Archive for category SALES BEST PRACTICES
How To Deal With A Stall In Negotiations
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on December 10, 2014
When you get to a point in the conversation with a customer where you have to negotiate on price or some other issue, remember one thing: the vast majority of negotiations occur because you haven’t identified the value of doing business with you earlier in the conversation.
I have found that if you uncover the needs, wants, desires ad motivations of customers early on, the whole aspect of having to negotiate starts to change. Because you are aware of how the customer will value your offering before you present ideas, you know exactly where you may need to give more than take. Negotiations most often occur when the customer has not had all their needs dealt with, or the value of your offering has not been built up enough before presenting solutions.
Having said that, it may well be that you get into a negotiating scenario that requires you to give and take. How do you know exactly what will be important or valuable to the customer?
Well, it may be that the two most powerful words in any negotiation are “What if?”. Using this question works because it allows the other person to consider possible solutions without committing to them. This way you can avoid making an offer before they have signaled a willingness to accept it.
To put this technique into action, suggest a possible solution by saying, “What if our solution involved distributing to other warehouses? Is that something that might work for you?” Then listen closely to the response, and change the suggestion if necessary, remembering to phrase it as a hypothetical (”What if?”) and not a formal offer.
Don’t commit to a solution before confirming that it works for the other person. Ask, “What if?” to test ideas before making formal offers.
A good way to prepare for this stage might be to ask yourself what combinations of options would make an attractive solution to both you and the other person. Should you present options independently or package them as one solution? Also, ask yourself whether you, personally, are willing to accept the solutions you’re suggesting.
It’s important to position this technique in the customer’s mind before you try it out. Saying something like, “We’re probably not ready to commit to an actual solution yet, but I have some ideas that we could discuss to see if we can get closer here. Would you like to hear them?” would allow the customer the chance to see if there were options that would be satisfactory to them.
The objective of this technique is to get the customer to see how different approaches might or could work for them, and offers opportunities for them to test out hypotheses before making decisions.
This article was originally posted to the MTD Sales Training Specialists blog by Sean McPheet on November 19, 2014.
Fire These Customers Immediately
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on November 20, 2014
Not all clients are created equal. Nor should you be compelled to treat them equally. There’s no law stating you must sell to everyone, or keep servicing clients that are the wrong fit for your business. It’s as fair to say that your business has outgrown some types of customers as it is to say that you have some customers that you should have never brought on in the first place. (You know who they are!)
If you’re miserable working with a client that you know isn’t profitable for your company, you won’t be motivated to serve them well. And, if that client isn’t receiving the best treatment, they won’t hit their desired goals. By virtue of this predicament, you’ve created a “lose-lose” situation. You’re not helping the client reach their objectives and they’re not helping you reach yours.
Besides the ones that are clearly not profitable for you, here are four other types of clients that must go immediately:
- The ‘no one else matters’ client. These are the clients that expect you to work only for them and all the time. They drag quick calls into 90-minute meetings, and 90-minute meetings into all-day events. They call you on the weekends on your cell phone. These relationships never work and turn ugly when their inappropriate expectations aren’t met
- The ‘Sword of Damocles’ client. Walk away from any client who constantly peppers you with threats. Perhaps they threaten to withhold payment, leave for the competition, or shop your solution around. You can’t do your best work for them if you are constantly under negative pressure.
- The ‘check is in the mail’ client. You aren’t a bank, even if you work for a bank! Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. When a client starts abusing the financial aspect of the relationship, talk to them immediately. If they will not rectify the situation, stop work until they do, or fire them immediately. No matter how prestigious.
- The prima donna client. Success and failure should be a shared experience. When you and the client achieve a desired outcome, it should be celebrated as a team effort. And, when something goes awry, there shouldn’t be any finger-pointing on either side. Each accepts responsibility for their part in what went wrong and quickly resolves the issue. Rarely is a mistake one-sided but if it is (and all on you), accept responsibility immediately and resolve the issue. If a client is continually parading your joint success as their own singular success while at the same time foisting all the blame on you for failures, your relationship is one-sided and can never be profitable for you.
Firing a client may mean a short-term hit to the organization’s profits, but it’s critical for the long-term emotional health of your team and the company. Firing a client now not only frees up time for you to spend on more profitable clients, it also provides a boost of morale internally. When you step up and fire a bad customer, you win everyone’s trust, loyalty, and respect – especially your own.
