The corporate client acquisition process has many components, so many and so extensive that dozens of pages could be written about it. In this article, I will try to summarise part of my training and experience as a sales leader for more than 10 years.

When you manage a sales team, you have to manage different profiles. You are responsible for leading and motivating people in a complicate race (SALES JUNGLE).

The product/service is viewed differently by each client. Do we have the best product? Is it financially the best? Beyond these aspects, which are very important, the sales team must know how to bring out the value of the product/service, clients and prospects must trust in our company and not in the competition. Here, I like to talk about a complex path with clients: “we are the best team in the market that will help you to achieve the best results easier.

Any company can sell, but only a few can achieve the status of partner. Going from a commodity to a partner requires effort, honesty and a lot of smart work. What is the team's goal? To become a partner of clients, we must lose or win as the same as our clients, we walk together in the business strategy. We want to become a part of our clients, we talk to them and only about them and we will become their trusted advisors and focus on their company strategy. If we achieve this goal, our competitors will have little to do. We will sell more now and in the future, both to our clients (cross & up selling) and to prospects (new sales).

This is achieved over time, with hard work and by doing things right, with intelligence and knowledge. We will go through different phases in different fields: Business Knowledge, Client Relationship, Value Creation, Product/Service, etc....

People working with clients should focus on:

1. Building TRUST

2. Working on differentiating ourselves and becoming essential for our customers

In order to focus on these two points, all company’s tiers (starting with the management), must be oriented toward and focused on the clients and we must reach:

• Growth sticky with all levels client tiers (CxO, Managers, STAFF)

• Alignment of our development with the objectives of our clients

• Increasing knowledge of the organisation

• Involvement of customers in our planning

• A constant measure and quantification of everything related to customers and correctly alignment with their requirements and needs.

How can we begin?

The first thing a sales team must do, is to create/accelerate demand for our product/service. You could receive “NO” as an answer, but you have to insist in the right way and always repeat. A client says "no" today but as you know this is not a permanent answer... The first thing we should do is to know our "conversion sales rate" and analyse it in order to improve it. Never stop prospecting ;-)

It is important to be aware of the maturity period of our sale’s process. This is important, above all, to make a good, realistic, effective and efficient sales plan.

Sales teams must learn to "stop selling" and begin to elevate the dialogue in their conversations with customers. You must provide value to clients, whoever listens to you wants value for their company. We must take into account who is our interlocutor, value for CxO is totally different from staff value.

We must plan the sale process in the right way from the beginning. Working correctly from the base will give us many more chances of success.

I already have the "plan" but... What do I do now?

The first thing to do is to understand our clients' business, then make a political map of the client and establish a multi-directional "attack" towards various points in the client's organisation. Establish who we know in the organisation. We design 3 levels, executive, management and staff, work to be present at all levels, make a SWOT of relationships and analyse the possible decision making process. Once we know what the process is like, we analyse the profile of the people involved (sceptics, controllers, etc), and when we have as much information as possible, we establish the action points to star the relationship with the customer.

We are in. Now what?

The first thing is to know their current status, listen and based on what the information they give us, decide whether we are going to be direct, redirect the customer, split the offer or simply sow the seeds of the competition's "mistake". There are different strategies and combinations for many of them... The fundamental thing is listening, something that commercial people must perfect (better talk less and listen more). At this point it is critical to make SWOTs of the competition.

The most important part: VALUE PROPOSITION

You have to make a unique and different value proposition, it must be different from the competition's, establish at least three criteria and offer value to your clients. This seems obvious, but it is something that is missing from many proposals. There is a tendency to talk about price and this should not be the case, we need to be able to take the clients out of price talk and into the global value proposition, something that goes beyond just price. It is critical that clients understand the value we bring to their organisation, it is critical to establish long term relationships that are beneficial to both organisations. Creating a collaborative framework between the two entities will set us apart from the rest of the market.

When we make presentations, let's focus on value and keep in mind who we are presenting to. At this point I would like to comment on something that I have always done for years, if you are presenting to a CxO, the presentation should not last more than 15 minutes and the last 5 minutes must be dedicated to the farewell and closing.

How do I manage sales in my company?

The sales team leads the process, but leaves no one behind, the whole company is aligned with the client. We have worked on teaching our organisation who the customer is and where we are going. All the participants are informed and we encourage them to collaborate, we involve them. We want our success as a collective success, we need every single person in the organisation to feel that success is their own. It is the mission of the sales department and the management to make everyone feel that it is a great and correct achievement of objectives.

Humble, honest and constructive self-criticism, are the keys to carrying out this process correctly.