Developing Your Sales Pipeline: Selecting the Software

Last Tuesday Tech Tip we reviewed the Sales Process from Wikipedia listed as:

1. Prospecting / initial contact
2. Preapproach - planning the sale
3. Approach
4. Need assessment
5. Presentation
6. Meeting objections
7. Gaining commitment
8. Follow-up

We discussed the approach last week, and learned why it is so very important to the health of your business. However, to make sure that our approach actually leads to something productive and helpful to this potential client, we need to have a needs assessment ready to go.

The worst path is for your business to try and fit a client into your services, instead, your business should be discussing what the client actually needs.  Your organization’s assessment tool is a constant work in progress, seeking to glean and analyze the potential client’s challenges.  A sales person should be armed with this document or form because it helps the prospect talk about their challenges in detail; simultaneously, the form helps the rest of your team understand items discussed during the prospect interview. 

Vanderbilt University lists the 6 steps to designing an assessment as:

Steps in Designing an Assessment Plan

Step 1: Refer to or create mission statement for overarching guidance

Step 2: Specify the purpose, goals, and outcomes

Purpose - Why is this assessment being conducted? Generally, there are two primary purposes for assessment.

Improvement

Demonstrating Effectiveness

Goals – What are the higher-level desired outcomes contained within the mission statement? A manageable assessment plan will typically focus on three to five goals.

Outcomes – What are the measurable action statements that demonstrate achievement of the stated goals? There are two primary types of outcomes - operational outcomes and student learning outcomes.

Step 3: Plan for the delivery of outcomes

How will each desired outcome be achieved? A good exercise for considering the various points at which achievement of an outcome will be facilitated is completion of an outcome delivery map.

Step 4: Design or identify existing methods and measures

How will each outcome be measured? Assessment methods can be classified into two categories:

Direct Measures – Direct assessment measures require individuals or entities to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and/or a behavior that reflects achievement of the stated goal.

Indirect Measures – Indirect assessment measures rely on individual perceptions to determine if a goal/objective has been achieved.

Step 5: Plan for the implementation of the assessment process

Who will be responsible for doing each step in the evaluation process? What will be the timeline for implementation? What other programs/offices will be assisting with the evaluation process? Who will be participating in interpreting the data and making recommendations and decisions?

Step 6: Plan for the communication of results

How will assessment findings be shared with relevant audiences?

For a more polished presentation of your assessment tool, check out these tools:

• Adobe Form Builder
• Formsite.com
• Form.com
• Google Forms (used with your Google Drive)
• Formstack.com
• Wufoo.com