Precision Guided Selling: Your GPS to Sales Success

The days of annual planning, fixed value, and customer needs are gone. Now selling happens at the speed of change, and we at 5600blue have developed a system for managing that effectively.

• American Management Association reports that 90 percent of what sales gets from marketing is irrelevant and not being used.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) promised to make sales more competitive but didn’t. Seventy-four percent of organizations report low CRM adoption and find it’s really a management-reporting and pipeline-management tool.
• Harvard Business Review and Forbes report that legacy sales training has not shifted since the 1970s, and CSO Insights reports that 70 percent of sales training is gone 30 days after delivery.

The legacy approaches for sales support are quickly becoming irrelevant, and with 90 percent of sales organizations increasing sales budgets for 2015 and win rates below 50 percent, it is now imperative to change the way we sell, to make our numbers with more knowledge and less methodology training.

A new approach, Precision Guided Selling (PGS), is the next generation of insight selling that can replace legacy-methodology-based training. It consists of three main elements:
1. the knowledge that salespeople need to compete at the speed of change at every stage of the sales process;
2. Salesforce-integrated technology that delivers real-time knowledge and insight at every phase of the sales process, in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and email formats;
3. enablement in the form of skills training to synthesize the knowledge into customer conversations.

PGS offers help building organizational competency to support sales, as well as the individual knowledge and skills needed for sales in today’s world. With PGS, salespeople make decisions in line with shifting management priorities while leading customers to higher value decisions biased toward their solution.

To make better selling decisions, take the lead on customer decisions, and guide customers at every step of the sales cycle from qualification to close, salespeople need real-time knowledge. Here’s why:
• to make pursuit decisions in line with shifting management priorities, which impact pipeline and forecast;
• to gain access to executives and create demand using compelling market trends and insight that executives value most;
• to add value and influence the customer’s decision process, rather than simply understand it;
• to know how their solution maps directly with client needs better than the alternatives;
• to make better negotiation decisions at the end of the deal cycle.

Ninety-seven percent of likely customer tactics fall into two categories. PGS offers this knowledge to increase sales confidence levels and change the negotiation conversation.