You can’t ‘Get sh*t done’ if you don’t have a plan

They had become busy fools. Busy, tired, scared and frantic fools. More everything and everything faster.

I spent some of the last 6 months coaching a sales team who had been drilled with the motto ‘Get sh*t done’ on their daily catch ups. One of the team had the initials GSD carefully scribed onto the cover of their daybook. Not one of them knew what it meant beyond doing more of what they always did; more outbound mails, more cold calls, more sequences, more LinkedIn posts. More everything and everything faster.

Notwithstanding the crazy challenges of the last 6 months they had become busy fools. Busy, tired, scared and frantic fools. They had some success but nothing they could celebrate because there was no definition for what good looked like much less a plan for how they might get there or measures so they might know where they were on their quest.

To find prospects and turn them into happy, revenue generating, repeat customers they needed a prospecting plan. A plan to articulate the specifics of the sh*t they needed to get done to engage, inform, coach and provoke qualified prospects, a plan for the messaging and materials they needed to maintain a dialogue, and a plan for reviewing progress against agreed metrics.

In practical terms, each individual salesperson must set out the targets, activities and engagement strategies they believe will deliver their contribution to the corporate sales plan. Running headlong from one day to the next is not going to work.

A prospecting plan needn’t be complicated. Here are 5 key building blocks...

1. Ideal Prospect Profile

A clear understanding of the ideal prospect should be at the core of prospecting activity. The profile may vary by market or vertical, but a lot of time, effort and resources will be burned on inbound and outbound activity, so it makes sense to be clear about the profile of the ideal prospect.

There are many readily available templates for the profile. They can be populated from existing knowledge or fresh, external, eyes can be retained to create new materials.

TheIdeal Prospect Profile has 4 primary functions...

• Align all prospecting efforts to a commonly agreed target profile  
• Make a clear distinction between a lead and a prospect
• Begin to define qualification questions, materials and campaigns aligned to the business and operational challenges of the ideal prospect

The more closely the business aligns itself to the ideal prospect the greater the opportunity to be regarded as distinctive in its engagements.

2. Intelligent milestones 

There’s no getting away from it, performance will be measured, reported and reviewed.The prospecting plan needs to set out both leading and lagging performance indicators.

Leading indicators will be activities and initiatives that are foundation stones or clearly recognised factors of future success and could include time spent on specific activities, responses to outbound initiatives or completion of significant events such as ‘proposals sent’. The type of product or service being sold and the go to market channels being used will influence the adoption of leading performance indicators. In effect, leading indicators look at the road ahead.

Lagging indicators describe the results that have been achieved and could include revenue status, number of deals closed or average deal sizes. They tell us what has already happened.

The prospecting plan should prioritise what it considers to be the key indicators and set out the activities and milestones to ensure they are hit. The business must clearly understand the relationship between leading and lagging indicators and how activities will be tracked and reported so discussion and debate focuses on improvement ideas and not the validity of the data.

3. Build campaigns 

The prospecting plan should include campaigns to support leading and lagging indicators for the following quarters. As a great sales VP of mine once told me, ‘You need two eyes on this quarter and one on next’. He wasn’t wrong.

The activities themselves could be generic and themed to a product launch or an industry issue, seasonal or based around industry events. They could involve promotions, speaking opportunities, social media or personalised outbound campaigns.

The campaigns should be supported by milestones and targets distributed around key contributors to the sales effort. This is nothing to do with remuneration. It is to ensure that dependencies on product support, material production, event management and the associated resources and budgets, become shared success criteria. Sales is a company-wide challenge and success should be a company-wide experience.

Salespeople prefer spending time on selling activities that are closer to the end of the sales process than the beginning and will happily fuel debates about the quality of inbound leads. Campaigns should support, not replace, time each day or week the salesperson dedicates to outbound prospecting. 

4. Messaging and tools

Prospecting with clear and focused messages helps salespeople attract, engage and nurture ideal prospects. The tools they build, such as case studies, success stories, scripts and playbooks, should relate to industry trends and adapt fluently to the business or operational goals of key individual prospect stakeholders.

The salesperson should be deeply familiar with the stories of success achieved working together with peers of the ideal prospect and constantly seek to reframe arguments and proof points to ensure the stories remain compelling. The best performers are not satisfied acting as a case study audio book.

Consideration should also be given to the ease with which an ideal prospect can navigate the company web site. What will they be looking for and what will they find when they get there?

The prospecting plan should identify the tools that are needed and the actions to be taken to address any gaps. The salesperson must understand how to use the tools and resources to elegantly introduce insightful questions that create an opportunity to both confirm and influence the thinking of buyers and decision makers.

5. Measure, review and refine

The prospecting plan should include regular formal and informal review points, including standing Sales meetings. Making them part of the plan encourages the salesperson to engage as a peer and take responsibility for their prospecting plan, rather than being summoned to a management inspection.

A review of the prospecting plan should include:

• Progress against agreed Leading and Lagging performance indicators
• Feedback and lessons learned from a review of wins, losses and stuck deals
• Ideas and actions to adapt and positively influence performance

The theme here is to inspect what is important and what was expected and use the findings to agree the next prospecting actions.

Time spent reviewing progress will quickly shine a light on the mindset of the salesperson. Focus attention on understanding the highest impact performance levers and driving changes in behaviours to amplify the activities that deliver the best returns.

Successful salespeople will take a pro-active ‘rolling thunder’ approach to communicating performance updates allowing themes and ideas to develop and focus to be maintained.Underperforming salespeople are more likely to adopt an irregular ‘lightning strike’ approach which can be disruptive and, often, arrive too late to influence progress.

Margin notes...

The world of sales is awash with endless ideas and opinions, templates and lists. Don’t be consumed by stories of people ‘crushing it’! Lessons can be learned from everyone’s experiences, but the reality is that prospecting is hard work and requires thought and planning.

Make a prospecting plan, version 1, and make it action orientated. Get the best brains involved to road test assumptions and ideas. Review progress against expectations at regular intervals, understand what can be improved and take action.

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