What we do | Sales Segment View | Excellence in Mid-Market
Excellence in Mid-Market
Customer segmentation dictates sales strategy and engagement. While the fundamentals of sales process, discipline and execution remains the same, the nature of engagement becomes different across different segments.
For our various offerings, we follow a depth and breadth approach depending upon the segment of customers you would like to address.
In the case of mid-market, we help you develop broad strategies that encompasses the ecosystem and stresses on cross-boundary collaboration.
Irrespective of the segment for your customers, our range of offerings will build your set of capabilities for you to retire market potential faster.
Better Account and Territory Planning
1
Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
The least common denominator for planning is the Account or the Territory. For a sales professional, their ability to meet quota is indexed on a strong pipeline, and the best source of a solid pipeline is through Account / Territory Planning. In several organizations, account planning is a customary Q1 ritual with some meetings, some pipeline generation, and some PowerPoint slides. This ritual has led to sellers questioning the value of the entire exercise that finally results in missed quotas and challenged customer relationships. There must be a better way.
Our Approach
- The Front-Line Sales Manager is the fulcrum for change in any sales organization. They need to be front and center in the exercise to drive account/ territory planning
- All account / territory planning needs to be conducted in an environment of positivity and possibility. This enables the team to think creatively without undue review pressure
- Stretch is important for Account and Territory Planning. This helps the planning teams to “think out of the box” to come up with innovative strategies to address customer and territory needs
- The best Account Plans address unarticulated and unknown needs of the customer
- Account / Territory planning without customer validation and partner triangulation is hallucination
How do we engage?
Account and territory planning engagements involve the identification of specific accounts/ territories and account / territory teams for the planning exercise.
The first planning session is led by our master facilitator utilizing a coaching approach to drive the planning process for one identified account / territory team. Multiple sales managers observe the conduct of the planning session and take notes so that one chosen manager can replicate the process for a different account / territory later in the day.
This cycle of observation and application is driven for multiple industries and territories so that the managers understand the nuances of facilitation and coaching across different industries and teams.
Impact driven for customers
Managers who have experienced our account / territory planning engagements talk about their ‘A-Ha’ moments when they realized that what they know is very different from what they should know. Principles of facilitation, structuring meetings and conversations, utilization of frameworks to facilitate stretch thinking are all elements that they found valuable.
Sales professionals who experience this account / territory planning workshops talk about discovering a new normal for the quality of their account/ territory plans. They also realize the impact of facilitated account / territory planning, that helps them focus on the customer/ territory, rather than on the process. They are sometimes surprised about the quantum of opportunity that lies untapped with their customers and territories. The joys of teaming and building accountability to customer outcomes are also exercises that transform how they think about teaming.
Organizations who invest in these Account and Territory Planning workshops are pleasantly surprised to discover multiple millions of $s of additional net new pipeline. At Tripura, we have had the pleasure of running hundreds of these sessions across the globe and have generated close to $5 Billion in net new revenue for our customers.
Customer Results - Case Study
The discipline to track planning to revenue
Our customer is among the Big 5 in the Business Applications Software Market world-wide. To sustain their edge, they licensed intellectual property (IP) from Tripura Multinational to define their Deal Qualification discipline world-wide. Our IP currently filters $3 billion of their opportunities every year. In addition to deal discipline, they quickly realized the need to build a greater pipeline so that they could be assured of overachievement through the fiscal. This desire for more made them get in touch with Tripura Multinational again to amplify their pipeline volume.
Success is created twice – once in the head and the second in reality. When it comes to aspirations, human nature is to look back and incrementally predict the future. Keeping this principle in mind, we designed an engagement that allowed the customer’s sales organization to appreciate the larger market opportunity and hence their addressable opportunity. The contrast between their addressable opportunity and their current realization helped them move out of incremental thinking into multiplier thinking. Once the art of the possible was recognized, they quickly moved to land that possibility in the common language of money, customer capabilities and customer projects.
Managers watched us in action on how we simplified, synthesized, and sequenced the art of pipeline creation in an atmosphere of positivity and possibility. The managers then took turns to apply their learning with different customer accounts so that they could become independent coaches to their own teams rather than depend on external engagement through us.
Initial Results within Southeast Asia, netted our customer a total additional pipeline volume of 125 million dollars. Through diligent tracking through their CRM, they were able to attribute 8 million dollars of additional revenue closure, due to our engagement with them, which resulted in an ROI of greater than 20x. This blending of aspiration, manager capability creation, pipeline measurement and tracking became a best practice, which was then subsequently rolled out to other parts of Asia.
These types of engagements across multiple customers over the past few years have helped us create over 4 billion dollars in net new pipeline for our customers.
