Archive for category SALES BEST PRACTICES
Social Selling Isn’t Just “a” Thing – It’s “the” Thing
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 15, 2015
You can’t read a sales- or marketing-related blog without seeing something about social selling. There are tips and techniques, camps and courses, and even social selling consultants, both real and fake.
But as this new sales trend/methodology/process starts to take hold beyond just the cutting-edge techies and social media mavens, it’s starting to look less like a “new sales methodology” and more like a requirement for any salespersons’ toolkit.
If I were to say to you today, “I want to help you learn telephone selling techniques,” you’d laugh me out of the room. Why? Because you’ve been doing that your entire career, as has every other salesperson.
Social networks, however, are relatively new. And it took a few years for smart salespeople to figure out how to leverage them for insights that helped move deals along. It also took a few years for people—you, me, your manager, your leads, their marketing departments—to all jump on the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and other (Yes, I use Google+. Don’t judge me.), bandwagons.
Now, the use of social networks is ubiquitous. Seriously, who do you know who doesn’t have a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile? It’s a pretty small group. So using this information to help you sell more is an obvious, albeit new, part of your daily life and it’s going to be for a long time.
So while the term “social selling” is pretty popular these days, it’s not really a thing. If you want to achieve your quota and outsell your competition, you need to treat it as the thing, meaning it’s what will set you apart for now, but pretty soon, it’ll be a normal part of selling, not just a buzzword.
This article was originally posted to the InsideView Blog by Jason Rushin on March 18, 2015.
What Separates High-Performing Sales Organizations From Average and Underperforming Sales Organizations?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on April 7, 2015
That’s what Velocify, along with Steve Martin, author of the “Heavy Hitter” series of books on enterprise selling, set out to discover. They asked 800 sales executives, managers and front-line sales reps a whole lot of questions—42 of them to be exact—to get at the answer.
The results of their study, which can be downloaded here, should be of interest to any sales leader. The report aims to show how high-performing organizations differ from average and underperforming organizations in terms of attitudes and structure.
Survey respondents were asked to compare year-over-year revenue growth for the past 2 years. Those that characterized their growth as significant were rated as high performing organizations. Those that characterized their revenue growth as flat or declining were rated as underperforming organizations (those in between were characterized as average).
The report offers up a summary of how people in each group responded to the questions. It’s interesting to note that 47% of the respondents were quota carrying salespeople. It could be enlightening to see how their responses compared to those of sales leaders.
Here are some of the key highlights from the study:
- High-performing sales organizations set higher quotas and expect fewer sales reps to meet their quota
- Mediocre sales organizations were slower to fire underperforming sales reps
- The best-performing sales teams were more likely to describe themselves as a “cohesive group”
According to the study, three key differentiators separated the great sales teams from mediocre teams according to the study.
Differentiator #1: Aggressive Goal Setting The best performing sales teams consistently set higher quotas and expected fewer sales reps to meet quota.
46 percent of respondents at high-performing organizations said that less than 60 percent of salespeople should make quota, compared to just 30 percent of respondents at average and under-performing organizations.
18 percent of high-performing sales organizations indicated that salespeople will be terminated for poor performance after one quarter compared to only 2 percent of average and 5 percent of underperforming organizations.
Differentiator #2: Team Mentality A team-oriented outlook was more prevalent among high-performing sales organizations.
High-performing sales organizations were nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as “a cohesive group of like-minded individuals” than people at lower-performing organizations, who more often described themselves as “a loose collection of individuals.”
The best teams also viewed individual talent as a lesser factor for sales success than mediocre groups, but were less likely to include below-average salespeople – exhibiting a more unified sales culture.
Differentiator #3: Process-Driven High-performing sales organizations were more likely to employ a structured sales process than others.
High-performing sales organizations were almost twice as likely as underperforming organizations to describe their sales processes as “closely monitored” or “strictly enforced or automated.”
High-performing sales organizations ranked “disciplined sales process and systems usage” as the second most important factor separating great from good sales organizations. They were also more likely to closely monitor lead follow-up than lower-performing organizations.
The report, “The Sales Organization Performance Gap,” includes analysis and survey results for 15 key questions. Here are a few (somewhat re-worded):
- What is the optimum percentage of salespeople who should make quota to validate that quotas are not set too high or too low?
