4Sight Systems - Sales Solutions by Sales Professionals

APW/OPW Account/Opportunity Planning Workshop

Fully-Facilitated 2-Day Workshop

What is a Planning Workshop?

The 4Sight Systems APW and OPW are fully-facilitated planning workshops designed to draw out the critical issues and establish a winning strategy and executable plan for high-ticket, "must-win" accounts and opportunities.

Why Facilitation?

Have you ever struggled with any of the following inhibitors when building and executing on winning sales plans?

1. Difficulty in seeing "the wood for the trees" when dealing with the same sales scenario day in and day out.

2. Difficulty in really thinking "outside the box" to gain input and ideas from all parts of your organisation.

3. Siloed thinking in a cross-functional organisation.

4. Inter-departmental politics occasionally driving behaviour.

5. Ensuring all team members are committed to the post-plan governance and ultimately execution of the plan.

6. Gaining validation of the plan with the customer - the only way to know if your plan really is a good one.

Professional external and neutral facilitation in alignment with the unique ForeSight Planning Framework are the dual keys key to breaking down these inhibitors and driving full collaboration between all functional units in complex accounts and opportunities.

Why a 4Sight Facilitator?

Many years of senior sales experience combined with our practical facilitation experience in delivering over 200 workshops for complex accounts and opportunities with some of the world's most successful sales organisations gives us great knowledge and credibility. Let us drive your personnel at all levels to think creatively and challenge each other to uncover the real issues and build a winning plan.

Workshop Flow


Following in the footsteps of business innovators like Henry Ford, we have designed our workshops to promote on-going collaboration as the fundamental corner-stone of the successful sales plan - "coming together, keeping together and working together" is what it's all about! To ensure the success of this collaboration, we document the entire process by means of a "programme log" recording all pre-session engagement, the live workshop and all post-session engagement. This document has proven invaluable to both sales teams and their management alike.

Pre-Session Engagement

We will spend time with the account team to customise which elements of the Foresight framework are specific to your requirements, specify any pre-work required and establish a Session Contract to ensure clear governance between all parties. Where possible, we recommend involving the customer at the pre-session stage too.


Workshop

During the highly-interactive and focused 2-day workshop, you can expect to be challenged to truly think "outside the box" and to find answers to the most difficult questions. We will guide you through a process of discovery regarding your customer account or opportunity, and throughout the process act as facilitator and scribe to produce an executable plan for future collaboration. It is highly desirable to involve the customer in the Intelligence gathering stage of the workshop.


Post-Session Engagement

The executable plan and agreed governance will be minuted and echoed back to the team. We will conduct a full workshop debrief and help in coaching and mentoring the team leader going forward. We also recommend "closing the loop" with the customer by means of post-session validation.

Why 4Sight?

Customer Input and Validation - The Key to Successful Plans

The key to a successful plan is in obtaining customer input and affirmation throughout the build and execution phase. The only way you ever really know that you have a winning plan is if the customer concurs! Without this essential "feedback" mechanism, the danger is that plans become based on what the sales team WANT to be true rather than what they KNOW to be true. Huge amounts of sales resource is wasted on sales engagements that have never been validated with the customer. Let us guide you away from this particular pitfall.

As an optional addition to the standard Pre-Session Engagement, we can conduct an "Executive 360" interview with your potential customer prior to engaging with you, to establish that customer's current view of your company, products and services.

Likewise, as an optional addition to the standard Post-Session Engagement program, we would be very happy to lead the CVR or "Customer Validation Review" process with the customer, a role for which our neutrality and industry experience at the most senior levels uniquely equips us. This has been found to be a very powerful tool by our existing clients and is a fundamental part of the ForeSight strategic selling philosophy.

Who should attend?

The long-term success of facilitated workshops depends largely on having the full extended team present. All parts of the organisation that are required in the sales campaign must be involved in building and challenging the plan to ensure they are committed to the all-important execution of the plan.

Account Managers, Systems Engineers, Sales Management, Systems Engineering Management, Sales Executive Management, Sales Overlay Functions, Customer Advocacy/Services, Legal, Finance, Business Unit heads....in short, everyone who "touches" the account or opportunity.

Collaboration becomes much more difficult if one or more of the key parts of the organisation are not present. The key to real collaboration and gaining "buy-in" to ensure execution of plans is to build the plans as a team and then execute as a team. In workshops we have conducted where this was indeed the case, significant improvements in account relationships and opportunity close rates have been experienced.

Why 4Sight?