Building your Revenue Department in 12 months – the “Fire Your Sales Team Today” digest

Some time ago, I've been reading the "Fire Your Sales Team Today: Then Rehire Them As Sales Guides In Your New Revenue Department" book. The book is written by Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman, the guys responsible for building Square2Marketing's marketing machinery. I was impressed with the ideas this book has outlined, especially how the marketing and sales departments are envisioned as one segment, just with different internal processes. Merged together, these two departments support inbound marketing and account management, making together the "Revenue Department". Following is an outline of the 12-month-steps, needed to craft your very own Revenue department. If you'd like an in-depth guide with detailed descriptions on the process, reading this book is a must.

Month #1 - Biting the Bullet

Theme: Setting the table Goals: Setting a baseline from which to grow and mark progress Challenges:

1. Biting the bullet and investing a person dedicated to, and responsible for, your company’s marketing efforts.
2. Putting each target group into individual characteristics.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Draft a marketing avatar (FYSTT chapter 6).
2. Hire or transition a current employee to lead your marketing efforts.
3. Utilize a CRM system.
4. Add Google Analytics to your website.
5. Build a system to track the Net Promoter Score.

Month #2 - Guiding your Sales team

Theme: Marketing and sales team review Goals: Analyzing the current state of your sales and marketing efforts Challenges:

1. Coming to grips with the hard truth that certain members of your current sales team might not be able to make the transition to the Guided Sales Process.
2. Finding a new Sales Guides.
3. Calculating actual ROMI in current marketing tactics.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Write out a personality assessments of current sales team members.
2. Analyze your sales and marketing balance.
3. Perform an ROMI analysis.

Month #3 - The Destination

Theme: What’s the EndGame ? Goals: Completing the Stairway 2 Heaven Exercise Challenges:

1. Find the time to work on the five components of the Stairway 2 Heaven exercise.
2. Crafting the perfect story for your team and clients, making it easy for them to understand the direction in which you are headed.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Complete the Stairway 2 Heaven exercise.

Month #4 - Think before you leap

Theme: Strategy before tactics Goals: Understand the pains and problems of your target so you can match solutions Challenges:

1. Ensuring all of your solutions actually cascade down from a specific pain. No pain ? Chances are that no one cares about the solution.
2. Defining each of your target markets in a unique way. Understanding that the conversation you might have with a retail customer is completely different than the one you have with a wholesale customer.

Deliverable Checklist:

1. Compile a list of pains for each target market.
2. Confirm that you have solutions for all pains and that the solutions relate to one or more specific customer-pains.
3. Create an enhanced marketing avatar description.

Month #5 - Be Remarkable

Theme: Living the “remarkables” Goals: Positioning your company as unique in the marketplace Challenges:

1. Getting the team to “buy in” to being remarkable.
2. Implementing the Challenges necessary to exceed customer’s expectations.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Prioritize your list of new remarkables.
2. Conduct a competitive review.
3. Select your Change Agent.
4. Read The Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

Month #6 - Plan ahead

Theme: Develop your marketing strategy and plan Goals: Plan the marketing program that will drive leads for the Sales Guides Challenges:

1. Picking the correct tactics that will generate enough leads to reach your revenue Goals.
2. Developing a unique voice that will appeal to your to your target.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Create a one-page marketing plan.
2. Develop your very own voice and tone document.

Month #7 - Content is King

Theme: Guided Sales and marketing process revamp - 1 Goals: Develop content and communication to support the Guided Sales process Challenges:

1. Devoting the time and effort to create content or outsourcing it.
2. Creating collateral that clearly describes your amazing inside reality.
3. Creating compelling follow-up to get prospects to advance the sales process.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Make a No-Risk Offer.
2. Create a Low-Risk Offer.
3. Define an Offer to Do Business (with).
4. Design support collateral.
5. Develop a Lead Nurturing campaign.

Month #8 - New vs. Old

Theme: Guided Sales and marketing process revamp - 2 Goals: Creating a Guided Sales process Challenges:

1. Recording each step in the current sales process.
2. Integrating remarkable stories and content into your new Guided Sales process.
3. Making the hard decisions necessary to ensure Sales Guides can execute the new process.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Draft a flow chart of old process.
2. Draft a flow chart of newly enhanced process, comparing the new one with the old.
3. Create a human resources action plan for developing Sales Guides.

Month #9 - Do you even analyze?

Theme: Guided Sales and marketing process revamp - 3 Goals: Discovery and diagnostics components of the Guided Sales process Challenges:

1. Changing the sales team’s behavior.
2. Taking the time necessary to really work with prospective clients to co-create solutions.
3. Saying “no” to unqualified contacts.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Read Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thull.
2. Define the discovery component of your sales process.
3. Make a Diagnostics Diary.
4. Build a qualification system like Pain/Power/Fit.
5. Write a list of the one hundred questions your team needs to ask prospects to know all of the details necessary to create a perfect solution.

Month #10 - Working on your Close rate

Theme: Guided Sales and marketing process revamp - 4 Goals: Dramatically enhancing your close rate Challenges:

1. Perfecting your presentation.
2. Breaking the habit of providing a long written proposal.
3. Creating an accurate metrics review system.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Design a Guided Sales presentation format.
2. Draft an agreement document.
3. Determine key metrics and implement a tracking system.

Month #11 - Full merge ahead

Theme: Building the revenue department Goals: Smash your sales and marketing functions into one: The Revenue Department Challenges:

1. Changing the sales and marketing team’s behavior.
2. Communicating the vision of the new Revenue Department.
3. Finding the time to meet weekly with the new Revenue team.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Create an organization chart for the Revenue Department.
2. Develop a transition plan for all new roles.
3. Communicate your new plan to the sales and marketing teams.
4. Establish a meeting schedule for Revenue Department team members.

Month #12 - Going to the next level

Theme: Tracking, Testing, Training and Taking It to the Next Level Goals: Fine-Tune and expand the newly integrated sales and marketing program Challenges:

1. Reviewing metrics weekly.
2. Dealing with lack of creative thinking to develop new and better ways to market your company.
3. Having the guts to invest in the program as it blossoms.

Deliverables Checklist:

1. Develop a metric-centered tracking system.
2. Create competitive campaigns to test against current campaigns.
3. Engage your entire team in training program development.
4. Plan for expansion.