How Sales Leaders Can Plan With KARE
The companies that emerge stronger from a crisis all share one common strength –their sales and leadership teams are willing and able to move beyond their existing comfort zones, look to where new opportunities lie, set new priorities, and create new action plans.
That starts with planning for and taking ownership of the total addressable market. Sandler uses the KARE Model to structure this exercise and it can be summarized in the following steps
- First, sales leaders need to apply best-practice evaluations of their markets to identify routes to growth, instead of responding to external changes as they arise.
- Next, they must create a targeted market development plan. To begin with we need to look at all the possible market opportunities open to us and segment them using these four KARE criteria:
- Keep. Which segments, clients or channels offer stable income, but limited growth?
- Attain / Acquire. Where can you find the new growth? Which clients can you win from your competition?
- Recapture. Where have you lost ground in the past and can potentially recover now?
- Expand. Which of your current segments or accounts offers the best chance for up-selling or cross-selling?
- Once that is completed, some essential questions remain to be answered, including:
- What pains and challenges are our current and future clients facing and how can we profitably resolve for them?
- What people and tools can we apply to these opportunities?
- How do we connect with the most important target markets?
Waiting until we see results means waiting until it is too late. Results are a consequence of previous activities. Leadership must look at quantifiable behaviors and track the leading indicators that show how well, or poorly, the organization is performing to effectively transition to the New Normal. Do not simply track closed sales. Track the behaviors that deliver closed sales, and closely watch the timelines and direction the needle is moving.
If organizations want to drive growth through the recovery, sales teams and its leadership must accept ownership of growth in the face of the new, fluid, highly competitive landscape that has emerged and understand how to harness the potential of the total addressable market.
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