Failing to Plan, is planning to fail.

Welcome to this week’s blog post. I’m discussing the importance of a plan and how PROCES can help your business.

Failing To Plan

At the end of this month, we will be at the end of the financial year and will have a clear view of how well we performed over the last 12 months.

We are also at the point where we are starting to consider the year ahead and what we want to achieve in terms of sales targets.

However, when doing this, many people often put all of their focus on the outcomes they want and forget to put in place a clear plan for how they are going to make them happen.

One certain thing I have learned in my last decade of teaching businesses how to increase their sales is:

If you don’t make a plan – your subconscious mind will make one for you.

Unfortunately, when the subconscious mind makes our plans it normally focuses on our fears. Guess what happens when we focus on the things we fear most?

However, we can choose at any time to focus on something more constructive and we are much more likely to hit your targets if we have a plan.

PROCES

That’s my Segway into the first behaviour of our sales PROCES at Kennedy Ross Consulting Limited.

PROCES stands for Plan, Reach, Obtain, Connect, Elaborate and Success. It’s a  sales system that guarantees to get you results!

Sellology

My book “Sellollogy: Simplifying the Science of Selling” shows how to handle each step of our sales system in an easy and straightforward way.

Whether you are super experienced or terrified of sales, this book will give you real life examples of the worst and best behaviours to exhibit whilst selling.

Sellology is set out in a way in which the reader can dip in and out of any page and immediately benefit from what’s read.

This is from part of the introduction to the Plan chapter.

“Clarity Creates Opportunity”

Many very smart, quick-thinking, fast-talking sales people will say they don’t need to plan or they haven’t got time to plan.

Maybe they don’t, but one thing is for sure, the more clear we can be about what we want, the more likely we are to achieve it.

And, having been a part of many different planning processes throughout the years, one thing we need to guard against when talking about planning is wasting our own time.

I have seen sales managers insist on levels of planning which far outweigh the potential benefits in the meeting which can cause the sales person to lose all motivation for planning at all.

Planning today is about having as warm a connection as you can possibly muster, to give yourself the best opportunity possible to sell to your prospect.

Remember – Cold is bad, warm is good.

These days the amount of information available in the public domain is staggering, so there is never an occasion when you can’t find out more about a potential lead and their respective business.

This means that there is never any need to go into a prospect cold, when there is so much warmth to be easily generated by simple good planning.

Excellent Planning – Inside and Out

Sales planning comes in two types – external planning and internal planning.

External planning is where we research our potential customer using social media, industry intelligence and competitive information.

Internal planning is where we consider how we will apply the PROCES. sales system to your sales meetings, in particular in the areas where you feel less confident and/or less informed.

What I’m saying here is that straightforward planning works every time, while over-planning can be a waste of time

So, when you are planning your next 12 months sales targets take an hour or so to plan out what external factors you need to research about your leads and prospects and also what internal systems you need to prepare to make your sales meetings go smoothly making the best of your personal sales style.

If you haven’t already, you can take our free Business Style Test HERE