¶ Introducing Sales Planning Series
From Tokyo, Japan and New Plymouth, New Zealand. This is Down to Business English with your hosts Skip Montreux and Samantha Vega.
🎵 Music
We have something special in store for listeners today, don't we, Skip?
We most certainly do, Samantha.
Why don't you tell everybody about it?
Recently, I was able to sit down and interview Mr. Gregory Kostiuk on the subject of sales.
And Gregory Kostiak would be
Greg is the founder and president of StratX Sales. He has over 30 years of executive sales experience and is also a certified sales leader and fractional or outsourced VP of sales for a range of companies. in a variety of industries.
A fractional VP of sales. So unlike a consultant who looks at a company from the outside and makes recommendations for them to follow, a fractional sales VP would work from the inside. Be a part of the company and actually implement a stale strategy?
That is a very good differentiation.
And what did you speak with Greg about specifically?
Greg speaks to me about effective sales planning and why it is important for a company to have an effective sales plan.
Something every organization needs.
Absolutely. He talks about the three core elements of an effective sales plan and gives seven tips on how to achieve those elements.
And that is what we're going to hear today on D2B.
What we are going to do is this. The interview itself runs just over 40 minutes. It's a little bit, well, it's a lot too long for a D2B episode. So what I've done is I have divided the interview into four parts. Today, listeners will hear part one of the interview. And afterwards, you and I will go through some of the key words and phrases in the interview in our traditional down to vocabulary section. Then we will do the same for part 2, 3, and 4, and release those as individual episodes.
Once we have released all four parts, I will post the interview in its entirety on our website.
Sounds like a good idea.
So let's do it. Let's get D2B down to business with part one of my interview with Gregory Kostiak on the three core elements of an effective sales plan.
🎵 Music
¶ Greg Kostiuk's Sales Expertise
There is an age-old adage that in business, there are only two types of people. People who sell things and people who support the people who sell things. Now, if you are in administration or the RD department or the accounting department, you might have a few issues with that old proverb. But no matter how you slice it, there is no doubt that sales are at the heart of every successful business.
They are the key to profits and to company growth. And that is why it is in the best interest of every organization to have an effective sales plan. Joining me today to talk about how to build an effective sales plan is Gregory Kostiak, the founder and president of Strat X Sales, based in Houston, Texas. Greg helps business owners grow sales in a cost-efficient, low-risk way. He is an expert sales advisor and practitioner with decades of experience.
that give him the ability to address challenges related to revenue generation. Greg often operates as an outsourced VP of sales on a part-time or interim basis. He provides his clients with a custom tailored sales strategy, an integrated sales process, and implements a proven sales execution plan that drives aggressive revenue growth. On top of all of that, he has a CSL or a certified sales leader designation and is involved in training future sales leaders with this proven system.
Greg, thank you very much for coming in today. Welcome to Down to Business English.
Well thank you, Skip. I'm very happy to be here.
So that's a very impressive bio that I you know, to honestly, I lifted off your LinkedIn page. But can you tell me a little bit or give me a some background on the sectors and industries you have been involved in in your career?
Sure, Skip. I'd be happy to do that. Educationally, I have a technical background in petroleum engineering. And uh later in life I I got a business degree to complement that. But I spent the vast majority of my career in the oil and gas industry.
Energy.
Yes. And within that, I had the opportunity to travel the world, work with many, many different types of companies in different cultures. But my primary focus throughout my corporate career was. Building and growing world-class sales teams. I demonstrated that with a number of different companies located in Canada, in Western Europe, in the UK and France. Wow. I lived for a Three years in in Moscow in Russia in in the mid nineties.
Mid nineties.
Yeah, the beginning of perestroika it was a very interesting time.
That could be another podcast in itself, but
At least one. And so then in the late nineties, I I transitioned or changed my domicile to Houston, Texas, is which which is where I've resided for the past 25 years.
In Houston.
Yes. In Houston, Texas, yes. My current occupation is as a advisor and practitioner to small and medium sized businesses. While I do work with energy companies, I'm certainly not limited to that. The principles of sales and revenue generation do not change across industries, particularly uh is in my case I'm focused on B2B businesses.
