Beyond Form Filling: Embracing Strategic Planning in Sales

CRM systems, forms and checklists take an inordinate amount of the seller’s time, particularly when it comes to complex or bid-driven sales. We hear time and time again how much sales teams see spreadsheets, CRM systems and checklist forms as a tax on their time, often leading to issues with accuracy and hygiene.

The issue lies in how these crucial tools are seen in organisations. For most, they capture important data on an opportunity but force sellers to live in the past, detailing the actions they have taken to manage the pipeline rather than driving forward the actions they need to take to win the sale.

Put simply, when you fill out a form and tick boxes, you’re doing data capture. When you embed the SCOTSMAN? process and understand Commitment Selling, you’re accelerating a process of planning.

Changing perspectives

The difference between form filling and planning came to the fore recently in a deal review Gary Donoghue, one of our SCOTSMAN? coaches was conducting on behalf of a large IT managed services provider. He was talking to an experienced sales professional who had recently joined the customer’s business and was new to SCOTSMAN? and Commitment Selling. It would be fair to say that his previous experience with other methodologies had left him with negative views around sales process management and planning; he saw it as a form filling exercise, as we’ve described.

Working with him, it was clear to see that he soon found the new process to be the opposite – it drove him to look at different aspects of the sale, including the quality of the opportunity, the politics involved, and the criteria that a buying decision would be made on.

He could then take these different views of the opportunity and turn them into a meaningful plan of attack for him, others around him in the business, and, crucially, for his prospect. He could plot actions that he knew would move the sale forward, with the full understanding that if these actions were not taken by the prospect, it would raise questions about how serious the prospect was about using them as a supplier, allowing him to more efficiently ‘qualify out’ or progress towards a win.

His plan was comprehensive: it planned several meetings forward, it included multiple people – some of whom he had not met yet, but it also included plans for introductions and mechanisms to meet them. It included plans to influence them to direct their decision criteria towards their product’s strengths and unique capabilities.

Fail to plan; plan to fail

Many sellers seem reluctant to put effort into planning because of the very real possibility that things won’t go the way they want.

During the Falklands War, a British General was asked,

“What is the point of all this planning? You know that once you meet the enemy the plans will fall apart!”

His reply was this:

“If you have a plan, then in your mind you have a clear view of what the ground looks like. And when things go wrong, as they inevitably will, then at least you know where the boltholes are, and you can survive. But if you don’t have a plan then sometimes you don’t even realise that things are going wrong, and that is very serious.”

Wise words indeed. Even shorter, General Eisenhower simply said this:

"Plans are nothing. Planning is everything."

The same is true for complex sales: there needs to be a plan, but with the acceptance and expectation that things might not go exactly as planned, and with a full understanding of the implications of that, and informed decisions can then be made. The plan can be constantly updated to deal with new information and new challenges, and create new actions to address them. All with the full understanding that if these actions are not done by the prospect, and the problems are not being resolved, these are all signs you are going to lose – so it could be time to withdraw to allow time to be used more effectively elsewhere.

Other sales methodologies rely on checklists or binary yes/no box ticking exercises. In complex B2B sales, opportunity qualification rarely fits into such boxes. It’s therefore critically important that sellers adopt a process that collects the right data, yes, but that also supports the identification of work to be done.

The SCOTSMAN? and Commitment Selling methodology is a framework for planning, and our enablement model supports all aspects from Leadership - inspecting the right metrics, Systems – facilitating the planning, collection and inspection, People – developing the skills and knowledge, and the Process – to support best practice and have everyone working in the same direction.

If you feel that you or your sales team are form fillers, get in touch and let’s create a winning team of planners using SCOTSMAN?

[email protected]