The Campaign Plan: An Essential Sales Tool
Forget your sales process. What's important is the prospect's BUYING process, because that's what's going to drive the sale. Unfortunately, while a sales process can be "canned" and repeated, every buying process is slightly different, and often wildly different, than the next.
Because of that, you need a way to keep track of how the prospect will buy and which people will play key roles in that buying process. Now, if you're working with one or two customers, and there's a short decision-making cycle for what you're selling, you can probably keep that straight just using your own memory.
However, if you're working multiple deals, tracking all the different elements of a buying process is impossible without a campaign plan for every deal. This document need not be an enormous tome. In fact, it's better if it's short and sweet, because that forces you focus on what's important, and makes it easier to update as you learn more about the buying process.
By the way, you DON'T write the campaign plan all by yourself. On the contrary, a campaign plan is far more effective if you write it with one or more of your initial contacts, the person or persons who want to see your solution implemented in their firm.
Rather than give you an outline, I though it might be more useful to provide you with an example, based upon a real life campaign. Here it is:
SAMPLE CAMPAIGN PLANRELATED POSTS:
DESCRIPTION: Microsemi offers a variety of embedded devices, including eight-bit microcontrollers, specialty memory products such as electrically erasable programmable read-only memories; and code-hopping devices used in keyless locks, garage door openers, and smart cards. Its chips are used by tens of thousands of customers in the automotive, computing, consumer, industrial, medical, and networking markets.REQUIREMENT: Microsemi is experiencing significant quality problems due to their outsourcing of supply chain to rural China. They need a convenient way to accumulate test results on components in order to identify problems before they ripple through the supply chain, creating bad runs at their final assembly plants. Preliminary estimates are that this problem is costing them $2 million a year, roughly 1 percent of their $200 million a year revenue stream.
LIKELY SOLUTION: Our silver-level supply chain report module, along with customizations to make sure that it can draw data from their existing ERP system. Estimated cost is $1 million, which will provide an ROI within six months.
KEY DECISION-MAKERS: The following people will need to be fully committed in order for a purchase to take place:
DECISION-MAKING PROCESS:
- Terry Moon, VP of Manufacturing. Responsible for the problem and has the most stake in fixing it. He's well regarded in the company, but not seen as a power player, which is why this hasn't been addressed sooner. [phone, email]
- Mikel Kallima, CIO. Holds the budget for all IT purchases. Will need to be brought on board or he can block the sale. [phone, email]
- Will Jorryn, CFO. Insists on signing off on any purchase greater than $500k. [phone, email]
- Brasen Rangle, Director of Supply Chain Logistics. He's my initial contact and source. He reports to Terry. He'll be responsible for training personnel on the new system, so he needs to be in the loop. [phone, email]
- Skip Karsen, Engineer Emeritus. He's the architect of the ERP customization and usually against "foreign" additions to his system. He may present a problem and will need to be won over to this approach. [phone, email]
PURCHASING PROCESS: Once consensus is reached, Moon will write an official request to Kallima, enclosing our sales proposal. Once the request is signed off by Kallima, Jorryn will free up funds, which can be paid out according to a PO from our offices.
- STAGE #1: Problem recognition. The problem is widely recognized inside the manufacturing group, which has been complaining about it for years. However, top management has been focused on stock growth. I will need to raise the priority of this problem by meeting with Kallima and his team.
- STAGE #2: Define economic consequences. We will need a confirmation that the estimates are correct. To do this, I'll need to work with Moon, who will be able to set me up with Jorryn in order to confirm the numbers.
- STAGE #3: Commit Funding. At this point, Moon will need to sponsor me to a meeting of the steering committee to present the results of the previous two stages, along with a draft solution. Prior to that, I'll need to set up meetings between Rangle, Skip and our engineers to confirm feasibility.
- STAGE #4: Define Decision Criteria. The company seldom writes official RFPs, so we'll be able to move forward with a letter of intention. This should be joint-authored by Moon, Rangel, Kallima and Karsen.
- STAGE #5: Evaluate Alternatives. Karsen will probably want to confirm that their current ERP vendor lacks this capability and make certain that there's not a better approach. I'll need to give a presentation to an evaluation team (unclear at this point who will be on the team.)
- STAGE #6: Select Vendor Solution. Assuming we are the selected vendor, we'll work through the details and move forward with the installation.