Stage One — Fighting Fire with Fire Stage One Deliverables: 120-day action plan for optimizing the sales and marketing processes Comprehensive direct/indirect sales strategy Pipeline Review with Deal Coaching Sales Scalability Plan with Territory and Segment Coverage Positioning and Messaging Report Hiring and Skill Set Profile Win/Loss Analysis Stage One Summary: The main benefit of this first stage is competitiveness. To quickly maximize and accelerate your ability to be competitive we’ll conduct a detailed Pipeline Review to analyze your pipeline and determine how to immediately impact the sales situation through Deal Coaching. This lets us focus on some immediate opportunities, maximizes your resources and weeds out those deals that have little chance for success. It also provides visibility to your sales process, shows us how your team qualifies opportunities, and gives us a flavor of what the competitive landscape looks like. At first glance, some of our clients pause as they initially think that they are in the best position to perform this review and analysis. What we find is that they are much too close to the opportunities and that a third party perspective increases effectiveness and performance. As an essential part of the performance optimization plan, this stage is where we evaluate the effectiveness of your Competitive Positioning & Messaging, incorporating these points of differentiation into your team messaging. We also perform Win/Loss Analysis to provide the quickest feedback on why you are winning, losing and where the fastest returns for improvement may be. These diagnosis sessions will reveal the risks and opportunities associated with your sales strategies (or lack of them), as well as the gaps between you and your competitors. We will obtain reliable, actionable and unbiased feedback about your sales team, offering and positioning – in a way you can only get from third-party inquiry. Finally, we’ll inspect and review your team, the hiring schedule, the skills sets and types of people you need, and how you should disperse the resource to best cover the segments and territories. We’ll provide a Sales Scalability Plan to show you how to grow the organization. Read about Stage Two next: Priming the Charges