- How soon is a sales person terminated for poor performance?
- In what order should the factors that separate great from average (and from underperforming) sales organizations be prioritized?
This last question uncovered an interesting result. Both the high performers and the good performers ranked “lead generation and pipeline activity” as the most important factor, above six other factors including sales leadership and sales talent.
Comparing how you would answer these questions to those of the survey respondents just might cause you to re-think the attitudes and structure of your own organization.
This article was originally posted to the Smart Selling Tools Blog by Nancy Nardin on January 28, 2015.
Do You Talk To Your Prospects and Clients or Do You Talk At Them?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 24, 2015
Knowledge should be one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox. Knowing how to use specialized industry vocabularies should also be one of our basic and power tools. In reality, for many of us, knowledge and specialized lingo are powerful—in costing us business.
Naturally a great many new salespeople are tempted to try to impress prospects and clients by demonstrating their product knowledge and slinging their newly learned industry vocabulary around. They tend to oversell, answer questions no prospect has ever had, dazzle with words the prospect and client may not be familiar with. They talk about the fine points of their product or service; discuss how their service or product will impact ROI; how best to onboard new employees or products or services; how their product or service creates a new paradigm to address the prospect’s issues or needs; and the list goes on.
Impact ROI? I see, you mean whether or not it makes me more money than it costs. Onboarding new employees or products or services? I get it, you mean purchasing and integrating a new product or service or hiring and orienting a new employee. Creating a new paradigm to address issues or needs? You mean a different way of dealing with the problem, right?
You can say ROI, onboarding, or paradigm, or you could just talk to your prospect. Some say that if you want credibility with your prospects and clients you have to speak their language. I don’t have a problem with that in the least—if you’re actually speaking your prospect’s language. But how many prospects actually talk about onboarding a new product or service or creating a new paradigm to address an issue or problem? And there’s certainly something to be said about just talking to the prospect in plain English.
And very often new sellers butcher their newly acquired vocabulary and confound and frustrate their prospects with their enthusiastic demonstration of their knowledge of the minutiae of their product or service. Many lose more sales than they capture because of their lack of discipline and their need to impress.
Unfortunately I’ve noticed over the past three years that this desire to impress isn’t confined to new sellers. I consistently run across experienced sellers who should know better that are making the same rookie mistakes. The only real difference between these experienced sellers and new salespeople is experienced sellers tend to have a better grasp of the industry lingo.
In the current tough selling environment even experienced sellers are falling into the trap of trying to oversell and to impress with their knowledge and ‘deep’ understanding of the prospect’s issues. We tend to pull out all the stops and often end up losing our discipline and the prospect’s attention. We try to force the sale.
Rather than creating new clients, we end up alienating them. Whether you’re a relatively new seller bursting with enthusiasm and wanting to impress your prospects or an experienced seller feeling the pressure to produce, you need to step back and relax. Giving in to the pressure to oversell and force the sale is self defeating. Address your prospect’s needs and leave the unnecessary demonstration of knowledge and the impressive vocabulary at the office.
This article was originally posted to the Sales and Sales Management Blog by Paul McCord on January 27, 2014.
Sales Management Coaching – The Power of Questions
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 16, 2015
Asking questions is an underpinning of successful selling. The notion – ask, listen, and then talk is a powerful principle in the science of successful selling. Asking questions is also an underpinning of successful interactions between salespeople and their sales managers.
Consider this; Effective coaching is not so much about teaching people, as it is about helping them to learn – that’s why top coaches ask more than tell. The problem is too many times when coaching, managers do it the other way around. They don’t ask enough questions and they talk more than the sales rep.
Given all that we thought it would be a good idea to provide some specific questions that could be used to get the sales coaching session on the right track. While there are no silver bullets, here is a starter list of 11 questions that could be used when coaching after a sales call.
- How do you think the call went?
- What do you think was the customer’s major walk-away from the call?
- What specific piece of value did the customer gain from the call?
- How did we differentiate ourselves from the competition?
- If you could do the call again what would you consider doing differently?
- What happen that you did not anticipate – how could you have prepared differently?
- Which part of the call didn’t go so well? How would you improve on it?
- What did you plan to do that you didn’t do – why?
- Who did the most talking?
- Did you leave the call with one of the advances you planned?