B to B, business to business.
yeah Currently I help small and medium-sized businesses with really all of the challenges associated with sales and revenue generation. And those challenges always fit into really one of three buckets. There's a strategy component. Very often uh what is missing in small business is the second one, which is the processes themselves. And of course, there's an execution challenge in a lot of cases. And that's uh what I specialize in is the sales leadership and and how to execute a plan.
So when you say small business, can you give me an idea of what you mean by small to medium sized businesses?
Yeah, there's a a number of different definitions. Our core businesses are the core businesses that I work with are typically in the revenue range of five to fifty million dollars annually. However, There are a lot of businesses that are startups that in some cases are even pre-revenue that are well funded. that appreciate the importance of of getting a process and a plan in place before they attempt to grow and scale.
And frankly, for for smaller businesses that that have the resources to um to do it. It's actually much easier to create a process and a business and a sales plan as opposed to more mature businesses that have bad processes and they need to be.
Starting at the at the very beginning, so to speak.
Exactly.
¶ Sales Plan: Core Elements Overview
Well, the reason we have you in today is to talk about building an effective sales plan. So let's get into that. Tell us more about the three core elements of building an effective sales plan and the seven tips on how an organization can achieve them.
Absolutely. Happy to do that. And I'll point out that an effective sales plan really, I spoke about three buckets, strategy, process, and execution. And an effective sales plan is really kind of focused on that first bucket. And we leak over into process, but this is about strategy. What how are you going to go about generating sales for your business?
The three core elements of an effective sales plan are as follows. One, know your customers and define your value. And I'm really going to focus on that one and I'm sure you'll see why. Two, have clear tracking and team focus. Somebody famous once said, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So this is also very important. And three, developing clear boundaries or territories of of how your sales team attacks the target customers.
Okay. Before we dive into all of this, uh these elements do they apply only to small and medium businesses or are they equally as applicable? You mentioned sales team and of course, down to business English is a business and Uh we're very small, there's only myself, basically. So would these elements apply to someone in my situation?
Absolutely. These elements apply to every commercial business and in particular a B2B business, but I very often talk to business owners that they are the entire sales team. And their objective is is very often to transition away from that and and have a standalone salesperson or sales process, somebody else looking after it. But Down to business English is is is very similar to a lot of uh young small companies when they start.
There just isn't the resources to have an entire team. So it is very applicable and important that small businesses understand this and do what they can to follow the best practices that we're going to talk about.
¶ Ideal Customer Profile & Value
Oh fantastic. This is very exciting for me. Okay. Well let's let's let's go with uh element number one. Know your customer and define your value. What what do we need to know about this?
First of all, let's talk about knowing your customer. Positioning is is all about what makes your company unique or better than your competition. This is why the business you're in was even created. So leveraging the why. And and most people have heard of Simon Sinek famously wrote, you know, what's your why? He's one of the premier business um advisors on the planet.
So I think a lot of people are familiar, but understanding why you're in business is a very important element to knowing your customers and defining your value. So we use an acronym or a uh called the Ideal Customer Profile, ICP.
ICP Ideal Customer Profile
And it's really worthwhile for any business leader to spend time thinking about what that ideal customer profile looks like. The considerations that you bring into the ideal customer profile analysis are things like which customers make you the most money. So financial indicators and like revenue and profitability. Different customers also have different costs and and sometimes those costs
can be high for for a customer that's perceived as being ideal, but they suck up a lot of resources within an organization. So maybe they're not ideal. And then there's another factor that many, many, if not most, customers overlook, and that's loyalty.
Mm-hmm.
Companies that sell software as a service, which is a very popular uh vertical, they have a metric they call churn. And churn is identified as being how much of their monthly revenue, how much is it decreased by people that do not renew their software license? And churn is a measure of loyalty, and every business has an element of loyalty to it.
But it's well known that if you can identify your loyal customers, they're the ones that tell other people about your company and about your product or service. And they are in fact the best form of marketing on the planet, bar none. Considering loyalty in the ideal customer profile is smart and important. Having said all that.
