Sales Call Plan Essentials: What Top Sellers Do Differently

We all know how difficult it is for your sellers to get time with buyers these days. When these opportunities arise, it is essential that your people have a sales call plan in place. According to Forrester Research, only 19% of the more than 400 US-based IT and Executive Buyers surveyed believe that meetings with salespeople are valuable and live up to their expectations.

This data suggests a significant opportunity for selling organizations to improve the quality of these sales conversations. Effective sales calls start with pre-call planning and preparation. This is the first step of establishing a comprehensive sales call plan.

Well-prepared sales reps have a better chance of getting the information they need. They can secure commitments to create, qualify, and advance opportunities. It also demonstrates that they have their act together to the buyer, which helps build the seller’s credibility and trust.

Failing to adequately prepare and ignoring the specifics of the call leads to an unstructured dialogue. This lack of organization and clarity of thought is especially detrimental in increasingly complex sales. Here we look at why completing a pre-call planner is critical to success and how to execute that planning with a structured approach.

In this approach, your sales call plan should anchor on three key elements:

• Knowing your customer
• Knowing your fit
• Knowing your strategy

Knowing Your Customer

Taking time to research and organize your thoughts about the customer is important. It helps you avoid the trap of making assumptions. Each customer is unique, and the conversation should reflect that.

Without taking this critical first step, sales professionals risk starting the call with irrelevant questions. This outcome can be embarrassing and irrelevant. It diminishes the customer’s confidence in the sales professional and, eventually, the solution positioned.

Some sales professionals may believe they know the customer based on previous research. This thinking can also lead to problems.

Businesses and their strategies change often and research goes out of date fast. Sales professionals need to prepare using recent information.

The time and cost required to get the call is significant. Knowing the customer in advance prevents wasting valuable time that could go toward identifying the customer’s core needs.

Knowing the customer means:

• Researching the customer’s goals, vision, challenges, and competitive standing
• Identifying and gathering stakeholder information
• Discovering potential gaps and needs

From the customer’s perspective, if a sales professional cannot be trusted to properly prepare for a sales call, they cannot be trusted to deliver and implement a solution that has far-reaching implications for the stakeholders and decision-makers involved.

Knowing Your Fit

Knowing how your solution fits the customer’s needs is critical when differentiating from competitors. Consider a review of more than 1,600 B2B sales professionals, which shows that “accelerated commoditization and substitution” are circumventing the dialogue between the sales professional and customer. Knowing the fit in advance prevents this common problem in selling today.

While the call will help illuminate the specifics of the fit, it is critical to have an idea of where the solution is most applicable. With this in mind, the sales professional can articulate differentiated value of their product or service early. Knowing the fit does more than qualify the value of the solution from the customer’s perspective — it qualifies the sales professional. As solutions become more sophisticated, they demand more expertise from the sales professional after the sale and through implementation.

Knowing the fit means:

• Identifying opportunities to create differentiated value
• Mapping capabilities to potential needs
• Understanding the solution’s competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Anticipating and preparing responses to objections
• Clarifying internal resource needs

Knowing the fit helps the sales professional bring specificity to the call. As a result, the customer is likely to respond with similarly specific information. This equips the sales professional to position the solution in a tailored way.

Knowing Your Strategy

Knowing your strategy means becoming intentional in the way you plan for the call. This planning involves organizing the call's flow. It includes opening remarks, questions, recommendations, and asking for a commitment from the customer. Knowing your strategy means knowing the details of each part of the strategy and how to transition from one to the next.

These components of the strategy become even more important when selling as a team. Each person must know their role and responsibility on the call. Each team member must be clear on what questions they will ask and how they will ask them.

While questions are the primary tool of consultative selling, they should not be viewed as a means for navigating the sales call. Questions work when you organize them into a cohesive strategy.

The importance of preparation is seen in some of the most high-stakes professions today. Pilots dutifully follow procedural checklists. Technicians operating complex industrial machinery also follow a checklist.

Surgeon and author, Atul Gawande discusses the importance of checklists in his book,The Checklist Manifesto. He states, “checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us — flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

However, planning and procedures only work if sellers follow them every time.

To plan the strategy, the sales professional must:

• Consider where the customer is in the buying process
• Set a primary and secondary call objective
• Plan the call flow

Part of executing a successful strategy is knowing what the chapters of the call are, how long each should be, and how to get from one to the next with a natural, smooth transition. Knowing the customer, knowing the fit, and knowing the strategy each require the other two to work properly. Once the framework of the call is clear, sales professionals must get specific about the objectives that fit within that framework. Effective objectives adhere to SMART criteria.

