UNDERSTANDING KPI, DECISION MAKING AND BUDGET FLOW KEY FOR SUCCESSFUL SELLING

The one key formulae every sales team is aspiring to have is to understand the time, efforts and money spent on closing a deal and definitely to understand the length of the sales process. To arrive at any such understanding, the knowledge is very important

 1)     KPI and Decision Making 2)     Budget

 KPI and Decision Making:

Every Decision Maker will have KPIs to achieve and every KPI will have two components 1) Meets Expectation: Focus on core expectation 2) Exceeds Expectation: Focus on things that helps improve the performance of the core expectations. 

For example: Meets Expectations: In manufacturing companies, managing the production unit will always be the core expectation, so when the machineries are properly taken care and when the employees working in the production unit delivered their work expectations, then they meet expectation.

Exceeds Expectations: In the same manufacturing companies, when the machineries and employees were able to achieve expected results and if they were able to identify methods on how to improve the efficiency of the machines and how to improve the production of the employees, then they are complimenting factors that lead to exceed expectations.

Any decision maker’s ultimate focus will be to achieve his expectations first and then focus on things that will help him to exceed the expectations.  From selling point of view, it is very important to know, the services/ solutions you sell creates urgency to meet his meets expectation criteria (or) to exceed expectations. Anything that creates urgency to meet expectations first creates urgency to buy and it becomes easy to sell. Only when the expectations are met and can be met, the urgency to invest into something that helps exceed expectations

Budget:

Now let us understand how the budget works. Most of the organization expects every LoB’s heads or the decision makers to present their budget requirement by third quarter of every year for the next financial year. This includes the both core business and things that compliments the core business. The management then decides on the allocation of the budget according to the business demands on the first quarter of next financial year. Most of the budget requirement will focus on the core business and very minimal business case will go for complimenting factor.

Even the most compelling solution that exactly meets the KPI of the decision maker will go through slow decision making process due to limited budget availability. So it very important to understand how much is the budget available and how the decision maker will handle the budget. If you are already in customers allocated budget (or) waiting to get in his business case to get allocated. Developing this ability is very important as the time spent on one opportunity has equal chance of missing another opportunity.

Please share your thoughts on the same