When it comes to a sales strategy, it’s important to know your competition, but it is even more important to know your potential client. Now more than ever, in this competitive market, you need to stand out amongst the crowd. What are you providing that others on the market are not? And even more important, what has happened, is happening or will be happening with your target account?

Sales tools are a great way to obtain detailed strategic intelligence on your lead. Having this knowledge can give you more confidence to target their specific requirements. A superior plan of action can make the difference between closing the deal or losing it.

We have developed a Strategic Account Plan Template exclusively for high tech sales reps selling into Fortune 1000 and Global 500 accounts. It is designed to support the account management team to effectively prepare and stay focused on the customer’s business objectives and goals. This ensures they achieve the planned results, create a consistent experience for the customer, and ultimately identify how they can make a positive impact on the customer’s business.

This Strategic Account Plan Template will help you to take a deep-dive look into the account and analyze their industry, key contacts, trends, current economic conditions, financials, their competitors, technology, goals, objectives and more. Having all this information in one reference spot that you can bring with you to sales meetings will keep you organized, on top of your game and ahead of the competition.

Use our Strategic Account Plan Template for strategic account planning and organize your comprehensive and in-depth research so that you’re always prepared. Don’t let disorganization and lack of good account intelligence contribute to a lost sales opportunity.

For additional resources, please visit our website: http://www.salesquest.com/resources.

Ryan Murray
SalesQuest
Email: Ryan @ SalesQuest dot com
978.749.9999 ext. 102

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

With tech spending finally on the rise again, business needs that may have been pushed aside due to cost cutting initiatives are finally starting to be addressed again. This, of course, means that companies, especially large enterprises and the Fortune 1000, will be investing in solutions that may not be crucial for the day-to-day functioning of the business, but that may increase profitability or ease a (less crucial) business pain.

Wholesale retailer BJ’s has formulated an entire technology revamp project that they call IT Roadmap, which is expected to cost them $20-30 million per year until 2013. The project is meant to pull the company out of the economic depression by capitalizing on opportunities for improvement and updates in their systems and processes, especially ones that may have fallen by the wayside over the last few years. These improvements include their sales reporting, financial and membership systems.

As the economy stabilizes, the BJ’s knows it needs to capitalize on their customers’ imminent increase in spending by catering to them in the most efficient way possible. BJ’s plans to complete their HR system upgrade, pilot new store registers and launch a new e-commerce website in 2010. BJ’s expects these investments will cost approximately $68 million.

As part of the their focus on customer data, BJ’s is taking a close look at product and data management and will also be pursuing a master data management (MDM) initiative. They are looking to link customer “membership” data to their product data so that any patterns or inconsistencies can be analyzed (through an ERP system) and then use this information to optimize their supply chain, product offerings, and e-commerce/point-of-sale systems according to what their customers’ behaviors are.

There are two separate components to the initiative, according former CIO John Polizzi: a business and a tactical project. “We chose the membership and product data management system as the first two areas where we are going to look to externalize our master data from any application. Then, as we choose an ERP system, that will be the data source that feeds the ERP data.” BJ’s is currently in the process of selecting an ERP system, which is to be planned for implementation by 2012.

Clearly, BJ’s and other retailers are finally ready to spend again. They realize that in order to stay competitive, they must spend now. If your organization is already established in the retail vertical, now is the time to refocus your efforts on finding the business needs within these accounts and then aligning you product to become the solution. If you are looking to expand your target industries, retail is a ripe opportunity as consumers are beginning to spend again and retailers, more than ever, need to cater to their customers’ needs.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Being prepared for a sales opportunity is a critical component of being a successful sales rep. Now, more than ever, being educated on your target account in preparation for an important meeting, presentation or call can be the deciding factor in whether or not the sale moves forward and the prospect becomes a customer. Account planning helps you to effectively prepare and stay focused on the prospect’s business objectives and goals to ensure that you achieve your planned results, create a consistent experience for the prospect, and ultimately identify how your product or service can make a positive impact on their business.

Strategic Account Planning

This need for preparation and planning is especially important when selling enterprise technology solutions. You need to know the account inside and out, what technology is currently installed, if your competitors in the account, who the decision makers and influencers are, what their business drivers are, and what their budget is. All of these components can be determined through the research required to create a strategic account plan that will guide you through the sales process.

An account plan should be your blueprint to guide you through the account. It should answer the 5 W’s: who, what, where, when and why, and it should assist you throughout the course of the sales cycle. The account plan should be continuously updated with information you uncover throughout the sales cycle and help you connect the dots to win the sale.

Account planning takes a lot of time and research. The first thing you need is a well-designed account plan template, as the template is your roadmap for the sale. Once you have a template, you then need to fill in your roadmap with different routes and eventually connect the routes to your final destination: closing the sale.

