Tools & Resources

Every well-tuned sales engine uses the following tools in the various phases of the sales process:

1. Sales Trailer – A “Sales Trailer” is to a business what a movie trailer is to a movie. It’s the concise but descriptive statement that answers the question you get 1,000 times a day; “What do you do?” The Sales Trailer does not answer all of the questions about your business, on purpose. It is meant to draw prospects into a well-structured conversation.

2. Differentiators – This tool answers the question; “What makes you different, not just better?” It’s not enough to just be better, you must be able to communicate what makes you unique, different, unstoppable.

3. Value Proposition – What value do I derive from working with you? So how do you say this and be tight about it?

4. Conversation Progression – This tool forces you to structure the first three – your Trailer, Differentiators, and Value – into a conversation that engages a prospect in a way that quickly qualifies them in or out of the sales process.

5. Competitive Landscape – Don’t just list competitors. This tool ensures that you’ve captured their messaging and where they focus, and then equips you to put your differentiators into sharp relief.

6. Target segment “filters” and bulls-eye – What filters do you use to narrow your target market (and resulting messaging) into a group that will ultimately reference each other? Targeting is more about identifying which pepperoni pieces to target vs. which slices of the pie. Slices are un-differentiated groups of prospects that have not been filtered. Pepperoni pieces are clearly-identifiable groups with defined edges. This tool helps you hone in on a group, hone the message, and turn the sales engine much faster and more efficiently.

7. Qualifying Questions Checklist – This tool ensures a disciplined process of checking off the critical qualifying questions that often derail our sales efforts. Is your list thorough, and is it in priority order?

8. Objections/Responses Checklist – Handling objections the right way is key. You get different types of objections at different stages of the sales process. Do you have the answers? Are you ready to handle an objection such that the prospect feels acknowledged and satisfied?

9. Sales Hurdles Diagnostic – Entrepreneurs always face the inevitable “I’ve never heard of you” push-back. This is not an objection, it’s a hurdle. This diagnostic tool helps entrepreneurs and sales teams to identify the highest hurdles and put plans in place to overcome each of them.

10. Story Matrix - This tool provides you with way to capture, distill and categorize your most powerful stories in order to have them at-the-ready for every sales situation.

11. Presentation & Meeting Checklist – Only 30% of the success of a sales meeting or presentation happens during the meeting. This tool provides sales teams with the necessary “surround” to ensure that every high-stakes meeting is fully wrung-out.

12. Nine-slide Presentation Deck – Do you have the right deck? Is it longer than nine slides (if so, it’s too long).

13. Top-down & Bottom-up Sales Forecast – This tool is designed to ensure that you don’t stop at top-down forecasting (everyone does..) and ensures a disciplined way of creating more accurate sales forecasts.
14. A “Day-in-the-Life” Worksheet – Sales professionals and entrepreneurs must take a highly disciplined (that word again) approach to their day.

15. Win/Loss Debrief – The debrief tool is designed to extract high-value insights into your sales process after every loss, and win.

The experience of running my first company, WisdomTools, taught me how critical these tools are to building a well-tuned, disciplined sales engine. It also taught me how often this is overlooked, and how I made the mistake of thinking that “training the sales team” was the same as equipping them with the knowledge, skills and discipline they need to succeed.

Creating these tools is a process. This process takes several mental frameworks that I have built for my students and that our clients now use to attack a market, penetrate the right target clients and build profitable businesses. It most often begins with a shift in mindset that sales leaders and professionals need to make in order to perform better.

These frameworks and the tools listed above serve as the foundation of the services we provide.