Archive for category SALES LEADERSHIP
How To Get Higher CRM Adoption Rates
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on September 16, 2014
We’ve all heard the staggering statistics behind this-and-that CRM product. “Will cut lead gen time in half in 90 days!” or better yet, “Gain 85% more customers per year!” Right.
The unfortunate thing is many really terrific CRM products actually can have a monumental impact on your sales process. That is, if anyone would use them.
The trick to finding a CRM product that actually benefits your business is figuring out how to get people to actually adopt and use the process, and not just some people. Everyone. Over 66% of companies say they have a hard time raising adoption rates over about 50%. That’s a discouraging number.
Here are a few ways to get higher CRM adoption rates without losing your whole sales team to Groupon or Apple or whatever the foosball-in-the-breakroom-company of the month is.
Make Your CRM Software Unavoidable
Doesn’t that sound…annoying? At first, yes. There’s really no getting around the inevitable discomfort that comes with implementing a new CRM, akin to getting a new phone with a whole bunch of foreign-seeming buttons to learn. Before you launch companywide, it’s crucial to put safeguards in place that consistently remind your team to use the CRM, trust the CRM, love the CRM. Also, make it difficult (and awkward) to avoid the CRM-driven data at meetings and in status reports and you’ll see adoption rates rise.
Put Your CRM in the “Cloud”
Cloud computing doesn’t just make things more convenient for everyone, it’s going to make your employees more mobile. That’s a great value-add! If you can find a way to reward employees who are consistent with their CRM use with flexibility (say, work from home Fridays or longer lunches) you’re going to see more people taking advantage. In general, your staff is going to care most about the things that make their life easier too, not just yours.
Choose a CRM that can be Customized
There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of CRM products out there, some great and some best left to go the route of Pets.com. Of course, juggernauts like Salesforce have a lot to offer businesses but it may make more sense to find a product that’s specifically designed for your industry and for the type of sales team you employ. The more simple customization your CRM product offers at a user-level, the higher your usage rates are going to be.
Analyze the Data Often and Openly
Think fast: what’s the point of CRM software? If you said, “to keep my lazy employees on track,” then you are a terrible, terrible boss. The real reason CRM is valuable is cold, hard data. Whoever “owns” CRM in your office should regularly offer insights based on the data it provides and also make that data available to the sales team. Not only will this give everyone a little more ownership, it will prove the point that your fancy new CRM setup isn’t going anywhere.
You can’t force employees to use your CRM, but you can give them a lot of incentives. The more attractive you make a CRM-driven workplace the higher your adoption rates are going to be. Every. Single. Time.
This article was originally posted to the Mindmulch blog by Ryan Currie (guest blogger) on November 18, 2013.
Ryan Currie is a product manager at BizShark.com, with 5 years experience in online marketing and product development. In addition to web related businesses, he also enjoys the latest news and information on emerging technologies and open source projects.
Six Keys to Startup And Small Business Sales Success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on September 4, 2014
One of my favorite all-time sales executives always had a quote at the top of the enormous whiteboard in his office: “Start-ups don’t starve, they drown.”
That’s true across a variety of departments and disciplines, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than in sales. When you’re in start-up mode, you’re often trying to sell something to people who don’t know about it and don’t believe they need it. By definition, you’re creating a category and using a machete to cut through a virgin jungle.
Unfortunately, that’s often used as an excuse to “throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall” to see what sticks, and otherwise throw what should still be a disciplined sales strategy into chaos. Chaos leads to drowning, and drowning leads to death. Any start-up veteran knows that when sales dies, the company isn’t far behind. Here are six places most start-ups (particularly of the B2B variety) should focus to improve their precision, strategy and success.
Sell the hole, not the drill
Nobody cares about your product or service, unless it helps them do something or achieve something or mitigate something they care about. Few people go to the hardware store to buy a drill. What they really want are holes. It’s your job to figure out what that means for your customers. Then, everything in your sales process (and marketing) should align behind it.