- What did you learn from the sales call that will impact your future sales calls on this customer?
Obviously the sales coaching questions that you would use would depend on the specific sales rep and the type of sales call. So your list of questions would be unique for each call. However, when coaching it is always a good idea to plan some coaching questions before the sales call and then modify the list as the sales call progresses.
This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection by Janet Spirer on February 6, 2015.
Salespeople Have to Invest Their Own Money in Their Own Sales Success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 13, 2015
How much are you investing in your own sales success?
Take a second and add up how much of your own money that you invested in 2014 in your own sales education. How many dollars (or Euros or whatever currency you use) of your own money did you spend to learn something new about sales that could improve your performance and enhance your sales skills? How many sales books did you purchase (and actually read?) Did you hire a sales coach? Attend a sales conference? Or take an online class to learn more about how to sell to your customers?
If the total amount that you invested in your own sales success doesn’t equal 1% of your total compensation in 2014, then you have to ask yourself a single, difficult question: ‘Am I really serious about my sales career?’
How Much Are You Prepared to Invest?
In working with thousands of salespeople over the course of my work, what I’ve witnessed is that the most successful salespeople are continually challenging themselves by expanding the boundaries of their knowledge about sales, sales skills and their customers. Through my own informal research what I have found is that the most consistently successful sales reps are those who invest their own money in their continuing sales education, with top performers routinely investing 1% or more of their total pay in self-improvement
Too many salespeople seem content to wait for their employers to provide some sales training a few times a year. They think that it is solely their employer’s responsibility to train them to master their craft. Unfortunately, that is a losing strategy. By its very nature, sales is an entrepreneurial profession. It rewards those who take risks and those who have the discipline to constantly work on self-improvement.
For example, would you invest $17.95 per month for the chance to boost your commissions by 20%? Or, to earn an additional $1,000 in 2015? Of course, you would. $17.95 to earn $1,000? It’s a no-brainer. $17.95 is nothing. It’s the price of three fancy coffees from your favorite coffee house. It’s about $.60 per day.
What is significant about $17.95? $17.95 is roughly the average price of a sales book purchased on Amazon. There are dozens of extremely useful books on sales published every year that offer new insights and strategies for becoming a better salesperson. Would you set aside one hour per week to read one sales book per month if you could learn new strategies and techniques that you could put to use in your selling to help you win more orders and earn more money? Of course you would. Which raises the question: why aren’t you?
Would You Sacrifice One Hour of TV Watching?
Which leads us to another important question about investing in your future: What are you prepared to sacrifice in order to succeed? Would you be willing to forego watching The Bachelor, or any other completely forgettable TV show for that matter, to give yourself an additional 60 minutes of free time each week to read a sales book (if it would increase your chances of earning more money?)
Take the first step. Turn off your TV and invest some time to explore the universe of free sales resources available for sales people that can help boost your career. Read a few sales blogs everyday, attend free sales skills webinars once per month, watch YouTube videos about sales, listen to a weekly sales podcast (there are hundreds) or download and read an eBook, about sales. Through your research identify two or three sales experts who you feel will challenge you to look at your selling from a different perspective and who will challenge you to break out of your mold and try something new. Investigate their available paid resources like sales books, online classes, mastermind groups and sales coaches.
Then commit your time and money to put some skin in the game. Start small. Buy a sales book and read it. Or download the audio version and listen to it in your car. Put your own time and money at risk and I guarantee that you’ll instantly be more committed to wringing the maximum value out of that investment. Because if you won’t invest $17.95 every month to boost your sales and your commissions, then you’re not really serious about succeeding in sales.
This article originally appeared in the Sales Fix Blog on February 9, 2015.
Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Better Listener
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 10, 2015
“It can be stated, with practically no qualification,” Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens write in a 1957 HBR article, “That people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening.” In a study of thousands of students and hundreds of businesspeople, they found that most retained only half of what they heard — and this immediately after they’d heard it. Six months later, most people only retained 25%.
In this, I suspect the world has not changed much since 1957. So I dug into HBR’s archives for our best advice on the imperfect art of listening. Here’s what I found.
