Your Unique Sales DNA

Your company has its own DNA. It isn’t exactly like any other company, even if you are in the same line of business, and even if you sell the same thing. This means that what is right for one company may in fact be wrong for you (even if you like the idea, and if you really want to implement it).

1. Process: The sales process that you choose needs to be the right process for your company. It needs to be directly tied to the verifiable outcomes that you need to achieve to successfully move your dream client from target to close. What works for someone else may or may not work for you. Your needs are different.
2. Methodology: New methodologies are sexy. They’re designed to meet new needs within the sales process. But no matter how popular a methodology, it doesn’t make it right for you. Your company may or may not have the capacity, the resources, or the will to execute the methodology. Your salespeople may not be capable of pulling off the methodology. Worse still, popularity doesn’t make any methodology the right prescription.
3. Value Proposition and Differentiation Strategy: Your company’s unique DNA means that you have your own value proposition. There are unique things that you do because you have certain beliefs about what is right and wrong, and because you have certain abilities to produce results the way you do. It doesn’t matter what your competitors do; you are not them. Their DNA is different.
4. Management Structure: Your management team is a unique collection of individuals. If you swapped one of them out, the personality of the team would change. Deciding what is right for your organization requires that you look at your management team, management structure, management style, and determine whether or not you have the right people and the capacity to change what you want to change.
5. Skill Level: Your team members have a certain skill level now. The skills they have now are the starting point for developing higher level skills. There isn’t a way to jump levels of skill development. Much of the advice you hear about the processes, methodologies, and the tools that excite you assume a certain skill level. A skill level you may or may not yet have.

You may want to take on some new initiative, process, methodology, or program. You might want that new initiative because everyone else is doing it, and it sounds like the right answer. But what is right for one company at one time doesn’t make it right for you, at least not right now. No matter how sexy the idea.