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Issue 12 - July 2004
More electronic
newsletter articles:
Wilson's
Writings
Leadership
Lessons
Practice
Perspectives
Marketing Matters
Successful
Strategies
Successful
Strategies:
Planning Your Sales Success – Tools to Support
You
REDW Business and Financial Resources, LLC (REDW), the largest public
accounting firm in New Mexico, believes in leveragability where possible
and promotes a culture of communication and accountability. This is the
premise on which Steve Cogan, CPA, bases his business development success.
Steve and REDW engaged ConvergenceCoaching, LLC in our individual coaching program, called Mapping Your Career Success™, which supports Steve in:
- Creating a vision for his career;
- Identifying how he can measure his success; and
- Creating a framework for developing his priorities and being accountable to his vision.
Steve has access to a coach who supports him in taking his career and his audit practice to the next level. This first required Steve to assess his current performance and the performance of his practice, as well as to gain feedback from others in the firm as to where they thought he should focus his energies. Then, he developed a set of goals to achieve during his time in the program. “Doing this has allowed me to refocus my energies on the things that are important to me – and to the audit practice – versus spinning my wheels on things I can’t necessarily impact,” says Steve. “I have a renewed commitment that allows me to be more effective, and the results speak for themselves.”
Once this was done, Steve and his coach worked together to develop and then implement some new management tools and processes into his everyday work life. First, they created a Personal Marketing Plan (PMP) to identify Steve’s core marketing objectives, his ideal target client profile in various industries and to document his marketing activity commitments for the coming months. Then, Steve began addressing these commitments each month, moving his marketing outreach efforts from internal cross selling, to existing client outreach and networking, to “colder” prospect outreach.
Steve also tailored
the ConvergenceCoaching, LLC pipeline template tool, which is a simple
Excel spreadsheet (click here for a template: http://www.convergencecoaching.com/csc_docs/pipeline.xls)
that enabled him to begin tracking all of his sales opportunities, including
both prospects and new service opportunities for existing clients of the
firm. Steve tracks prospects for the Audit and Consulting group as well
as those he has sourced for other firm departments – an area where
he has had particular success.
In addition to maintaining a pipeline of all his opportunities, the pipeline
updating and review process provides Steve a consistent method of accountability
and a way to definitively track success.
Another component
of the Mapping Your Career Success process is ongoing monthly coaching
calls where Steve reviews his pipeline of opportunities and other agreed
upon actions with his coach. This accountability enables Steve to consistently
move opportunities forward as well as provides him the ability to identify
and measure his achievements. His successes range from a large multi-year
audit engagement worth over $100,000 annually to simple bookkeeping and
audit services for $10,000 that were on the “pipeline” for
some time and are now closed. In addition, he has referred over $50,000
in closed business to other groups during the time he has been working
his program.
“I have incorporated my pipeline into regular communications with
my other partners so that they can see the accomplishments we are achieving
in the audit practice,” says Steve. “It lets me know that
I’m on track and my partners can begin to see how the process works
and also look for areas where we should be leveraging each other on similar
opportunities that they might be working on.”
Steve has also implemented
other sales tools and processes including the development of a proposal
template that is being incorporated in other areas of the firm. He also
has an ongoing commitment to “client care” lunches where he
meets with a minimum of one existing client a week and three to five network
contacts per month to cement his relationships and uncover any potential
service opportunities that may exist.
To develop a sales culture of accountability in your firm, a leadership
commitment must be established. The benefits Steve has realized include:
- Providing a consistent method for managing his sales opportunities;
- Beginning to smooth peaks and valleys in activity for the audit practice; and
- Increasing his ability to predict resource needs and overall revenue projections.
To find out how you or your firm could benefit from a Mapping Your Career Success individual coaching program or discuss the process of implementing sales process tools and pipeline meetings in your firm, contact Tamera Loerzel at tamera@convergencecoaching.com or 952.226.1780.
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