They are:

• Specific: What needs to happen? What actions will the customer take?
• Measurable: How will you know that you have accomplished the objective?
• Achievable: Can the objective be accomplished? Does it consider where you are in the sales process, the readiness of the customer, and the volume of the work required?
• Relevant: Is the objective appropriate, and does it advance the sale?
• Timed: When will the objective be carried out?

Creating a Sales Call Template

When outlining a sales call plan, there are important questions to consider. Knowing the answers to these helps sellers better navigate their calls. Use the following template as a starting point and edit this list based on your selling situation and your call objectives.

What is your baseline strategy?

This is a bit of a “chicken and the egg” situation. You might need to go through and check your answers to these questions. This is important as you find more information during the preparation process.

• Where is the buyer in their decision-making process?
• Where are you in your selling process?
• What are your objectives for your call?
• What information, support, or decisions do you need to achieve your objectives?

What’s going on in the buyer’s company?

Whenever you can tie your capabilities to a company’s strategic initiatives, you stand a better chance of getting executive attention. Focus some of your preparation on creating relevance.

• Look up the company in your CRM system. See if you have worked with the company or if anyone in the company responded to past marketing offers.
• Google the company’s name, and click on a few links to find recent news and information.
• Have there been any “trigger events?"
• Google the phrases “<company name> problems” and “<company name> strategy”
• Is the company is publically traded? If so, visit the investor relations site and watch recordings of recent CEO’s analyst presentations.
• Is the company is private equity (PE) owned? If so, visit the PE firms website to learn about their investment strategy and philosophy. Also, identify the Principal at the PR firm responsible for your target company.

What’s going on in the buyer’s industry?

Selling successfully to sophisticated buyers hinges on industry expertise. Staying current on industry trends should be a continuous process.

• Look up other companies in the industry in your CRM system to see related work you’ve done
• Google “Recent challenges in the <insert buyer’s industry> industry”
• Google “Top issues facing <enter buyer’s role>”
• Google “Top issues facing <enter buyer’s role> in the < insert buyer’s industry> industry”
• Google “<insert client’s industry> industry associations”
• Google “<insert client’s industry> industry study”
• Google “<McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, Bain, PWC, KPMG, E&Y…> industry report”

What’s going on in the buyer’s career and life?

It is always better to relate to your buyer on a personal level. We live in a world of information overload, spam email and automated messaging. Mass messaging falls on deaf ears.

• Link to the buyer on LinkedIn and follow them if they are active on twitter
• Google “<buyer’s name, title and company>”, and pay attention not only to what is happening in their business life but in their personal life as well
• See if the buyer has spoken on YouTube or shared presentations on Slide Share
• See if the buyer is active in associations or has presented at conferences
• See if the buyer is active on social media or blogs
• See if you have any mutual connections on LinkedIn, and reach out to any connections you believe would be willing to share insight to help you understand the buyer better

Who else will influence the buying process?

Try to learn, in advance, who will influence the solution and the decision-making process to buy from you. People have a tendency to link to their colleagues on LinkedIn, some of whom you can infer will be influential.

• Check who the buyer connects with on LinkedIn. People have a tendency to link to colleagues and others in their functional area.
• Visit each buying influences LinkedIn profile. Pay close attention to whether they are linked to any of your competitors. If they are, then that’s a red flag.

What issues are pertinent to the buyer?

Your people may be about to engage in a conversation that could go beyond their level of comfort and expertise very quickly. They need to get smart fast enough to add value to the conversation, but they can’t lose credibility.

• Talk to your internal subject matter experts
• Google “research on <issue of interest>”
• Google “McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, Bain, PWC, KPMG, E&Y…> report on <issue of interest>”

What solutions are relevant to the issues?

Your people need to know how to organize your company’s capabilities. They need to formulate these solutions to potential challenges or opportunities. They also need to know the limitations of your capabilities so they don’t promise the customer something you can’t deliver.

• Visit your own website and read how your company is positioning the solutions that you think will be relevant to the buyer
• How does your solution address the issues that you want to discuss?
• What objections do you anticipate and how can you proactively resolve them?
• How do different products and services you offer link together into a comprehensive solution?
• What additional internal resources should you consider lining up to support your pursuit?

Are your customer conversation skills sharp?

All of this great research and preparation won’t deliver results if your people can’t deliver the message to the customer. Encourage them to take the time to practice so that they will be more confident in the moment.

• Anticipate how the call will play out and find someone to help you practice!

Use this sales call plan template to master all types of sales calls. Remember, preparation is key in a successful sales call. This leads to more effective sellers that close more deals.