Once you
identified ideal customer profile, you can start to think about your unique value proposition, the acronym UVP.
Well, just before we get into UVP, let me backtrack a little bit here. When you say, you know, it's important to leverage the why the company got started message. What do you mean precisely? Does that mean leveraging that through advertising or Is it more in relation to creating a company philosophy that's shared or ingrained in your sales staff?
Why the company started and why it's in business. is important across the spectrum of everything it does, including how employees view the company. and how customers and prospective customers view the company. So yes, it is going to be used in advertising, but it's more along the lines of a philosophy and so that it's a consistent communication effort to outside stakeholders.
To outside stakeholders. Okay, that's clear to me.
So shall we move on to tip
Tip two. Yes, tip two. Um what is tip two? Tip two is
🎵 Music
Do you find Down to Business English useful in your English studies? Would you like to support the show? Consider becoming a D2B member today. Down to business English memberships come with a Great benefits. First, D2B members receive bonus content in the form of exclusive members-only episodes.
Second.
Within moments of a new episode being released, an audio script is automatically emailed to you. There is no need for D2B members to go through the time consuming process of visiting the website, logging into their account, locating an episode, and then downloading the audio script file. And third, D2B members have 100% access to the entire library of audio scripts. All the way from season 1, episode 1, right up to the most recently released episodes.
Interested in becoming a member? Just visit the Down to Business English website and click on the membership link at the top of the page.
🎵 Music
¶ Down to Vocabulary: Part 1
Very interesting information there.
Yes, and a lot of professional language being used.
That too. I strongly encourage listeners to go to the D2B website and download the audio script. There is a lot of good vocabulary to hear in action and study.
Too many words for us to cover completely in D2V, so we are going to approach Down to vocabulary a little differently today.
Here is what we're going to do. First, Skip and I are going to explain the meaning of some professional words and phrases that came up in the interview.
And we will talk about them in the order they are used in the interview.
Then Skip and I will demonstrate all of those words and phrases in action through a model conversation.
In the model conversation, the words will be used in random order. So let's go. Let's get D2V down to vocabulary.
First on the list is the noun compliment. A compliment is something that when combined with something else, makes it better or more attractive.
In the opening of the interview, Greg mentioned that he has a background in petroleum engineering. And at some point in his career, he got a business degree to complement that.
In other words, the business degree made his professional credentials better.
It is very important that we point out that you need to be careful not to confuse this keyword with the similar sounding noun complement. They sound almost identical.
They do. And their spelling is identical except for one letter. You can only understand which word is being used in the context of the sentence. It might help to remember that complement with an E is about completing, and complement with an eye is about courtesy, especially in the form of admiration, esteem, or approval.
Today we are focusing on complement with an E, C O M. P L E M E N T, not complement C O M P L I M E N T.
You spelled those perfectly, Skip.
Oh, thanks for the compliment, Samantha. You are such a great compliment to the
Wow, that must be so difficult for second language English speakers to hear the difference.
I know.
In case you didn't catch it, And don't feel bad if you didn't. The first compliment, Skip used, is a polite expression of praise. The second compliment, he used, was today's keyword.
Moving on, our next word is the noun component. A component is an essential element or ingredient of something. Actually, I don't think this is such a difficult word, but the reason I chose it is because most of the time I hear my students using it. They are using it in reference to a literal electronic component to a larger device.
Like an IC chip or printed circuit board.
That's right. However, in the interview, Greg used component idiomatically to refer to one of the three parts of an effective sales plan.
And I like how he called them buckets.
Oh, so did I. In fact, the way he used the word bucket was very much a synonym of component. He said that all of the challenges connected to sales fit into one of three buckets. And the first component.
In other words, the first bucket.
That's right. The first bucket was a strategic own it. In other words, strategy is an essential ingredient to strategy.
¶ Down to Vocabulary: Part 2
Next on the list is the verb to dive in, which simply means to start doing something with a lot of energy. In the interview, it was Skip who actually used this. when he wanted to ask a question before moving on to the next topic.