Develop a deep(er) understanding of our target customer and their ecosystem
How much do you really know about your target customer? What they care about? What are their objectives and what are the primary obstacles keeping them from achieving them? Who are the key people inside (and outside) of their organization helping them achieve those results, and/or keeping them from getting there? The better you understand the underlying ecosystem and environment in which your customers exist, the better you can align your message and value proposition to things they already value and care about. This is especially important for start-ups selling in a category where the value proposition isn’t yet clear.
Teach everyone in your organization how to listen for buying signals
Buying signals aren’t often explicit. More often than now, a “buying signal” will actually be in the form of someone complaining about something, or otherwise exhibiting the signs and symptoms of a problem you can solve. Those are the buying signals your competitors either aren’t listening for or just plain ignore. Teach everyone in your organization, but especially those with customer-facing roles, to understand your deep customer profile/personas and know when they’re seeing those early-stage buying signals online and elsewhere.
Map your sales process to how your customers buy
Anything less than this will introduce unnecessary friction between seller and buyer. You aren’t going to change when the buyer is ready to buy. But you can help them understand and quantify their needs faster than they would have done so naturally. Just make sure the process you manage with your sales team aligns with that natural buyer process, and the result often will be increased velocity, loyalty and conversion from your pipeline.
Calculate the sales activity and pipeline required to hit your sales number
How many leads do you expect will become qualified opportunities? How many qualified opportunities do you expect will close? If you haven’t done the math, most likely your pipeline is still too small to reliably achieve your monthly or quarterly sales goals. Doing “the math” up front helps create more realistic expectations and also ensures that sales & marketing are aligned around exactly what kind of results at each stage of the process are required to consistently hit the number.
Clearly define success metrics and lead/opportunity stages
Does everyone on your team agree on the definition of a “qualified” lead? If I asked each member of your sales team what criteria are required for a qualified opportunity, would I hear the same answer? If you don’t have this level of consistency, it’s too easy to have sales pipelines that are unreliable, unrealistic and simply inaccurate. Common definitions ensure transparency and accuracy, and allow you to more tightly define specific next steps and focus areas for improving strength of pipeline at any given time.
This article originally posted to the Customer Think Blog by Matt Hienz on July 29, 2014.
Sales process – it must mirror the customer’s buying process
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on August 8, 2014
In the last ten years a substantial amount of time, effort, and money has been devoted to discussing the sales process. Listen to a conversation about the sales process and it usually begins by someone saying something like:
- “We have very aggressive sales targets and we’re just not getting there.”
- “We’re not leveraging our own best practices – a lot of our sales reps are simply doing what they did the last time.”
- “Our customers’ buying process has undergone dramatic changes but we’re still selling like we always did.”
Whether or not you have consciously addressed the topic of putting in place or modifying your sales process – it is happening every day. It is whatever your salespeople are doing on a given day to navigate the customer’s buying process.
If you want to put in place a more effective sales process, avoid these two pitfalls.
Lack of definitional clarity. Sales process is one of those sales concepts that unfortunately means something different for each person with whom you talk. Some would say if you put in place a new questioning model you have changed your sales process. Others would say that is simply adopting a new questioning model. Try it. Ask someone what their sales process is and a good bet is you will get not just different answers but entirely different types of answers.
To make something better everyone needs to have a clear and common vision of the topic at hand – it’s about being on the same page.
Our best suggestion is to restrict the term sales process to mean the overall set of steps you take from beginning and end of your sales cycle to win the business versus using the term interchangeably with concepts related to selling techniques, models, frameworks, and best practices.
Unbridled compliance. It is not a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons to have everyone do their own thing – that is not the road to success in today’s market. That’s an easy one.
On the other hand, in today’s disruptive buying environment it is equally true that unbridled compliance to a standard sales process can have its own pitfalls.
The greatest risk is that rigorously following any standardized process only works when one is absolutely clear that you are following a path that leads to success. In the B2B market the problem is many companies are going through transformational changes. These changes are impacting what they buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it.
So, a strategic caution is in order: Are you doing a good job driving compliance to a sales process that is more about what and how customers were buying five years ago versus what they are doing here and now?
Summary. On the sales process scale of “everyone does their own thing to blind compliance” we suggest being somewhere in the middle.
