50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People: Habit #11 – Target Accounts

May 28, 2015 Selling Comments Off on 50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People: Habit #11 – Target Accounts

Continuing with the twelve Organizational Skills let’s look at Habit #11 – Target Accounts.

Develop and implement a Target Account strategy that focuses on past successes and the leveraging of those successes.

Last month’s newsletter discussed having a plan, a plan that outlines what you’re going to sell and to whom you are going to sell.  This assumes that you have a list of people that can use what you sell.  This may be a huge assumption because there are very few people that are actually proactive in determining to whom they’re going to sell.  Many people go through industrial parks and make calls, and many people call the same prospects over and over, but very few people actually sit down and figure out which companies can derive value from the products they sell.

Understanding the value of your products or services, that is, how the products or services deliver value to prospective customers, is something very few salespeople quantify.  The word “quantify” is used because it’s always about the money.

The question you need to ask yourself is: “How, financially, can I contribute to my prospective customer’s bottom line?”  This is a question to which very few salespeople know the answer.  Very few salespeople actually ask the question.  Very few salespeople think of the question.  It’s baffling how few salespeople ask this question because no one buys anything from anybody unless they can make a profit.  It’s all about the money.  A target prospect list should be made up of prospects to which you can deliver value through increased profitability.

How do you get this list? 

Getting a list may seem difficult, but it’s not.  You should develop a list of successful sales and the names of the customers to which the sales were made, and sort the list by product or service.

Next, determine why the customer bought the product or service.

• What was in it for them (the customer)?
• What motivated them to buy?
• What savings/profit was generated? This needs to be stated in financial terms.
•  In other words, what was in it for them (the customer) financially?

The next step is to place all these companies into a plan in order for you to present the value proposition that you’ve developed earlier in the process. Again, this seems like a lot of work to many, but this is the basis to growing your business, and Top Performers jump at this opportunity.

“A Habit” is not work, but just a thing that is done every day and developing and implementing a Target Account strategy can easily become a Habit.  Develop the process, create the Target Account List and then work the list.

TIME MANAGEMENT.  For Top Performers, every task is planned and focused on the goals that earn the results.  Top Performers use a Target Account strategy to focus their efforts and maximize the utilization of their time with and on their customers.  Top Performers plan and then engage.  They act on their plans, they work hard and they get results.

Coaching these skills is a critical part of what we do. We are here to help you develop and implement your Strategic Plan and coach and develop the skills to implement the plan successfully.

We are having great success coaching and implementing these methods and skills and our clients love it!