The easiest, most respectful way to fire a client is:
Call them. Do not use email. Thank them for their business to date and explain that you’re not the best fit for them moving forward. Try, “Thanks for considering us. At this point I don’t think we are the right fit for helping you meet your goals.” Always keep the focus on their interests.
Be professional. Don’t use this call as an excuse to tell clients all of the things that are wrong with them and their approach. Simply tell them that they will be more successful working with another company.
Recommend another option for them, even if it’s a competitor. This way you can find them a new home quickly.
This article was originally posted to the Eye On Sales Blog by Colleen Francis on November 17, 2014.
Stop Using Features, Advantages and Benefits in Selling
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION, SALES BEST PRACTICES on October 15, 2014
The key to successful selling is learning to understand a client’s buying criteria and building your presentation around them. Its common knowledge nobody likes to be sold to. But people love to buy. And, because your prospects may feel resistance towards salespeople in general, you need to present your product or service in a way that glides right past any resistance. If you can do that properly, your prospects will want to hear more and they will take action in response to your suggestion.
Stop using Features, Advantages and Benefits!
How are you going to do it? Well, here’s the way to overcome it. Instead of naming features, advantages and benefits of your product and service, start with asking questions. You need to find out your client’s hot buttons, and they’re all located in the unconscious mind with their emotions, and their values.
When you know what someone’s criteria are for any given specific situation, you hold the key which unlocks the door to closing the deal. You have the piece of information which will open your prospects up, and you’ll be able to talk to their conscious and to their subconscious mind.
Then, when you do start with your presentation, your messages will not only be right on target, they will be focused to the one thing and one thing only – that being what is really important to your clients. You’ll not be talking about features or benefits, but the client’s hot buttons.
All humans are the same. We all have needs, we all have wants, we all have drives, and we need to connect to those wants and needs and drives. People love to buy. People love stories. People love to be led. Your role is to lead people, not to name features and benefits. Everyone can be persuaded.
This should be your mantra. You need to believe you can persuade everyone. But to start doing it, you need to uncover their hot button which will make them buy. Forget about selling logically. Forget about focusing on a logical rationalization of objections people have and to handle any objection they have logically.
Stop using features and benefits. Start talking to your client’s unconscious mind. Here I’m talking about their emotions and their values.
So what is a Hot Button?
A Hot Button is something important to your client. It could be a problem; it could be a need, an interest, maybe even a passion. It’s what motivates your client’s decisions. Your role is to find this hot button. Let your clients talk. Your job is to ask open-ended questions, and then you listen. But more importantly, you have to touch on the important stuff.
If you just use same old questions with each and every client you have, you’ll always get the same answer, and probably not be successful as you could be. Every person has things which are really important to them. At a high level, we refer to these as values, like security, adventure, freedom. But people also have values within a different context. In a sales environment, you have to uncover the values that are related to the situation they have, and these are referred to as criteria or buying formula.
Now, if you ask a person “What is important to you in your work?” they’ll tell you what their criteria are for their work, like doing a great job, making lots of money, helping other clients. And if you ask the same person what is important to them about the place where they live, you get to talk to a different criteria because the context is different. A client’s criteria are really context-dependent.
So your client’s hot buttons are dependent on the context of the communication. Your client’s criteria in an influence situation are their hot buttons within that context.
For example, if a person is buying a home and he or she says, “I’m really interested in a safe and secure neighborhood,” that’s what’s most important to them. Then those specific words are their criteria in that context, their hot buttons. When you start presenting, you have to use those same criteria to let them know that you understand them. It’s a part of reflective listening, where you use the keywords that people are mentioning to you during the questioning phase of the sales process.
The truth is its more difficult to sell in today’s market because the world is much more diverse than it was a decade, or even a year ago. Today’s sales challenges don’t respond well to last century’s tips, tricks and techniques. Those skills are not wrong; they are simply old, outdated and incomplete for today’s market.
This article was originally posted by Alen Mayer on The Missing Piece to Your Sales Success.
The ultimate response to “I want to think about it.”
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on August 29, 2014
When a customer says “I want to think about it” or “I need some time to think it over” it’s one of the most frustrating expressions a salesperson can hear. You feel helpless, or if you’ve been poorly trained, you lapse into some manipulative dialogue that proves you’re both a crappy salesperson and you’re only there for the money.
