Advance's Professional Sales Consultancy

A sales consultancy ideally should provide analysis and training to professionals and enterprises for improving its sales. The training and responsibilities of a sales consultant depends on the type of consultant: one who advises businesses and other salespeople often has years of experience and training, while one who sells products may not need much training at all to start with. The work environment for both of these careers is generally fast-paced and involves a lot of interaction with people.

There are always debates and arguments regarding the professionalism and seriousness involved in the entire process of consulting. A proper consulting approach requires in-depth study and research of client’s business proposition, its current stage and its desired stage.

Then a detailed gap analysis is required at every level of sales process before arriving to a conclusion.

‘Waterfall model’ is mostly adopted in the entire process. Basically it should cover every stage between ‘Contacts’ to ‘Contracts’.

Most sales systems measure sales activity. They measure number of meetings, number of demonstrations and number of proposals. Advance Selling Skills Academy has launched tools to help you measure the quality of the process and its outcomes. These outcomes are defined as commitments made by the customer (both internal and external).

How do Advance’s Sales tools work?

>> A framework that helps individuals excel and facilitates measurement of improvements
>> The sales process through both the selling and buying organisation
>> The generation of sales process road maps
>> Measurement of what the customer is doing
>> The capture and planning of agendas, meetings, commitments and timetables.

The approach equips sales teams and their management to:

>> Manage any complexities in the process
>> Pick up on mandatory steps, especially rigorous qualification throughout the process
>> Structure the sale into an implementable plan
>> Identify resource requirements well in advance
>> Make timely and effective management interventions – before the event
>> Measure effectiveness of the process
>> Redesign the plan as the sale progresses.

In sum, a high quality comprehensive process for sales teams and their management, designed for the real world.

Benefits

Greater consistency and effectiveness for sales teams and management result in improvements in:

>> Qualification rigour (if you’re going to lose, lose quickly)
>> Forecasting accuracy
>> Sales force productivity
>> The performance of average sales people (by following the documented best practice)
>> Working with other functions to progress the sale.

Together these should deliver:

>> Reduced costs of selling
>> Higher win rate
>> Higher sales
>> Higher profits
>> Greater profitability
>> Ability to quit unwinnable bids more quickly
>> Better use of sales, support and other resources

Advance is a professional sales consultancy that specialises in revitalising every aspect of sales operations. It combines its experience based consultancy, sales methodology and IP with modern training and technology to help clients maximise profitable growth.

How does Advance’s consultancy help Sales operations?

>> Business leaders gain control of forecasting and predictability
>> Understand, articulate and sell the company vision.
>> Take advantage of change – it creates needs
>> See the world through their customers’ eyes
>> Understand the context of what people really want to buy
>> Align and articulate the offer in the context of the customer’s needs
>> Gain customers’ commitment to their way forward
>> Manage and work within a sales process.

This is how Advance helps organisations improve their bottom line and gain a competitive edge.

Performance Management System to Grow Sales

Performance Management System helps in managing employee or system performance and aligning their objectives, facilitating the effective delivery of strategic and operational goals.

With a good performance management program in place, managers indicated that employees hit 21.5 percent more of their goal targets. Similarly, employees estimated that with an effective performance management system, they achieve 8.3 percent more of their goals.

An ideal Performance Management & Development process brings positive impact through several avenues. 

• Improves employee engagement because everyone understands how they are directly contributing to the organizations high level goals
• Professional development programs are better aligned directly to achieving business level goals
• Create transparency in achievement of goals
• Integrates individual Performance Development with incentives/bonus, learning impact and greater goals of the organisation.
• Helps audit / comply with legislative requirement
• Improved management control.

The Advance Academy is built on a Performance Management  technology platform that delivers multi-dimensional skills and knowledge training for businesses. Our business-focused approach to learning determines training needs based on job role. Job profiles define the skills required at different levels of competence, and a management led process allows managers to continually review their people’s training needs and progress.

The platform integrates with existing ERP or CRM and provides benefits like:

• The staff member reviews personal performance, documents self-assessment comments and gathers needed documentation, including 360 degree feedback results, when available.
• The supervisor prepares for the PDP meeting by collecting data including work records, reports, and input from others familiar with the staff person’s work.
• Both examine how the employee is performing against all criteria, and think about areas for potential development.
• Develop a plan for the PDP meeting which includes answers to all questions on the performance development tool with examples, documentation and so on.

What can you expect from Advance’s Performance Development & Management Process?

• Grow sales
• Reduce costs in the organization
• Stop project overruns
• Align the organization with organisation’s vision and mission statement.
• Decreases the time it takes to create strategic or operational changes by communicating the changes through a new set of goals.

Advance’s Performance Development and Management process is renowned and tested by organisations like Accenture, Vodafone, Xerox, Lufthansa, IBM.

Advance’s Sales Forecasting Tool ‘SCOTSMAN®’ is the Right Choice

After a lot of research,  Advance came up with the well thought metric sales forecasting tool ‘SCOTSMAN®’. Advance has helped more than twenty thousand sales professionals across the world by equipping them with this scientific process.

