The next in our series (see below for links to previous posts) builds on the work entailed in Steps One and Two, and is demanding on many levels. Yet it is not worth doing unless the organization is prepared to follow through on the remaining steps. Investing the resources required to acquire knowledge but then failing to follow up on it has repercussions for organizational efficiency and team morale.
Analysis must be followed by action. The most efficient way to approach this step is to examine all the events discovered in the previous two steps and categorize them. (This is when to get the “lumpers” involved.) Most selling errors, failures and weaknesses fall into one of the following categories:
- Weak leadership
- Errors in judgment
- Inadequate procedures
- Procedures not followed
- Having the wrong person fill a role
- Not assigning enough people to a particular function
- Inadequate technology (for collaboration, production, etc.)
- An insufficient selling budget
- Poor planning and scheduling
- Insufficient or inaccurate customer knowledge
- Inadequate information about the competition
Once this list is compiled, it is important to get the perspective of the “splitters.” This is because an action-item list, the output of Step Three, should be driven by systemic weaknesses or flaws, not one-time events that are unlikely to occur again. The splitters can identify the unique events. Some examples include:
- The competitor made two acquisitions that added critical capability late in the sales cycle.
- Important decision-makers in the customer organization were removed from the process due to unforeseeable events after the solution was proposed.
- A natural disaster, such as a blizzard or a flood, prevented key players in the sales process from attending presentation rehearsals.
No organization can develop processes that anticipate all contingencies, and no organization can afford to go down that road. However, many selling events reveal systemic flaws, and these form the basis for the action-item list. Although priority is necessarily attached to the events that actually resulted in the loss, other weaknesses or problems can be of equal importance. Resources are finite, and not every flaw can be addressed.
Items on the list can include training, hiring, firing, acquiring new technology, reassigning personnel and developing new approaches to customer intelligence gathering, to name just a few. A professional must take ownership of the action-item list and, for each action, identify the following:
- What needs to be accomplished
- What the interim steps are
- What the relevant milestones and deadlines are
- How the team will know when the problem has been fixed
- Who will be responsible
Whoever owns the list needs to schedule regular meetings until all the action items are addressed. Because taking action always demands resources above and beyond what was planned for, senior leadership buy-in and support are critical.
Stay tuned for the next installment!
Past posts:
Step One – Find out what happened
Step Two – Determine Causality
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photo by Katrina Snaps