Archive for January, 2014
Think You’re Losing a Sale? Ask Yourself These Five Questions:
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 30, 2014
It happens to every sales person at least once. You feel like you’re right on the verge of making the big sale when suddenly the customer starts reacting in a certain way and you know you’re losing the sale. When this happens to you, you need to sit back and take a good long look at the whole process. Identify where things might have gone wrong and why you found yourself losing a sale. Here are five questions you need to ask yourself.
1. Were you totally prepared? Sometimes it’s hard to know at exactly what point you’re losing a sale. You need to go back to the very beginning and determine whether you were adequately prepared. Ask yourself if you were completely sure of the client’s needs. Did you find out exactly what the client was looking for? Did you have the necessary information to develop a presentation or proposal which demonstrated to the client you completely understood their needs? Was your product knowledge sufficient to begin with? Losing a sale can happen at the very beginning of the process and you need to look back to your very first encounter to determine where things may have gone wrong.
2. How did your initial contact go? You can find yourself losing a sale from the very first contact. Try to think what was said at your very first meeting. Did you miss some important information? Losing a sale at the initial contact is more likely due to something you said or did the customer didn’t like. You may still be asked to make a presentation, and even submit a proposal. But it’s hard to get past a bad first impression. Think about everything from your original greeting to how the client reacted to you. When losing a sale, think about whether something felt wrong from the very beginning.
3. Was your proposal right? If you did learn the needs of the client, did you present your proposal in such a way it was clear you understood what they wanted? Losing a sale in this part of the process can be fairly common. Perhaps your presentation was too generic and, while it may have covered all of the basics of what you have to offer, it may not have been specific enough to the client’s actual needs. What was your impression of feedback or body language of the client during your presentation? When making a presentation, it can sometimes be obvious you’re losing a sale. In addition to product information, you’re also projecting a personal and a company image. Think back to every part of your presentation from how you were dressed to how you responded to questions.
4. Why do you think the client said no? Again, look back at the entire process. Did the client ask questions? If so, did you answer appropriately? If the customer went with another company, look at the company and see what the differences were between your product and theirs. You can also ask yourself about other companies who may not have gotten as far as you did before losing a sale. Looking at those companies can show you where you were stronger and where you may need to focus more in the future.
5. Now what? It is often hard to accept losing a sale. And it is certainly appropriate to ask the client why they said no. In fact, the only way you can work on avoiding losing a sale in the future is to find out why you lost this one. Most clients will give you some idea as to why they went with someone else. Use this information to improve or correct any areas where you were lacking.
It’s tough losing a sale, but it happens to everyone. The key to future success is to learn from the loss by reviewing what went wrong and making appropriate changes for the future.
Trust – The Simplest Key to Sales Success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 24, 2014
We’ve all encountered this situation; young girls with their moms standing at a grocery store entrance selling cookies or boys with their dads selling popcorn. Why is it, a majority of people passing will stop and make a purchase? A large part of the reason is the organization sponsoring the girls and boys selling these goods has spent years building trust in the community and you have faith your money is going to a good cause. Trust is one of the most important aspects in sales. And sales trust is the significant factor in your ability to succeed.
It’s an unfortunate situation; many buyers just don’t trust sales people. This lack of trust has come from past dealing with sales people who have been too pushy or just plain dishonest with the buyers. Further, some 90% of companies surveyed report they will only buy from a company they do trust. If you want sales, you have to build sales trust. Today, a majority of sales people are more educated, well trained, and are aware of the importance of building a lasting rapport with their customers. Building rapport builds trust. And once you have established the trust, it’s important to maintain it. Never promise something you can’t deliver, always stand by your word, and always admit when you’ve made a mistake. Building a lasting sales trust will help assure you continue doing business with the customer for years to come.
Once you have developed sales trust with your customers, they are more likely to recommend you to other people. If the customer believes you are someone they can trust, they’re more likely to put their own reputation on the line to refer you to other customers. Building sales trust helps you to build business through word of mouth. Customer referral and recommendation is among the best marketing you can receive and it’s entirely built on trust in you and your company. When a potential customer sees a satisfied customer who’s working with you, they’re far more likely to do business with you.
Trust, particularly sales trust, speaks to your integrity as a person. Your own self-worth is built upon being a person who is trust worthy, believable and honorable. As a sales person, you will look for these traits in your own company and the company will look for you to be dependable and truthful. Groups which have trust in each other tend to work better together and are more likely to offer assistance and direction to help each other succeed. When you feel good about yourself and your company, your self-confidence grows. Buyers pick up on that self-confidence and it makes them feel more confident in you and your company. A customer or client who has confidence in you is basically displaying that they have sales trust in you.
Sales trust takes time to develop and unfortunately can be shattered very quickly. It’s important you do the things which build and maintain trust. You need to be reliable, dependable, honest, and honorable. This is the secret to developing and keeping sales trust.