It all starts with actually caring what other people have to say, argues Christine Riordan, Provost and professor of management at the University of Kentucky. Listening with empathy consists of three specific sets of behaviors. First, there’s the actual intake of information — recognizing the verbal and nonverbal cues the other person is emitting. Then there’s processing, which is where we make sense of what the other person is saying. Finally, there’s responding. This is where you validate what they’ve said — and note that validating doesn’t mean you have to agree with it — by nodding, playing back what you heard, or otherwise acknowledging that you’re picking up what they’re putting down.
To help you stay focused on the most salient points of what someone else is saying, take notes as you listen. Ram Charan offers a tip he saw work especially well for Larry Bossidy when he was CEO of Honeywell. Bossidy would draw a vertical line down the page of his notebook and write general notes to the left, while keeping track of the most valuable nuggets on the right. This helped train his brain to listen intently and zero in on what’s most important.
Recognize your defaults. Are you gregarious and outgoing — a real extrovert? Then you have many wonderful qualities, but listening well may not be one of them. It’s tough to listen when you’re the one who does most of the talking. Or are you super-conscientious, your smartphone always in hand and your calendar always uber-scheduled? Again … listening is hard when you’re distracted by a screen, or rushing to your next meeting. Knowing yourself is a key part of being a good listener (and one of just many good tips in Sara Stibitz’s piece).
Pay attention when your mind wanders to figure out what’s stopping you from listening. This piece of wisdom comes from Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins, executive coaches and co-authors of Own the Room. When your attention flags, is it because you’re starting to plan your response to their comments? Or have you started listening to your own inner critic, instead of what they’re saying? But you can’t really listen fully at the same time you’re thinking about something else. When you notice something has blocked you from listening, simply make a note of it — don’t belabor it, or you’re just not-listening for even longer! — and shift your attention back to what the other person is saying.
Nichols and Stevens point out another factor that can stop us from listening: our own emotions. Feelings fog up a conversation. When you notice you’re having an emotional reaction, withhold evaluation and, with your judgment thus suspended, embark on a hunt for evidence that proves your own position wrong. “If we make up our minds to seek out the ideas that might prove us wrong, as well as those that might prove us right” – which human beings tend to do without making a conscious effort – “we are less in danger of missing what people have to say.”
When someone is upset or venting, a lot of us “listen” by sharing our own experiences (note: that is actually just talking). Or we try to fix the problem. (Note: that is also talking.) Or, perhaps because we’ve been told, “Don’t try to fix it, just listen!” so many times, we clam up and say nothing, which doesn’t result in the speaker really feeling heard. So the best way to listen when someone is venting is to ask questions, writes Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and author of Just Listen. Help them get all that anger and frustration out into the open, where they can start to make sense of it on their own. Pose questions like, “What are you most angry about?” and “What are you really worried about?” They’ll feel heard, and you’ll get to the root of the problem.
As Nichols and Stevens point out, the basic problem with listening is that we can all think faster than we talk. The human mouth plods along at 125 words per minute, while a neuron can fire about 200 times a second. (This helps to illustrate why it’s crucial to slow down difficult conversations.) So give your brain something else to do while you listen: note the key points that are coming up in the conversation, actively look for nonverbal cues, ask yourself what the speaker might be intentionally not saying, or weigh the evidence being presented.
“The effectiveness of the spoken word hinges not so much on how people talk as on how they listen,” Nichols and Steven write. Many decades later, that’s still true. You can’t necessarily turn the people around you into better speakers. But we can all make ourselves better listeners.
This article was originally posted to the Harvard Business Review blog by Sara Green on February 6, 2015.
Companies with a Formal Sales Process Generate More Revenue
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on February 3, 2015
How well is your company managing its sales pipeline? Research conducted by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association revealed that 44% of executives think their organization is ineffective at managing theirs. (The survey included 62 B2B companies, 39% of which have revenue greater than $1 billion and 37% of which have revenue greater than $250 million.) This statistic is discouraging because there is a direct correlation between effective pipeline management and strong revenue growth.
In our survey of B2B companies, executives were asked to rate their company’s year-over-year change in revenue on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing “drastically decreased revenue” and 7 representing “drastically increased revenue.” Executives were also asked to rate their company’s effectiveness in managing the sales pipeline. On average, companies that reported having ineffective pipeline management had an average growth rate of 4.6; companies with effective pipeline management had an average growth rate of 5.3, a 15% increase. Even more interestingly, companies that mastered three specific pipeline practices saw 28% higher revenue growth.