Introduce a well thought out sales process because it can contribute to replicating success and scaling the business. But, beware of overdone rigor and excessive compliance. The latter will tend to eliminate innovation and discourage the positive deviants among you from exploring the ideas that will define what success looks like tomorrow.
This article was originally posted to the Sales Training Connection blog by Janet Spirer on August 25, 2014.
Twelve Reasons You May Be In a Sales Slump
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on July 29, 2014
Sales numbers are down and you’re starting to sweat. As a sales manager, you must act quickly to turn things around when you first see the numbers dip. You need to diagnose the problems and make changes immediately so your team doesn’t fall short of the sales goal for the quarter or year.
To help you get to the root of the issues impacting your sales results, here’s a quick summary of twelve common problems which can lead to a sales slump. By pivoting quickly and making a few key changes to your team and its process, you may very likely see a boost to your sales.
1. Limited sales training – Sales reps can’t naturally catch onto your sales strategy and product strengths without the right preparation and tools. Extensive training on products, re-training on new products, sales skills classes, and more, are all necessary to adequately prepare your sales team.
2. Lack of Sales Coaching – Training should not be the end of the learning process for the sales team. Implementing consistent, one-on-one coaching with your people is vital to continued improvement of sales skills and increased performance.
3. Lack of a sales process – If your sales people aren’t aware of what sales techniques are working and which ones aren’t, it’s impossible for your team to improve. Create a detailed sales process to standardize successful selling methods across your team.
4. No visibility into the sales pipeline – If you’re not aware of every opportunity in your sales pipeline, you’ll lose control of your sales team. Use analytics to track key metrics like the behavior of closed/won deals, the length of your sales cycle, win rates, conversion rates by stage and the rate of growth for the overall pipeline.
5. Incorrect sales forecasting – If you’re not using historical data to extrapolate your sales quarter-to-quarter, you’re really just guessing and crossing your fingers. Use data analytics to improve the accuracy of your forecasts so you won’t miss your goals again.
6. Confusing quotas – Your sales reps should know exactly what goals they are required to meet each month, quarter, and year. If they’re not constantly aware of the goals, they may not work as hard. Try implementing a sales leaderboard to push your team to reach competitive goals incorporating gamification.
7. Confusing compensation – Similar to quotas, your sales people should know exactly how their compensation plan works. Your plan should be clear-cut and tied directly to sales results, motivating your team to sell hard.
8. Poor time management – Sales reps should be logging their activities daily in your CRM so you can monitor how many calls, meetings and demos they give per day. If you see one of your sales people falling behind in activity levels, you can offer sales coaching to help them to get back on track and improve their results.
9. Bad objection handling – If your sales people aren’t prepared to handle the standard sales objections that come up on a call, they will never succeed in closing a deal. You should have a playbook of common objections and train your team to expect people to resist the price, timing or another factor in the sale, and help them deal effectively with these objections to close.
10. Working unqualified opportunities – If there isn’t a sufficient process for qualifying leads, your sales team will struggle. Sales people will waste time chasing prospects that don’t have enough pain, have no purchasing power, or have a long timeline and no urgency. Make a plan to qualify leads extensively before they pick up the phone.
11. Misalignment with marketing – Aligning sales and marketing teams is always a challenge, but it is vital for sales success. If the handoff of leads between the two isn’t smooth, or the two groups have completely different goals, you’ll struggle to see sales results.
12. Product is devalued – The key to closing sales isn’t always offering a discount to the buyer. In fact, you may have accidentally devalued your own product by cutting your price too much. This can hurt margins and still not increase overall profits. Work with marketing to price your product, based on the perceived value of your product in the market.
Now that you understand some of the major pitfalls that can drag down your sales team, you can alter sales strategies, coaching, and communication to help your team succeed. By making some high-level changes, your sales team can turn things around and exceed their goals.
Seven Ways Your Sales Team Can Improve Results with Social Media
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on March 4, 2014
Are your salespeople actively engaged in social media as part of their lead generation efforts? If not, they (and your business) are missing out on great opportunities for researching potential B2B clients, building new networks and uncovering prospects by investigating their social media profiles.