There’s a better way.
The paradox of “I want to think about it” has always been that the salesperson wants to make the sale right away, and the customer has not yet seen the value or the reduced risk in doing business with the salesperson.
And often, the customer has already made up their mind, but does not want to share that with (you) the salesperson. The salesperson gets frustrated and blames the customer for their inability to decide, rather than taking responsibility for his own lack of sales ability and lack of preparation.
REALITY: Stop blaming. Start taking responsibility. Be prepared (Boy Scout motto) for the objection way before you get to the sales call.
Here is what to say, here’s what to offer, and here’s how to offer it…
You say: “I’m an expert at what I do. You’re an expert at what you do. Let me share with you the questions you need to ask yourself, and ask of others, as you think about it.” These are questions way beyond “How much is it?” and “When do I really want to start?”
Hand over a list of questions about the intricacies and the value of your stuff. For example, if you’re selling IT services and data protection, here’s a list of questions that you might want to ask:
Mr. Prospect, here are six things you need to think about as you’re deciding:
- How much is your data worth?
- Who is protecting your data daily?
- How much spam do you get? How much time do you spend dealing with it? What is your time worth?
- What happened the last time you lost data?
- What is a business heart attack to you?
- What’s the difference between 99% guaranteed up time and 100% guaranteed up time? 3.65 days of downtime. What is the extra 1% worth?
You hand the questions to the customer and read the questions out loud, and then ask him or her, “Would you like to think about these questions by yourself, or would you like to think about them with me?”
Keep in mind, you are the expert. The customer is depending on you for answers that he or she cannot create for themselves. Whether you’re selling life insurance, refrigerators, accounting services, new cars, or a million dollar home, most likely the customer is making a purchase one time, but for you it may be your one-thousandth time to make the presentation. It’s critical that you transfer confidence, not just information.
“I want to think about it” is your GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY to give value, prove value, make the prospect think about themselves and their options, and still have an opportunity to make the sale.
THE SECRET: You must prepare for the “I want to think it over” stall BEFORE you make the sales call. You have to positively accept the stall when it occurs. The more positive you are, the more surprised the prospect will be. And you must present my solution in EXACTLY the manner I have described above.
When presenting this answer to the prospect, your tone must be both friendly and calm. The prospect will see that you’re prepared and at the very least be impressed – and at the very most, be both engaged and willing.
You are in complete control when you’re prepared.
You have totally lost control when you’re not prepared.
REALITY: This solution will NOT work all the time, BUT it will work. How often it works will be determined by how often you try it. The more you prepare for it, the better you will become at overcoming.
Want to try it? Or do you want to think about it? It’s your choice.
This article was originally posted to the Eye on Sales blog by Jeffrey Gitomer on August 1, 2014.
Unlocking Hidden Revenues from Current Customers
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on August 14, 2014
When sales leaders seek growth, many turn first to new avenues – new customers, new geographies, new products and other untapped sources of revenue. However, there often is considerable growth potential in the existing customer base. Current customers have already shown they need your product or service and want to buy from you. Significant growth can come from getting them to buy more of what you sell.
The key to growing existing accounts is increasing your share of “addressable spend” – the total amount a customer spends on the category of products or services you provide. Here are the three steps every organization must take to understand their opportunities, prioritize them and then develop plans for growing share of spend with each customer.
Step 1: Understand the potential of your accounts. To capture more of the dollars customers are spending on your product or service category, you first need a solid fact base. For each customer, seek the answers to five questions:
- What is the customer’s total spend on the types of products or services your company sells?
- How does the customer’s total spend compare with their peers’ total spend and to the market opportunity in your product/service category?
- What does the customer currently spend with your company and on which products or service lines?
- What does the customer currently spend with your competitors and why?
- In aggregate, is the overall level of spend increasing, decreasing or remaining constant?
Share of Addressable Spend
In building out your fact base, it can be instructive to ask each of your sales reps to estimate your company’s share of addressable spend for each of your top customers (e.g. the top 100 or top 25%). Once they’ve done so, the manager or an independent resource should validate those figures. In most cases, the sales rep will have overestimated the share, usually due to assuming that a strong personal relationship equates to a high share of wallet or to misinformation from customers. This is not unusual. We once worked with a company whose sales reps overestimated share of spend by 20 to 30 percent for three-quarters of their customers. While the mismatch between perception and reality was sobering, it ultimately led to increased sales as those reps were able to pursue opportunities they hadn’t known existed.
