Every month I receive a variety of questions from salespeople and their managers. These come from a variety of sources - my live seminars, the monthly phone seminars, questions that are sent into my newsletter, and issues that arise in the course of my consulting work. Out of all of these, I select those that I think have the most universal application, and respond to them here.
I've heard you mention several times the importance of prioritize and targeting customers. Can you shed some more light on this?
This is a key issue with me, as I believe it is one of the ways to make the biggest, most rapid change in your results. Too much good quality sales times and talent is squandered on customers that aren't worth the investment. If I can help salespeople adjust their investment in time so that they are spending more time on the high potential and less time on others, they'll see an almost immediate improvement in results.
So, I have developed, over years of trial and error, a simple but incredibly powerful system for prioritizing and targeting accounts. While I don't have space here to describe the whole system, I can suggest several things you can do to institute this practice in your sales team.
- Set up some company-wide definitions. Everyone should understand what an "A" account is. Likewise for B and C accounts. In addition, there ought to be some standards for how you define each of these. For example, you might say an A account is one who could buy $1,000,000 of your stuff each year. OK, how do you determine that an account could buy $1,000,000? Does the sales person guess? Or do you use some more sophisticated means of coming to that number? You need to answer these kinds of questions.
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- Once you've created the criteria and definitions, train the entire group in the use of those concepts. Require that by a certain date, they have analyzed and rated all of their customers. You may even develop some forms, electronic or hard copy, which everyone uses.
- Now, legislate that everyone should spend the biggest portion of their time with the A accounts. My rule is 50% of your time with the A accounts, and 50% of your time with everyone else.
- Manage the implementation. Every time you ride with a salesperson, discuss it and look for evidence that indicates the salesperson is following through on using the system. Make it an issue in sales meetings and in evaluations.
I have developed a variety of resources to help you with this. The system is described in detail in my 10 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople book. It's also dealt with in the time management addendum to How to Excel at Distributor Sales. In my archived TGIF phone seminars, I devote one entire seminar, #14, to the system. Finally, I offer this is a � day customized seminar.
The reason I have so much material on this subject is that I believe that it is one of the key behaviors for sales success. Everyone should be using it.
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If you have any comments or questions, email them to me. I do, of course, reserve the right to edit.
Here are a few articles by Dave
that you might be interested in reading:
- Developing Account Strategies:... Our objective is to equip you with an understanding of the principles and processes you'll need in order to develop effective account strategies. First, let's define our terms. Strategy means a series of steps designed to bring your prospect or customer from where they are now to where you want them to be. It's the long-term view. Realistically, it's a planned series of sales calls in which each sales call has a distinctive set of purposes, a distinctive piece of education, a person or set of people to speak with, and a distinctive agreement that you'd like to attain. The purpose, the timing, the organization, and the sequence of that series of sales calls is the strategy. It's the long-term perspective, the big picture, of what you want to do and how you want to do it..... {Read More}
- Managing Information... I'm spending more and more time dealing with information. It's squeezing out my selling time. Here's the issue. Technological advances in recent years have multiplied the amount of information that you must handle. The quantity of information landing on your lap has increased from sources all around you. Welcome to the information age. This problem of information inundation is a relatively new but almost universal threat to your livelihood. Four or five years ago, salespeople were not too concerned with it. Today, dealing with information is so critical that it is an important part of almost every seminar I present.... {Read More}
There are also many other action-packed articles for sales professionals that offer how-to solutions to every day sales problems that you can read online at www.davekahle.com/article.htm.
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