Here are seven ways to encourage your sales team to embrace social media:
1. Direct your salespeople to refine their profiles. Start by making sure they have social media profiles on the appropriate channels. The marketing team can help determine where your customers and prospects those platforms. Their profile pages need to attract potential customers. While including the basics on an individual salesperson, the profile should mostly focus on your business and the solutions you offer to prospects. Also include videos, PDFs and links to your business website in these profiles.
2. Schedule time for focused social media activity. It takes discipline to use social media properly (and avoid wasting time watching cat videos!). Work with your sales team to plot out a schedule of focused activity on various social media networks, whether it’s a half-hour a day or 2-3 times a week.
3. Generate content your sales team can use. Back in the day, salespeople handed out brochures or fliers to interest prospects. Today, it’s all about customized content marketing. So it’s up to you to ensure your salespeople can refer prospects to first-rate, problem-solving content on your business website. Not only will this draw more traffic to your site, it also supports the sales team’s efforts to position your business as an industry and thought leader.
4. Promote sales blogging. It’s no longer enough to feature a blog post from your CEO or CMO. Members of your sales team should also be blogging and steadily building a rich network of followers. Encourage team members to think about new ways to focus on prospects’ needs and business challenges by answering common questions that prospects ask in their buyer journey. They should also think and blog more broadly about general industry issues, rather than shilling for your business. Again, focus on solutions your sales team can provide and that will draw more interest from prospects.
5. Keep an active LinkedIn presence. For sales of B2B products and services, LinkedIn is probably the most significant platform for your sales team’s activities. Your individual salespeople’s LinkedIn profiles are the first place a prospect will check out, so as noted above, be sure these are up-to-date and contain the right messaging.
Also, each salesperson should be gathering new LinkedIn connections as frequently as possible. Have them build their network by reaching out to past customers, colleagues in the industry, friends and family members. It’s important to have a robust network of connections as part of your LinkedIn profile.
By joining and participating in LinkedIn discussion groups, salespeople will come in contact with a wide range of potential customers — though it’s important to remember these discussion groups are about specific issues, not a venue for blatant self-promotion. Encourage your sales team to answer questions that demonstrate their problem-solving knowledge. An interested prospect will often follow up, on their own.
6. Use Twitter to make connections and follow trends. The businesses and prospects you want to connect with may be tweeting. Shouldn’t you and your sales team be listening? Twitter offers a wealth of opportunities for staying abreast of industry trends, which can in turn help your team anticipate future sales opportunities. Once your salesperson has become comfortable on the platform, he or she can reply individually to a prospect’s tweet, thus initiating a one-on-one exchange which turns a cold lead into a warm one.
7. Have a vibrant Facebook presence. Your business should already have a Facebook page. From there, encourage members of your sales team to create a Facebook group that relates to your business offerings and invite people to join. Once the group starts talking, there’s always an opportunity to send targeted messages to individuals within the group and get the sales process moving forward.
Being active in social media isn’t a substitute for picking up the phone or firing off an email to prospects, but it represents a dramatically different way of cultivating leads and enriching your sales pipeline.
Are Your Sales Meetings Destroying Your Sales Team and Undermining Your Authority?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on February 24, 2014
Are your weekly sales meetings building your team, your credibility, and your company’s sales or are they destroying morale, motivation, and undermining your authority? Unfortunately most sales meeting do far more harm than good to the sales team, the sales leader, and the company.
They don’t have to. In fact, regular (regular does not necessarily mean weekly) sales meetings can be the backbone of creating a thriving, high production sales team. Most often, however, they are the ruination of the sales team.
Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along. They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.
Sales people generally hate this weekly meandering through sales meeting hell and the accompanying glimpse into the hollow caverns of the sales management brain in stupefying inaction.
Why? I believe there are four primary reasons sales meetings are such a waste of time and effort:
1. No purpose. A great many sales meetings are held for no other reason other that it’s Monday (or Friday, or Thursday, or whatever day of the week they are normally held on). Consequently, the meeting is destined to be a time waster. One time wasting meeting is bad enough, but I know of some companies who have three or even five of these meetings every week (often these multi-meeting companies are seeking to keep control of their salespeople).
