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SMART WAY™ SERVICES
Prospecting
the SMART Way®
The Prospect Scorecard
Of all the costs associated with sales, the most difficult to control
is the cost of sales time. Improve return on sales effort by upgrading
your sales team’s ability to select the right accounts –
accounts that provide the highest return on investment of sales
time, effort and money. It’s not good enough any more to qualify
business prospects according to the classic three questions: do
they have the money, the need and the willingness to act now. These
days, sales time is too expensive, and too scarce, to waste on unqualified
prospects or unproductive activities. Instead, you want to discover
– and fast – if the next opportunity will:
- Be likely to prefer your products, services, and relationship
style to the competition
- Provide adequate profit as well as revenue
- Be more likely to provide long-term, repeat business
- Value your expertise and give you ‘positive strokes’
in the marketplace
Show your sales team how to work less, and earn more, by building
a SMARTWay Prospect Scorecard®.
The SMARTWay Prospect Scorecard is a scoring matrix unique to your
business, based on known characteristics of your existing customers.
The Prospect Scorecard takes the art of qualifying to the next level.
It allows your sales team to determine whether a prospect is worth
the investment of their scarce and precious selling time and energy.
A key element of the SMART Way method, the Prospect Scorecard shows
your sales people how to pick and choose only those accounts most
likely to produce long-term, profitable relationships with your
company, and therefore justify investment of effort. It will also
show which customers are better served by alternative methods, such
as through the distribution channel, or through e-commerce.
When you develop a Prospect Scorecard for your business, you will
evaluate three sets of criteria:
- Specifics, Demographics and Hard Facts. What “hard”
information characterizes your best customers? Do you work better
with customers with a particular number of employees, revenue
levels, locations, industry sector or other factors? How important
is each of these criteria to your decision to invest further time
in the account?
- Value-Added to Value-Sought Characteristics. What
is the best way to identify the appropriate exchange of value
between your company and your best customers? What do you do well,
and how does that benefit your customers today? Which of these
characteristics is most predictive of a good relationship with
future customers? How important is each of these criteria to your
decision to invest further effort?
- Danger Signs. Even if everything else signals “go,”
what evidence suggests that the account might not be worth your
time and effort? How would you figure out if the prospect wanted
your offer only to leverage a better price with their preferred
provider? Are you talking to a decision maker at the right level?
Which of these characteristics is most damaging to your future
investment with the prospect?
Building a SMARTway Prospect Scorecard requires thoughtful analysis
and critical thinking about the nature of your business today, and
about ways you’d like to transform it in the future. The result
is a highly effective tool that accomplishes several results:
- Shows sales people which accounts to select, based on return-on-investment
criteria.
- Provides suggested questioning techniques, so sales people
can dig out the underlying issues, meanings and strategic objectives
of the buyer.
- Gathers pertinent data about existing and prospective customers
for future analysis and enrichment of marketing initiatives.
Prospecting the SMART Way® is a one-day analytical workshop
whose output is the SMARTWay Prospect Scorecard. Post-workshop services
include:
- SMARTWay Electronic Scorecard: an engineered spreadsheet that
calculates the prospect’s value score and guides the sales
person’s time investmentl.
- Follow-up training or coaching: tailored half-day workshops
in the use of the scorecard, delivered directly to the sales force,
or in a train-the-trainer format for sales managers.
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