Target Account Planning Strategies (TAPS)
Target Account Planning Strategies (TAPS) is a proven business growth system that identifies key opportunities and utilizes a step by step plan for improving cycle time and frequency of sales success. The result is a more effective and efficient sales approach to keep sales professionals’ time spent on the highest impact activities.
TAPS is designed to leverage the skills and methods introduced in the Dimensions of Professional Selling (DPS) workshop to further hone sales excellence and elevate your company’s position to “Preferred Position” among target accounts. This dynamic, hands-on program allows participants to use real target accounts to apply the analysis and planning methods taught and develop an action plan specific to your company.
Simply put, the TAPS workshop introduces a targeted selling approach to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales professionals’ efforts in:
- New business acquisition
- Further penetration into established customer accounts
- Successful introduction of new products and unique services
- Insulation from aggressive competitive activity
- Prevention of price erosion in established accounts
Click here for a complete description of the TAPS Training Program
TAPS TRAINING PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Phase I - Simulation Game
- This engaging and relevant exercise will introduce your employees to critical financial literacy skills in a fun,
highly interactive, and non-threatening manner. In this simulation, participants become owners of a realistic
company, where they are given three years to meet shareholder expectations.
Moving Ahead with Target Account Planning
- Participants begin by understanding the goals for the workshop, tying target account planning to your company’s
disciplines and leveraging The Position Progression Model.
Results-Producing Behaviors
- Essential skills and methodologies, including listening, “Odds Are,” personality orientations, LAER, Positional
Selling, and Jadik Matrix are reviewed in a fun and experiential lecturette. Particular emphasis is made on those
areas that will be used as part of the Target Account Planning Strategies planning system.
Adding Dimension to the Positional Selling System
The core learning of Target Account Planning Strategies begins by taking the Exploratory and Presentation processes to another level.
Key activities include:
- Developing a list of all potential decision-makers and their roles in the decision, and matching them
with potential business needs based on those roles. - Learning a questioning process for taking a decision-maker beyond the discovery of his/her current needs
and helping to pull them into the future as it pertains to your solutions. - Paralleling your solutions to their future needs and the future needs of their customers.
The Target Account Plan
- Participants are now ready to review the “Sales Cycle” decision-makers go through before awarding major pieces of business.
They become aware that customers perceive that they need different types of relationships with their suppliers and that to be
most effective, they must understand how they define the desired relationship and how to proceed once they do. - Each participant is asked to begin to create a plan for a real target account based on the information they bring with them.
This tool becomes the “roadmap” for developing an Action Plan complete with dates, responsibility assignments, and milestones.
Negotiate Your Way to Success
- Finally, participants are asked to put aside their preconceived notions of the negotiation process and openly examine
some new ideas about negotiations. The highly interactive negotiations simulation is interspersed with individual
and group activities that illustrate the conceptual and tactical elements necessary to conduct and conclude a win/win exchange. - A customized team role-play provides participants the opportunity to practice the complete the negotiation process from preparation,
through the exploratory and presentation stages, to finalizing the agreement. Before leaving this module, participants
will explore how the various levels of position will affect the win/win negotiation process.
Summary
- Target Account Planning Strategies is an action challenge sales development initiative resulting in detailed sales call planning,
masterful execution, and rigorous follow-through. It results in new business opportunities, expanded market share, and profits.
Target Account Planning Strategies represents the critical path to be implemented for new business development goals in selected target customers.
Copyright 2008 Carew International, Inc.