Beacon has spent nearly 30 years working across the globe to help clients dramatically improve revenues, margins and client relationships. Beacon’s focus is leveraging our hands-on fractional leadership experience syncing sales, operations, marketing and client/customer requirements. This vast experience has led us to the development of our proprietary Iconic Selling diagnositc approach. This approach can be used to improve your sales or operational team's performance because it flushes out what is important to your patients, clients or customers and aligns with the many ways their journey may take place.
The Iconic Selling diagnositc approach can rapidly create differentiation based upon the talent of the internal team, technology and relentless adherence to metrics driven processes based upon customer needs. This may be business-to-business or business-to-consumer markets. Iconic Selling is not only a flexible sales framework but it is core to continuous improvement in every aspect of your prospect's interactions with their customer or patients. As a result the two selling situations below are ideal candidates for embedding the Iconic Selling thinking.
Clients selling products and services in highly competitive environments requiring a degree of customer education to differentiate.
Clients selling complex products and services in rapidly changing environments due to technology, regulatory or competitive issues and advancements
Beacon is regularly sought to help with these types of challenges:
- How can I better integrate sales and operations to improve our customer experience and margins?
- Our can we more effectively respond to the market when our competitive landscape is changing by the day?
- How do a create a more unified and consistent sales cycle which maximizes the value of my sales engineers ("SE's"
- How does your sales enabelment team collaborate with the sales and operational executives to create the platform for growth based upon your clients needs and perspective?
Below are Beacon’s key differentiators along with critical elements we tend to see in the best sales enablement efforts.
The Beacon Differentiators
Every member of Beacon applys the Iconic Selling framework to dozens of complex situations every year. This may be as an external coach, part of an virutal account team or as a fractional sales or operational leader driving the Iconic Selling thinking through a division or organziations.
This provides a depth of insight that is unsurpassed by any internal or external provider. Our deep involvement in these deals or running the sales and operations teams allows for the rapid deployment of proven training, coaching and metrics tracking while maxcimizing the value of your internal experts like sales engineers . This includes President and CEO Carl Erickson who has worked on hundreds of deals in everything from technology startups to the Big Four. Our framework is called Iconic Selling.
Beacon has identified five levels of work winners.
While two of the five are effective revenue producers, only one of the five is an effective leader who consciously helps foster total team performance.
Beacon has also identified six specific sales skill sets across a complex sales cycle that are essential to efficiently and effectively engaging with clients. Iconic Selling.
A critical question to consider is how well your team is integrated across the sales cycle and are the client-centered deliverables clear to the team?
Beacon has a proprietary sales assessment that identifies exactly what a sales team knows about each skill set and where their blind spots may be. The assessment results can also be used to establish a personal development and team plan which provides direct insight as to where losses probably emerge.
Armed with sales assessment and skill sets insight, Beacon crafts highly customized efforts to instill the right knowledge, skills and behaviors in work winners, which propel superior performance.
This includes coaching and guiding sales leaders, sales people, work winning partners and teams to progress to the highest performing level. The key is ensuring whatever is implemented is sustained within the organization and this change effort is one of Beacon's greatest strengths.
The Challenges we tend to see:
When we apply the Iconic Selling investigative process to the different issues clients face, they may manifest themselves in different ways but here are ones we hear often:
- There is little or no common sales language across the organization. In other words, what is a qualified deal? What is a billable effort or qualifying event? How do you consistently accomplish access to influencers and decision makers? What is proof of power? What is the action plan?
- There are little or no objective non-financial metrics to understand the progression of an account or deal.
- Cross-selling and differentiation are afterthoughts instead of positioning for these straight away.
- We struggle to make effective use of every prospect interacion by various team members including our sector and technical experts. They often end up talking too technically with potential clients and others like call cenetr staff do not realize their impact on the sales cycle.
- The lack of a client centered sales framework or flexible approach to look at the world through the eyes of the client causes misalignment of team objectives.
- Little insight into what an optimal sales cycle looks like and how to train the ideal.
- Our people struggle to efficiently turn conversations into opportunities especially when it is not in their service or practice area.
- Our RFP conversion rates are below what we want, and our opportunity cost is considerable.
- My people struggle with maintaining the margins we would like.
- We really wrestle with gaining access to the C suite and maintaining it.
The Sales Enablement Perspective:
Addressing the issues above and many others is a difficult task that should not be underestimated. Some are often rooted in the operational policies or lack thereof and others in the sales enablement arena.
- Our experience and research have shown and proven there are six critical skills sets that the best work winners employ. This is what has given rise to the Iconic Selling framework for engaging with prospects. It is intended and applied to the client or prospects journey in manner that ensure an appropriate building of momentum towards an ultimate buying experience.
- Beacon's proprietary Iconic Sellling approach can provide instant visibility into accounts or deals at a glance that can have a major impact on how an account or deal is handled and what resources like SEs should be used and when, how call center staff should be trained and even what kind of appointment confirmations should be used and why. This is core to a totally holistic approach.
- All training is around real situations that provides participants an opportunity to immediately apply the thinking to their accounts while in the training session. People also leave with an actual plan that they have initiated in the training session.
- Coaching on real deals, for an extended period, reinforces the behaviors fine tuned or learned in the training and helps the effort become sustainable.
- Where possible, internal coaches are super-skilled to eventually sustain the effort internally and assume all roles.
- There must be metrics in place to check performance of the team and look specifically at the types of deals coached and the impact.
- There needs to be a communications plan that highlights and reinforces learnings to the wider team.
- There should always be linkages to internal post-decision reviews and how that information is being used to determine competitor’s tactics and set specific competitive strategies.
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