COMMERCIAL
“Seed, nurture, grow”
– Steve Hirschfeld
The Commercial Organization is the front-line for generating business and accelerating growth. Investing in an effective “presales” technical consulting team, analyzing the market by segment and theater, developing consistent sales motions, getting the right price for the right market at the right time, establishing compensation plans that drive the right behaviors and building the right partnerships are all key elements to success. Operationalizing all of these elements can turn a company hoping to make it’s revenue targets into a consistent and repeatable organization.
Understanding how to build and motivate your salesforce and provide them with the support teams necessary to optimize the sales engine is essential to maintain a solid growth trajectory.
VALUE
“Value articulated but not achieved is worthless”
Every sales cycle results in a need for a buyer to justify the investment prior to getting to signature. It’s a simple truth. Avoiding the subject is not an effective selling approach. It will result in delayed timelines or lost sales.
But many business cases that get approval, wind up in the bottom of a desk drawer. Pulling value off the table for each of your customers will result in more business at that customer, but will also allow you to generate more business at other customers and accelerate sales cycles.
DEAL DESK / DEAL NEGOTIATIONS
“Give a little to get a lot – not to get a little and only if it’s appreciated”
Much has been written on best practice negotiation skill with great ideas and resulting in improvements when applied properly, but getting to the best deal for all parties can still be quite challenging. Bottom line, if you set expectations early and manage expectations throughout the negotiation process, you will see better results.
Getting the value message right, understanding the complete buying process, aligning that with your selling process, knowing every pressure point before you begin tradeoffs with your customer and avoiding traps like separating the commercial negotiations from the legal negotiations are a few of the concepts that can result in the best deal for both sides.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
“Create raving fans”
– Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
After closing a deal, it is important that you deliver an effective implementation. Establishing a consistent implementation methodology with Best Practice recommendations, having experienced program/project management resources, establishing milestones and success criteria tied to your value proposition are all key elements to success. In addition, selling services and protecting your services revenue stream is critical as margins are generally lower for Professional Services revenue. Compensating your services team can be challenging as well. Compensating based on billable hours or utilization is typical, but incenting your delivery team based on milestones and success criteria, and/or value attainment can change behaviors for the better.
Your ability to sell add-on business, whether additional software or services is dependent on your ability to set and manage expectations effectively and to deliver what you’ve promised.