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 compiled a checklist to see if your structures, functions, and competencies have expired in the VUCA work reality related to sales and business development.
Are we clinging to the old ways of doing things, hoping they will be relevant for the present and future work demands? Please read through our 2-part VUCA and business development checklist to understand your team or organization's strengths and potential weaknesses so you can accurately prepare to speed up your growth this year.
About the Checklist:
It is separated into the Critical Skills Required in the VUCA World and a Sales & Business Development section. Each section comprises four parts, including a question so you can evaluate your organization critically.
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 understand your business as a business.
Question for Evaluation: Do Your Employees 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 that 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 Employing Hose Management or Fire Prevention?
3. Short, Medium, and Long-term Planning - Complex Consequence Analysis & Strategic Risk Management: An organization's action will have short, medium, and long-term implications. Every human capital action introduces profound risks 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 must 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 on 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 explain the wallet value of their client base?
2. The Value Proposition – How Your Product Brings Value to the Customer: Your product exists to address a customer's need – plain and simple.
Question for Evaluation: What is the benefit of your product to the customer, and how well do your salespeople position that benefit to maximize customer value and revenue and create a competitive advantage?
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 understand the TCBC entirely?
4. The Journey - Priorities, Urgency, and Smart Activity: With the objective starting point for the sales and business development journey, a client business plan helps salespeople prioritize, measure, and maximize every activity.
Question for Evaluation: Are your salespeople working from a robust client business plan?
I would like you to discover how to 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 take the next step toward reaching significant sales growth success.