Screen Trees

Watching CNBC’s Planet of the Apps I was intrigued by the inner workings and motivation of people in the latest goldrush. One company was inventing an app for tracking your expenses. Such apps are nothing new of course – I came across a web-based expenses solution a few years ago that was founded way back in 2000, and is still going strong today – but the race to be the first on the iphone seems hot (despite the programme’s assertion that the real money is in games!).

Anyway, from scratch to submission the team had a target of eight weeks. They made it (and gained the green light from Apple) and put down part of their success to developing ‘screen trees’.

Every single page that the user could see was mocked up at the start. This focused on the user-experience in a way that matched it to the app’s capabilities.

This naturally got me thinking. Couldn’t you do something similar for your ideal sales campaign? In fact, mapping each requisite stage of the sale should surely be a fundamental part of any sales process?

Your very own ‘Sales Tree’ would show all the meetings, activities and outcomes that need to happen (or that you know when they happen you are more likely to win) and let you judge each campaign against the desired progress.