How can a tool help a sales person to achieve his or her goals in sales? This was the initial big question we took on when we started to build the Sales Guide and Sale Secretary in SuperOffice 7.
We realized that it is the individual sales rep who has the final word when it comes to deciding on what the best thing is to do in each situation while working towards closing a sale. And, if we base our design decision on this fact, then the task very quickly became: How can we provide the sales rep with tools that enables him or her to do just that?
Using this approach, we came up with a set of challenges we wanted to address. The challenges boil down to:
- I have a lot of sales going on at any given time and I find it difficult to keep an overview that prevents me from losing track.
- Every time I re-enter one of my ongoing sale processes, I spend a lot of time reading up on where I left it.
- I spend too much time on planning how to build a path towards closing on every sale I work with.
- Am I actually moving forward here or am I just walking around in circles? Is it time to disengage and move on?
- Can we as a team, learn from the best performers and build a guide that everyone can benefit from?
Our answers to these challenges resulted in SuperOffice 7 and what we call Sale Management.
Lots of professional sales organizations in the B2B market are adapting a selling method as a way to structure their selling process. Whether they make their own or adapt an existing method, they are all based on some common ideas:
- Make a map on how to get from A to B (B being closing a sale)
- Define a set of verifiable milestones along the path
- Document the fact that you have reached a milestone by getting a confirmation from the potential buyer.
The logic being:
You are more likely to arrive quicker and more often to your goal if you have a good map that clearly marks the best route.
The SuperOffice Sales Guide is a tool that aims to bring this method in to each ongoing sale that a sale rep has in process. It aims to help set your method and best practices, whatever it is, to good use. This is where the method meets the reality.
There is a saying that the higher your activity level is, the more sales are coming in. It’s time to add an addendum to this saying: It has to be the right activities at the right time. A prospect is too valuable to be lost because you do the wrong things at the wrong time.
SuperOffice can’t decide this for you, but at least you have a tool with just the right information that enables you to make these kinds of decisions.
So if you still haven’t spent some time studying how Sale Management in SuperOffice 7 may help providing some answers to some of these challenges, I think it is time to start now. I hope you will find it time well spent.