What did these top companies do to achieve such a high level of success? Here are the three best practices that these all-star sales forces have in common, as well as ways to implement them in your company.
Clearly define the sales process. Pipeline management includes how the sales pipeline is designed, how it is measured, and how it is used to drive sales rep performance. However, at its most basic level, the sales pipeline is merely a representation of a company’s sales process. We discovered that sales forces were most effective at managing their sales pipelines if they had invested time in defining a credible, formalized sales process. In fact, there was an 18% difference in revenue growth between companies that defined a formal sales process and companies that didn’t.
So what does it mean to have a formal sales process? For starters, it means having clearly defined stages and milestones that are universally understood by your salespeople. Your sales team shouldn’t have to guess where a particular deal stands or how they should be managing deals in each stage. In addition, your sales process should align with how your customers move through their buying process. Too many sales teams use generic sales processes, and consequently get generic sales performance. Invest the time in developing a unique process for your team, and make sure that they understand how to use it.
Spend at least three hours a month on pipeline management. In addition to having a solid process in place, our research revealed the importance of dedicating enough time and resources to carrying it out well. Companies in our survey that spent at least three hours per month managing each rep’s sales pipeline saw 11% greater revenue growth than those that spent fewer than three hours per month. But success doesn’t just depend on the amount of time that’s spent on pipeline management – how the time is spent is just as important.
Many sales forces believe they are spending a lot of time managing their pipelines when in reality they’re spending a lot of time creating forecasts. If your pipeline management discussions revolve around close dates, probabilities, and deal sizes, then you are forecasting. Period. If, however, you spend your time discussing the overall health of your sellers’ pipelines and how they can shepherd more deals to successful closure, then you are managing your pipeline in a productive way. The primary focus of a pipeline meeting should be to help reps develop a game plan to move deals forward, not just scrubbing CRM data and forecasting revenue.
Train sales managers on pipeline management. Our research also revealed that 61% of executives admit their sales managers have not been adequately trained in pipeline management strategies and techniques. This begs the question, “How can we expect our sales managers to do something well when we haven’t prepared them to do it?” Companies that had trained their sales managers to manage their pipelines saw their revenue grow 9% faster than those that didn’t. But not just any training will do. Sales managers need targeted training to address specific pipeline management challenges.
Most pipeline training that sales managers receive is limited to how they log in to their CRM tool and generate reports. What they really need is training in how to make better pipeline management decisions. For instance, sales managers need to know how to determine the ideal pipeline size for each rep. They need to know at what point in the sales process their actions have the biggest impact. And they need to know how to structure pipeline meetings so they enable coaching rather than inspection. Even these few skills can have a significant impact on sales force performance.
Ultimately, pipeline management is a critical activity for all sales forces, and better pipeline management can make a huge difference in sales performance. Our research shows that there are no secrets to realizing this increased performance — you must define your sales process, commit to good pipeline management, and enable your managers to carry it out. If you integrate these best practices into your sales force, you can expect to nail your forecasts, hit your quotas, and see your sales reps succeed beyond what you thought possible.
This article was originally posted to the HBR Blog by Jason Jordan and Robert Kelly on January 21, 2015.
Five Reasons You Should Never Be Afraid to Ask Questions
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 29, 2014
An ancient Chinese proverb says, “He who asks question remains a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask, remains a fool forever.”
One of the biggest ways people are handicapping themselves today is by being too afraid to ask questions. While there is plenty of knowledge all around us to be gained, it would be foolish to think we can simply gain everything we need to know from first-hand experience. We need to rely on the knowledge of others around us to pass along information and assist in broadening our horizons of ignorance.
While it is very easy to talk about, it is often very hard for many of us to take the leap of faith and ask questions. In a study from Harvard Business School, they cited multiple reasons for people’s reluctance to ask questions but the most prominent response was due to fear of negative evaluation. While I don’t find it all too shocking, I do find it very concerning and therefore I have compiled a short list of reasons you should never be too afraid to ask questions:
1) You Don’t Know Everything
No matter what you may think, you do not know everything there is to know about a certain topic area, let alone life in general. While there are experts all over the world for any given focus, they themselves would tell you that they still have a lot to learn. As the great philosopher Socrates once said, “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Coming from such brilliant man who has provided us with so much information in the past, this quote should speak volumes about the importance of understanding how little we really know. It should also create a sense of humility, allowing you to feel comfortable about asking questions.
