Do you know with certainty if you will achieve your next sales goal? Introduction to Followuppower.net

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1 Do you know with certainty if you will achieve your next sales goal? Staying in business and thriving is all about keeping existing clients and attracting new clients. Companies that follow a disciplined, structured sales process will be much more successful than a company with a loose individual focused selling structure. Companies that want to sustain successful revenue objectives need to have their sales process defined and key activities or behavior tracked and measured. By having accurate records, you can react to customer interactions with facts and figures that will impress your client and position you as an informed and preferred vendor. A few examples of the fundamental kind of information that should be tracked: The customer s contact information. Who is the person responsible for handling this customer? What have we done prior to this requested transaction with this client? Are they ready to buy? Do they have money or are they looking to determine a budget and then go in search of the money? Who are the decision makers? What is the status or possibility of this client doing business with you? What comments or communication have you had with the customer? What was the last conversation about? What s the next step and when is it due? Having good information allows everyone involved in the selling process to be informed and make good decisions. Most important is that the customer feels you have your act together. Customers believe if the sales process doesn t flow well that the delivery of goods and services won t be any different. Never underestimate the power of a well-oiled sales machine. Having the right tools to better understand and service your customer s needs can be the defining difference between you and your competitor. Customers who feel valued, informed and confident in your ability will do business with you. By knowing the status of each salesperson s Pipeline and Closing Ratio you can with certainty predict future sales and ensure the success of your sales team. Introduction to Followuppower.net Hello, my name is Gregg Wallick. How would you like to double the size of your company? Nothing is more important to any business than securing revenue or as most people call it, making a sale. I believe sales drive everything! Without a sale nothing else happens. When I was first introduced to the following well known sales statistics, I almost fell out of my chair. 48% of all sales people never follow up with a prospect 25% of all sales people follow up once then stop 12% of all sales people follow up twice then stop Only 10% of all sales people follow up more than 3 times 2% of all sales are made on the first contact 3% of all sales are made on the second contact 5% of all sales are made on the third contact 10% of all sales are made on the fourth contact 80% of all sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact If 80% of all sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact, how could I insure we are making those fifth to twelfth calls? In 2001, I decided that there must be a better way of tracking and monitoring sales teams. Prior to having an automated sales application, everyone submitted their weekly sales report on an excel spread sheet. Funny how life can be such a paradox, the best sales people did the worst reporting and the worst sales people did the best reporting. Conclusion, great sales people sell. Weak sales people write good reports.

2 The majority of the businesses that I ve run have been in the construction industry. I know if you put the right tools in the right person s hands they can double or triple their productivity. So, why not give your Sales Team a tool that they could double or tripled their productivity? I m convinced; selling is a step by step process from the initial contact to the ultimate contract. Follow up Power brings comfortable discipline to everyone who belongs on your sales team will embrace. Why, because it automates the selling process and helps a sales person better organize their priorities. Having your priorities focused means making customers happy and ultimately making more money. My experience also has proven that Follow up Power quickly identifies under achievers. In conclusion, Follow up Power will monitor, measure, facilitate and report the behaviors that your sales team chooses to do. Yes, behaviors it s up to you to determine what behaviors your sales team does that make money. I ll guarantee if the people involved in the selling process do just three or four fundamental behaviors correctly, they will have significantly more success. If you believe What gets measured gets done, you will love Follow up Power! Top Ten things that Follow up Power will do for you 1. Standardize your Selling Process First, identify the steps required from initial contact to contract. Map out and define how each step should be handled. When we designed Follow up Power, we made it flexible so it can be adapted to numerous selling processes. When everyone is doing the selling process the same way it makes it easy to manage, hire and train new sales professionals. 2. Automate your selling process By having an automated and structured selling process, success can become predictable. Follow up Power will automate many of those manual steps allowing your sales team to stay on top of their commitments and spend more quality time with your clients. 3. Promotes Teamwork In most organizations, the selling process includes numerous people. Communication and coordination of each person s role and responsibility must be managed if you want it to be successful. Follow up Power will allow you to coordinate and assign different tasks, set deadlines resulting in a faster, more efficient selling cycle. Faster selling cycles equal higher revenue. 4. No more sales reports One of the biggest challenges I ve found with most really good sales professionals is they hate filling out reports and applications. Follow up Power simplifies that requirement. Follow up Power does all the reports your team could ever need. There is only one location that the user will input their data. Most of the fields are drop down menus that allow you to use multiple choice to aggregate your data in a consistent way. Reporting is done in real time and shows up on your personal Dash Board and Home Page telling you what s going on and who you need to spend your time with that day. 5. No more lost files Since Follow up Power is a Cloud based SaaS software application it can be accessed anywhere there is Internet access. All proposals and documents can be linked to that client s electronic file. The file can be shared with everyone who has security to access to the file. The program has numerous security levels depending on how much access you want to grant each user. 6. One place to access all your forms and documents Follow up Power has a library that allows you to store all your proposal templates, marketing and promotional documents, forms, policies and procedures, etc. in an easy to access location called Resources. By having all your documents accessed from one location you can insure everyone is working with the latest most current documents. 7. Outstanding Visibility Follow up Power understands that most sales people are visual learners. Data is meaningless unless it is turned into Information. Follow up Power communicates the majority of its information in easy to understand graphs and charts. Each sales person has their own Home Page outlining the number of proposals they have submitted, contract values secured, paytime earned, Pipeline aggregated and closing ratio. Each user has a tailored personalized Dash Board that tracks those fundamental behaviors and keeps you focused on the priorities you have established. Priorities are color coded for easy use. You will monitor your past accomplishments with the Home Page and plan your future with your Dash Board.