2. No preparation. Whomever is in charge of the meeting (generally the immediate manager of the assembled team) has invested not a single minute in preparing for the meeting. As they’re sitting down for the meeting, they take out a pen and jot down two or three things to talk about. Again, it is the perfect setting for a waste of time.
3. Too many tangents. Without having prepared for the meeting and knowing exactly what to deal with, it is easy for the manager to veer off onto tangents that ultimately have nothing to do with anything. Yet another factor that guarantees the meeting will be useless.
4. A haven of negativity. Especially during times like the present when business is tough, an unprepared manager tends to focus on trying to cajole numbers out of his or her team. People are put up for ridicule in front of their peers because of poor numbers, they are forced to justify their performance, and the rest sit in silence, knowing their turn is next once the manager has finished “coaching” their current prey. Now not only is the meeting a waste of time, it is a real morale killer too.
Great, so sales meetings suck. Everyone already knows that. What can managers do to make sales meetings valuable? I’ve found four simple rules seem to work very, very well:
1. No purpose, no meeting. Only hold meetings when there is a REASON to hold a meeting. That may be once a month, once every two weeks, once a week, or as needed. The company no longer paying for coffee is not a reason for a meeting; that’s a memo. Reviewing the pre-call planning steps is a reason for a meeting.
2. No preparation, no meeting. If for any reason the person managing the meeting has not had time to thoroughly prepare, the meeting is canceled. There is no excuse for wasting the team member’s time because the manager didn’t get their job done.
3. A sales meeting is not the place for individual coaching. A sales meeting is a group activity. Address the group’s needs and issues, not individual salespeople’s. There is no excuse for denigrating anyone in front of the group or for wasting the group’s time for individual coaching. Each team member should have coaching time scheduled outside the sales meeting. The rule is, if a meeting degenerates into individual coaching, the team members are free to leave (note, however, that answering a specific issue a team member has with the subject matter being discussed is not individual coaching).
4. Set a time limit, stick to it. Salespeople need to be selling, not attending meetings. Under normal circumstances, sales meetings should be kept to an hour or less. Only under extraordinary circumstances should a meeting exceed an hour.
Your sales meetings should concentrate on helping team members sell. Reviewing market conditions; presenting new products or services; reviewing sales skills such as prospecting, making presentations, asking questions, pre-call planning, and the other aspects of selling and the sales process; role playing activities; and other core content should be the heart of the meeting. Seller recognition and reinforcement should also be an integral aspect of your meetings. Leave the meeting on a high note, not a downer. Housekeeping notes and announcements should be kept at a minimum—discarded completely and put into memos if at all possible.
Meetings are important, but too many meetings or too much wasted time turns what could be a valuable tool into a wrecking ball plowing through your team, leaving lifeless, dispirited bodies in its wake. If your meetings are unorganized, are designed to do little more than keep control of your salespeople, or drag on incessantly, you’re killing your team, not building it.
Turn your sales meetings into real strengths, not team killers–both you and your team members will be glad you did—and within short order you’ll actually see some smiles and enthusiasm Monday morning instead of the deadwood that drags itself into the meeting room.
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This article originally appeared in the Sales and Sales Management Blog on February 4, 2014.
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How the Best Sales Leaders Structure Sales Training to Optimize Talent
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 13, 2014
Average Sales Leaders often mistake talent as being a static sales metric. You either have it, or you don’t. The best Sales Leaders know the opposite is true. Talent is a dynamic factor which they must continue to develop in their sales team.
Most organizations have some form of sales training but lack a systematic approach for continuous skill advancement. As the Sales Leader, it’s up to you to ensure instead of waiting for talent to show up, you invest in developing it.
There are four crucial stages to structure your training to produce optimal growth within your sales team:
- Pre-Session Preparation
- Training Execution
- Post Session Reinforcement
- Measuring Results
Pre-Session Preparation
Choose the right topics – An effective sales training program should promote sustainable skill improvement rather than being company, or product-focused. In order to truly grab the attention of your sales people, the skill you choose to develop must be valuable. What defines a valuable skill? One which is as complex as it is relevant. If a sales representative can learn this skill on their own, they’re not as likely to be engaged in the session.