2) You Aren’t The Only With A Question
It is highly likely that if you are curious about something, so is someone else. When you are in a meeting of colleagues, it can be intimidating to see everyone around you looking engaged and comfortable with what’s being discussed. However, if you have any doubt whatsoever in the subject matter, someone else in the room is likely feeling the same way also. With that being said, not only will you be helping yourself out, but you will be helping those around you by raising questions as well.
3) Questions Facilitate Discussion
By raising questions in a group setting, you are often times enabling a further discussion within that group. Maybe what you asked will spark a thought of someone else or maybe your question was something the rest of the group hadn’t thought about yet. You shouldn’t feel like your questions will take away from productivity or be a waste of time. If anything, asking lots of questions and brainstorming will likely help the team get better and make sure you have everything covered.
4) Educated People Respect Your Desire To Learn
The most educated people in the world would never scoff or look down on someone with a desire to learn. In fact, in many of my experiences, leaders have a very high level of respect for those who show interest and ask questions. While you may be worried that it makes you look LESS intelligible, it is actually making you look MORE intelligible. Your desire to learn shows and the questions you ask are the first step in fulfilling that desire.
5) The Internet Isn’t Always Right
With the advent of services like Google and Answers.com, people sometimes think that they should be able to find everything we need to know via the internet. However, that is not true. Nowadays it has become extremely easy to host websites and circulate unverified information to the public that it can be a tall task figuring out how to filter the good info from the bad. This is where a trusted human element needs to come in. Reaching out and finding respected educators or topic professionals can be a great way to find the answers you are looking for. Aside from purely finding information, reaching out to credible sources can help to create new relationships for the future – something a computer and WiFi can’t replicate.
As a part of our constantly evolving society you should take pride in your lack of knowledge and find a comforting humility in knowing that you have so much left to learn – whether it is at work, at home, or just life in general. So I challenge you to stay curious, challenge the unknown, and certainly ask more questions.
Besides, would you rather be a fool for 5 minutes or a fool forever?
This article was originally posted to the Business 2 Community Blog by Colin Jordan on December 2, 2014.
Six Soft Sales Skills Critical to Sales Success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 24, 2014
Asking questions. Selling value. Handling objections. Crafting sales strategy. Closing. Analyzing the competition. Check out any sales training program and you’re likely find some of these sales skills being taught. They are the fundamentals and they are critical to sales success. And just because they are fundamental does not mean they are simple to learn. To perform them skillfully requires a lot of practice and feedback.
But to borrow a phrase, these skills are “necessary, but not sufficient.” A study by Millennial Branding and American Express, for example, reported that 61 percent of managers surveyed felt that soft skills were more important in new hires than hard skills, or even technical skills. In fact, the same study showed that the top three characteristics managers looked for when promoting Millennials were the ability to prioritize work (87 percent), a positive attitude (86 percent) and teamwork skills (86 percent).
The study goes on to report six soft skills most often cited as critical to success. Although the report was focusing on professionals in general, we thought the work held merit for those concerned about developing sales success.
- Communication – Communication moves beyond sending emails, texts, and Instagrams. Everyone inside companies must be able to effectively engage people face-to-face. Nowhere is this more critical than for salespeople who must engage a wide variety of customers across a varied set of situations.
- Teamwork – B2B sales increasingly are moving away from salespeople as the lone wolf to sales teams – whether multiple salespeople, technical specialists, etc. This means salespeople must develop the skills required to both lead and to participate in sales teams.
- Flexibility – Flexibility provides some unique challenges for salespeople. Beyond simply being flexible about schedules and responsibilities, salespeople increasingly are being called on to marshal internal resources and to be part of – or manage – sales teams. In today’s environment salespeople are required to play different roles at different times during the sales process.
- Positivity – This one is no surprise – people like to be around positive people. And, this is certainly true for salespeople. Salespeople need to learn how to leverage praise from people for what they do and avoid overreacting to criticism and bad news. But, salespeople have a special challenge – not only do they have to work with colleagues, they also have to work with prospects and customers where it’s easy to say “yes” – but yes is not always the right answer. Salespeople must learn how to effectively say “no” or disagree or present a different view to prospects and customers and have the customer view that interaction positively.