Recommended Resources for Sales Planning
A growth mindset to achieve your goals can be as easy as ABC
A growth mindset to achieve your goals can be as easy as ABC
Mid-Market Deal Execution
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Of the many challenges facing sales organizations, the one of hope-casting is perhaps the most frustrating. Sellers are not the only one to be blamed – over estimation is an inherent human characteristic. When sales leaders understand this nuance of psychology, they can then look out for ways to remove the dysfunction of hope-casting.
It is our belief that deal qualification is the core of selling. Just as the strength of the core defines the strength of the human being, the strength of deal qualification defines the strength of a sales organization.
Our Approach
- The measure of qualification is not in what the seller does, but what the customer does.
- Qualification without customer validation and triangulation is hallucination.
- For the multiple different criteria for qualification, sales professionals should focus on thinking deeper, broader, and further, so that they can discover the details that define the quality of qualification.
- The depth of qualification should be commensurate with the complexity of the deal, and appreciative of the volatility and uncertainty in the customer’s environment.
- Deal Qualification is not a one-off exercise. It is done at least thrice before the deal fructifies.
- The measure of a good deal qualification discipline lies in the improvement of qualification rate and win rate in the pipeline.
- Sales is the systematic elimination of risk.
Most of our customer engagements stem after they miss their forecast either for the quarter or the half. We then subject the top 10 deals for the next quarter to flow through our deal coaching sessions, so that the opportunity pursuit teams can assess the quality of their qualification, identify risks associated with the deal and develop actions to mitigate the risks discovered.
In addition to these powerful outcomes, sales teams also realize the extent of their integration and the split of responsibilities required to secure the top deals.
Customer Results - Case Study
Traversing the journey from “hopecasting” to forecasting for one the largest software
When the deals start slipping, the quantum of reviews only go up. With multiple quarter commitments getting missed, our customer realized that turning the dial on reviews was becoming counter – productive. They decided to use our expertise as a third-party verification and validation mechanism to help their sales teams confront reality and improve the quality of their deal qualification.
Along with the customer, we identified the top 10 deals for the fiscal that are crucial for success. Deal coaching calls were structured with the entire opportunity team in attendance. After establishing a container of safety, we leveraged the art of powerful questioning to help the opportunity teams think deeper and smarter about their value and differentiation. Combined with coaching around stakeholder management, competitive strategy, partner eco-system linkage and customer consensus, the opportunity teams were able to identify the top risks that confronted them and then built a strategy to mitigate those risks.
Over 60% of the top 10 deals closed as forecasted. In addition to learning the finer nuances of deal management, sales managers and regional leaders understood the importance of taking a coaching approach to progressing top deals towards closure. Sustenance of these learnings and their application to other deals in the pipeline is another positive outcome of this engagement.
Customer acknowledgement testimonial
Recommended Resources for Sales Planning
Tips for sales leaders to develop their teams & ace the B2B prospecting process.
Tips for sales leaders to develop their teams & ace the B2B prospecting process.
Resonating and Differentiating Your Customer Conversations
3
In physics, resonance is defined by the matching of frequencies that increases amplitude. In sales, the ability to resonate with customers is important for meaning and motivation to be established in the conversation. The lack of resonance is very easy to decipher – the lack of progress on deals is a surefire indicator of mismatch of frequencies in client conversations.
For sellers to make sense to customers they need to possess a foundation of three core capabilities:
- The ability to talk the language of business and industry, broadly called business acumen
- The ability to talk the language of money, specifically called financial acumen
- The ability to talk the language of senior executives, loosely called executive conversations
How do we engage?
When customers discover a fall in pipeline volume, a decrease in velocity and a deterioration of quality that is when they reach out to us. Rather than spending time on internal reports, we spend time observing the quality of customer conversations. The extent of customer acknowledgement of the value and learning within the call is a leading indicator of the need to invest in capability building in business acumen, financial acumen, and executive conversations.
Our engagements are designed both as workshops for knowledge assimilation and as “real plays” for field application.
Clients who have experienced these engagements talk about increased access to decision makers, increased deal sizes and faster deal closures. They also talk about the levels of peripheral intelligence displayed by their field and the quantum of insights they bring back from their client conversations.
Customer Results - Case Study
Accelerating Client Value through Business and Financial Acumen
The global business services arm of one of the Big 4 Consulting Companies was facing a strange issue. Even in an environment where they were a captive delivery arm, their penetration within their member firms worldwide was in the low double digits. This was despite the fact that a global mandate existed to leverage the business services arm. They turned to us to help them increase their levels of penetration.