Set clear objectives – Sales people like to be included in the decisions which pertain to them. Don’t keep the meeting a secret – be very open and clear as to why the training session is taking place and what you expect as the result. If you express the objective as quantifiable, even better. Sales people will then be incentivized to actively monitor their own performance in respect to the goals.
Assign ‘homework’ – A training session has no hope of taking hold if your sales people are not prepared to engage. Assign some pre-training work to get your people acquainted with the material. Then, stipulate they bring relevant examples and questions to make the training session more interactive.
Training Execution
Set expectations – Before the meeting, refresh everyone on the purpose of the training session and its desired outcome. List the main points and even take time to write them out. Specify what’s expected of everyone during the meeting. Beginning each training session this way ensures everyone starts off on the same foot.
Cover the topic – This is the meat of the training session – the content. In this stage, it’s imperative you take the time to explain your concepts in a clear and concise manner. What is the skill you want your team to work on? Include slides, videos, and examples to help reinforce the concept. As a bonus, you can have some of your top sales performers weigh in on these skills to add peer credibility.
Use case studies – Nothing cements an idea quite like using a real-life scenario. Explain an example where the skill wasn’t used properly and therefore produced a negative outcome. Then, refer to a case where the skill was effectively used to produce a desired outcome. Transforming theories into real concepts will ensure it sticks with your team.
Role playing – While many Sales leaders think it’s more important to explain a concept, the majority of the training session should be spent role-playing. Why? Because role-playing does work! Have different individuals perform the skill while the rest of the class watches and provides feedback. It’s not only extremely effective in helping your people comprehend the skill, but it also promotes teamwork.
Wrap up and decide next steps – Once you feel your team understands the main purpose of the session; it’s time to wrap up with the key takeaways to solidify their understanding. Before you excuse them however, make sure you have received commitments from each of them on the behaviors they will change and the skills they will adapt. Then, ask for their opinions on how they want to be held accountable for implementing these skills and the kind of support they find most beneficial. This way, you end the meeting with a clear and agreed upon goal for the future.
Post-Session Reinforcement
Reinforcement – If you have no post-session plans for reinforcement, then you’re just wasting time. Reinforcement is the key to solidifying skills into a rep’s daily routine. There are several different kinds of reinforcement – below are listed what have been found to be the most effective ones.
Peer Accountability – One of the strongest types of reinforcement comes from our peers. They are the most influential tools at your disposable and spend the most time interacting with your developing sales people. Ensure these prominent figures lead by example and reinforce the key concepts from the meeting.
Real-Time Coaching – Nothing helps you understand how well your people are implementing their training like observing them directly. Spend some time in the field watching and working with your sales people. Observe and insure they’re utilizing their new found skills and step in when they’re using them incorrectly. Real-time coaching is very effective in eliminating poor behavior.
One-to-One Meetings – Setting time aside to discuss individual progress will show the members of your team you’re serious. If they see it’s important to you, it will become equally important to them. This time can also double as personalized coaching if an individual sales person requires additional advice or assistance.
Positive Reinforcement – While observing the team, openly promote those who are successfully applying the learned concepts. Making good behavior known fosters feelings of good-will and encourages sales representatives to keep trying.
Measuring Results
Before embarking on this sales training journey, you should establish a clear objective – a particular goal you’re trying to achieve. The skill you’re attempting to teach will determine the exact sales performance metrics, the key performance indicators (KPIs) of this success. Broken down into five different levels, here are some suggested indicators:
- Observed change in behavior
- Deal Advancement
- Deals Won
- Quota Attainment
- Margin and Revenue
Each of these levels represents a different stage of learning. However, observing a change in behavior is only the first step. Once you see these skills start impacting the bottom line, you will know the training session has come full circle.
