Page 158 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

a sales leadership team, we started the brainstorming process. Ultimately, we
decided to iterate on our qualifying matrix. We came up with an improved
matrix that better summarized the discovery approach our most successful
salespeople were taking with potential buyers. We called this qualifying matrix
GPCT (Goal, Plan, Challenges, Timeline).

Here are the details:

1. Goal: The business goals around which the prospect's company is rallying.
As my mentor John McMahon once eloquently stated, “A well-developed
goal is quantified and implicated.” “Quantified” means there is a number
attached to the goal (i.e., the prospective buyer needs to increase lead flow
by 20 percent). “Implicated” means we understand the implication if the
buyer does not achieve the goal (i.e., if the buyer does not increase lead flow
by 20 percent, the buyer will have new salespeople with no leads to call; the
buyer will essentially be spreading the same potential revenue across a larger
sales team; salesperson productivity will decrease, and the buyer will likely
fail to grow the business). The “Goal” helped us understand how much
impact we could have with the buyer and gauge how important goal
achievement would be to the buyer.

2. Plan: The business plan put in place to achieve the goal. In the HubSpot
context, the “Goal” was typically oriented around lead generation. The
“Plan” was, in turn, a marketing strategy meant to increase lead flow. Will
the company increase its presence at trade shows? Will the company launch a
direct mail campaign? Will the company increase its advertising spend, start
a blog, ramp up cold calling, etc.? Uncovering the buyer's “Plan” helped us
to assess whether we felt it was realistic and whether we could help. Ideally,
our salespeople would identify a plan that would work and with which we
could help (i.e., develop an inbound marketing program). We would
obviously convert many of these sales opportunities into customers. In
contrast, we often found buyers with plans that, in our experience, were
likely to fail. A common example of this scenario was a company that
planned to purchase a list of cold prospects and cold email them. Not only
did this strategy yield few leads, but also the cold emailing activity increased
the likelihood that the company's email would be sent directly to spam
folders, negatively impacting future sales and marketing efforts. In this case,
we needed to educate the buyer's team on the dangers of their current plan
and redirect them toward a more effective strategy. These were tougher sales
opportunities to navigate. In reality, customers could actually execute their