How to Accelerate Business Performance

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome Selling Power's daily report. Today we have the pleasure of continuing our conversation with Julie Thomas CEO of Value Vision Associates. Julie, how do you do it? How do you help companies accelerate business performance?

>> Julie Thomas: Well the first thing you have to do is diagnose what the problem is just like if your car breaks down on the side of the highway until you lift up the hood, look at all the tires it's very difficult to determine what needs to be fixed. And so as we work with our clients the first thing we do is go through a diagnostic process just as the mechanic would to determine what's the problem. Is it the carburetor or is it that you've put the wrong gas in the car to begin with.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what are some of the typical efficiency leaks that you find today in sales organizations?

>> Julie Thomas: Well it's pretty simple. It breaks down to a couple of things: We're not wining enough business, we don't have enough business in our pipeline to even be playing with or our deal size is too small. You can look at those variables and almost break it down to one of those 3 and then peel back the onion even further to figure out ok if it is that we don't have enough deals why? What's going on? But we start with those 3 critical factors: Deal size, number of deals in the pipeline and how long it's taking to close them.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what would accelerate the deals in the sales follow?

>> Julie Thomas: First of all it's having some understanding of how the customers buy. The only reason we have a sales process is to facilitate how our customers buy from us and it's amazing to me how many customers or companies define these elaborate sales processes with people on white boards in rooms that have never made sales calls and so they built in extra steps and hurdles that their sales reps may have to jump through that add no value to the customer in influencing their purchase decision.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So how does the sales process evolve in the company normally?

>> Julie Thomas: Normally what I have seen is a company looks at maybe 2 or 3 deals that they want to replicate and they say ok what were the steps that took to complete to get that business closed? But the reality is if that was Signa assumed spelling Motorola might make those purchasing decisions very different so that sales process can't always be developed in the vacuum of not understanding how our customers buy.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what's the secret for developing a sales process that's flexible enough to apply across the board?

>> Julie Thomas: Well part of it is to teach the sales reps how to uncover individually how their prospects are going to buy so that they can then map and flex and adapt their processes to how their prospects buy and we call that developing a mutual plan with our prospects.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: But isn't this a little bit counterproductive with sales force automation that actually forces sales people to follow a rigid process?

>> Julie Thomas: Well that's the challenge with the tools are the tools adaptable enough to map to what actually happens in real time with the prospect or does the sales rep try to adapt what's supposed to happen in real time to the tool. What came first the chicken or the egg? And it's a real challenge and one of the reasons many sales people haven't adopted some of the tools that have been heavily invested in because they don't believe it'll help them actually be more effective.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: How do you get this all in synch so all the wheels are spinning at the same speed?

>> Julie Thomas: Well it's kind of like a 3 legged milk stool. You need to get all of the legs even and working or guess what when you sit on that stool it's gonna break down. The first leg of that stool has to do with the process. So defining the right process that those sales process need to go through. The next one is the skills and behaviors and that's where we often come in and work with clients in teaching them the skills and how to behave to effectively drive the process to those results and then the 3rd one is the tools as you mention, making sure that the tools and the desktop resources available to those sales professionals map to the skills that you've taught them because if there is not alignment between the skills and the tools something's gonna give and the whole thing will break down.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So it's process skills and technology.

>> Julie Thomas: Yes.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Thank you Julie. Here you have it. Here's an opportunity to improve your business processes by aligning the process with the way customers buy with the tools you have and with the skill sets. Tune in tomorrow.

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>> Julie Thomas and I we're continuing our conversation we'll talk about how to reduce the sales stress.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====