Once you have established a solid understanding of your share of customer spend, segment customers by relevant factors in order to prioritize them and develop action plans for each group. Start simple, segmenting by easy-to-identify methods such as account size, current spend, industry vertical and geography to determine whether there are clear opportunities to employ a share-of-spend growth strategy. From that initial basic segmentation, go on to segment along more sophisticated lines such as buyer values or loyalty scores, which will enable further refinement of targeting and messaging. When done well, segmentation will help you identify distinct customer types for whom you may be able to create strategies that work across a whole group.
Step 2: Prioritize the opportunities identified in Step 1. Once you have established your fact base, you can begin to prioritize accounts. This is an important step as not every account with a gap between their addressable spend and the amount they are spending with your company presents a good opportunity for growth.
One of your highest priorities for a share-of-spend effort should be your “splitters” those customers for whom satisfaction is high but share of spend is relatively low. Splitters are those customers who divide their spending dollars between multiple vendors. Do you know who your splitters are and are you monitoring this data point on a regular basis? Just as important, do you know which splitters are (a) highly satisfied with your company, as determined by measurements such as Net Promoter Score (NPS)® (trademark of Sametrix Systems, Inc.) but are (b) giving you a comparatively low share of their spend? These customers are prime targets for the sales organization to understand and address the root causes of the gap.
It can be helpful to plot accounts in a visual manner. We like to use a 2×2 matrix capturing both NPS score and spend share. Customers who fall into the lower right quadrant should be at the top of your share-of-spend priority list.
As you prioritize your accounts for share-of-spend growth, you will find some which would be best served by field sales reps or inside sales reps and others that are better served by skilled account managers. To best serve each account, it is important to formalize distinct roles for field reps, inside reps as well as account managers and then match them to the right accounts.
Step 3: Have a plan and stick to it. Left to their own devices, most sales reps will naturally gravitate toward customers where they have friendly relationships and away from more challenging customers. Yet the more comfortable accounts may be the ones where reps have the highest share of spend and therefore offer the least opportunity for growth. A solid plan for each account, enforced by sales managers, ensures reps devote most of their time and business development dollars to the highest potential accounts.
The best territory plans lay out which accounts to visit, how frequently and with what messaging to ensure high-potential, high-priority accounts get the most – and the right – attention. The best plans also include implementation of a formal program for requesting customer referrals, particularly to other buying units within the same company. Many customers have multiple divisions, geographic locations or departments that could benefit from the same kind of success you have brought to one division of the company. In most cases, all you need to do is ask for the referral.
Increasing your share of addressable spend among current profitable customers is a highly effective growth strategy as it is largely about deepening and expanding relationships with customers you already have. But as with any other growth strategy, it requires a thoughtful, measured approach and cannot be undertaken by gut feel. Successful execution takes time and resources, but by adhering to these three steps, we have seen companies grow their share of spend significantly, thereby igniting stronger revenue growth.
This article was originally posted to the Sales & Marketing Management Blog by Carter Hinckley and Corey Torrence on August 27, 2014.
Carter Hinckley is a Managing Director with Blue Ridge Partners, a driver of revenue growth. He has more than 30 years’ experience in sales, senior management and consulting — all focused on helping firms grow sales more effectively. He can be reached at chinckley@blueridgepartners.com.
Corey Torrence also is a Managing Director with Blue Ridge Partners. From strategy through implementation to executive management he has focused on achieving revenue growth and profitable bottom-line results. He can be reached at ctorrence@blueridgepartners.com.
The Sales Skill You Need to Succeed
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on July 29, 2014
ROI, P&L, Acquisition Cost, KPIs, EBITDA…
Did your eyes glaze over as you read the words and acronyms in that line? These are common business terms senior executives discuss, use and measure but I have consistently been surprised how many sales people get the “deer in the headlights” look anytime I mention them in sales training workshop.
Why is this important?
Today’s sales person needs to become more business focused. We need to think and act like business people, rather than someone hawking a product, service or solution.
What does this mean for you?
If you are already familiar with business terminology, jargon and acronyms, all you need to do is present this “business” understanding when you are dealing with key executives.