Talent is not a static metric. Successful Sales Cultures at top-performing sales businesses stress continual training and reinforcement of skills. The representatives with whom you spend time in developing will reward you with their improved performance. The best Sales Leaders understand the value in developing their talent and will invest the time into doing so.
Three Critical Skills New Sales Hires Lack
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on January 3, 2014
The best sales managers know how to hire enthusiastic people who have the right attitude and want to take advantage of a great opportunity. But even the best new hires usually lack many key skills. Where does a sales manager start? Here are three critical skills you should focus on coaching with your new hires.
Qualification Skills
Do you remember when you were new on the job? Did you know how to recognize prospects that could turn into good clients and those that would just waste your time? Neither did I!
Too much valuable time is wasted on low potential accounts. New hires need to learn how to weed out under-qualified leads faster. Your role as the sales manager, especially with new hires, is to get involved early in the sales opportunity. Talk to your sales person about a prospect and ask specific questions such as “Is this organization a good fit for us and our products/services?” Then ask them to explain their answer. What are they seeing or not seeing which makes them think the company is a good or poor fit? If it is a good fit, ask them, “Where is this customer in their buying process?” and “What factors did you use to determine this?”
Developing Strategy/ Process
When new hires lack a defined sales process, they have no strategy for success. If ramping your new hires to success faster is a goal, your company may very well need a “sales playbook” which captures best practices used by your senior sales people. The playbook should document both the general sales process you want your people to use plus examples of what successful sales representatives do in a variety specific situations, such as selling different types of products/services to specific types of decision makers. Once you have the documentation, make it available to your new hires – preferably online, or somewhere they have easy access.
Having the playbook isn’t enough, however. To become proficient and confident in selling situations, new hires must practice the steps of the sales process, determining where a customer is in their buying process, and work on problem-solving skills and questioning techniques – while also appearing confident on knowledge about your company’s solutions. Of course it would be best they gain this practice through role-plays with you than when dealing with customer! If you have your company’s sales process “baked” into the playbook, you have a ready source for developing role-playing scenarios which you can run with new hires. And keep in mind “flexibility training” is essential in role-playing. Offer scenarios which are unexpected with questions out of left field etc.
Understanding Company Expectations
Success in sales is not just what one does, but how one completes each step. Being a successful salesperson takes a mix of consultative selling skills and attitudes, performing to high expectations, and meeting the needs of an employer – not just customers. Many salespeople, and especially new hires, lack a vision of what their company expects. As a sales coach, take time to develop a Success Profile that defines all these elements then share that list with your team. You can use this Success Profile as a coaching tool. Use it to launch discussions with each sales person about their professional development and attitude improvement goals. This profile might also suggest to new hires what criteria a company may use to look for in people they consider for promotion.
If you can help your new hires master these three areas; Qualification, Process, and Expectations, they will have a solid foundation for a great sales career.
This article was originally posted to the TopLine Leardership Blog on December 19, 2013.
Effective Sales Coaching – It’s All About Timing
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on October 18, 2013
The fundamental mistake which sales managers make, which is perhaps the worst culprit in terms of de-motivating a sales force, is managing only results instead of the behaviors and activities that lead to the results.
It came be seen as entirely rational for sales managers to focus on results because that’s how we are measured and, of course, compensated. Unfortunately, it’s not very effective at motivating salespeople.
Here’s why…
A sales “result” is what comes about as a consequence of the sales process or processes preceding. Sales managers who manage by results, by which I mean a sales manager who waits until a poor result is produced and then confronts the salesperson about the poor production, is like a “Monday morning quarterback.” They are criticizing what happened after it happened, and much too late to do any good.
To be an effective sales manager you must focus on the input side of the production equation, the sales behaviors and activities that contribute to the sales results.
Many sales managers haven’t clearly defined the behaviors and activities sales representatives need to be successful. Here’s a test for you. Suppose you were to email five of your salespeople and ask them to each reply to the following question: “Please describe to me the specific behaviors and activities you need to perform to achieve the sales results our company expects.”
How many different answers would you receive? If you’re like the managers who have actually tried this test, chances are quite a few. In too many sales organizations, there is a lack of clarity about and understanding of the behaviors needed for success. Your salespeople, then, are selling on instinct.
