales team, so that you can realise all your organisational financial goals each year
• Develop and deploy an effective “Predictable Sales Process” – Best sales practices within your organisation, so that all of your sales professionals, wake up daily, with a crystal clear plan and daily sales process, similar to the one used by your top sales performers.
  • This helps you to have a documented winning sales process that your entire sales team can follow
  • It also saves your sales team loads of time daily, as they are crystal clear on what they need to do daily
  • As you have an effective system, all sales tasks are completed and no customers are ever forgotten
• Our blended approach to training offers your sales team the opportunity to continue the learning in their own time and at their own pace, so that the learning is internalised and the tools and sales techniques are deployed in the field.
• We tailor all of our Sales Enablement Solutions, to suit your individual needs, so we dont waste any time teaching your team concepts they don’t need to learn
• etc

I am sure that you get the idea. Think about your own industry, markets and customers and create your own winning story about what makes both you and your organisation differentiated. Now describe this detailed story line below. The more you design this story and the more you tell it to the right customers, the easier it will be to retain existing customers and also the easier it will be to acquire new business.

What story, can you tell them about your organisation and how you are there to serve them?

Question 2

How are you going to go about collecting, all the data already available within your organisation?

I have noticed that most organisations, do have an extensive amount of sales content available. The challenge is that most of it is spread throughout the organisation and can be found on a number of different peoples, computers, laptops, mobile phones etc.

One of the first and most crucial exercises, is the pooling or gathering of all the resources that are available.

These would include things like:

• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Proof of concept
• Data sheets
• Product informational sheets
• Any useful information that can be used in your multi-channel communication strategy.

If your organisation has a marketing department, then they will co-ordinate this exercise.

All you need to do, is send any materials that you have to your marketing department.

If you do not have a marketing department, then you will need to nominate someone in your organisation, who will act to co-ordinate the gathering of this info.

Please explore your own devices and files and, send any info that you believe, will be useful to show customers, “VALUE“, to the person coordinating this in your organisation.

1. Please describe in detail, who will be responsible to co-ordinate this exercise 
2. Please describe when you will dedicate a few hours to search through your own materials, to discover any valuable or useful info, which you will then send to the person co-ordinating this exercise.

Question 3

Who will be responsible for creating a central place, for storing and accessing your Sales Deck content?

As you gather all the sales content, sales resources and sales info, from all the different locations within your organisation and you develop other crucial content to support both your existing and future customers, you will need a central place to store it.

The place you choose, should be easy to access from anywhere. It is for this reason that I suggest that the content is stored in the cloud, with easy access from any where.

If you have a marketing department, they will co-ordinate this exercise.

If you do not have a marketing department, please nominate someone to fill this role. Your IT department, could also be perfect to co-ordinate this exercise.

1. Who will be responsible for co-ordinating this exercise?
2. Describe the system, you intend deploying below:

Question 4

Accessing the info, sales content and sales resources, must be simple

It is for this reason that I recommend that you create an easy to use indexing system or I find the best option to create a “CONTENT MAP“, which clearly defines where everything is and then makes it easy to access.

If you have a marketing department, they will co-ordinate, develop and maintain this.

This function, can also be filed by your IT department.

1. Describe who will be responsible for co-ordinating the development of your “SALES DECK MAP” or indexing system?
2. Give your SALES DECK MAP some thought. What would you like included?

Question 5

Describe the different sales decks, you need to create for your existing customers below:

Your industry, may be different, so don’t assume that your industry, only needs the three sales decks, described here, namely:

1. Top level or C-Suit – Sales Decks
2. Second tier or buyer/manager – Sales Decks
3. User – Sales Decks

Your industry, markets and customers are unique, so the “Sales Decks” you design, may be different to the example below:

The graphic, above, describes the three Sales Decks, we deploy and the how we deploy them

Example:

We find in our industry we use, three different types of sales decks

1. CEO/Managing director deck – Top level, to encourage high level buy-in
2. Director/manager/buyer – This is the brass tacks deck, which focuses on ROI
3. Solutions deck – this is the sales deck, I use when I connect with sales managers and sales professionals – this deck focuses on solving any challenges, users or in this case sales professionals encounter.

Use the example above as a starting point.

Describe the different sales decks, you need to create to ensure that you engage all your existing customers effectively, below:

Question 6

Describe how you intend to deploy each of your three sales decks below:

When you explore the graphic above, you will notice the following:

We have described the three sales decks on the left hand side, namely

1. CEO/Managing Director deck – High level
2. Director/manager/buyer – brass tacks, including ROI
3. Solution deck – Sales professionals

The top line describes the size of the company. Based on the size of the company, we deploy the sales decks as shown:

• CEO/Managing Director deck – we only use this deck in organisations, with more than 10 employees
• Director/manager/buyer – We use this deck, with the leadership at smaller customers with up to 10 employees and deploy it as shown in the graphic at above, at other size organisations.
• We deploy the solutions deck at all customers

Using the above example, as a guide, please describe, how you plan to deploy your own sales decks in the field.

Explore your industry, markets and customers and decide how to best deploy your own sales decks.