Customer use of Shipley is often the secret advantage of business and sales leaders involved with Business-to-Business or Business-to-Government sales in the defence, technology, infrastructure, construction, transport, financial services, legal or other complex markets.
Is Shipley only for big companies?
Not at all. Many big companies, indeed global organisations, secure huge benefits from teams sharing a common language and consistent Business Development (BD) process and tools. Benefits including improved win rates. And discovering revenue performance management is more straightforward to measure and manage – which occurs when teams have aligned, quantifiable steps to follow.
SME’s Benefit from Shipley
And many owner/operators or sales leaders of Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have secured remarkable results from learning and applying Shipley principles and tools to regular deals of as little as $10,000. One customer reported doubling their business turnover in a year – after several team members attended an initial one-day foundation Shipley workshop.
Government use of Shipley for SME growth
Many government programs responsible for SME growth, principally supporting exporters, or support of defence sub-contractors, have had Shipley develop and run #WinWork programs for their SME communities.
We have already invested heavily in sales training, why would we need Shipley?
Salespeople, sales process and sales training, are fundamental investments for even the most modest-sized businesses.
And yet the global sales training organsiations themselves report substantial gaps between sales training investments and improved sales results. Some of the blame for this lag in results lies with leadership failures in sales process discipline, and lack of reinforcement of excellent sales training.
But another overlooked cause is that customers decisions today rely on more than a good working relationship with a salesperson.
The ongoing testing of assumptions in the pre-tender or Capture phase is now beyond conversation and require crisp, useful written summaries of key issues and possible solutions.
And the formal customer procurement process can be a complex minefield no amount of sales training will ever prepare you for.
What does working best with Shipley look like?
We work best with those who recognise that an ad-hoc approach to preparing for their ‘must-win’ interactions creates risk and leaks value. And with those who wish to apply a proven structured method to their strategic deal preparations.
Quick fixes – individual skills development.
Many begin with the basics – online courses for necessary improvements to your team’s writing skills followed by training for superior planning and management of bids and proposals. Many of your BD, bid and proposal team will have already undertaken this level of Shipley training. Many more, especially new team members, will need to either refresh, update or acquire these fundamental business communications skills.
Building and leveraging individual competence.
Business leaders with a longer-term perspective wanting significant team effectiveness and value-for-money, also invest in vital reinforcement and coaching of their teams’ newly acquired skills.
Strategic Capability Building
Organisational capability building includes educating and involving the leadership team in understanding, guiding and supporting greater customer focus and more disciplined capture and bid processes.
Enjoy an improved Sales Culture.
To #WinWork effectively is a team effort. Combined customer focus and less wasted time in winning bids is more fun, less stressful and much more profitable. An environment, a culture most find a significant improvement.
