Competencies
- Distinguish between traditional, personal, and strategic selling.
- Create a strategic sales plan.
- Apply customer service skills before, during, and after a sale.
- Describe the key functions of managing a salesforce.
- Apply management strategies to a business-to-business (B2B) salesforce.
- Select appropriate software platforms for sales management and customer relationship management (CRM).
Scenario Information
You are one of the founders of a family-run business that offers bookkeeping for small businesses in your tri-state area. Your business has been level for many years, and you have a strong, healthy relationship with your clients. Many of your clients have been with you for over 10 years, and your new clients almost exclusively have come from word-of-mouth promotion from current, satisfied customers.
You want to expand the services you offer to include payroll and accounting beyond bookkeeping. You have heard from your current clients that they need assistance with those two services for their business to grow, but you have been hesitant until this last year. In the last 18 months, you have a family member that has passed the CPA exam and remains a vital employee. She has expressed interest in being more involved and leading the payroll and accounting business, but she is not very well-versed in sales.
Your sales staff has historically been the family, plus the bookkeeping staff. Your main job at the company has been in customer relations and hiring. There are 4 family members working full-time (including the new CPA), as well as 3 bookkeepers. You have 27 business that you consider your main customers, and you have about 2-3 new customers every year or two. There is also a natural attrition of about that same amount every couple of years as well.
Instructions
As the co-founder and managing partner of your business, you are in charge of this new project. You will be the primary researcher, and you have decided to present a comprehensive strategic sales plan to the other owners, the new CPA, and the bookkeepers.
As managing partner you have decided to create a strategic sales plan to share your findings and the proposal using a PowerPoint presentation. Before presenting, you will share with the other co-founders using a PowerPoint with detailed presentation notes to mimic your narration for their approval. Your goals will be to expand the services you offer to current customers, and to create a prospecting list of new customers that can use the full bundle of services you can now offer.
You decided it will be important to include the following:
- Introduce the launch of the new payroll and accounting services to the employees emphasizing the selling style you expect to implement.
- Outline how the sales program impacts personnel needs and the employee hierarchy. (For example: Will you hire a dedicated sales staff?)
- Identify management strategy/ies being implemented to meet the goals.
- Explain the structure of the sales compensation plan.
- Incorporate how you will compensate the bookkeepers that help convert current customers to the new bundle of services.
- Emphasize the role of customer service.
- Express the value of customer service for this expansion.
- Integrate the use of communication and psychological expertise and problem-solving skills.
- Explain how customer data will be collected and shared.
- Include your recommendation whether a CRM system needs to be purchased and integrated for your business to grow and for information to be shared with the full team.
- Establish metrics to evaluate the success of the sales plan.
- Incorporate both qualitative and quantitative.
- Evaluate lead generation and sales conversion.
