What we do | Sales Offerings View | Plan Better
Plan Better
The first step towards meeting and over achieving your sales quota is to build a sales plan. Whether it is at the account level, territory level or the organization level, your plan is your compass for achievement.
The best sales plans are generated as a team, validated with customers and periodically indexed to growth parameters in your addressable market.
Do you want to assess the success rate of your largest deals?
Insight Driven Account Planning
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Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
The least common denominator for planning within sales organizations is the Account. For a sales professional, the ability to meet quota is indexed on a strong pipeline, and the best source for a solid pipeline is Account Planning. In many organizations, account planning is a customary Q1 ritual with some meetings, some pipeline generation, and some PowerPoint slides. This ritual has led sellers to question the value of the entire exercise that finally results in missed quotas and challenged customer commitments. 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 planning.
- All account planning needs to be conducted in an environment of positivity and possibility. This enables the team to think creatively without undue pressure.
- Stretch is important for Account Planning – this helps the planning teams to “think out of the box” and come up with innovative strategies to address customer needs.
- The best Account Plans address unarticulated and unknown needs of the customer.
- Account planning without customer validation and triangulation is hallucination.
How do we engage?
Account planning engagements involve the identification of specific accounts and account teams for the planning exercise.
The first planning session is led by our master facilitator using a coaching approach to drive the planning process for one identified account team. The managers observe the conduct and take notes so that one chosen manager can replicate the process for a different account later in the day.
This cycle of observation and application is driven for multiple industries so that the managers understand the nuances of facilitation and coaching across different industries and teams.
Experiencing 'A-Ha' moments.
Managers who have experienced our account 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 find valuable.
Sales professionals who experience these workshops talk about discovering a new normal for the quality of their account plans. They also realize the impact of facilitated account planning that helps them focus on the customer rather than on the process. They are sometimes surprised about the quantum of opportunity that lies untapped with their customers. 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 Planning workshops are pleasantly surprised to see 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 $4 Billion in net new revenue for our customers
Customer Results - Case Study
Connecting the Dots from Account Planning to Revenue Results
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
Q0 Planning: 5 Ways You Could Assess If You Have a Good Plan?
Q0 Planning: 5 Ways You Could Assess If You Have a Good Plan?
Amplify Your Pipeline Through The Power of Coaching
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One of the dysfunctions that sales leaders constantly complain about, is the tick box exercise of Account Planning. This is often seen as a Q1 exercise to be completed by the end of Q1 to gain a certain level of pipeline sufficiency. Some leaders tell us their teams ask how much pipeline they require so that they could “stuff” their pipeline with enough ghost opportunities to meet their account planning goals. There must be a different way!
Our Approach
- Planning happens best through the interplay of divergent and convergent thinking.
- The admission of ignorance is the beginning of learning.
- Thinking “outside in” is a powerful way to connect the dots from the customer to the seller.
- An environment of positivity and possibility helps everyone deliver more.
- Getting the sales team to integrate and collaborate is crucial to a greater outcome in account planning.
- An account plan without customer validation and stakeholder triangulation is hallucination.
How do we engage?
A benchmark is important for every person to assess their gap from their current version of performance to the standards required for excellence. Our engagement delivers a benchmark across three levels:
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The quality and depth of information needed for any account
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The quality of coaching and facilitation required for running a planning session
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The quality of validation and triangulation required for any account plan
Our facilitator leads by example on group coaching of the account planning session, post which one of the sales managers demonstrates their capability to do the same. Multiple iterations of observations, feedback and application across industries builds the core strength of managers to coach towards powerful account planning outcomes.
Multi-million dollars net-new opportunities
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Coached hundreds of Account Planning sessions across the globe and empowered hundreds of sales managers to generate over $4billion dollars in net-new pipeline.
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These engagements have covered over 20 different countries across 5 different continents, which is a testament to the effectiveness of this framework across different cultures. There are no excuses for not coaching powerful account plans to generate significant pipeline.
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Smart customers also build their operational discipline to track net-new opportunities generated, right through qualification, acceleration, and closure.
One of our customers, who identified $125 million net-new opportunities through our engagement was surprised to realize $8 million dollars of closed opportunities, through this process, within a quarter.
Imagine, how much more pipeline and revenue you could drive for your sales organization through us.
Customer acknowledgement testimonial
Resources to Help You
Three Tips for a Billion $ Pipeline
Three Tips for a Billion $ Pipeline
Crafting a Better 3-Year Sales Plan
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Our Approach
- Current organization structure and hierarchy should not be replicated to drive three-year planning processes.
- To think outside the box, you need to look into other boxes.
- Measure yourself by not what you have achieved in the past, but by how much of your addressable market you have retired?
- Diversity is the foundation to drive innovation within a strong three-year plan.
- Simplicity with sophistication should form the backbone of the planning process.
- Any planning without critical stakeholder validation and triangulation, is hallucination.
How do we engage?
We design an engagement roadmap that includes the planning team (ideally not more than 25 leaders). Good planning requires good preparation, and some preparation guidelines are sent prior so that data is readily available to substantiate the planning. If possible, we would prefer an offsite location that helps bring together the body, heart, mind, and soul for the leaders. We facilitate a series of experiences that help the leaders understand each other better and leverage their differences to achieve more for their vision.
In some cases, we leverage our partnership with MarketCulture to assess the level of customer centricity within the leadership team. Leaders measure their organizational focus on customer centricity across eight different parameters that also helps them benchmark themselves against the best in class. This assessment has proved to be useful as a pre-cursor to the planning exercise, so that leaders confront their current reality with respect to their collective customer centricity.
Clients who have experienced our facilitated three-year planning approach are surprised by how much they are able to achieve within two days. They are also surprised how the richness of the engagement helps them sustain the planning efforts into execution and results.
Customer Results - Case Study
Ensuring 3-year plans truly deliver results – “Failing to plan is planning to fail”
The Indonesia subsidiary of one of the world’s largest software multinationals wanted to develop a three-year plan that truly reflected market potential. Previous annual efforts had been mostly internally driven with lack luster follow-up and not much progress in market share. They believed that a facilitated process would help them achieve more, and they turned to Tripura for help.
We designed an engagement that allowed the top leaders to understand the divergent perspectives everybody had on their market and its potential. This then helped them during the workshop to first decide on a common aspiration that everyone would feel inspired and motivated by. The next step was to ensure that leaders understood their behavioral similarities and differences so that they could leverage their differences to achieve more for every project that supported their aspiration. We also empowered them through a series of experiences by which they were able to translate their vision into specific goals, strategies, metrics, measures, and milestones. We also leveraged Black Hat Thinking to identify future potential risks that needed to be mitigated as the teams translated strategy into execution.
The subsidiary leader was surprised to see the quality of the output at the end of two days. This was far beyond their expectations, and it earned them appreciation from the Region for a higher order of aspiration, supported by a solid set of strategies. Their ability to have meaningful conversations with their regional leaders on investments and outcomes led to a higher investment for the Indonesian subsidiary. The acceleration that they received on account of their strong strategies helped them front load their performance, to such an extent that the Covid-19 crisis did not make a significant dent in their growth numbers.
Recommended Resources
Measure the Power of your Questions
Measure the Power of your Questions
In Sales, the quality of the questions become even more important. What if your question itself is of tremendous value to your customer making them think differently? How have your questions reframed your customers’ reality lately?