The most difficult part of account planning is performing the research to start mapping your route. Sales intelligence tools can help you answer the 5 W’s and create a logical roadmap for your sales process. As discussed previously in this blog, sales intelligence is critical to achieving best-in-class sales results. Companies using sales intelligence have shorter sales cycles and have more sales reps hitting their quota. Using sales intelligence research in conjunction with account planning gives you the map and the routes for the sale. After that, it is up to you to execute the plan and follow you guide.

Unfortunately, like using a GPS to find your way, in selling there is no one telling you where to turn or when you have reached your destination. But, there are great sales intelligence resources out there for you to take advantage of, and coupled with account planning, you can outrun your competitors.

-Mark Kilens
mkilens @ salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 118

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The issue of how a sales rep’s time is spent is not as simple as eliminating the need to do personal research by investing in sales intelligence; it is clear that the buck does not stop there. It not only takes time to do the hard research; even if the tools are paid for, there is still the issue of aggregating all of the content and making it available, easy to find, and consolidated in one place.

CRM systems solve this issue and even further reduce research and preparation time. In their study, Aberdeen found that 72% of their defined Best-in-Class companies currently have some sort of a CRM solution to “centralize” their information, compared to only 50% of the Laggard companies. Even further, 74% of Best-in-Class companies also integrate their marketing materials in the CRM system so that their sales representatives can “speak intelligently about the right products and services for their prospects.”

Clearly, centralization is important. It is not enough to just purchase contact information and company profile reports; if sales reps are actually going to use them before they make a call, it needs to be easily accessible and attached to the place where they are retrieving account and contact information. The number one priority of the rep is to hit their numbers every month if they want to keep their job. When the choice is between making more calls each day by passing over research and spending time to access information to be fully prepared, the choice is likely to be the former.

Aberdeen also looked at the most common delivery methods of sales intelligence at companies within the sample space. The majority (57%) indicated that e-mail was the method for delivering sales intelligence. While e-mail is not CRM-integrated, it is more easily accessible and convenient than accessing information on the internet, as only 31% indicated that they use a third-party web application where a login is required, and 29% indicated that their sales intelligence is aggregated on the company’s intranet. At the end of the day, a rep’s time is much better spent analyzing the information and preparing for a call than spending time looking for it, and Best-in-Class companies indicate that their reps spend “at least three to five hours a day in the CRM solution,” and therefore, their sales intelligence is best utilized when it is delivered in the CRM.

The key to sales success is not as simple as purchasing a sales intelligence tool and expecting numbers to immediately go up. The disconnect between a sales intelligence tool and a rep must be eliminated by exposing them to the tool, giving proper training, and making accessibility to the information quick, easy, and constantly present. CRM software, while occasionally expensive, is the best solution to this problem, and will increase the usage of your sales intelligence investments.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

“Sales management, for the most part, is stuck in the 19th century. The problem isn’t just archaic tool or organizational structures; the fact is that a majority of sales managers don’t understand that their job is to enable sales reps to do their job better, not control them” – Steve Reeves, Founder of FrontOfficeBox.com.

This quotation in Aberdeen’s sales intelligence study perfectly describes the disconnect that exists between the purchase of a sales intelligence tool and the success of the tool as exemplified by metrics within the sales department. Aberdeen’s 2009 study measured the successes of “Best-in-Class” (top 20%) versus “Industry Average” (middle 50%) and “Laggard” (bottom 30%) organizations based upon 4 key performance criteria:

• Year-over-year increase / decrease in the amount of time sales representatives spend searching for relevant company / contact information
• Year-over-year performance in lead conversion rates
• Year-over-year performance in sales cycle time
• Year over year performance in the percentage of sales representatives achieving quota

Not surprisingly, the Best-in-Class companies achieved increases of more than 50 percent in all of these performance areas, but what is more interesting is how much these rates fall in companies where sales intelligence may be used, but it has not been implemented correctly.

From the top 20% in the industry to the middle 50%, the rate of improvement drops an average of about 25%. Year-over-year improvement for the “Industry Average” class hovers around 25%, as opposed to the 50% or more increases for the Best-in-Class companies. The numbers are even more staggering when looking at the “Laggard” class; these companies saw at best a 3% improvement, which resulted in an 5% average decrease in personal performance improvement in the company’s sales reps, where the Industry Average and Best-in-Class reps saw 1% and 15% increases, respectively.

Obviously, just purchasing sales intelligence tools is not enough to decrease research time and increase lead conversion rates, sales cycle time, and reps hitting their quotas. And in this economy, if you are in the bottom 30% and not correctly utilizing these tools, it has resulted in a decrease in performance rather than just minute increases. This indicates that now is NOT the time to slack; it is the time to get your act together.

You cannot just give your reps a map and expect them to drive from point A to point B if you haven’t taught them how to drive, or even more fundamentally, how to read a map.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2012 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.