Archive - November 2000
Uncover Hidden Revenues With Skilled Internal Selling
Why Does Skilled Internal Selling Matter?
While effective internal selling doesn’t directly produce the big flashes of revenues that external selling can, it does increase efficiency and ensure that more external sales
happen—two outcomes that can have a marked impact on your company’s bottom line. By outfitting your sales professionals and managers with the skills they need to effectively propose new solutions for customer needs that your company is not currently meeting, you can help your organization:
- Capture and mine more revenue generating ideas,
- Strengthen relationships with current customers, and
- Generate new business.
What is Skilled Internal Selling?
First, let’s explain what Skilled Internal Selling isn’t. It isn’t inside sales. Skilled Internal Selling is effectively proposing an idea—the use of one of or a combination of your company’s products, services, or other resources—in a new way that will benefit both the customer and your company. The skill is in making sure the idea is proposed effectively, in the language of the executives who have the power to approve it. This means your sales professionals and managers must be able to:
- Confirm the idea is aligned with your company’s strategic goals,
- Include the revenue/expense justification for the investment,
- Detail the broader competitive impact of the solution,
- Provide a strategic profile of the account,
- Utilize credible benchmarks and estimates,
- Address the concerns of all business functions that will be involved, from marketing to legal,
- Understand the criteria decision makers will use to evaluate the proposal, and
- Identify appropriate stakeholders to build cross-functional support for the idea.
Who Benefits From Skilled Internal Selling?
While you, your company, and your customer all benefit from streamlining and standardizing your internal selling process, the one-day Skilled Internal Selling training solution itself is targeted to sales professionals and managers at or near the customer level. These are the individuals in the best position to identify unmet customer needs and formulate solutions to meet those needs. This program provides them the guidance they need to get those ideas proposed and approved.
What are the Results of Skilled Internal Selling?
A growing startup in an innovative healthcare marketplace implemented Skilled Internal Selling after recognizing that many good ideas were hidden behind bad proposals and that turning bad proposals into reviewable proposals utilized too many resources. The program helped the company take advantage of more revenue-generating opportunities. Today, the company is a leader in the marketplace and is known for having a sales force of strategic thinkers.
Call or click now to learn more about Skilled Internal Selling from Alliance Performance Systems
(941) 766-0058
Deliver Customer Value, Differentiate Your Business
The Issue: To differentiate in a crowded marketplace, science-led healthcare businesses must train their sales professionals to deliver customer value.
Sometimes, this is easier said than done. Successfully delivering customer value takes a research-based sales training system that:
- Emphasizes the key behaviors of top performers
- Integrates a common framework and language into the organization, and
- Is expertly customized to both the organization and the industry
The Solution: Achieving Sales Excellence
Achieving Sales Excellence (ASE) builds on extensive sales force effectiveness research to help your sales professionals and your business deliver the customer value that extends far beyond the product. The ASE system is customizable and scalable and has helped leading companies in and out of the healthcare industry win customers and boost results.
To learn more about Achieving Sales Excellence, read our latest article:
“Deliver Customer Value, Differentiate Your Business”
Accelerate Toward Your Product Launch Goals
Can substantial commercialization goals be achieved in record time?
Pharmaceutical sales representatives motivated not only to compete, but also to collaborate can boost the velocity of a product launch. By sharing their sales successes with colleagues as soon as they occur, reps can help the entire organization rapidly identify effective sales strategies and use them to drive toward revenue targets.
How can sales leaders inspire reps to collaborate?
Read Alliance Performance Systems’s latest case study, “Accelerate Toward Your Product Launch Goals” to learn how one mid-sized pharmaceutical company used a high-energy, interactive simulation with a racing theme to help reps see the rewards of mixing some collaboration in with the competition.
Creating Value for Your Most Challenging Customers
Are your products lacking the strong competitive advantage needed to make it in this market? No problem.
Even sales forces that call on no-see/no-change doctors without differentiated products can create value for their customers. How? They focus on uncovering customer needs, and they build a brand for themselves and their entire organization in the process.
Find out how one pharmaceutical company is engaging its own sales force to create value and build a brand.
Read Alliance Performance Systems’ latest case study, “Creating Value for Your Most Challenging Customers” to learn how a customized training solution built around tools like the Value Creation Opportunity Matrix and the Spectrum of Needs can help sales forces create value.
Yes, Virginia, You Can Sell Mature Drugs
Reps Need More Than a New Detail Aid to Sell Mature Products
Reps constantly request new tools and data for mature products. Marketers work hard to put new wrapping on old messages, but it isn’t enough. Reps are still running out of things to say to customers. Why? Because creating fresh messages for mature products demands an in-depth strategy.
Build a Mature Product Strategy Around 4 Key Principles
Alliance Performance Systems has supported biopharma companies that successfully managed mature brands by executing plans built around four key principles. Discover these principles in Alliance Performance Systems’ latest article: “Yes, Virginia, You Can Sell Mature Drugs.”
Strategic Alliances Podcast #004: Major Concerns For Pharma And Biotech, Part 3: How Do We Get Our Sales and Marketing Teams To Work Better Together?
It’s sales and marketing not sales vs. marketing. Peter Pisarri, VP of Client Development at APS, explains what it takes to get your sales and marketing units to play for the same team. Part 3 of a 3-part podcast focused on the major concerns of pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
The Strategic Alliances audio podcast, from Alliance Performance Systems, offers insight into strategies and tactics you can use to improve your company’s sales and marketing results. Each podcast also includes valuable commentary designed to inspire sales representatives, account managers, and other members of the sales team to think about a different way of selling – a way that truly puts the focus on the customer. Topics like business acumen, negotiation, customer needs, coaching, leadership, and more are discussed with subject matter experts and leading consultants. Alliance Performance Systems is a performance improvement consulting firm that has been successfully designing and implementing sales and marketing solutions for Fortune 500 firms since 1994.
Listen to Episode #004
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