- Time management – Whether new to sales or a veteran, time management is an obstacle all salespeople must tackle. Learning how to prioritize and manage time is important for all salespeople. A good idea for any salesperson is to periodically assess the percentage of their time they are actually selling vs. doing something else. If one can increase that number by 10%, which in most cases is very likely, a whole lot of good things happen.
- Confidence – Confidence is an underpinning of every salesperson’s success. Salespeople must learn to display confidence – it’s at the heart of building their credibility and credibility is a key for success. When someone is new to a company or new to sales, building confidence and credibility can be tough to do. One answer is leveraging your company’s capabilities and success stories until you develop your own tales of success.
If one believes the soft skill story, then a real challenge emerges for sales managers. It’s likely that most salespeople would not on their own, over time, develop these soft skills. As a matter of fact in some situations, time may actually degrade the skill. For example, a salesperson could very easily lose confidence due to failures vs. learning from the failures as to what to do next time.
Once again this is why sales management coaching and modeling are so important for developing and sustaining a successful sales team. Yet, how often do the soft skills make the short list for sales coaching?
This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection Blog by Janet Spirer on November 21, 2014.
©2014 Sales Momentum®
Five of the Biggest Sales Mistakes You Are Making
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 19, 2014
Making sales mistakes can be detrimental to your company’s bottom line. In order to rectify sales mistakes, you need to know what they are and be able to identify them within your own sales department. So, here are five of the biggest sales mistakes you are making, and how you can fix them.
- Hard Selling
Your sales department’s key selling tactic should be that of nurturing relationships with clients to make the sale, not pushing the products or services onto them. This is one of the most disastrous sales mistakes your company can make. If your sales reps are still hard selling to customers, they will come off as rude, pushy, and demanding. That type of selling died out in the past. Relationship nurturing is now the best way to increase your sales numbers. Build your reputation, and create long-lasting business relationships with clients. If you see that your sales people are still cold calling, they’re making sales mistakes. It’s time to re-evaluate your selling strategy.
- No Calls to Action
Your sales reps shouldn’t leave a conversation or a meeting with a client without a call to action being set in place. It’s the sales people’s obligation to ask for a commitment-they shouldn’t leave things open-ended. At the end of every meeting, the sales person should be asking for a firm date on a next meeting or another commitment that can make the client move forward in the buying cycle. Without proper follow up, these leads can get cold. Sales mistakes like this can cost you sales.
- Focusing on Your Own Needs
Hopefully, your sales reps are excited about the products or services that they are selling. However, if they keep going on and on about what they’re selling without listening to the client and letting him talk, they won’t be making many sales. Customers are interested in how your products or services can help them solve a problem or address a particular need that they have. Therefore, all selling should be based on what your sales rep can do for the customer. Focusing on your own needs instead of the client’s needs is one of the most common sales mistakes you can make.
- Making Promises
When it comes to closing deals, some sales reps can get ahead of themselves and promise things that they can’t actually deliver. This enthusiasm can be detrimental to your company’s image. It can cost you repeat business, which is why it’s one of the biggest sales mistakes. Your reputation can be tarnished if clients can’t believe what your sales people are telling them. It’s not useful to promise a client the world if you can’t deliver-you won’t get the deal in the end and you will likely lose that customer for future deals, too. You should have clear guidelines set out for how far your sales reps can go in negotiations, so they know not to overstep their boundaries and make promises they can’t keep.
- Not Being Organized
No one likes having his or her time wasted. But, if your reps are going to meetings unprepared and unorganized, this is exactly what they’re doing. Getting a meeting is your chance to create a relationship and explain to the client that you have a solution to his problem. If you’re spending the whole meeting learning the fundamentals about the client’s company, his job, and his needs, you’re not leaving yourself time to actually build rapport. This is one of the most destructive sales mistakes. Before any meeting or conversation, your sales reps should be performing research on the prospect and his company and preparing answers to questions that might come up-whether about his needs or about your own products, pricing, or timelines. Don’t waste the opportunity for a first great impression by being unprepared.
Avoiding these five sales mistakes can help you close deals and build long-term relationships.
This article was originally posted to the SalesForce Search Blog by Brett Evans on November 27, 2014.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the SALES BEST PRACTICES category.
Follow On The Web!
