CREATESPACE Influencing in Engineering and Maintenance Services: Winning Practices for Team-Selling as a Process

This book makes available to engineering and maintenance services salespeople the advanced sales training they require to be successful in their roles. If you are one of these, it will provide you with the opportunity to develop your competences, showing you how to develop effective value propositions and how to influence systematically and sell as a team. As a result, you will become better influencers and sellers, making the sales teams you are on stronger. So that the various stages of the pursuit are clearly separated, the sales process is partitioned into four sections: customer selection, pursuit preparation, customer meeting management, and pursuit management. Work with customers who have issues and have admitted they do so. These are the customers you can actually help with your offering. Try to focus on those customers who value maintenance, and those whose decision makers can be fairly readily accessed. Select your customers carefully. After all, developing a good understanding of their installed base, of the corresponding business potential, of their service culture, and of their relationship with you is hard work, and your time and effort should not go to waste.Make sure you always try to develop the best possible value proposition and pursuit strategy and action plan. Carefully analyse the customer installed base and organisation, understand and present your service portfolio in a convincing and meaningful way, develop the customised value proposition leaving no stones unturned, plan the pursuit strategy and action plan sensibly, and, finally, summarise the pursuit preparation in one simple working document that you will update in time.Finalise your pursuit team, making sure to have the right mix of individuals on board as well as executive sponsor support.Move the pursuit forward step by step, keeping your mind focused on the desired outcome. Manage as effectively as possible all customer meetings by carefully and systematically doing the following: (a) prepare the meeting objectives, actions and questions, (b) position yourself, your company, the reason for your visit, and the value proposition to the customer, (c) explore the customer’s challenges, needs, interests, value drivers, constraints, and expectations about the value proposition, (d) demonstrate the value proposition to the customer, (e) generate a positive outcome from each meeting, and (f) use proven tactics when meeting face-to-face.Manage your pursuits carefully. Be in all ways consistent, systematic, and focused. To help you with this, use the supporting tools described in this book such as the Pursuit Strategy and Action Plan Summary, the Value Proposition Summary, the Customer Background Information Summary, Sales Pipeline Management, and Service Sales Campaigns Management.Finally, make use of the case studies presented, which are based on actual experiences and sales pursuits. They provide valuable learning points and showcase how the concepts introduced in the book can and should be used in practice.Because the influencing approach presented is based on the concept of customer value, is aimed at teams, and relies on tested processes, tools, and methods, it can also be used for influencing the development of in-house maintenance operations. If this is your goal, remember that the problems at hand remain essentially the same: you need to understand which internal customer should be considered and what their issues are with processes and installed base. You will also need to develop the corresponding all-party map, value proposition, strategy, action plan, and pursuit team. The key difference will be the shifting focus: from external customers to internal ones. Finally, even though this book is largely based on experience acquired in an industrial setting, it can be used in other settings, requiring only minor modifications to the service sales-process, tools and methods presented.