Archive for June, 2014
Social Media; Helping Manage and Close Deals
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on June 23, 2014
Social media is often thought of as an external, customer-facing sales tool. But inside the organization, social technologies are powerful tools you can use to engage your employees for real-time feedback, enabling them to collaborate on tasks and connect to the resources they need for success. Imagine your ability to harness and develop new business ideas when your employees are all connected, working together, real-time.
Sales professionals need to be able to get up to speed quickly, keeping track of the network of people and business events that are relevant to closing deals. They are looking for tools which can make them more educated not just about the prospect but also about your organization’s offerings, before, during, and after sales discussions.
What’s the biggest complaint in sales? Hands down, it’s sending too much time on non-selling activities. Sales people are constantly looking for answers and expertise to close more deals faster. In our personal lives it’s fairly easy to find people and information we need – we use search engines and social networks to find what we want. Why wouldn’t the same approach make sense at work? This is why social experiences should be an integral part of business solutions.
Ask any salesperson how they meet revenue targets and they’ll tell you it’s all about how they can stay on top of the situation. How does a sales person cut through the clutter of daily business and listen to what’s going on in the context of his specific accounts, leads, contacts, and deals? They want business tools which help them “follow” the people, organizations, and events they cares about. And of course they need access to this information no matter where they are—at their desk or on the road through a tablet or phone.
Social tools can also help accelerate the sales process. Salespeople constantly need to make decisions about the deals and people they work with. Public social networks like LinkedIn provide additional insight into customer connections, preferences, behaviors and sentiments, which can lead to more productive sales engagements. Pulling this information into daily productivity tools—such as Outlook email client or a CRM application, for instance—in a way that allows people to manage their social networks and stay up-to-date directly in that tool, is a real benefit to the sales professional and the organization as a whole.
Salespeople are results-oriented—they like to have achievements acknowledged (and shared). Social tools for business can be configured to automatically post updates when actions occur, such as closing a deal. The system can be a real support to someone in this role, offering instant acknowledgement and making sure everyone in his organization’s network—from the boss to the VP of Sales—is aware of the efforts and successes of the sales team.
How to Hire More Top Performers
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on June 16, 2014
How much is your top salesperson worth? Everyone knows some people get better results than others. But the best aren’t just a little better than the rest — they’re typically a lot better. Bain & Company’s research suggests that top performers are roughly four times as productive as average performers. Sometimes the difference is far greater. For example, the best sales associate at Nordstrom sells at least eight times as much as the average sales associate at other department stores.
Given the sizable differences between the best and the rest, a company with a higher percentage of top performers will naturally tend to outdo its rivals. The reason is that it has higher human capital productivity (HCP), which we know correlates closely with financial results. Raw talent isn’t the only determinant of HCP, but if you don’t have the “A” performers you need, none of the other factors will make much difference. So improving your overall talent level is the first step toward higher HCP.
How can a company raise its skill level—and in particular, how can it increase its proportion of top talent? Bain & Company suggests three keys.
Assess your talent pool. You can’t know the magnitude of the task you’re facing until you know exactly where your human-capital strengths and weaknesses lie. AllianceBernstein (AB), an asset management company with $3 billion in revenues (and $454 billion in assets under management) based in Manhattan, rates each of its 3,700 employees every year on both performance and potential. The senior team at AB spends several days together each year cross-calibrating the two sets of ratings across the entire company, so it always knows where its top performers are. One caution: performance and potential both matter, but performance should count for a lot more. Performance is real; it can be measured objectively. Potential is always subjective, and may never be realized. So pay close attention to your high performers. If they’re a tiny fraction of your overall talent pool, you know you have a problem.
Control your pipeline. Whenever possible, avoid relying on executive search firms as the primary source of new talent. A company looking for more A players needs to know first-hand about the talent that is available, and it needs to do its own recruiting. One well-known Silicon Valley firm relied heavily on headhunters to find engineers for many years. The result? It got engineering candidates who couldn’t land jobs at Apple, Google, Facebook, and other A-list companies in the valley. Only the arrival of a new CEO led to a change in the policy — and an eventual uptick in the company’s talent base and performance.
Have only high-performers conduct the interviews. It’s a sad truth about human beings: B and C players can’t always identify top performers, and may feel threatened by them if they do. Average performers look for congeniality, the ability of an interviewee to fit in. They don’t always look for — and they may not favor — someone who seems likely to raise the bar or make them look bad. One other tip: involve as many line managers in the interviews you can. Many jobs these days are highly technical, from software development to running a copper mine. Interviewers from HR aren’t usually capable of judging someone’s technical skills.
A company, like a sports team or a symphony orchestra, has to do a lot of things right to reach the pinnacle of performance. But if it doesn’t have a healthy share of those exceptional individuals who do so much better than everybody else, then it’s out before the race even begins.
This article was originally posted to the Harvard Business Review Blog by Michael C. Mankins on May 8, 2014.
Questioning Your Sales Training Investment?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on June 16, 2014
Does this sound like a familiar conversation within your organization? “We don’t spend money on outside sales training because it never seems to do much good. In the past we’ve had training companies come in and work with our team but as soon as they leave it seems like our people are just back to doing what they were doing before. Training is just a waste of our time and money.”
Many company leaders have the above attitude because their experience has been that the training they paid good money for didn’t change their sales team’s behavior—at least not for long.
