Closing in Line with Your Sales Forecasts
Business development roadmaps for value creation
To grow as a business development professionals or key account managers, you and your people should plan and propose ‘customer journeys’ to prospects and existing clients which map out the journey for the relationship in terms of the value it will create for both the buying and selling organisations.
These business development and account management roadmaps should:
- Be applied at the senior decision-making level at every level.
- Include milestones for immediate, medium and long-term wins for the client.
This means that your people should present solutions that address the most pressing needs of senior buyers over a predetermined timescale. Ideally, these needs should be driven by eternal pressures for change that face the client.
If your business development and account development roadmaps are aligned to a set of external pressures and compelling external events, your client(s) will drive the close at each stage of the roadmap. They will be happy to agree a date for signing the contract, which will be seen as simply one milestone in the journey towards delivering significant value.
The client should also be happy to agree the commercial structure of each stage as quickly as possible so that they can get the deal signed off and avoid any delays in the solution’s delivery.
Effective and reliable closing and forecasting of new business requires business development professional and key account managers to lead and drive urgency in their target markets. Traditional sales people realise this but they often sacrifice longer term client relationships for the sake of winning immediate deals.
Business development professionals and key account managers are much more focused on their medium and longer term reputation. Many therefore have seldom natural focus (or urgency) to drive short-term opportunities or assure the date and value of more immediate wins.
A business development roadmap that starts with early wins and leads to medium- and long-term relationships that add greater value opportunities for the client, combined with the use of external pressures for change, is the route to successfully closing in line with your sales forecasts.
It is then up to the sales leadership team to ensure that this ability prevails without compromising the professional standing of sales professionals in their target markets.
The implementation of a consultative approach to business development and key account development - that involves a customer-orientated methodology for driving urgency through a business development roadmap - will improve brand perception and client loyalty. At the same time, a consultative approach will transform the selling organisation’s performance in terms of closing new business and forecasting the timing and the value of wins.
Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase
Contact Sterling Chase for more information or for a free consultation.
