TRAINING | firststrikesales

Jumpstart Training/Workshops

Many companies start selling in the United States with the misconception that it is similar to your home geography. And, in fact, it may appear that is the case on the surface. However, the structure and management of the sales process are completely different, as is what is acceptable relative to the level of "assertiveness."

FirstStrike is pleased to inform you of an offering to help you jumpstart operations in the USA. This offering can also be very effective for organizations that are either mid-launch or in a restart mode.

The objective is to give you a dependable foundation for direct sales that includes an achievable objective, a rock-solid prospecting strategy, and a sales force trained in the “dark arts” of managing a sales process. The offerings are explicitly sculpted for each client and use either your company's experience or existing sales processes as the basis for any conclusions arrived at. The intended audience is managers and salespeople launching a new product in the USA.

We start with a two-day session with your management team to assess the viability of your existing revenue targets. Is the number achievable with the resources you have in place? We do so by using my extensive enterprise sales history and my extensive background. Our deliverables include a sales forecast for the company, the staffing, and the tools needed to achieve it. Another deliverable is at least the skeleton of a standard sales process. This exercise can be painful, but like nasty-tasting medicine, it is often a lifesaver. The numbers never lie.

The balance of the sessions is with your sales team, which initially focuses on refining the standard sales process and confirming our decisions relative to sales objectives, staffing, and tools. We begin delving into the details of the process. I provide a conceptual framework for prospecting, qualification, sales cycle control, and closing. We then use your existing sales cycles to illustrate the use of these concepts to provide immediate value to your bottom line. The deliverables include the validation of your pipeline, some potential improvement to your chances of winning these deals, and salespeople trained not just conceptually but in real-world examples by someone who lives in this world.

Also included is detailed training on prospecting and development of the salespeople’s plan for pipeline development, including the tools to utilize, how best to leverage them, and the verbiage, timing, and techniques to utilize. Your salespeople will leave with a detailed prospecting strategy, and you will have a concrete way to monitor their progress or lack thereof. We can virtually guarantee that this will dramatically improve your pipeline within 90 days if your people follow the plan rigorously.

The sessions emphasize the differences between prospecting and selling in the US and your home geography. These range from using proper English in your emails to acceptable assertiveness in this market and everything in between. We have experienced that recognizing these subtle cultural dissimilarities can often be the difference between success and failure.

Because we review every active deal and create individual prospecting plans for each sales representative, the length of the engagement can vary. Engagements can range between 5 and 10 days but never more than three days in any given week. Remote training is available but strongly discouraged, as this will greatly dilute the spirit of collaboration and the impact of the training.