We realized quickly that the gap in penetration was really a gap in resonance and conversation. The business services arm was talking of more people and process whereas the member firms were expecting the language of business, money, measurements, and outcomes. We designed a series of workshops for various groups for them to appreciate the new normal for client expectations and how they could skill up to meet those expectations.
We then put this into action. We designed a series of coaching sessions with specific leaders so that they were able to lead by example on the skills that needed to be demonstrated, and also coach their teams to resonate better with their clients. The ability to build a set of proactive insights, engage customers through storytelling and control conversations to outcomes were all part of the engagement.
Feedback from the workshops was extremely positive with many attendees pointing to the value that they could apply every day. Because it was a workshop, every person brought in a crucial client relationship that they wanted to transform. All of the tools, methodologies, and frameworks that they learnt could be readily applied within their client context. Client penetration moved by several points. The workshop and coaching sessions started prior to Covid19 and continued virtually with no loss of fidelity, clarity, or value.
Customer acknowledgement testimonial
Recommended Resources for You.
Get a GRIP on Senior Executive Conversations
Get a GRIP on Senior Executive Conversations
The Three Dimensions of Negotiation
4
Our Approach
- Never do something for nothing.
- No value no sale.
- Win win is a misnomer, sometimes called 50/50. A better approach is 150/150.
- Every negotiation is three parts preparation and one-part execution.
- The best framework to utilize throughout all negotiations is the iceberg principle.
- Intent trumps fluency as much as value trumps price.
- The art of negotiation is the ability to proactively address the unspoken.
How do we engage?
Typical client engagements start with their articulation of poor price realization in strategic deals. Clients see an increased usage of discounting, most often towards the end of the quarter, as a leading indicator of field incapacity to create and claim business value.
Our workshops keep active opportunities and negotiations at the center and then develop an approach to create business value in customer terms. This value is then leveraged to gain access to multiple stakeholders, so that a consensus on value is developed and the opportunity is morphed into an organizational business priority. The duopoly of value and access negate the need to negotiate for price. The ideal sales teams are those that make procurement a tick box exercise.
Knowledge without field application is sales hallucination. The ability to negotiate well, and throughout the sales cycle, is a fundamental skill that requires reiteration and reinforcement. We work through sales managers so that they can coach their teams on and off the field in their ability to apply the principles, practices, and disciplines of good negotiation.
Customer Results - Case Study
Building negotiation acumen for better value, access, and price
The Asia Leader of a large business applications multinational was worried about the quantum of discounts that were happily traded away at the end of every quarter. She wanted to stem the rot and also build capabilities and skills so that the field is not held hostage to the penuries of the quarter end. They turned to us to design an engagement that would solve for the present as well as inoculate for the future.
In addition to recommending some changes to the compensation and rewards mechanisms for seasonality and discounting, we also designed a workshop that would get the sellers ahead of their buyers. The foundational disciplines of value creation, stakeholder management and negotiations were weaved in within the context of their own opportunities and aspirations. Managers had the explicit role for facilitating their team’s learning rather than leading with their expertise.
Coverage of the games people play in negotiations and role playing those situations had a deep impact on how sellers could build situational fluency to address games buyers play. This trio of psychology, principles and practices provided a rich tapestry of scenarios for the sales teams to build situational fluency and exercise control on deal negotiations and progress.
The customer was initially aghast at the number of deals that had no measurable customer value. Slowly their dismay turned to gratitude as they could now perceive the right set of deals that merited forecasting. This ability to face reality was perhaps the biggest takeaway. Their greater awareness of negotiation principles and practices allowed them to build a higher discipline around negotiations that helped them improve the velocity and quality of their best deals.
Customer engagement scenario
Recommended Resources to Ace Sales Negotations.
How can Sales professionals beat the Price Game and win large deals?
How can Sales professionals beat the Price Game and win large deals?
Self-Leadership Mastery in Sales
5
It is no surprise that sales managers are not provided all the skills and training that is required for them to maximize their effectiveness. There is an inherent assumption that they possess most of the sales management skills, which we are discovering is not necessarily true. In coaching thousands of sales managers over the past several years, we are constantly surprised about how they struggle with some of the basic management skills.
This background and experiences are the genesis for our offering.
Our Approach
- The greatest leveler is time. Management efficiency and leadership effectiveness is indexed around how sales managers plan and spend their time. Harmonizing their various roles to maximizing their effectiveness is key.
- The biggest single impediment to sales managers effectiveness is the “Expert’s Curse”. This is when sales managers start doing what their team members should be doing and start telling when they should be coaching.
