Don Lazzari, Founder of Delivering Value, a US-based sales consultancy, has worked with the ARPEDIO tools since the beginning, seven years ago. Lazzari, who built his successful career by adopting and implementing sales processes that work, believes that if you find a process and follow it with discipline, you will win more deals. ARPEDIO has become a fundamental part of activities of Lazzari’s company, bringing standardization and transparency into the sales organizations that he works with.

ARPEDIO tools help his managers follow a disciplined process, onboard reps quickly and coach them individually from the beginning to winning the sales opportunity. As the external consultant, following the sales process closely and acting as the manager, Lazzari believes the tool enables him to better understand his clients’ perspectives and pain points and coach accordingly. It makes it easy for him to stay “on top of the game” as accounts mature and deals develop.

This way of having clarity on the entire sales process even makes it possible to drill down and zoom in on each individual step of the process and investigate whether that part contributes positively to the overall outcome. And if it doesn’t, it’s easy to change. This way, your sales activities do not become outdated, even in a fast-moving and trend-dependent environment.

Delivering Value recently led Relias Learning through a two-day workshop on opportunity management, during which participants used the ARPEDIO tools to identify the “red flags” in their sales processes before these became potential deal breakers and more difficult to mitigate.

While optimism is one of the main drivers of effective sales activities, it can also lead to regrettable decisions. Not all opportunities will lead to sales and revenue. Perception, emotion and subjectivity can cause confusion in a sales process. That is where ARPEDIO comes in handy – by taking the subjectivity out of the reporting and creating transparency on the health and status of each account and opportunity.

Lazzari trained Relias Learning to use ARPEDIO to institute the following process: At the beginning and throughout the sales cycle, managers need to understand and qualify the opportunity from a set of specific criteria in order to move forward. Once companies start doing this, they are able to drastically reduce the amount of time spent on deals that will lead to nothing. This allows organizations to focus their efforts and determine exactly what needs to be done by whom. This data-driven way of doing objective assessments of deals replaces optimism-driven ones and drastically improves forecast accuracy.

“As we know,” says Lazzari, “a committed approach to stakeholder management is fundamental when chasing opportunities and evaluating accounts. ARPEDIO has developed an incredibly simple tool, operating on a plug-and- play model that facilitates the process and eliminates once and for all note- book sketches and messy spreadsheets. ARPEDIO has helped many organizations track, qualify and quantify their account management and stakeholder relationships.”

The results at Relias Training have been impressive: An almost doubling of revenues after instituting ARPEDIO tools. Lazzari stresses: “We have a sound process that is backed up by good tools that reinforce discipline.”

This is a section of an article from Velocity Magazine.