• Financial: How do we look to shareholders?
• Customers: How do customers see us?
• Internal process: What must we excel at?
• Innovation and Learning: Can we continue to improve and create value?

Balanced Scorecard aligns organizations to new strategies: away from the historic, short-term focus on cost reduction and low-price competition, and toward generating growth opportunities by offering customized, value-added products, and services to customers.

All this sounds pretty good so why don’t we just reverse the strategy and make our Sales and Marketing presentations accordingly:

To measure your product or services value to your customer organizations:

• Financial: What increase in revenue or decrease in cost are they going to achieve?
• Customers: What will allow them to leapfrog or succeed more than their competition?
• Internal process: What will change and how do you minimize the worst case scenario?
• Innovation and Learning How easy is it to implement and who is involved?

If we continue on and follow the best practices for using the Balanced Scorecard are approach would continue by keeping objectives simple, use others(most specifically our customers) to help develop specific objectives, link objective to revenue increase/cost reductions and clearly state and communicate objectives.

This may not be totally encompassing of a good presentation but if these four scorecards areas were accounted for in every presentation, would you improve your likelihood of success?

Technorati : Balance Scorecard, Marketing, Presentation, Sales

That says many times we just did not qualify them. Sound better! How ever, I think we should put another hole in our sales funnel. Just not at the bottom, maybe in every section. Accept the prospect, and than see if he fits through our funnel. If we struggle keeping him in the funnel have a pressure relief valve that leaves him exit gracefully.

Wonder why we get bad clients? We are successful at cramming them through the funnel instead of leaving gravity do its job. You can provide an easy path and even accelerate it but stop trying to overcome objections, just provide answers to them and leave good old gravity take its course.

P.S. There is another way of getting people out of your sales funnel, it could be overflowing.