That's right. After Greg gave us an overview of the three elements and was just about to start going into the first element in more detail, I stopped him and said Before we dive into these elements, do they apply to all sizes of businesses?
In other words, you communicated you wanted to ask a question before going further into the discussion.
You often hear this verb and variations of it in business meetings. Let's dive into this. Or before we dive into this, Or let's not dive into this until everyone arrives.
Why don't we dive into the next word on D T V?
Good idea. Next on the list is the expression bar none. When you describe something as being bar none, you are saying it is the best of its kind.
We should point out that bar non itself isn't an adjective, but it is used with an adjective in superlative form.
Yes, that's very important. In the interview, Greg said that loyal customers are the best form of marketing bar none.
The superlative adjective being best.
Greg was saying that the best kind of advertising was loyal customers talking about your product. That there is no better kind of advertising.
And finally on our D2V list is the idiomatic phrase along the lines of something. When you say something is along the lines or along the same lines as something else, You were communicating that they are similar.
In the part of the interview where Greg and I were discussing the value of the why a company started message, I asked if this message should be used in advertising. Or to create
And Greg replied that the why the company started message was more along the lines of a philosophy. In other words, it was similar or more similar to a company philosophy.
So that is our list of to V words. Complement, Component, to dive in. Bar none and along the lines of something.
¶ Vocabulary in Action & Wrap-up
So now listen to Skip and I use these words in action.
The scenario for this model conversation is this. A salesperson is meeting a potential new customer. A month earlier, The salesperson had provided a sample product to this potential customer. And the purpose of this meeting is to discuss the customer's reaction to the product.
Skip is the salesperson and I am the new customer. And what is the product sample?
Oh, it really doesn't matter. It could be a chemical or some kind of electronic device or piece of equipment. Anything really.
Okay, got it. Here we go.
Thanks for having me come in today, Miss Vega. I really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Mr Montreux. Oh.
Oh please call me Skip.
My pleasure skip. So our people have tried the sample product you provided us last month. And I must say that it is the best sample we have looked at in the last year, bar none.
Oh, that's great news. But honestly speaking, that is along the lines as comments I hear from many of our other customers.
Is that right?
Yes, we are very proud of our product and strongly feel that it is better than anything our competitors can offer.
Well, I think that you have every right to be proud of your product. And I think it would be a great complement to the other components we use in our organization.
Fantastic. Shall we talk about how many units you would like to order and a delivery schedule?
Well, before we dive into that, we will need to discuss price. I'm afraid the list price you have given us does not meet our budget at all.
No problem. The Lisp price is a standalone price that doesn't take into account the volume of your order. I'm sure we can come to some kind of agreement on price That will meet your budget.
That is good to hear. I will have our procurement department get in touch with you ASAP so that you can discuss the details.
Fine by me
🎵 Music
Would you like to support Down to Business English? Help D2B reach more people wanting to improve their business English skills. Be sure to subscribe to Down to Business English on Apple Podcasts or any place podcasts are found. While you are there, why don't you leave a rating and a review? Down to Business English. Business News. To improve your business English.
🎵 Music
That was part one of my four part interview with Gregory Kostiak of Stradic Sales on the three core elements of an effective sales plan.
Very interesting to hear a sales leader talk about this topic. Sales is such a demanding job, and there are so many aspects to it.
There is no doubt about that. We will be releasing part two, three, and four over the next few weeks. So everyone, make sure you are subscribed to the Down to Business English RSS feed.
And be sure to visit the D2B website and download the audio script. There was a lot of professional language used in the interview. Our URL is downtobusinglish.com. That's one word. Down to businessenglish.com.
And you will also be able to find there links to Greg's website and all of his contact information if you would like to get in touch with him about the services he offers as an outsourced VP of sales.
I'm assuming he's on LinkedIn.
Oh yes, he's a salesperson. Of course he's on Link. Thanks for listening everyone. See you next time.
Take care.
🎵 Music
Down to business English. Business News. To improve your business English.