Overview:

No matter what we sell, no matter how large or small the transaction, there is a person or an organisation involved. Each of the people we interact with will have their own personality, needs and motivations. In a business, they will also be working as part of an organization with structure, policies, procedures and the influence of culture. In the same way that no two people are alike, the same holds true for customer organizations. There are many company specific considerations we need to be aware off if we are to be efficient, effective and avoid making mistakes that could cost us the sale. Beyond that, just who are the people we need to engage with? How do we create a relationship development plan? How do we benchmark the strength and relevance of our relationships? The answers to these questions will have a major bearing on the success of our sales efforts.

Learning Outcomes:

• Be able to situationally analyze the various customer individuals who can impact sales
• Build understanding of the organizational differences in customer’s business that can impact how we sell to them
• Be able to look beyond an organization chart to see situational power
• Build insight in to cultural differences and sensitivities that can help us to understand how to sell to our customers
• Be able to use tools to realistically benchmark your overall relationship strength at each customer
• Understand how to use a process to actively increase your customer relationship strength
• Understand how to express your value propositions in context of the customer audience
• Build insight in to your customer’s budget development and management process

Who this course is for:

Sales people, sales managers, executives, business development, sales engineers, sales support, marketing. Any customer-facing representative engaged with customers who needs to understand our customer’s decision making process, their policies and procedures, cultural sensitivities, the power and influence relevant to us.

Benefits to you:

Being able to build insight in to the way our customer runs their business will help us navigate our sales more smoothly and effectively. Understanding their processes helps us set expectations for our own company and work closely with our customer as a partner. Being able to accurately and comprehensively develop a people development plan for each sales opportunity will help us focus our efforts on the most relevant people and not be too focused on people who can’t help bring our business to fruition.

Benefits to your organization:

When sales people have a detailed understanding of their customer’s organization, policies, procedure and culture they can be more efficient in their use of resources. When they have a realistic understanding of the level of support and opposition for a specific sale, they can develop winning strategies to influence the people that really matter. The net of this is sales become more predictable, forecasts more accurate.