Collaborate to Win Business: Introduction

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

• Explain how Altify Test & Improve best practice helps you collaborate with your revenue team to improve opportunity plans
• Describe how revenue teams use this approach to coach each other and maximize their chances of winning deals
• Describe the three phases of the Test & Improve process

 

Test & Improve is a best-practice meeting cadence facilitated by Altify software in your opportunities.

As the name suggests, it helps revenue teams collaborate on opportunities by providing a structured approach to getting the most out of each person's knowledge and experience.

Regular Test & Improve meetings test the team's opportunities for vulnerabilities and gather recommendations of the most effective actions to improve them.

When you've established a regular Test & Improve cadence, and people participate fully, everyone on the revenue team benefits.

• They develop a better understanding of the current opportunities, the business value you're delivering to customers, and relationship-development priorities.
• They coach each other. This often leads to better anticipation of competitors' moves, and more effective strategies to block them.
• They're better prepared to discuss their plans with their customers.
• They knows how to focus investments and align resources in a way that helps them to win.
• And because people from across the business can participate, the whole company benefits from the way the process helps people to share ideas and best practices.

When to Carry Out Test & Improve Meetings

We recommend establishing a weekly time for your opportunity Test & Improve meetings (the end of the week is often best) – choosing a different opportunity for each meeting.

With this meeting cadence established, opportunity owners can prepare in advance, and the reviewers (the meeting participants who will help to test and improve the opportunity) will have the event in their calendars, reminding them to allocate the time.

We also recommend that you run Test & Improves for key deals when you're preparing for a forecast meeting or a quarterly business review.

Altify's Test & Improve

Altify's Test & Improve is designed to make it as easy as possible to have a successful Test & Improve meeting. Using it, the opportunity owner can easily:

• Schedule a Test & Improve meeting. (Invitations are automatically sent to the invitees for their calendars.)
• Present the opportunity during the meeting. The opportunity is shown in a format that is tailored for Test & Improve meetings.

Running a Test & Improve Meeting

Lynn Benfield is an account executive at Retail POS, a supplier of point-of-sale (POS) technologies. She wants to conduct a Test & Improve for one of her opportunities – "MyHealth 150 POS Software Upgrades".

Lynn has a good understanding of what her customer needs to achieve, and she has started to build relationships with each of the key players.

She believes that to win the deal she’ll need to shift the focus of MyHealth’s buying criteria to a different problem, one that will favor a Retail POS solution.

She’s concerned that this strategy could open her opportunity up to competition, and she’s looking for ideas to minimize this risk.

She also needs to keep her revenue team coordinated on this opportunity so that they can help deliver key messages to multiple levels within MyHealth’s organization.

Lynn’s sales manager, Tony Webster, hosts Test & Improve meetings every Friday morning. Lynn has asked to schedule her opportunity for Test & Improve during one of the upcoming meetings.

Recommended Best Practice Meeting Flow

Altify's recommended meeting flow, which includes "swim lanes" for both presenter and reviewers, is shown below.

The meeting flow has three phases:

1. Understand the plan.
2. Test the plan.
3. Improve the plan.

It's very important to complete these three phases in the correct order every time you conduct a Test & Improve meeting.

Sometimes, reviewers may sometimes want to jump in and try to offer their ideas too soon. Make sure they wait until everyone fully understands the plan before they start to identify vulnerabilities (test the plan) or provide recommendations (improve the plan).

As the diagram shows, most opportunity Test & Improve meetings can be conducted in one hour:

• 35 minutes allocated to understanding the plan.
• 10 minutes allocated to testing the plan.
• 15 minutes allocated to improving the plan.

The blue activities are carried out by the presenter. The green ones are carried out by the other people at the meeting: the reviewers.

Who Should Participate?

Lynn needs to consider who should attend the Test & Improve meeting.

The list of attendees will include a presenter, a team of reviewers, and someone to act as the facilitator/coach.

• Presenter

The Presenter is typically the opportunity owner, but could also include other core team members involved in creating the opportunity. In this example, Lynn will present the opportunity plan.

