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Scenario for Strategic Selling

This scenario provides an example of the business process performed by a sales manager using Strategic Selling. Your company may follow a different process according to its business requirements.

A sales representative joins the sales team for a new opportunity. Before he makes any calls into the account, the sales representative plans to perform a Miller Heiman Strategic Selling analysis of the opportunity. The sales representative locates the opportunity in his opportunity list and then selects the Strategic Selling view tab.

Single Sales Objective

In the Single Sales Objective view, the sales representative reviews the information typically shown at the top of the Strategic Selling Blue Sheet. He gauges his general feeling about the opportunity. He notes that two fields have been carried over from the Siebel account form—the dollar volume of business that he is currently doing with the account and the amount that he plans to do with the account over the next year or more. These two fields are read-only.

The sales representative proceeds to assess his competitive position and determines the timing for his priorities. He selects the Strategic Selling Assessment template and evaluates the opportunity to determine how it compares against an ideal customer. Based on his evaluation, the opportunity is automatically scored.

Buying Influences

The sales representative then navigates to the Buying Influences view. Contacts associated with the opportunity automatically are shown in the view. He adds new contacts and assesses his relationship strategy with each of them. Each contact can play a variety of roles in the evaluation, and each buyer can have a reason for participating in the evaluation. The personal win and business results tell the sales representative and his team the benefits for his contact, and the ratings show how well the sales representative has covered all aspects of the opportunity. The sales representative then enters evidence to support his ratings.

Position Summary

In the Position Summary view, the sales representative completes a description of his company's strengths and weaknesses (red flags) in the deal. He also identifies information required to close this opportunity.

Possible and Best Actions

Now that he has set his Single Sales Objective and completed his customer and competitive analysis, the sales representative creates an action plan for his team to win this opportunity. He goes to the Possible Actions view and adds a list of possible actions generated during a collaborative session with his team. The actions the team will take are marked Best. These automatically appear in the Best Actions view where the sales representative assigns them to sales team members and marks the due date for each action. These activities automatically appear on the assignee's calendar, to-do list, or activities list, based on the choice in the Display In field for each activity. The sales representative can check this list at any time as the deal progresses to track the status of the activities.

Blue Sheet Report

After the sales representative has finished entering and updating his Strategic Selling information, he can generate a Blue Sheet report that he can print or email to share with his team.