If you’re struggling to accelerate your sales, don’t worry, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes, it’s hard. It takes time and effort. But what if you learn a tool that will speed up the process of accelerating your sales and sustaining a year-on-year growth environment?
In today’s podcast episode, I will introduce you to the sales acceleration formula and share a case study that will show you how I used the tool to deliver double-digit growth in a healthcare company within a year.
Steps To Accelerate Sales
“Adapt the way you think and the way you work, to get success.”
There are numerous strategies to get rid of inefficiencies, which frequently cause sales to be stagnant. If what you’re doing is not giving you the results you want, then there’s a need for a change.
We’ve developed the sales tool to help you and your sales team do all of the heavy lifting. What it does is guide you through the process of creating an effective, implementable account plan using the sales acceleration formula.
The sales acceleration formula is a very simple sales growth process that not only accelerates sales but also improves employee productivity. Here are the steps that you need to take in the sales acceleration process:
- Accounts
Giving yourself a chance to pick the right accounts. Accounts can be your customers or clients in your business. Make sure you understand that you are in the right place.
- Decisions
See the right people who will affect the decisions required for you to get your product or service into those accounts, and then ensure that you’re working with them on affecting the right decisions. Then build up a decision-making map for each one of those decisions.
- Awake
Understand what keeps decision makers awake at night and what are their objectives because once you understand them you can help them deliver their tasks and it helps the acceleration process.
- Present
Make sure you apply the first three steps because if you understand that you are in the right place, you understand who the decision-makers are, and if you understand their objectives, then you can present the right solutions. - Tackle
After the presentation, it’s now about tackling and managing objections by providing the right answers and ensuring that you overcome objections.
Case Study: Application Of The Sales Acceleration Formula
This case study is focused on the healthcare industry because medical or healthcare sales tend to be very complex with many people involved in the decision-making process. If you can do it in this type of business, you can do it in any other type of business too. Your business sales will accelerate if you just simply follow the process.
When I started working with Vernacare in 2014, they were delivering £5.5 million worth of annual sales. I applied the process with the pneumonic ADAPT to understand the market and accelerate sales. How did I apply the formula?
- A – I identified 9 target markets by looking at the attractiveness and probability of the market and plotting them to narrow down the things I needed to do.
- D – I also utilize the experience of UK salespersons of the year because they understand the process and to better understand the decision-making unit and what decisions need to make.
- A – Understanding the customer’s intent.
- P, T – After doing the first three steps, I started looking at the delivery plans on how am I going to present and what are the objections, then tackle those objections and provide the right solutions.
What were the results? Eight months after starting this process in 2015, we delivered £6.2 million worth of growth.
After seeing the result, we started to headhunt staff to make sure that we got the right staff that would follow the process. I started to refine the marketing based on our understanding of the sales process and the customer intent, and then I introduced the sales academy, which trains the salespeople. We also have 3 business development managers working on the methodologies.
2017: growth goes to £8.8 million, a double-digit growth.
This time we started to build up more because we now have a growth engine. We are now very clear on what’s working. We increase and expand the size of the team, and then we start moving into new markets with the same methodologies, but we are still analysing what has changed.
Is the market still the same? Do we need different decision-making units? What’s the customer’s intent? We’re constantly analysing, reviewing, and acting.
2019: the sales start to accelerate further to £13.8 million almost tripling the sales based on the sales acceleration formula.
We began introducing new products because we now had a better understanding of the market and were looking into new markets. We don’t stop analysing, reviewing, and acting by looking at the adapt formula in 2020.
2020: the year of the coronavirus We really accelerated sales during the pandemic, because we were still reviewing, analysing, and acting.
Generalisation
What was appropriate four years ago is no longer applicable now. As a result, you must examine what is happening in the processes and if the probability has also changed.
You must constantly analyse, review, and adapt. Based on the case study, it’s all about targeting the right places, understanding the process and the people involved, and then accelerating by choosing the right decision, presenting the right solutions, and tackling the possible objections to providing the right solutions.
If you follow this formula, the process might be hard, but in the end, it will show you how you and your sales team can automate this to achieve consistency and significantly improved results.