Most salespeople will agree that ‘Time Management’ is the biggest challenge which affects their sales performance.  Among all the factors of time management: Travel, Administration, and Business Meetings, sales people will agree that two third of their time get lost in deals which never materialises! Few may say that they learn when they lose but its definite that they learn a lot when they win.

Generally sales people assimilate a lot of data for an accurate conclusion of their sales deals.  One popular method is listing down ‘show-stoppers’.  Show stoppers are the list of factors which can foil the sales deal. Many will agree that budget, competition and need fitments are the main ‘Showstoppers’ to be considered while planning a sales deal. There is a typical phase in ‘Sales Cycle’, where the sales people just need to wait for their prospect’s decision.  This typical phase can be better described as ‘fog of unknown’. Sales Managers get the real pain in projecting their figures during this period. Most of the mismatches in sales projection arise due to uncontrolled nature of ‘fog of unknown’ phase.

Sales process consultants or Sales coaches often don’t have any idea to overcome the phase of ‘fog of unknown’ and quantify the uncertainty.

Advance Selling Skills Academy’s registered qualification process SCOTSMAN® is an ideal metric to forecast sales. After a lot of research,  Advance came up with the well thought metric ‘SCOTSMAN®’ Advance has helped more than twenty thousand sales professionals across the world by equipping them with this scientific process.  The idea can be easily incorporated into a sales automation system.

Each alphabet of ‘SCOTSMAN’ denotes factors to be considered and quantified for sales forecast. ‘S’ denotes Solution, ‘C’ denotes Competition, ‘O’ denotes Originality, ‘T’ denotes Timescales, ‘S’ denotes Size, ‘M’ denotes Money, ‘A’ denotes Authority, and ‘N’ denotes Need.

 Solution is the recommendation of sales people to address client's needs. Competition is the competitor analysis for the prescribed product or service. Originality is the strength of the product’s or service’s uniqueness or Unique Selling Propositions. Timescale is the time required for implementing or executing the solution given to client. Size is the check of feasibility of solution. Money implies the budget, pricing and costs involved with solution. ‘Authority’ measures the depth of access with the decision makers. Need is the ultimate check of the client’s requirement of the prescribed solution.

Advance Selling Skills Academy has designed a questionnaire for each stage of SCOTSMAN. The answer to the questions is close ended and can be quantified. After calibrating the responses against

SCOTSMAN, the salespeople can quantify the sales deal with definite numeric outcomes like 8 out of 10, 6 out of 10 etc. This process automatically brings transparency in the entire sales process management. Senior executives can keep a track with more accuracy on the sales deals and this leads them to better forecasting.

When all organisations are going for sales automation, there is hardly any room to leave qualitative data in the entire sales process. Advance’s SCOTSMAN® is a definitely a big leap towards sales automation.

Published by: Aurindam Ghosal

E-Learning Technologies are Boosting Agility

Despite projected growth in the global population from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 7.6 billion in 2020, the working-age population is expected to decline in many countries. Japan already has more people exiting the workforce than there are workers prepared to enter it.

In the European labour market, 2010 marked the first time more workers retired than joined the workforce. While this labour gap is a relatively manageable 200,000, it will surge to 8.3 million by 2030.

By the end of this decade, other large economies such as Russia, Canada, South Korea and China will also have more people at retirement age than are entering the workforce. Other, younger countries stand to profit from those trends.

Other emerging market economies with young labour forces such as Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia may benefit from a demographic dividend, a surge in productivity and growth as those workers join the labour pool.

But the dividend pays off only if the country provides its youth with adequate educational and economic opportunities to develop their skills.

 There is a growing mismatch between the skills employers need and the talent available

An estimated 31% of employers worldwide find it difficult to fill positions because of talent shortages in their markets, reports the 2010 Talent Shortage Survey from Manpower, an international employment agency.

When it comes to attracting employees with critical skills, the task becomes even more challenging. Today, 65% of global companies and more than 80% of companies in fast-growth economies are having problems finding employees with the skills they need, according to Towers Watson, an HR consultancy.

So, employee skill development is becoming a prime focus for all organisations irrespective of sizes. But the concern of implementation in a cost effective way has always remained a challenge. While most organisations agree that they need to concentrate on boosting up employee skills, they also agree that huge gestation lag, slow cascading of knowledge and increasing cost make the proposition cumbersome and difficult.

Organizations with strong learning culture significantly outperform their peers. 46% more likely to be first to market, 37% greater employee productivity, 34% better response to customer needs, 26% greater ability to deliver "quality products", 58% more prepared to meet future demand, 17% more likely to be market share leader.

Considering all the intricacies, companies are relying more on e-learning or online sales training for their employees.

Companies are now increasing their use of eLearning regardless of size.  41.7% of global Fortune 500 Companies used technology during formal learning hours last year. Learning Technologies are boosting agility. 35% improvement in time competency, 32% faster roll out of new IT systems, 32% improvement in ability to introduce new products and services, 26% overall cost saving!

Unisys, the IT major has recently tied up with Advance Selling Skills Academy, UK, for training up its sales force.

Advance Selling Skills Academy is always ahead of the curve in customised, flexible sales training solutions. The training solutions are available on online platform with 24/7 access. The rich sales training courses are complemented with e-books and course notes. The course contents can be accessed offline also.