3 8. Flexibility Follow up Power is formatted so that you can search aggregate or sort data any and every way imaginable. Data can be exported and imported in an Excel format. Your CFO or Analyst will love the programs ability to sort your sales data every way imaginable. 9. Never lose a client when a sales person leaves your company It happens.sometimes sales people depart for whatever reason. However, that doesn t mean you have to lose everything that sales person worked on during their time with your company. Many times you have made the investment into submitting a proposal and a decision still hasn t been made. Follow up Power will allow you to reassign that opportunity to another sales person and hopefully salvage a sale. Within hours depending on the number of transactions, you can transfer all those opportunities and files to a new sales person and make the transition look seamless to the client. 10. Never miss a deadline Follow up Power has a feature that will the person designated when a deadline is missed. If it s a proposal that didn t get delivered or an estimate that didn t get completed, the system will tell you what deadlines are approaching or missed. This feature can be used by the sales person or the sales manager. Whoever you wish to direct the notice will get an at 8:30 am each morning telling the person designated what deadlines were missed. How to Install Follow up Power The most important thing to insure a successful implementation of this system is Executive Buy In. Don t think you can delegate this responsibility to your administrative assistant to run you reports. The people responsible for the sales and marketing results MUST be involved in using the system on a daily basis. Getting started requires following these 6 steps: 1. Appoint an Champion Identify and appoint one individual to be the initial point of contact. This individual needs to be someone who is a leader, supporter, coachable and has great communication abilities. The Champion will be responsible for administrating the application among staff members. 2. Identify your selling process What are the steps required in your selling process from Contact to Contract. Understand how a sale should flow through your organization. Remember, Keep it Simple is the foundation of a successful automated sales program. Don t over engineer the steps. Identify the three or four key behaviors you want to track for each person involved in the selling process. Then select the Follow up Power platform that mirrors your process. All sales organizations follow similar avenues for sourcing new business: Proactive Prospecting Existing relationships RFP (requests for proposals) Marketing campaigns All organizations follow similar behaviors for pursuing potential customers: Client contact information obtained Prequalify the opportunity: Determination of the need to be satisfied Determination of the decision making process Determine if the customer is ready to spend some money Quantitative the scope of work desired Price Determination

