“Probe 6”: A key device to improve your sales efforts and results in the future

As you would know, before pilots guide the planes they operate on to the runway and into the sky, they are compelled to always go through a checklist of critical items…to ensure success and safety for the journey ahead. What you may not know is that the majority of companies and sales people do not use any form of checklist to guide progress and success in sales. In my view, the control of selling activities, including marketing’s contribution to determine the value of ‘sales stories’…is absolutely woeful! Most sales people are supposed to reach high-level budgets with low-level offerings, with amateur selling efforts that make markets cringe.

“Probe 6” is designed to offer business people in management and sales, a brief but vital system of checking where they stand on key factors that make or break sales efforts. Here we go…

1. PURPOSE does not relate to being virtuous or pious, rather it raises the question about what your key sales focus is: to create mutual success or to ‘get budgets’. If customers were to receive recordings of company management and sales meetings, they would be dismayed and appalled at the amount of indulgent presentation and discussion. So the first point is really the most decisive factor, and the one that detonates thought and action in the other key areas: are you dedicated to creating more success every year for customers, or are you more concerned with your own success?

2. POTENTIAL demands that companies see more than ‘what can we sell’ and ‘who can we sell to’, and instead focus mainly on ‘opportunities to do more than our competitors have done, so as to fulfil the purpose of creating mutual success’.

3. PROPOSITION refers to the sum total of what you offer the market, so as to fulfil your purpose of creating customer success, and if product and service make up most of your ‘offering’ then you are in big trouble. There is no shortage of products in any market, and service is an entitlement, and besides, if customers buy your products, does that guarantee them success? Rarely! The creation of customer success involves the addition of two essential ingredients: ideas on how to achieve success with products purchased (customers do not possess such ideas)…and efforts by the supplier to ensure that the customer actually reaches the point of success (based on the fact that it is possible to advise customers and then find out they failed to use the advice).

4. PRESENTATION concerns how you project information about your exciting proposition to the market, via ads, your website, your call centre and the ‘calls’ made by your sales staff. In this regard, it should never be a question of how various people ‘want’ to sell; it is a question of creating the right presentation and then placing this before sales staff as a complete package, in the same way that you package your products. In most companies, there are as many ‘presentations’ as there are sales people…and most of them are dreadful!

5. PREPARATION naturally involves the extent to which sales people are trained to ‘present propositions’ in a professional manner, so that they are always in complete control of sales interviews. When I started in selling I got ‘a day on the road’ with another rep, and I think the training issue is still an embarrassment to the business community.

6. PLANNING simply relates to proactive sales effort. A budget is not a plan, it is a commercial need that reflects what the organization must ‘get’ in revenue…while a plan should provide a commitment for what the company must ‘give’ in its selling efforts. If every sales person identified a mixture of 5 ‘partially developed customers’ and prime prospects each month, for the purpose of presenting key propositions…then all of the other points will be put into ‘action’.

I am doing this exercise with a company in the week ahead, and I hope you see fit to utilise Probe 6 soon.