War Stories

“OK, so now you have the time and the method to do homework, but what homework is important to gather? How much information is too much and/or not enough? How do you organize this information in a useful state? Who has the time to get so organized?” The answer to these questions is War Stories.

War Stories are the physical repository of the information you need on your RedZone accounts. War Stories are tactical in nature and are broken up into three sections:

1. History
2. Company information
3. Sales strategies

All focused on the sale.

History

• What has the history of this account been with you or your company?
• What have they purchased before, if anything at all?
• Who has ordered what from you before, and why?

If the prospect has not done work with you before, who have they done business with previously, what have they purchased, and why? This is the section where you build your case on why you should be spending so much of your time with this account.

Company Information

What does this company do? What is important to them? Where can you go to get information on a company? Let’s answer Where, What, and Why.

Where

• Annual Reports
• Hoovers
• Prospect’s Web site
• Prospect’s competitors’ Web sites
• Market research information
• Magazines/periodicals
• The prospects themselves

There are a multitude of places to gather company information.

What

You need to gather very specific information about your very important prospects. It’s almost like you should know more about the prospects than they know about themselves. To achieve this, you need to answer these questions:

• What is the customer’s annual revenue?
• What is the customer’s annual earnings?
• What is the 2-year history of revenue and earnings?
• What is the customer’s current market share and market size?
• What are the projections for market share and market size for the next 2 years?
• What are the customer’s top two competitive advantages, and how do you contribute in making them more competitive?
• What is the mission of the company, and what are the top three items on the corporate agenda?

Why

Every salesperson knows the trick. It goes like this. Every month, every quarter, a salesperson is working on deals. However, there are one, two, and sometimes even three deals out of the ones that are going to close that are really important. These are the ones that are going to make or break the quarter or even the year. These are the ones you do a WarBook on.

As a salesperson, you have the choice to work on RedZone accounts. You can be a solution-oriented, consultative, ProActive salesperson; or you can be a vendor: Put an euro in; get a Beer. You can vend. Which one are you? Go back to the seven War Stoy questions, and try to answer them for your top two prospects. Can you answer all seven questions? If you can, congratulations, you are ProActive. If not, why not?

When you are in front of a senior manager of the company you are calling on, what are you going to do or say? Are you going to break out your brochure? How about getting out that presentation you developed for lower level people? Will you give them a Feature/Benefit overview of your product/ service and then ask, “So Ms. Koops, given what we can do, how would we benefit you?” That won’t exactly impress them.

You need to know more about your accounts than they do, at all levels of the organization, and the seven War Story questions can do just that. How long do you think it would take you to gather the War Story information on your top one or two prospects: a few hours at most? This is time well spent.

Sales Stragegy

This is where you use the strategies, as well as any others out there, whether Target Account Selling, Solution Selling, Strategic or Power-Base Selling, Dadidadida… Here is where you are strategizing the account to work it ProActively.

Assemble one to three War Stories at most. No computers are allowed here. War Stories need to be mindsets in your head.

A War Story is assembled on a per deal basis, not by customer. If you are working on two deals with one customer, you should have two different War Storiess. A War Story is also very different than a customer folder. A customer folder, by definition, is a reactive document. You are storing information in a customer folder in case you need it (reactive). A War Story is a ProActive story; you are using the War Story in a ProActive manner and need it almost every day. It tells you not only what has been done in the past, but also what you need to do in the future.

You are placing the account strategies you have developed in the War Story, as well as whatever tools will enable your strategies in the future. The War Story will become more important to you than your day timer, since War Stories are the roadmaps to sales success for your RedZone accounts.

Success from a WarBook

When you get good at War Stories, they become a powerful tool both inside and outside the organization.

Homework (prepare !!) is where great salespeople excel. They know that spending too much time doing homework is avoiding actual prospecting and wasting selling time. If they do too little, they go out unarmed. Homework, like anything else that needs mastery, will be somewhat time consuming up front, but after a while, when a process has been established, will become simple and easy. It should end up being 10 to 20 percent of your overall time.

The homework you do for prospecting for new or additional business is a critical part of your success. Homework does not mean spending all your time researching your accounts and never making a call, nor does it mean giving it a cursory once over. AProActive salesperson spends the right amount of homework on his key RedZone accounts and updating his WarBooks. Once you get a system down, you will not only have more information with you when you prospect, but since information is power, you will be more confident and more insistent on success. Preparation, that is, homework, is the key to success—in sports, music, and in almost everything you do. It is especially true in sales. The ProActive sales person wins . . . period.

Some Thoughts… A Landing Place or Page

What is a Landing Page or Place?

A landing page is any page on a website, or a particular place in a city where traffic or people is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to.

Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.