In my last blog post I wrote that the best way to repeat your biggest sales wins is to conduct a special form of a Won Sales Analysis. Conducting such an analysis tells salespeople exactly how and why they won the business and how to identify the prospects most likely to provide a similar win in the future.

I received a lot of feedback on that blog post from people who were keen to point out that sometimes your biggest wins are not ones you want to repeat. Here are a few reasons why:

• You had to discount heavily in order to win the sale
• You had to make service or support concessions to win the sale
• The prospect took forever to make a decision.

I completely agree that your biggest wins are not always your best wins and that a better way to leverage a Won Sales Analysis is to analyze your best wins. 

What your best wins look like

So what do your best wins have in common? I would argue that all your best wins have three or more of the following characteristics:

• It was easy to reach the decision maker
• The prospect made the purchase quickly
• You did not have to discount heavily in order to win the business
• The decision maker provided a testimonial, was willing to be a reference, and/or referred you to another decision maker who was a solid prospect.

Performing a Won Sale Analysis on deals that meet the above criteria can help you identify deals that provide the maximum amount of value to your company, not necessarily in financial terms, but in the quality of the deal. To help you identify your best deals, I created a worksheet you can use when analyzing your recent wins.

Repeating your best wins

The wins that most often meet the criteria above, your best wins, often occur when you reached the decision maker while they were unhappy with the status quo but they were so busy solving other problems they had not started talking to any potential vendors about this problem yet – what I call a Window of Dissatisfaction.

Hitting this narrow window of time can be tricky, but getting your timing right is the most effective way to start achieving your best sales wins. The folks over at the Corporate Executive Board created a great visual that explains what this looks like and what to do about it.

Focus on the best opportunities

I’m a fan of the work by Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue, on how to focus your energy in the prospecting process on the ideal customer. He says “Your ideal outbound customer should represent the largest revenue size or opportunity you can find that YOU ARE LIKELY TO WIN.”

I would add to that you want to focus your outbound activities on those in the Window of Disatisfaction AND those you are highly likely to win without having to discount heavily, wait too long for the sale to close, and allow you to get great references, testimonials, and referrals. Putting wins like this under the microscope can help you close high value deals every time.

Next month I’ll share some of my social media tools and how you can use them to listen for opportunities that meet the criteria above.

Want even more tips on improving your sales performance? Download a free copy of the ebook below: