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Do you need more business? - The big picture

Written by: Phil Shipperlee

Article Overview: Perhaps the most critical performance factor for any business is its ability to produce a reliable and predictable flow of new and repeat business, sufficient to deliver the financial goals within the business plan. Many businesses find themselves in the position of looking at the most recent month or quarter and wondering what happened. It doesn’t matter what has already happened, it’s now too late to change it. What does matter is that you have the means of determining the future. During the 30 years that I have been building and running successful businesses for myself, I have always ensured that above all I had in place a robust, fully integrated selling function; production, delivery, HR, etc. can wait because, if you cannot create enough customers to buy at the right price, then you don’t have a viable business.

Do you need more business? - The big picture

This is the first in a series of articles. My objective is to share my success with you and to hopefully give you some good ideas as to how you can apply our techniques to improving the performance of your business.

Perhaps the most critical performance factor for any business is its ability to produce a reliable and predictable flow of new and repeat business, sufficient to deliver the financial goals within the business plan. Many businesses find themselves in the position of looking at the most recent month or quarter and wondering what happened. It doesn’t matter what has already happened, it’s now too late to change it. What does matter is that you have available to you the means of determining the future.

During the 30 years that I have been building and running successful businesses for myself, I have always ensured that I had in place a robust, fully integrated selling function. This is the first thing that I put in place; production, delivery, HR, etc. can wait because, if you cannot create enough customers to buy at the right price, then you do not have a viable business.

Over 50 years ago, Peter Drucker said; “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer” More recently, Sir John Harvey Jones said; “Most British companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. Most fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling”. Can two very different, but equally great, business leaders be that wrong?

What do we do?

The business of Performative is very simple – we help our customers to bring about long-term sustainable improvements in the performance of their businesses. Our primary focus is the structure and performance of the Go-to-Market model, i.e. all of those activities associated with first creating customers and then selling your product, service or solution to those customers.

The processes that we use are based on our own methodology, Performative Structured Selling ®, and this has four main elements or components. Those elements cover the key areas of; Market Focus, Prospecting for Customers and Opportunities, Creating Customers and growing them into Strategic Accounts and finally Creating, Identifying and successfully Pursuing Opportunities.

Below, I have provided a brief summary of these four critical elements and in the subsequent articles I will expand on these topics and give you tips and ideas to apply to your own business.

Market Focus (your Proposition and Target Market)

The first element, Market Focus, creates an essential foundation to the whole Go-to-Market model. Simplistically, the Market Focus process looks at what you sell (your proposition) and who you should be selling it to (your target market).

The Market Focus articles will look at the mechanisms used to understand your proposition, through the eyes of your prospects and customers. I will also explain the parallel process that you could use to choose your market and within that market which sectors and segments to focus on.

Prospecting for Customers and Opportunities

The output from the Market Focus process will be a list of companies that we call suspects. The suspects are those organisations who appear, based on external research, to have the characteristics to become customers of your company and then to be interested in your proposition.
By producing the smallest possible number of suspects, before expending expensive selling effort, all remaining activities will be more focused and therefore more effective and efficient. This will help to give you a higher rate of return on your selling effort and a more predictable outcome. This will also help you to build some leading indicators which will enable you to spot weak points in the sales pipeline in time to do something about it.

The article on Prospecting for Customers and Opportunities will look at the various options available including; direct sales, tele-marketing, tele-selling, channels and partners. It will also look at the mechanisms used to take the “intelligence” gained in the Market Focus stage and to turn it into a qualification process to drive not only prospecting but later Customer Creation.

Creating Customers and growing them into Strategic Accounts

You will already have picked up that we see the creation of a customer as a very distinct process from that used when creating and pursuing opportunities.

The process of creating a customer, as a carefully planned activity, helps you to build your customers understanding of the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, a price and expendable.

The articles dedicated to this topic will, amongst other things, look at qualification, account planning and account networking. It will also show you how to rank different prospects in terms of their potential value to you.

Creating, Identifying and successfully Pursuing Opportunities

As already stated, this is different and separate from the creation of customers. This is driven by a process that we call quantification.

The articles on this topic will look at; quantification, bid planning, creating value propositions, preparing ROI models to support your bid, proposals and presentations. It will also look at different bidding regimes spanning the informal through to highly structured RFI/RFP process and government processes involving the European Journal and S-CAT. Finally, we will look at approaches to creating a sales pipeline including risk analysis and probability calculations.

Summary

By the end of the series of articles you will have the means to create a joined up process that turns your Go-to-Market model into a value chain taking your suspects through a process of qualification and quantification. The flow of orders into your business will be more predictable and you will have a series of leading indicators enabling you to take remedial action if problems are brewing in future months and quarters.

Copyright © Performative plc 2001-2006. All rights reserved.

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