After having that experience a couple of times it would seem rational to eliminate the outside training expense because obviously training companies can’t make the fundamental changes to people that they claim they can.
The company leader assumes that the root of the issue lies with the training company and its inability to have a long term impact on the sales force.
But is that really the problem?
Certainly the issue could in fact lie with the company that provided the training. But are a number of possible reasons apart from the company hired to perform the training for sales training failure–from treating sales training as an event instead of an ongoing behavior change process, to salespeople who view attending sales training sessions as torture, to the company’s failure to provide follow-up coaching for the sales team. All of these are real issues that can negate any potential success you might experience from your investment in sales training.
There is another factor that is often the real cause for the failure of the training—intentional or unintentional sabotage by the sales team management.
Are your sales managers trying to take the edge off their charges having to go to training by reassuring them, “yes, you have to go to the training, but don’t worry; just go and when you get back, sell the way you’ve always sold?”
Maybe they don’t believe in the training and are intentionally training their team members in different processes and tactics?
Possibly some sales managers don’t want to invest the time and energy in learning new strategies and tactics themselves and consequently don’t care whether their folks adopt the training.
If you fail to get full buy-in from your sales management team to the specific training you are presenting, you will not have comprehensive and universal implementation of the training.
Your front-line sales managers who work with their team members have more influence on how your salespeople sell than anyone else—more than senior executives, more than middle sales management, more than the training department, more than HR, more than the expensive sales trainers you hire.
If they don’t believe, the salespeople won’t believe.
If they don’t reinforce the messages, the strategies, and the tactics, those occasional training sessions will be nothing more than expensive exercises in futility.
How do you get all of your sales managers on the same page?
Before you ever put a salesperson in a training workshop or seminar, each and every manager must have gone through the management version of the training. Each manager must understand what the company’s comprehensive, unified sales process is and how the particular training that is scheduled fits in the big picture; what short and long-term results are to be expected; what their job is in reinforcing and coaching the training; and what criteria will be used to determine the success or failure of the training.
Most of all, each manager must believe in the process and strategy. .
Whether the training is presented by an in-house trainer or by a professional trainer brought in from outside, each segment of training should consist of a management segment designed to gain manager buy-in and to give them the tools and knowledge they will need to coach sellers once they are back at the office and a segment for salespeople that is attended by their managers.
And although the initial cost of training in terms of both time and money will increase, the long-term result will be reduced waste of training dollars and increased sales. That wished for unified sales process will begin to become a reality because the biggest determent to success has been turned into the biggest promoter of success.
Three Steps to Getting Out of a Sales Slump
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on June 13, 2014
When you find yourself in a sales slump, you can do one of two things: you can wallow in pity and nestle into that slump until somebody drags you out, or you can take initiative and climb out yourself. Obviously, the second option is best. When you take control of your sales slump, you increase in confidence, develop new skills, and give hope to those around you who may also be experiencing slumps of their own.
Getting out of that sales slump doesn’t require Herculean effort; you can accomplish your mission by taking the following three steps:
Re-examine Your Goals
In the hectic day-to-day busyness of your job and personal life, it’s easy to get spread too thin and distracted by all that you have to do. When you’re in this frame of mind, your work suffers, and you can find yourself in a serious slump.
Take a step back and re-examine your goals. You may have started focusing too much energy on areas of your job that are less important, and this can lead to a serious sales slump. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is my ultimate career goal?
- What do I want to accomplish by the end of the year?
- Which of my daily activities do not get me closer to my goals?
- What changes can I make in my schedule to devote more time to my most effective sales tasks?
If you’re really honest with yourself about these questions and then make changes to your routine, you’ll see results fairly quickly.
Try a More Personalized Approach
If your old sales methods just don’t seem to be working anymore think about ways you can personalize your approach to get yourself out of that sales slump. Here are some ideas:
Research before you contact. The Internet and social media make it easy to learn about a person or company before you approach them with a sales pitch. How does this help? It gives you insights into their needs, which you can address when you talk with them. For instance, if you know a company is opening a new department and will need a lot of new office furniture, which you sell, you’ll be able to time your meeting just right.
Expand your online network. Through LinkedIn and other social media sites, you can get to know contacts better and even make new contacts. Through social media, it’s easy to engage in discussions about what’s going on in your industry. This gives you an edge in personal conversations; you already know what people are thinking about.
Try asking insightful, open-ended questions. As you speak with people during sales calls, give them an opportunity to open up to you by asking thought-provoking open-ended questions. These kinds of questions get people thinking, and they’ll see you as a person who thinks through all sides of a question and not just a sales rep trying to make a quick sale.
Improve Your Follow-Up
When you get rejected, it’s natural to want to forget the whole thing and move on, but if you learn to successfully follow up with potential customers you may climb out of that sales slump much faster.
The key to following up is to track everything. Keep track of your phone calls, emails, sales appointments, and personal meetings at conferences and events. Schedule a time in your day to focus solely on following up; otherwise, this task easily becomes one of those you wish you had time for. The truth is, though, that successful sales reps find following up to be a critical component of their success.
Now is the time to get out of that sales slump. You can do it by re-examining your goals, trying a more personalized approach, and improving your follow-up. Once you’re out of your sales slump, continue to use your new successful sales slump avoidance strategies.
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