Sales Force Transformation |
Our client is the world leader in enterprise risk solutions, dedicated to helping financial institutions understand and manage risk
The Need
Our client has a series of market-leading solutions in a complex marketplace that is becoming more important and more competitive, with product differentiation becoming more difficult. To build on their success therefore, they wanted to ensure that their global salesforce skills and processes were equally market-leading. In particular, their brief to us was to;
- Implement industry-leading processes, particularly around opportunity management, proposals and negotiation
- Build a consultative selling approach that allowed them to have effective and credible business conversations with clients outside of IT
- Provide a globally consistent and professional approach to sales
- Improve sales pipeline by identifying opportunities earlier and shaping needs ahead of an RFP
- Provide a consistent approach to qualification that allows pre-sales resources to be allocated effectively
- Improve margins though better negotiations
The Solution
Greenbank was engaged in 2007 to develop a tailored programme, branded 'Raising the Bar' to introduce these processes and skills across the 3 main regions of Europe & Middle East, North America and Asia
The programme was split into 3 modules and phased to coincide with monthly sales meetings to minimize travel costs. The workshops followed the Greenbank buying cycle, with each workshop introducing both new processes and tools that we had developed and agreed with sales management and also associated consultative selling skills
Module One – Understanding Customer Needs introduced skills and processes to build a sales pipeline, from questioning skills, building rapport and account entry strategies to encourage pro-active earlier conversations, rather than waiting for RFPs. It also made use of the innovative, colour-based INSIGHTS personality tool to allow salespeople to be effective even when dealing with clients who are very different to them
Module Two – Proposing a Winning Solution, built competitive selling skills focusing on understanding clients buying criteria, qualifying and managing competitive opportunities and writing compelling client-focused sales proposals. It used an industry-leading and hugely sales-friendly opportunity management tool, Sales Opportunity Snapshot (SOS) to ensure that the approaches we introduced were actively used in ‘real life’.
Module Three – Win-Win Negotiations, introduced techniques for making sure that both our client and their clients end up with a solution that is right for them and adds real value.
The workshops were designed to be innovative and highly interactive and include use of role plays and real-life situations.
We delivered workshops in Europe and New York and put together a special 4 day workshop for the Asia team to coincide with their annual sales conference.
We also worked with their Sales Operations Manager to build an internal website to support the programme, store material etc and make sure that the processes linked to their Salesforce.com CRM system.
The Result
From day one, feedback was excellent. The SOS tool has now become an established ‘sales language’ with directors regularly asking “show me your SOS plan” and opportunities are more thought through as a result.
The use of the sales proposal template tool (which encourages a client-focused approach) had immediate results with a sales being won as a direct result immediately after the workshops. Their clients have actively commented that their proposals now are head and shoulders above their competitors in showing an understanding of their needs.
The use of simple, but highly effective, preparation techniques for negotiations has allowed salespeople to identify ways of meeting both their and their clients needs and increased margins.
