Winning Clients - Opportunity Management
The Sales Cycle
Workflow Analysis
Becoming skilled in the workflow analysis is a key differentiator among sales professionals. The workflow analysis addresses three things:
- What critical success factors do we affect in the prospect's business?
- If we are successful, will we enhance revenue or market share for the prospect, will we reduce costs or is there another strategic benefit to the prospect?
- How will the prospect measure the proposed results?
Conducting a successful workflow analysis depends on three things:
- Having a basic understanding of the prospects business before you meet
- Understanding workflow
- Practice
First, workflow analysis is a study of what the client does. It is not a needs analysis. This is one area where we are nitpicky on the words we use. We want to eliminate the word "need" from our vocabulary. As soon as a discussion turns to needs it is off track. Needs intimate that the discovery is complete, the situation has been studied and boiled down to the specific "needs." It implies that no further research is needed. The workflow analysis very specifically avoids needs. It keeps an open mind and an eye out for opportunities to add value to the prospect's situation.
In our experience, the best approach for a workflow analysis is with a very simple flowchart. This can easily be performed on the back of a napkin if necessary. The sales professional should be fully equipped to perform the analysis. At this stage, there is no reason to involve the salesperson's technical team.
A succussful workflow analysis meeting will involve everyone in the circle of influence. This includes the decision maker other influencers or people that might be affected by the situation or solution. If your selling manufacturing software you probably want the CEO, CFO, shop floor manager, purchasing agent, sales, etc.
The next part is the easiest but most important. We now want our prospect to walk us through their workflow. Where does it all start, where does it end and what happens in between? Keep this at a very high level. On the left side of the paper mark the first step of the process. Maybe that is to purchase inventory, maybe it is receiving an order, it could be anything. Then flow to the right noting anything significant as you go. The next step might be that some manufacturing or assembling happens. Then an order is received or filled. Then shipment takes place. A bill goes out. Just record events at a high level.
Once the major events are defined, ask the next question. Where are the bottlenecks in the process? Going through the timeline again, indicate the bottlenecks. Maybe you lose visibility to inventory at one point or processing purchase orders takes a long time or getting information from a remote location backs up.
Once the bottlenecks are identified then ask who these bottlenecks impact. Chances are they impact more than one person. Maybe sales, accounts receivable, purchasing or even the CEO are impacted. As we do this we are building our value proposition. Now we want to begin to quantify the value proposition. We know who is impacted, now ask about the impact in terms of dollars. You will very likely need to help the prospect through this every step of the way giving examples of how it has happened with other clients you have worked with.
If CFO is not able to get financial statements to the bank on time, figure out what happens when he is late. Maybe he doesn't have access to as much credit as he could otherwise. If so, what is that credit worth? What would they do or accomplish with the credit? Maybe clerk has to spend 30 minutes researching invoice information for sales. If so, learn how many requests they get a week and how many hours are consumed with that function then apply an hourly cost to that activity.
Once we know bottlenecks, who is affected and the impact of that we can determine if we are able to help the prospect. At the same time we are learning enough to determine if this could be a good deal for us.
|