To truly embrace the new VUCA work reality, it’s time to rethink all the old organizational structures, roles and competencies. To help you rethink and re-evaluate your organization, we have put together a checklist for you to see if your structures, roles and competencies have expired in the VUCA work reality as it relates to sales and business development.
Are we clinging to the old, hoping they will somehow be relevant for the present and future work demands? Read through our 2-part VUCA and business development checklist to understand the strengths and potential weakness of your team or organization so you can accurately prepare to accelerate your growth this year.
About the Checklist:
The 2-part checklist is separated into the Critical Skills Required in the VUCA World as well as a Sales & Business Development section. Each section is comprised of 4 parts including a question for evaluation so you can start to critically evaluate your organization.
4 Critical Skills Required in the VUCA World (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity):
1. Business Acumen – Understanding the Business of the Business: Every employee in every job should have an understanding of your business, as a business.
Question for Evaluation: Do Your Employees Really Understand Your Business?
2. Strategic Critical Thinking, Problem Identification & Accelerated Decision Making - The Skills that Elevate Doing into Thinking: Employees are so busy working and putting out near-term fires, there’s no time to think about the bigger question, “So what’s causing the fires and how do we prevent them from starting in the future?”
Question for Evaluation: Are Your Employees Into Hose Management or Fire Prevention?
3. Short, Medium and Long-term Planning - Complex Consequence Analysis & Strategic Risk Management: Every action an organization takes will have implications for the short, medium and long term. Every human capital action introduces profound risk and consequences.
Question for Evaluation: How would you evaluate your employee’s risk management capabilities?
4. Navigating the Horizontal Matrix Structure, Identifying Organizational and Functional Interdependencies & Complex Communication Skills: To be change responsive, hierarchical organizations will need to evolve into multifunctional matrix organizations. When matrix structures work well, the results can be extraordinary. Otherwise, there is chaos!
Question for Evaluation: How would you rate your employee’s matrix savvy and complex communication skills?
How do your people perform against these critical VUCA skills? Start to assess how your organization measures up against the impact of VUCA to your business. Take our complimentary VUCA Stress Test today.
Sales and Business Development:
1. The Selling Benchmark - The Value Opportunity: The wallet value assessment of each client determines the time, effort and urgency involved.
Question for Evaluation: Can your salespeople articulate the wallet value of their client base?
2. The Selling Benchmark - The Value Opportunity: The wallet value assessment of each client determines the time, effort and urgency involved.
Question for Evaluation: Can your salespeople articulate the wallet value of their client base?
3. The Milestones - The Total Client Buying Center (TCBC): In the complex selling process, each person in the buying center should have a relationship assessment designation.
Question for Evaluation: Do your salespeople have a complete understanding of the TCBC?
4. The Journey - Priorities, Urgency and Smart Activity: With the objective starting point for the sales and business development journey, a client business plan can help salespeople prioritize, measure and maximize every activity.
Question for Evaluation: Are your salespeople working off a robust client business plan?
Discover how you can implement a proven, strategic methodology to provide the WHAT, WHY and HOW information necessary to drive complex sales and accelerate growth. We invite you to download our sales growth checklist to start to take the next step toward achieving significant sales growth success.