If this is a new concept, you have a bit more work ahead of you.
The first step is to become more familiar with business in general and you can do that by reading business publications. These can include newspapers, trade journals, blogs, and magazines such as INC, Fast Company, The Economist, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes, and Entrepreneur.
If you understand what is important to business people, and you can position your offering accordingly, you will stand out from your competition and improve your odds of closing the deal.
This article was originally posted on the Fearless Selling blog on May 26, 2014
Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on July 1, 2014
Many people wonder what separates a top performing sales person from the rest of the pack. In most cases, it’s because they apply a number of best practices in their daily routine. Here are 17 best practices of top performing sales people.
1. They set HIGH TARGETS and goals. Top performers don’t wait for their manager to issue an annual or quarterly quota. They set their own goals that are usually more ambitious than the corporate targets.
2. They carefully PLAN their quarter, month and week – as well as their daily schedule. Too many sales people fly by the seat of their pants and only look at the day or week ahead instead of planning their month and quarter. Look at the big picture.
3. They set OBJECTIVES for every sales call. It is essential to know exactly what you want to accomplish before you make your call (face-to-face or telephone).
4. They ASK high-value questions that probe to the heart of the issue. Sounds simple but most sales people fail at this and ask weak, feeble questions. Top performers are comfortable asking tough questions that make their prospect think.
5. They LISTEN carefully to what their prospects and customers say instead of waiting for your turn to speak listen to your customer. You can ask all the questions in the world but if you don’t hear what people tell you won’t be able to present the proper solution.
6. They CLARIFY the issue when they are unclear what their prospect means. People often say things that are unclear and most sales people assume they know what their prospect means. Top performers take the time to fully understand by asking “What do you mean by that?” of “Can you clarify that for me?”
7. They WAIT TO PRESENT their product, service, solution or idea until they know exactly what their prospect’s situation is. The majority of sales people jump too quickly into their ‘sales pitch’ but top performers are patient and wait for the right moment.
8. They begin every sales presentation with a brief RECAP of their understanding of the prospect’s situation. Again, a simple concept but one that is greatly ignored by many sales people. A quick summary of your customers’ situation give you the opportunity to ensure that your presentation addresses their key issues.
9. They know how to ADAPT their sales presentation if their prospect’s situation has changed.
Making changes on-the-fly is challenging but it is one way to stand out from your competition. Learn how to modify your presentation when customer’s situation has changed from the time you initially met to the time you are delivering your presentation.
10. They know how to properly and effectively POSITION their product, service or solution. The vast majority of sales people fail miserably at this. They talk, talk, talk but usually end up talking about aspects of their product or solution that have little or no relevance to their customer’s situation.
11. Their sales presentations FOCUS on the prospect. Most sales presentations focus on the seller’s company, their product, or other trivial information that is of no interest to the customer.
12. They are PREPARED for potential objections. Top performers anticipate objections and plan their response before their sales call.
13. They always establish the NEXT STEPS. Decision makers are busier than ever which means they are more difficult to connect with. Avoid losing contact with a prospect by agreeing on the next steps after every sales call. Do this in face-to-face meetings and telephone calls.
14. They FOLLOW-UP after the initial call or meeting. Many a sale has been lost because the sales rep failed to follow up after the initial call. You cannot rely on your prospect or customer to call you; you need to take this initiative. Set this up during your call or meeting.
15. They PROSPECT continually to keep their pipeline full. It’s not uncommon for sales reps to experience peaks and valleys in their sales. This is usually a result of failing to prospect for new business on a regular basis. Avoid the highs and lows and schedule time to prospect for new business every week.
16. They deal with the DECISION-MAKER whenever possible. Dealing with people who have little or no buying authority is a waste of time. However, many sales people fall into this trap because it is easier to connect with people other than the decision maker. And that may be true. However, in the long run, they end wasting their time because they don’t close the deal.
17. They look for ways to KEEP IN TOUCH with their customers. A sale is not a one-time deal. However, you need to find ways to keep your name in your customer’s mind to prevent a competitor from squeezing in. Top performers incorporate this into their schedule and make it a priority.
Incorporate these strategies into your routine and you will quickly become a top performing sales rep too.
This article was originally posted to the Eyes On Sales blog by Kelly Robertson on June 23, 2014.
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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