How the Best Sales Leaders Structure Sales Training to Optimize Talent
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 13, 2014
Average Sales Leaders often mistake talent as being a static sales metric. You either have it, or you don’t. The best Sales Leaders know the opposite is true. Talent is a dynamic factor which they must continue to develop in their sales team.
Most organizations have some form of sales training but lack a systematic approach for continuous skill advancement. As the Sales Leader, it’s up to you to ensure instead of waiting for talent to show up, you invest in developing it.
There are four crucial stages to structure your training to produce optimal growth within your sales team:
- Pre-Session Preparation
- Training Execution
- Post Session Reinforcement
- Measuring Results
Pre-Session Preparation
Choose the right topics – An effective sales training program should promote sustainable skill improvement rather than being company, or product-focused. In order to truly grab the attention of your sales people, the skill you choose to develop must be valuable. What defines a valuable skill? One which is as complex as it is relevant. If a sales representative can learn this skill on their own, they’re not as likely to be engaged in the session.
Set clear objectives – Sales people like to be included in the decisions which pertain to them. Don’t keep the meeting a secret – be very open and clear as to why the training session is taking place and what you expect as the result. If you express the objective as quantifiable, even better. Sales people will then be incentivized to actively monitor their own performance in respect to the goals.
Assign ‘homework’ – A training session has no hope of taking hold if your sales people are not prepared to engage. Assign some pre-training work to get your people acquainted with the material. Then, stipulate they bring relevant examples and questions to make the training session more interactive.
Training Execution
Set expectations – Before the meeting, refresh everyone on the purpose of the training session and its desired outcome. List the main points and even take time to write them out. Specify what’s expected of everyone during the meeting. Beginning each training session this way ensures everyone starts off on the same foot.
Cover the topic – This is the meat of the training session – the content. In this stage, it’s imperative you take the time to explain your concepts in a clear and concise manner. What is the skill you want your team to work on? Include slides, videos, and examples to help reinforce the concept. As a bonus, you can have some of your top sales performers weigh in on these skills to add peer credibility.
Use case studies – Nothing cements an idea quite like using a real-life scenario. Explain an example where the skill wasn’t used properly and therefore produced a negative outcome. Then, refer to a case where the skill was effectively used to produce a desired outcome. Transforming theories into real concepts will ensure it sticks with your team.
Role playing – While many Sales leaders think it’s more important to explain a concept, the majority of the training session should be spent role-playing. Why? Because role-playing does work! Have different individuals perform the skill while the rest of the class watches and provides feedback. It’s not only extremely effective in helping your people comprehend the skill, but it also promotes teamwork.
Wrap up and decide next steps – Once you feel your team understands the main purpose of the session; it’s time to wrap up with the key takeaways to solidify their understanding. Before you excuse them however, make sure you have received commitments from each of them on the behaviors they will change and the skills they will adapt. Then, ask for their opinions on how they want to be held accountable for implementing these skills and the kind of support they find most beneficial. This way, you end the meeting with a clear and agreed upon goal for the future.
Post-Session Reinforcement
Reinforcement – If you have no post-session plans for reinforcement, then you’re just wasting time. Reinforcement is the key to solidifying skills into a rep’s daily routine. There are several different kinds of reinforcement – below are listed what have been found to be the most effective ones.
Peer Accountability – One of the strongest types of reinforcement comes from our peers. They are the most influential tools at your disposable and spend the most time interacting with your developing sales people. Ensure these prominent figures lead by example and reinforce the key concepts from the meeting.
Real-Time Coaching – Nothing helps you understand how well your people are implementing their training like observing them directly. Spend some time in the field watching and working with your sales people. Observe and insure they’re utilizing their new found skills and step in when they’re using them incorrectly. Real-time coaching is very effective in eliminating poor behavior.
One-to-One Meetings – Setting time aside to discuss individual progress will show the members of your team you’re serious. If they see it’s important to you, it will become equally important to them. This time can also double as personalized coaching if an individual sales person requires additional advice or assistance.
Positive Reinforcement – While observing the team, openly promote those who are successfully applying the learned concepts. Making good behavior known fosters feelings of good-will and encourages sales representatives to keep trying.
Measuring Results
Before embarking on this sales training journey, you should establish a clear objective – a particular goal you’re trying to achieve. The skill you’re attempting to teach will determine the exact sales performance metrics, the key performance indicators (KPIs) of this success. Broken down into five different levels, here are some suggested indicators:
- Observed change in behavior
- Deal Advancement
- Deals Won
- Quota Attainment
- Margin and Revenue
Each of these levels represents a different stage of learning. However, observing a change in behavior is only the first step. Once you see these skills start impacting the bottom line, you will know the training session has come full circle.
Talent is not a static metric. Successful Sales Cultures at top-performing sales businesses stress continual training and reinforcement of skills. The representatives with whom you spend time in developing will reward you with their improved performance. The best Sales Leaders understand the value in developing their talent and will invest the time into doing so.
Three Pitfalls to Avoid When Developing an Account Strategy
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 8, 2014
The importance of selling strategically is an idea repeated time and time again – the larger and more complex the sale, the louder the advice. However, advising someone to sell strategically is somewhat like suggesting they “sell smart.” That’s great advice, but a little vague unless you can provide some specifics about the how to accomplish the goal.
