MANAGE SMARTER: SO MANY PEOPLE, SO MANY DOORS - SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATE WITH A SALES MAP
Manage Smarter’s Scott Leland suggests mapping out your sales process. Strategically align yourself with the right players by being prepared from the beginning.
Manage Smarter Excerpt:
Challenge: When trying to access the right people in an organization to advance your sales efforts, you may struggle to chart a successful course. Maybe you spend a lot of time cultivating a relationship with one person, only to discover later that he or she did not have “pen power” to sign the deal. Or on a loss debrief, you learn you lost the deal because your chief competitor had the ear of a key influencer. Sometimes you don’t recognize until too late that a person you know in one division is tight with the project manager you are trying to sell in another. How do you make sure you—or the people you manage—recognize and identify the key players as soon as possible to optimize your chances of winning?
Solution: This is a universal problem, and I have encountered similar issues when advising companies in more than 30 countries. But no matter how different the culture or language, people worldwide have used maps for centuries to help them get where they want to go. Marco Polo and Magellan used maps to chart their course, and so should we in sales—a map to guide us in building stronger client relationships that lead to increased revenue.