Now imagine you’re a salesperson. You’ve just had a bad month. Your boss confronts you about that bad month, but he or she doesn’t have a clue what caused the bad month. The manager just pushes the button that sales managers always push when they don’t know what caused poor production-: “You’re not making enough sales calls. Increase your activity level and you’ll sell more.”
If you were a salesperson, how would that make you feel? I suspect you’d probably be demoralized. You feel like you worked hard, and don’t really know what to do differently. You would appreciate a more constructive coaching discussion, but you’re not getting it. Your boss just tells you, “get out there and sell more.”
To be a great sales coach you need to define the behaviors and activities your sales force needs to know and do to achieve maximum sales success. Put those in a document titled “Standards for Excellence.” And communicate them clearly and repeatedly to your sales team. Have your salespeople practice new skills and approaches while you observe so you can give them specific tips. Give them the opportunity to ask questions and get feedback early in the sales cycles.
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This article was originally posted to the TopLine Leadership Blog by Kevin Davis on November 20, 2012
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Five Characteristics of a Successful Sales Team
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on September 13, 2013
In order to build a successful sales team, sales managers and executives need to know the characteristics of a successful sales team in order to choose the right candidates. When the right sales people are on a sales team and the sales manager is actively involved in promoting the team’s success, that team will become successful. Here are five characteristics that all successful sales teams share.
1. A Successful Sales Team Is Collaborative
The days where a single sales person could routinely land major accounts alone are fast receding. This is due in part to changing customer expectations; prospects need to feel that someone at a vendor is always available, and team selling helps fulfill that need. A successful sales team is made up of individuals who thrive in a team environment and are therefore able to cooperate and collaborate on major accounts. This also means that sales compensation and incentive plans should have contingencies for equitably recognizing each sales person who made a contribution towards closing a major sale.
2. A Successful Sales Team Is Able to Self-Direct
Most top sales people are described as driven and self-directed. In a successful sales team, the majority of individuals fit this description. Sales people who are not able to self-direct and meaningfully contribute to team accomplishments and dialogue have little place in and rarely last long on a successful sales team. The self-direction of a successful sales team comes from many sources, including:
* Peer support. Members of a successful sales team tend to look to one another for assistance before requiring direction from the sales manager.
* Knowledge of resources. Sales people on a successful sales team are intimately familiar with the resources available, and will use these resources to their maximum potential.
* A comprehensive recruiting plan. The recruiting plan for a successful sales team must actively search for and select individuals who will thrive in the environment.
3. A Successful Sales Team Manages Its Time
Few things are more frustrating than seeing opportunities slip away due to poor time management. With a successful sales team, this is rarely a problem. Combined with the other characteristics of a thriving sales team, excellent time management skills allow such a team to coordinate individual effort to ensure that no sale is missed due to time pressures. These time management skills also allow these sales teams to make time for other priorities such as development and coaching without negatively impacting sales numbers.
4. A Successful Sales Team Has Inherently Strong Communication
Communication on any sales team is key, but the successful sales team makes communication an art form. At any time on a successful sales team, team members will be in routine contact with one another, team supervisors and managers, and promising leads and prospects. In such a sales team, sales opportunities are rarely dropped because the dialogue is kept open and active – while management is always aware of the status of important opportunities and sales targets. This communication also allows the sales team to:
* Understand what must be accomplished in order to meet quota.
* Give valuable input on the sales process to make improvements for even better sales team performance.
* Pivot where required when priorities or goals are changed as business needs evolve, without substantial disruption to the existing pipeline.
5. A Successful Sales Team Enjoys Winning
The thrill of winning is one of the drives behind most major sales achievements. A successful sales team is motivated by the thrill of accomplishment for its own sake, and the manager of this team will find that monetary incentives often come in second place. This does not mean that monetary incentives should be phased out; many sales people count this as a strong motivation. However, sales managers looking to build a successful sales team may want to move the strategy away from compensation and look to the non-monetary characteristics of a successful sales team first.
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The article was originally posted to the SalesForce Search Blog by Matt Cook on August 30, 2013
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