4 Proposal Preparation Proposal Submission Negotiation & Follow-up Award or Expiration 3. Set up your data fields, quantify what behaviors you want to measure and determine security access Identify who is going to be the Administrator of the application. This should be someone who understands the selling process and has some authority in the sales department. The best Administrators are the Sales Managers. Follow up Power allows you to customize your company s terms and phrases for the various steps identified in the selling process. It s important everyone is speaking the same language. Unless everyone on your sales team promote from within and doesn t have any previous sales experience of the terms and phrases. Take the time to agree on what means what. For example, what are we going to call the accumulation of proposals submitted? Do we call it Pipeline or Sales Funnel? These words and concepts need to discussed and defined. This way you will avoid confusion among your sales team. Most companies have different levels of information they want different people to have access to. You might only want a sales person to access their individual book of business. If you are a manager you will want access to everyone s activity and all the reports and graphs. Follow up Power was constructed such that you can grant access to those people you want to see the selective fields of information. After you have determined what behaviors you want to track, then determine how much Pay Time you are going to award the sales person when they complete each of the three or four behaviors agreed upon that will determine success. Measuring Pay Time is a way to coach your sales team to follow the company s specific selling process. Following the process should help you achieve success. 4. Down load your existing data Follow up Power allows you to upload the majority of your existing prospects or customer s data into the system. Our staff will provide you with an Excel spread sheet formatted to populate the application and get you started. Each file will need personal attention by the designated sales person to make sure you have identified where the customer is in the selling process. 5. Set up your goals I subscribe to the mantra what gets measured gets done. Again, championships are won by teams that have mastered the fundamentals. Follow up Power allows you to establish each person s goals for the fundamental behaviors you have identified. These behaviors are automatically tracked and displayed in real time on your Home Page and Report Card to see how you are doing. 6. User Training. Think Big, Start Small, Work like Crazy After the sales process has been identified, all data field are established, client information populated, goals set, you are ready to roll out the system. Let s face it, most people don t like change. The majority of people are comfortable doing what they have been doing. Unless they can be convinced that the change will improve their life they won t have any interest. Begin with a few respected users who recognize the benefits of the application. Once they start sharing their success other will stampede toward the new way of doing things.

5 Glossary of Terms in Follow up Power Follow up Power: The Sales Force Automation tool used to manage the sales process a company uses to gain and retain customers. Lead: An opportunity or prospect. A potential sales deal, or revenue-generating event. Sale: The process of converting a lead to revenue for the company. Pipe Line: The combined number of sales opportunities rated on the estimated period of time before the opportunity will turn into a sale. Selling Cycle: A commonly used term in a sales methodology that expresses the different steps a sales opportunity goes through in the Contact to Contract process. Follow up Power comes with basic pre-set sales stages defining the estimated time before the client is ready to close the sale. The system can be configured with other terms to align with the stages in their existing sales process. Closing Ratio: This is a ratio that reports the historic results of converting a contact to a contract. This ratio is reported in dollars and touches. The closing ratio is measured based on the previous year s historic result. If the selling cycle of the goods or services is greater than one year the system can be adjusted. The closing ratio is the best predictor of the probability to close the sale and is expressed in a percentage. Depending on the selling cycle of the goods or services will determine the amount of historical data required to have a predictable closing ratio. File Data: This is the page or location where you enter all relevant information into Follow Up Power. Information: Located in File Data : this is where the account s contact information is entered. Miscellaneous Information: Located in File Data, this is personalized to reflect the terms used in your company. This is the location with the pre-loaded drop down menus. For example, this area is to identify the people involved in the sales process, where the lead came from, the current status of the sale, the type of products or service proposed and the department involved, etc. Pay Time Behaviors: Located in File Data, establish and track behavior due dates. Home Page: The first page that is displayed when you open the program displaying the Sales Pipeline, Closing Ratio, Proposals submitted, Contracts or Revenue secured and Pay Time achieved. Dashboard: Your personalized report that displays what Behaviors need to be achieved and when. Your Dashboard is a display of what you have determined where you choose to spend your Pay Time behaviors. Reports and Charts: Reports provide better visibility into your own historical sales, marketing and support activities as well as those of your team and the overall company results. Reports can be displayed by Company or Individual format providing predictability to the future sales performance. Resources: Follow up Power has a library section that allows you to store all your proposal templates, marketing and promotional documents, forms, policies and procedures, etc. By having all your documents accessed from one location you can insure everyone is working with the latest most current documents. Report Cards: This is a report that allows you to drill down into the details reported on the Home Page. Details regarding Proposals submitted, Contracts or Revenue secured, Pay Time achieved.