Strategic Prospecting and Strategic Account Optimization

Most sales people will agree that a referral trumps 50 cold calls anytime! Unfortunately, the process of prospecting and account optimization is usually a haphazard process – a series of tactics and tasks unguided by strategies and goals. However, the research indicates that those sales people who develop a well thought out strategy for these processes and implement the tactics flowing from them consistently are more likely to achieve their sales goals. "According to CSO Insights, 76 percent of reps who excel at strategic account planning routinely hit quota and win 53 percent of their forecasted deals." (Selling Power, 4/14/2012)
A prospecting strategy assumes that a sales person works back from the goal to the strategy to the tactics. In other words, if the goal is X number of dollars in revenue and your average sale is $X, how many of these prospects do you need to close to reach the goal. In an excellent blog post on the newsletter Sales Buzz by Michael Pedone, he states "…clearly define what your goal is and who your ideal prospect is and then make that (prospecting) list."
Unfortunately, sales teams often engage in strategy development during the course of developing the sales and marketing plan and never execute.This is a bit like not listening to the GPS in your car and wondering why you are not ending up where you want to be.Strategic Prospecting.

• Mentioned above is to start with the revenue goals and work backward to evaluate the revenue of your average contract and how many of those you will need to achieve the goals. However, if you can increase the average revenue per booking, you can achieve goal on fewer bookings or exceed your goal. Calculate your contact to closing ratio to decide how many prospects you will need to contact in order to close the percentage that will take you to your goal.

• Before starting your prospecting journey, define your ideal client. This will mean that you won"t waste valuable time chasing after prospects that don"t find value in with your prospects or your skill sets.

• Develop a tactical plane to reach your ideal prospects. This plan should include finding referrals to pre qualified prospects, social media such as LinkedIn, email approaches and, of course, the phone. Research the average length of your sales cycle – that is, the time between first contact and close. This will give you a timeline of how many prospects you need to put in the pipeline in order to close by the end of the year and attain the goal.

Strategic Account Optimization.There are large demand generators in most every market and/or region.Unfortunately, most sales people settle for getting a piece of the action without developing a strategy to land other divisions to get a larger piece or all of the pie.

• In a group of properties within a hotel company, sales can develop a unified strategy to include all properties that stand to gain from this demand generator. It is mission critical that all the affected sales people develop a joint strategy with the delegation of tasks. Multi units should have a joint strategy session to ensure that all are on board.
  • Collaboration software or a joint database assists in team sharing of information, activity and passing on leads.
  • There are however several downsides to this approach – contingency plans in case of team turnover and accountability.

• In a single property situation, in many cases it will be one sales person designing and executing the strategy unless it is an institution such as a university with multiple levels of business – corporate, association, government, catering, SMERFE – that touch many sales people in the department. In the first instance, it can be a daunting task for a single person that requires prioritizing the demand generator strategy based on those areas/divisions/departments most likely to have the most demand. In the second it is the team effort as described above.

Accountability.The sticking point is this discussion in accountability – who is going to be responsible for executing these strategic plans and who will monitory the progress of the plans.It would be nice to think that individuals can execute and monitor their strategic plans.It is not that they don"t intend to but the "tyranny of the immediate and the urgent" often gets in the way.In the team approach, it would be nice if the teams were self monitoring but in actual practice teams often become less cohesive with time and when teams are composed of peers it is difficult to hold other team members accountable for executing their part of the strategy.There are several potentialsolutions.

• There are several CRM programs that prompt a team or team members on a specific project or task related to the strategic plan. This assumes that the individual sales team members use it.

• The reporting manager monitors for progression on the strategy and tasks in both situations.

• Given the statistical relationship between sales people that execute a well formulated strategy, a 53% close rate as mentioned above, the incentive for individuals to self monitor is huge.

The best business is from referrals from contacts and influencers that you already know as covered in both the prospecting and strategic account optimization strategic plan versus the cost of cold calling either by phone or email, There is also an advantage from an organizational standpoint in knowing you have a plan and by following it, it will get you to where you want to go in terms of achieving sales goals. Just as there is confidence in the car"s GPS to get you to the destination – it may not be the shortest route but you will get there if you listen to the GPS!