Platform Thinking is a powerful tool for planning sales activities, resource allocation and calculating stability factors. It can also be extremely valuable when you want to:
- Increase your number of clients
- Optimize your selling process
- Change your positioning
- Find an unexploited niche
What is Platform Thinking?
Platform Thinking (PT) is an approach to plan sales and negotiation activities for an individual Sales Manager or the whole team. The primary objective of practicing Platform Thinking is to increase personal or team effectiveness. Practicing Platform Thinking raises 3 key points:
- Customer segment – what is really attractive to us?
- What does our current negotiation or sales process look like?
- The arguments for our clients to continue working with us?
“…Sales platform, it makes sense…vitally important to us.”
James Shippen, Domino Printing UK
What customer segment is really attractive to us?
What clients bring the highest value to our organisation and why? After all, clarifying the customers segment where your company’s Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) can be utilised with the greatest returns shows where you have the most attractive customer sector. An understanding of the following topics can make sales teams more effective:
- Our company’s Unique Selling Points
- How to use them
- How to transform them into arguments
- Whom to approach with them – company, role, position, psychological type
So, a quite simple decision – “Who are our clients?” – can initiate a rather serious process; how to prepare our sales staff to find and select the right customers, and how to approach them.
Platform Thinking helps to focus your resources where they are absolutely necessary, and to save spending money on unnecessary activities.
What does our current negotiation or sales process look like?
The next step is to understand how to start and continue negotiations. Many companies today establish very specific rules for negotiation processes. Usually they employ the standard five- or seven-step selling processes as a base. There are certain areas in a negotiation process that everybody should be aware of:
- Where are we at maximum risk and where we are safe?
- How can I as a manager support my team in this process?
- Do we have any tool that describes our position in the negotiation process? What does the action planning in it look like?
These simple questions have a major impact on the daily activities.
Interested?
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