WHAT IS IT?

Many of our clients need help with sales success. In Steve Day’s book, “Downhill: The Building of Fast Moving and Healthy Startups” there is a lot of attention placed on building the right sales model for a scalable business. Sales Strategy is the detailed planning of how to build this process to yield the highest probability of lead generation, sales transactions, and satisfied customers.

WHY IS IT VALUABLE?

Today, the landscape of sales has changed. B2B sales are more likely to include two or more channel organizations than direct sales to end customers. Retail sales are more likely to occur online than in a physical store. Technology sales are more likely to be dependent upon a standards body or an early adopter. Things have changed. Oftentimes, an organization facing a sales obstacle has not ever accomplished sales in one of these new ways, and it becomes impossible to imagine their goods and services being sold in today’s landscape.

WHO DO WE SERVE?

• President or CEO seeking to build their first mass market sales strategy.
• Head of Sales seeking to have a creative designer help in developing a contemporary way to reach the marketplace.
• Head of Marketing looking to build a creative sales strategy or go to market strategy that will leapfrog competition.

HOW IS OUR APPROACH UNIQUE?

Advok8 has experience in many of the new or emerging sales strategies. Beyond that, we are constantly looking at multi-tiered models of sales, with an eye towards gauging their success. At the same time, we are closely aligned and experienced with www.salesforce.com, which is a leading sales automation tool.

What Advok8 believes is that in developing the sales strategy we are bridging two gaps. Internal to external perception gap. In many organizations we work with, within 15 minutes, you can discover why products are not selling. “The technology was too late to market.” “We are twice as expensive as the competition.” The problem is almost easier to discover than the strategy to bridge the internal to external perception gap. Furthermore, it is not an all or nothing proposition. What happens if you can only bridge 50% of the issue … does this mean that sales will double?

It is a process of tradeoffs … that almost always need an experienced outside to sift through the data. The second gap is the sales strategy gap. Perhaps sales executives have been hired. A few inside sales people have been working hard. The executive leadership believes that the athletes needed to win the game are in place. Yet those sales wins are not coming. The only solution is to put in more effort or change out the people. In reality, this is the worst kind of mistake. Experience teaches us that these types of decisions rarely work out. Our goal is to work with the team in place to discover how to design a better sales strategy that allows for less effort and a higher probability of success.

In accomplishing the closing of these two gaps, the Sales Strategy Development that Advok8 recommends often is simply taking an inside problem, with independent but qualified consulting, to turn in into an outside win.