The Winning Formula: Creating a Win Plan with Discovery at Its Core

So, you've conducted fruitful discovery and collected a lot of information about the client... Now what? We don't just do discovery for fun; we do it to gain insights that inform our strategy moving forward. This blog explains how to distill all the information gathered in discovery into a concise and effective Win Plan.

 

A Win Plan is a strategic tool for getting your entire sales enablement team on the same page. It helps ensure everyone is aligned on the key messages to maximize resonance with your client. The Win Plan takes everything you learn in discovery and helps you understand what you should communicate when you get in front of the client.

 

Let's start by "mapping" where your opportunity is coming from. This will help you understand the motivations that might be in play. Different people in the organization will have different things that motivate them. For example, an operational person will be motivated by things like, "It makes their job easier, it will take less time, or it has fewer steps." While an executive might care about operational impacts; they will be most motivated by understanding the connection from operational impacts to a strategic initiative they are trying to drive. This is important because it influences how you will engage with them moving forward.

On one hand, a deal could be:

On the other hand, a deal could be:

This is the most expensive deal from a sales process point of view. You started it, and you started it at the bottom of the organization. It may turn into something or it may not.

 

This is the easiest deal to map because you have senior sponsorship, and they need something fixed. It's not the easiest to win; it's just the easiest to map.

 

When a frontline manager drives an operational problem, they come to you with an issue that needs to be addressed.

 

A senior leader comes to you with a metric that needs to be fixed. This could be something like, "Grow EPTA by 15%," and they are looking at your solution to get them there.

 

Think about it this way, we have the capabilities and benefits we bring to the table; this is what our solution does. Ideally, we're able to connect these capabilities and benefits all the way up to the strategic initiative. But there is a lot of connective tissue in the way. It's common for a strategic initiative to have multiple improvement strategies to achieve its goal. You want to connect the improvement strategies to the impact statement uncovered during the discovery process. Then, you want to connect the impact statements to the capabilities you offer.

During discovery, you might uncover several impact statements, each with its own capabilities and benefits. Each impact statement and its associated capabilities and benefits will form an individual "demo episode." As you frame out what your Win Plan will look like, your message will be much more precise in light of everything we uncovered.

 

It likely unrealistic to have all this information coming into a sales call. This is totally fine. The Win Plan allows you to create a hypothesis. Fill in what you know about the account and then hypothesize what you think will happen in the areas you are unsure about.

 

Bonus: Sometimes, clients aren’t sure of the impacts an operational change will have or what operational changes are needed to connect to an overall strategic initiative. Preparing with some hypotheticals is a great way to be ahead of the conversation. It also makes you seem like a forward thinker, and that helps build your credibility with the client.

 

To round out these areas, you will have to do a little Discovery "On-The-Fly." There are two types of discovery we might perform depending on where the deal is coming from.

 

This is when you know what the overall strategic initiative is, but you need to uncover what operational changes will be necessary for it to happen. For instance, is it a new task management system or an updated process workflow? Whatever the change, it must align with the senior leader's vision. For example, if the strategic initiative is to "grow profitability by 10%," one approach could be to streamline business processes, freeing up time for your existing team to focus on areas that will drive growth.

 

This is when you know what operational changes the client would like to make but are unsure of the impact those operational changes will have on the overall organization.

 

In either case, the Win Plan is a great tool for working with your team on an opportunity. It helps capture the most important elements and translates them into precise messaging that aligns with the overall objective. No matter where a deal comes from or who initiates it, a Win Plan with some Discovery "On-The-Fly is just what you need to keep deals moving forward.