• Reviewers

The reviewing team is generally a small group of between three and five people and includes peer sellers, supporting team members, and the executives who'll make any resource or investment commitments required to pursue the opportunity.

Lynn will look to invite a diverse set of reviewers who can contribute a lot of ideas and constructive criticism for her specific deal during the Test & Improve meeting.

She’ll also consider specific colleagues whose expertise she needs — she may want to ask them to take ownership of certain actions identified at the meeting.

For example, these might include colleagues who have previous experience with a particular competitor, or knowledge of a strategic partner, or have won or lost a similar type deal.

Lynn thinks about the role each reviewer will be assigned at the meeting (customer, competitor, leadership team, or partner). The reviewers will be asked to think about the opportunity from the perspective of their assigned role.

• Facilitator/Coach

One of the attendees is asked to play the dual role of facilitator/coach. In this case, Lynn asks Leonard Page, another account executive on her team.

As facilitator, Leonard will assign the reviewers the roles chosen for them by Lynn. He'll also keep track of time to make sure everything gets covered in the 60 minutes allotted for the Test & Improve meeting.

As coach, he'll guide the revenue team to make sure the meeting follows the best-practice Test & Improve process so that it has a successful outcome.

Phase 1: Understand the Plan

The Altify Test & Improve tool guides everyone through the process. Lynn begins by presenting her opportunity to the reviewers.

(Reviewers shouldn't interrupt the presenter during this phase.)

 

When the presentation is done, reviewers are given time to ask clarifying questions. This helps to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of the plan.

 

The reviewers add their questions to the feed.

The feed helps to keep the meeting structured. After everyone's questions have been added, Leonard (the facilitator/coach) filters the feed so that just a single reviewer's questions are shown.

Lynn replies to each question concisely and avoiding speculation. Answers such as "Yes", "No", and "I don’t know" are all fine.

Then Leonard changes the feed to show the questions posted by another reviewer, and so on. (There may not be enough time to answer all the questions in the feed.)

Phase 2: Test the Plan

Next the presenter and reviewers test the plan for potential vulnerabilities, based on what they saw during the plan presentation.

In the feed, the reviewers share the vulnerabilities they've spotted.

As with questions, Leonard filters the feed so that it shows the vulnerabilities noticed by a single reviewer.

Together with the presenter, the reviewers then discuss the implications of each one, then move onto those of the next reviewer, and so on.

Lynn is careful to keep an open mind, maintaining an objective viewpoint and not taking anything personally. She avoids being defensive when vulnerabilities are raised — her focus is on uncovering any "blind spots" she may have missed in her plan.

Leonard may need to remind the reviewers to resist the urge to make recommendations during this clarification step. Their focus needs to be on getting a clear understanding of the plan and being careful not to jump to conclusions.

They won’t start discussing recommendations to improve the plan until all vulnerabilities have been reviewed.

Phase 3: Improve the Plan

In his role as facilitator/coach, Leonard will prioritize the more serious vulnerabilities for the third phase of the process: improving the plan.

In the feed, the reviewers add their recommendations for how to address these vulnerabilities.

They discuss the recommendations of each reviewer in turn. During the course of the discussion, Lynn can action next steps in the feed in response to recommendations. Or, if they're pressed for time, she can do this on the Test & Improve's Summary page after the meeting.

And if a vulnerability is simple to resolve, Lynn may even decide to do it straight away.

When the team's recommendations have been discussed, the meeting is done.

After the Meeting

 

After the meeting is done, Lynn can go to the Summary page in the Test & Improve to review all the questions, vulnerabilities, and recommendations that were shared in the feed during the meeting.

This makes it easy for her to action next steps with her team.

 

Lynn's Test & Improve is done. It's been greatly beneficial. She's received some great ideas from her colleagues. She and her revenue team have arrived at an agreed strategy and set of next steps.

And Lynn's colleagues have also probably got some good ideas that they can leverage for their own opportunities.