- Technology exists to drive sales acceleration. The effectiveness of a sales manager lies in their ability to get technology to reflect “one version of the truth” and to gain hindsight, insights, and foresights from the data.
- The ability to appreciate and apply the principles and practices of change management can make a clear difference to the effectiveness of the sales manager.
How can your sales managers become world class?
Time is a fundamental constraint for sales managers and any engagement needs to be designed while respecting these constraints. Our engagements modularize the key capabilities that every sales manager should possess.
Modularization helps the sales manager appreciate the new normal for their skills and engage in different experiences that helps them imbibe and embed the new set of skills and behaviours that are relevant for the future.
Interactions with a sales coach who has also been a practitioner helps the sales managers contextualize their learnings better. Specific situations and challenges help the sales managers build situational fluency in their application of new knowledge.
This combination of modularization, customization and experimentation provides the rich environment for the sales manager to gain the foundational skills that would amplify their effectiveness.
Impact driven for customers
Sales managers who have benefitted from our programs and were promoted to the next level, tell us that their engagement with us has transformed them in many ways:
1
They now know how to balance time, team, and talent to maximize productivity.
2
Their meetings are far more effective on account of their ability to leverage technology and data to have deeper meaningful conversations.
3
They have more time for their own leadership development due to their increased ability to situationally lead and coach their teams.
4
The program has allowed them to overachieve on their commitments because of their increased ability to manage a better book of business.
Customer Results - Case Study
Recommended Resources to Help Sales Leaders.
How A Caring Sales Leader Is Using Coaching To Improve Team Culture
How A Caring Sales Leader Is Using Coaching To Improve Team Culture
Coaching Your Team to Sales Excellence
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The necessity to coach for a sales manager is never in doubt. However, sales professionals can sometimes suffer from poor or ineffective coaching from their managers. It is therefore incumbent upon organizations to provide sales managers with the right capabilities to become good coaches.
Our Approach
- Coaching is a journey and from a practitioner’s perspective, it moves from awareness to appreciation to application.
- Organizations expect their sales managers to coach but these managers themselves have not experienced the power of coaching.
- Therefore, it is imperative to provide sales managers with a coach who can get the sales manager to experience several “Aha moments” that triggers their understanding and appreciation of the power of coaching.
- The key to building sales managers as good coaches lies in their application of coaching. Whether it is with a team member, an internal stakeholder or a customer/ partner, their ability to coach across different audiences and teams becomes a core competency to build a coaching culture within the sales organization.
Impact driven for customers
Customers leverage this offering when they need to drive three types of outcomes:
- Build volume in their pipeline
- Build velocity for their deals
- Build quality in their execution and people management
Each of these scenarios involve existing accounts, deals or teams through whom managers need to operate to add greater value to customers.
A typical application scenario for coaching involves a pre-brief to decide on the objectives and outcomes for the manager. The objectives and outcomes differ depending upon whether the target for coaching is either a team member, an entire team, or the customer/partner.
The second phase involves the actual application of coaching through their demonstration of the principles of coaching. Their efficacy in establishing a climate for coaching, their ability to structure conversations to powerful realizations and their ability to drive towards outcomes are all tested in the application scenario. This is when managers realize the gap between the appreciation and application of coaching.
The third step involves a debrief between the sales manager and coach on their mutual observations, blind-spots, areas of improvement etc. Multiple iterations of such applications of coaching, is what helps managers to build and sustain a coaching habit.
Organizations that have invested in building a coaching habit have been observed to showcase significant increases in pipeline volume, deal velocity and seller productivity.
2X increases in volume and velocity are not uncommon.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers across Asia to appreciate and apply the power of coaching for sustained sales performance.
One of the world’s largest software companies decided to establish an inside (digital) sales team across Asia to help lower the cost of sale and to amplify the acquisition of net new customers. Given the relative newness of the team and the extent of their addressable opportunity, it was felt that coaching would be a good investment to build their self- awareness, self-discipline and raise their execution quotient to achieve their results.
We designed a coaching engagement that brought together the best of our experience, in coaching sales managers across the globe. There were three specific areas of focus that helped the managers over deliver on their aspirational commitment for the fiscal:
- Plan for adequate number of coaching sessions (15 sessions over a period of nine months), to help the managers truly appreciate and absorb the power of coaching.
- Balance the coaching sessions equally between the appreciation of coaching and the application of coaching.
- Identify individual, team, and organizational challenges that the coachee could effectively apply their coaching skills to, which included their customer and their partner as well.
The entire market area across Asia over delivered on their commitment for the fiscal. They were conscious that their appreciation and application of coaching helped create bonding and aspiration within their teams that still sustains their collective passion for excellence.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for Coaching Your Team.