Let’s start by examining some of the fundamentals for developing an account strategy – beginning with an actionable definition: An account strategy is a plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message.
When thinking about what it takes in a major account to formulate a winning sales strategy, a good starting point is remembering the buying environment is complex. Many decision-makers and influencers are involved, the needs and issues are multi-layered and the solution configuration and implementation management is likely to be complex and sophisticated.
In major accounts, one-size-does-not-fit-all is the cornerstone proposition for formulating a winning account strategy. There are no generic customers in major accounts. So there are no winning generic account strategies. Each customer is unique and each major account strategy must take that uniqueness into consideration.
Here are three pitfalls that will make a successful account strategy less likely.
Underestimating the importance of information is the first pitfall. Collecting, analyzing, and utilizing information about the customer is the starting point to develop any effective plan of action for getting to the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Getting that right requires the recognition that breadth comes before depth.
There is neither the need, nor the time to find out everything about everything all at once. It is however important to get a broad information base about the customer even before your sales process starts and to build upon it early in the sales cycle. This provides the foundation for formulating an initial strategy and provides guidance as to where and how to get in-depth information. The trap is getting a lot of information about the wrong things from the wrong people.
Confusing goals and strategy is the next pitfall. A list of goals is not a strategy. It is just a long list of things to do. A good account strategy focuses on a few pivotal goals and then delineates the challenges, resources, and actions necessary to achieve a favorable outcome – what needs to be done and how are you going to do it.
A correlated trap is substituting blue-sky ideas for pivotal goals using buzzwords like customer-centric that are just vague statement about some desired end state.
The third pitfall is assuming the future looks like the past. We live and sell in a time of “compressed history.” Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future. As a result competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly. In major accounts, if you want to prosper, assuming what worked in the past will work in the present is a risky premise.
To avoid these pitfalls, one overarching best practice should be remembered. In order to think and act effectively throughout the entire sales cycle, your sales strategy requires constant updating. Success cannot be achieved by filing out a form and periodically checking off key milestones. It requires understanding and reacting to the changes in the account and reviewing the responses to those changes with your sales management and the rest of the sales team on the account.
This article originally appeared in the Sales Training Connection blog on October 13, 2013.
Three Critical Skills New Sales Hires Lack
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 3, 2014
The best sales managers know how to hire enthusiastic people who have the right attitude and want to take advantage of a great opportunity. But even the best new hires usually lack many key skills. Where does a sales manager start? Here are three critical skills you should focus on coaching with your new hires.
Qualification Skills
Do you remember when you were new on the job? Did you know how to recognize prospects that could turn into good clients and those that would just waste your time? Neither did I!
Too much valuable time is wasted on low potential accounts. New hires need to learn how to weed out under-qualified leads faster. Your role as the sales manager, especially with new hires, is to get involved early in the sales opportunity. Talk to your sales person about a prospect and ask specific questions such as “Is this organization a good fit for us and our products/services?” Then ask them to explain their answer. What are they seeing or not seeing which makes them think the company is a good or poor fit? If it is a good fit, ask them, “Where is this customer in their buying process?” and “What factors did you use to determine this?”
Developing Strategy/ Process
When new hires lack a defined sales process, they have no strategy for success. If ramping your new hires to success faster is a goal, your company may very well need a “sales playbook” which captures best practices used by your senior sales people. The playbook should document both the general sales process you want your people to use plus examples of what successful sales representatives do in a variety specific situations, such as selling different types of products/services to specific types of decision makers. Once you have the documentation, make it available to your new hires – preferably online, or somewhere they have easy access.
Having the playbook isn’t enough, however. To become proficient and confident in selling situations, new hires must practice the steps of the sales process, determining where a customer is in their buying process, and work on problem-solving skills and questioning techniques – while also appearing confident on knowledge about your company’s solutions. Of course it would be best they gain this practice through role-plays with you than when dealing with customer! If you have your company’s sales process “baked” into the playbook, you have a ready source for developing role-playing scenarios which you can run with new hires. And keep in mind “flexibility training” is essential in role-playing. Offer scenarios which are unexpected with questions out of left field etc.
Understanding Company Expectations
Success in sales is not just what one does, but how one completes each step. Being a successful salesperson takes a mix of consultative selling skills and attitudes, performing to high expectations, and meeting the needs of an employer – not just customers. Many salespeople, and especially new hires, lack a vision of what their company expects. As a sales coach, take time to develop a Success Profile that defines all these elements then share that list with your team. You can use this Success Profile as a coaching tool. Use it to launch discussions with each sales person about their professional development and attitude improvement goals. This profile might also suggest to new hires what criteria a company may use to look for in people they consider for promotion.
If you can help your new hires master these three areas; Qualification, Process, and Expectations, they will have a solid foundation for a great sales career.
This article was originally posted to the TopLine Leardership Blog on December 19, 2013.
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