A Systematic Approach

Our systematic approach to helping your sales organisation to implement the core principles of outcome-centric selling consists of four closely integrated elements:

• Assessing your organisation's people, processes and systems and the current level of sales performance
• Taking your organisation's existing experiences and adapting them into the Outcome-Centric Selling® framework
• Launching your organisation's company-specific playbook for implementing outcome-centric selling
• Maintaining performance improvement momentum through continuous refinement and reinforcement

Let's look at each of these in more detail...

We'll start the process by systematically assessing your sales organisation's current situation, establishing your desired outcomes and success metrics and identifying any obstacles that might lie in the way.

We use Objective Management Group's world-class evidence-based sales force assessment tools to objectively evaluate the current strengths and weaknesses of both individual salespeople and your sales organisation as a whole. This is a critical foundation for identifying and agreeing your development priorities, and for getting the best possible return on your investment in performance improvement.

And, of course, we'll want to evaluate your current sales processes and systems - including your CRM implementation - as well as the planning frameworks, messages and tools your salespeople are using in their day-to-day customer engagement. This typically includes interviews with a representative cross-section of your sales team.

We'll take everything we've learned from the assessment process and merge this with what we've been observing in terms of the latest emerging outcome-centric selling best practices to create your own company-specific sales playbook.

At minimum, this will include a clearly defined outcome-centric framework for understanding and facilitating your customer's buying decision process and for progressively advancing towards a successful conclusion through a series of verifiable milestones and checkpoints.

This will be supported by a series of simple but effective customised tools to help your salespeople identify and target the right sort of customers, to accurately qualify sales opportunities, to identify and assess all the key stakeholders, to craft a customer-specific value story and agree a mutual success plan - combined with simple yet clear territory, account, opportunity and conversation plans.

By the time we arrive at the "adopt" point (which, if we organise ourselves effectively, can be reached a matter of just a few weeks), we'll be in a position to introduce your new outcome-centric selling framework to your entire sales organisation, starting with the sales managers who are going to be so important in providing day-to-day support and reinforcement.

The new approach is, of course, much more likely to be adopted if we present it as a way of making your salespeople's and sales manager's lives easier and more productive, rather than just yet another bunch of new stuff you want them to adopt.

This often includes identifying and eliminating some of the existing non-value creating activities that are not ultimately contributing to either their or your success. Adoption is most effective when it is focused on doing a few (of the right) things well...

The launch of your new programme is of course only the start of a journey towards continuous improvements in sales effectiveness, supported by the effective processes, systems and metrics.

If you've chosen to implement the Outcome-Centric Selling® edition of Membrain's award-winning B2B sales enablement CRM (also available as a plug-in for an existing salesforce.com instance), you'll have a wealth of actionable analytics at your disposal.

Our partnership with Refract, the leading AI-based sales conversation intelligence platform. will enable you to systematically assess the effectiveness of your salespeople's conversations, and to identify and prioritise coaching opportunities.

And, naturally, we'd hope to have earned the right to continue to act as a trusted advisor and to continue to play our role in continuing the momentum.