At the Sales 2.0 conference today, and just had the opportunity to see a strong presentation from Jeanne Glass from Fair Isaac, explaining how the Fair Isaac organization is managing their internal sales process.
Ok, the coolest thing — XPLANE developed the process map for Fair Isaac to help them visualize, understand and communicate their sales process.
(A larger version of this image is available on Flickr.)
Love it, and this is perfect segue from the VizThink conversations of last week. Visualization matters, even in "hard core" business areas like sales.
For Fair Isaac, Jeanne noted three key factors for their individuals who are interacting with prospective customers.
- Know their methodology
- Know their customers
- Know their solutions
Fair Isaac seems to have a very strong measurement and benchmarking component to their sales process; they look at how they are doing on particular dimensions (e.g. "Our executive leadership is actively engaged in our sales process"), and compare themselves to both the industry average as well as the "world class benchmark" on those dimensions.
Most importantly, Fair Isaac encourages their team to use these resources in conjunction with their prospects and customers! For example, their team wants to have a high degree of transparency. How to do this? Fair Isaac shares their process with the customer, even down to sharing the plan that Fair Isaac has for a particular opportunity directly with the customer herself. Right on.
Scoring is a key part of the process, which enables decision making based on facts, not emotions.
Results at Fair Isaac from following this process:
- Improved close rates
- Common language
- Teamwork and planning
- Metric based decision-making
