Do You Have a Repeatable, Sustainable Profile for Success?

I was having a discussion with a good friend of mine recently and we were talking about how most organizations don’t have a repeatable, sustainable profile for how they achieve success. What we were referring to was the need for organizations to be able to have a clear understanding of how they are successful in winning business. For many organizations, they can give you an assumption that they have, but haven’t developed a profile of specifically what they need to successfully win business on a repeatable, sustainable basis. I think the reason for this is that they simply haven’t invested the time or research that it takes to analyze just how they win the business that they do. Next, they haven’t sat down and actually created a profile that they could disseminate throughout their marketing, product and sales groups, that they could actually put it into practice.

So, what we see is a group dysfunctional, non-communicating groups who are operating with their own independent course of action. The problem is, each group winds up going in a different direction, but all are trying to reach to the same goal, or destination, which is to win business.

Here are some of the things I think organizations need to do in order to create a Profile for Success:

1. They need to interview as many customers as they can to understand how and why they became a customer and then chart all of the common things that were done by everyone involved in the sale, so they can see any trends that they can replicate.
2. They need to also interview all of the salespeople who were involved in winning those accounts to understand what they did to win that business and see if there are common threads that can be replicated through the rest of the sales force.
3. Organizations need to analyze all of the marketing collateral that was used in the pursuit of those customers and see what collateral enticed the customer to contact their company in the form of a lead. This will validate marketing lead campaigns. Next, they should analyze the sales message to see which message resonated most with the customer and then see how many times that message was involved in a successful sale. Then, plot any additional collateral that was used to convince the prospect to buy.
4. Once these are completed, the company should have a pretty good idea of what a profile for success looks like. They can then take all of the pieces and incorporate them into a training program to teach all of their sales people about who they should be targeting to sell to. They will also know what issues they had, why they had them, who else was involved in those same issues and, ultimately, in the decision process and how best to win their business.  Marketing will know which messages were most effective and which marketing collateral should be used to both attract new prospects and then convert them to customers.

Those best-in-class organizations who know all of the information above and have a profile for repeatable, sustainable success, consistently outsell their competition time after time. If your organization doesn’t know all of the things mentioned above and have them in a structured process that can be shared by everyone, then perhaps you aren’t as successful as you could be.

At least that’s the way I see it, what say you?