Salespeople
are most successful when they use proven sales strategies to develop accounts.
It makes sense. Rarely will you make one sales call on someone and then never see them again. More likely, you will come to know these customers. You can’t expect to sell everything to everyone on the first call. That means you will see them again and again and again. That means that you must view each of
your customers from that long-term perspective.
Not all accounts are alike. They are different in their needs, in the dynamics of each situation, in the personalities of the people and the competitive situation that they present. Every account that you call on is somewhat different from all others. That means that you cannot treat each one
the same.
Add these two observations together, and it means that you must create an individual long-term strategy for each account to whom you sell.
Let’s Define Our Terms
Strategy means a series of steps designed to bring your prospect or customer from where they are now to where you want them to be. It’s the long-term view. Realistically, it’s a planned series of sales calls in which each sales call has a distinctive set of purposes, a distinctive piece of education, a person or set of
people to speak with, and a distinctive agreement that you’d like to attain. The purpose, the timing, the organization, and the sequence of that series of sales calls is the strategy. It’s the long-term perspective, the big picture, of what you want to do and how you want to do it.
It’s
like a football game. In every football game the coach develops a game plan. That plan describes how he wants the team to go about each individual play, ending up in winning the game. The plays themselves are like sales calls. Sales calls are the tactics, but the big picture into which they fit is the strategy. It’s the strategy, the big picture, that we’ll focus on in this chapter.
First, let’s review the two basic sales processes we examined in the first chapter. The first one focuses on creating customers, and the second one focuses on creating partners out of customers. You recall that the process works like this: first you identify suspects, and then you turn suspects into prospects, and prospects into customers. That’s one set of sales calls. That’s one strategy to achieve a purpose — to influence someone to purchase
from you for the first time.
Then the second part of the overall sales process is to take those customers, people who have purchased, turn them into clients, and finally turn a client into a partner. In terms of the biggest, most basic strategy, you strive to turn every prospect into a partner.
Let’s assume that you have made at least one sales call on a series of prospects. In the course of those first few sales calls, you have discovered some things about each of those prospects.
You have gained a
sense for the situation at each account.
