Size Assessors & Deal Finders
Wonder how the largest of businesses approach their sales funnel building at the moment? I found out interesting facts about the IT Services division of HP, effectively EDS as-was, and their strive this year to secure private sector mega-deals totalling a couple of billion.
Clearly, there’s a relatively small pool of organisations that can award such contracts, and perhaps only a handful of deals will contribute to the overall number. This has lead them to split their focus.
Knowing the long project gestations prevalent, firstly there is a size threshold. Opportunities of ‘only’ a few hundred million are qualified out.
The entire target market is segmented by their expected budgetary spend for core areas of business process outsourcing, applications and infrastructure. The decision to pursue any particular budget that may be up for grabs this year is based on a typical basket of measures, such as incumbency and fit.
A dedicated Business Development Team appears targeted with initial qualification. Following high-level CIO engagement, if pursued the deal is then assigned to a specific sales team.
With my Sales Ops hat on, the lengths they apparently go to in terms of prospect revenue profiling feel diligent. It is to the chagrin of virtually all smaller sales endeavours that such analysis is not a key pillar of their overall policies.
I also readily appreciate the strategic deployment of ‘deal finders’. Alongside being forced to fill in reports that are perceived as spurious, a huge gripe of solution salespeople concerns the generation of leads. Specifically, the amount of responsibility that should be owned by Marketing for this.
In the EDS-HP context, the action of having senior and industry-respected sales resource hold preliminary CIO discussions is also one well worth mirroring.
Imagine a meeting solely about business issues and plans of your key target market players, with the goal being to either shake hands and keep in touch as friends, or investigate the business case merits.
Even though people are extremely precious at present, where does anyone exist in your company that could help contribute towards success in either of these two compelling areas?