Posts Tagged Sales Strategy
The Six Main Components Which Create Sales Excellence
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on August 3, 2015
Excellence is a word that is bandied about so much these days that it can often lose its meaning or its differentiation. The dictionary defines it as ‘being exceptional, being superior in some way, achieving extreme merit, preeminence or distinction’. When we use the term, we commonly confuse it with something that is just better or an improvement of some sort. However, for something or someone to be given the accolade of ‘excellence’, we have to be more than just better; we need to identify the qualities that deserve the term, or we are in danger of diminishing the stand-out qualities that are required to receive the honor.
To achieve excellence in sales, we need to lay the foundations that support and enable the results we need to achieve. Here, we’ll discuss just six key components that create excellence in salespeople and make them stand out from the crowd. The first three are classed as intra-personal skills (internally-focused) and the others are interpersonal (externally-focused). Each one will assist in the development of quality and stature.
Develop a Full Range of Skills & Attributes
The top salespeople we have encountered take their own personal development very seriously. They create and implement a development plan for themselves that include seeking out training and coaching opportunities, reading, listening to and watching subject matter experts, update their product knowledge, develop their industry knowledge and plan their career progression in such a way that it enhances opportunities at every step.
Also, they see how new technologies their own company and competitors are producing add value to the industry, learning how these advancements affect and add value from their customers’ perspectives.
Accept Change As The Norm & Embrace It For Progressing Salesmanship
Great value-creators recognize that they must build a clear and flexible path through the changes their customers and industry must go through. They understand that their products and services must be instrumental in driving those changes. This requires the mindset to be adaptable to whatever circumstances the customer may throw at them.
Become Future-Focused
The high-quality salesperson will recognize the lesson that past teaches. Grab hold of the opportunities the present offers and develop the foresight to apply those learning’s to the future. In other words, they see the only things they really have control over are those future opportunities.
By recognizing the future is a blank slate ready to be written upon, the great salesperson doesn’t harbor resentment over what has occurred, but treats it as a school to learn how to build resilience and elasticity in their future plans.
Understand The Customer’s Business As Well As The Customer Does
Yes, it takes time, diligence, effort and guile, but it differentiates the haves from the have-nots in terms of knowledge and partnership abilities. Treating your customer’s business like your own means you build trust, and with that come the openness and exposure that allows you access to the inner sanctum. By having the attitude of curiosity, great salespeople build reasons for customers to develop close business relationships with them, hence reducing the emphasis on price that might let in competitive offerings.
Be Passionate About Service & Business Results
Passion is a chosen response when you feel enthusiastic and engaged with a project or task. Great salespeople choose this emotion wisely and use it to drive their actions and responses.
Having a passion for something engages you like nothing else does. Without it, you lack the inspiration or drive to concentrate on excellence or quality responses. Having passion separates you from the masses who allow the ‘that’ll-do’ attitude to affect their diligence. Having passion for business results helps you build value in the customer’s eyes as they recognize the impact your intensity and desire for improvement has on their business
Build Relationships Throughout The Customer’s Business
High-quality salespeople recognize the value of building many strong relationships throughout their accounts. This allows them to build business acumen and confidence when dealing with various people at differing levels. They see the value of discussing financials with the accounts team, talking strategies with the sales management team and highlighting technological advancements with the product-development team.
This allows a clear understanding of the shared needs and unique concerns of each component that makes up the customer’s decision-making teams, and allows trust to be engendered throughout the purchase experience.
Each of these components need to synergize together to create an overall impression of professionalism so that the salesperson is seen as a major asset to the customer’s business rather than just another supplier who blends in with the competition.
It takes time to determine which of these components are best developed and utilized with every account; but they offer a differential that will set you apart in many customer’s eyes as someone who is indispensable to their future journey.
This article was originally posted to the MTD Sales Training Specialists blog by Sean McPheat on July 2, 2015.
Focus on the Customer and Magic Happens!
Posted by Rick Pranitis in Sales Process Evaluation on July 21, 2015
Several weeks ago, I did a deal review with a client. It was a very large deal, important to my client. The sales person is an outstanding sales person–one of the top performers in the organization.
As I looked at the notes on the deal, the sales person had a number of good conversations with people in the organization. He had a pretty good understanding of what they were trying to do. He was laser focused on demonstrating how his solution was the best in helping the customer achieve the goal.
He was trying to reach the decision-maker and had hit a road block. He’d made call after call, sent email after email. He was very frustrated; he was normally accustomed to getting into whoever he needed to see at an account. But this particular customer was just not responding to any of the creative offers he made—lunch, a demo, meeting with product managers, an extended loaner of a system—nothing would drive a response. What was worse, is the people he had dealt with before started going dark.
As I looked at the email chain, each email was a variation on the same theme, “Let me tell you how wonderful my product is.” The emails were written much more artfully and each offered an enticement about learning more about the product. But there were no responses.
In the review, I started asking my usual questions, “What are they trying to achieve, why are they doing this, what are the consequences of doing nothing, how does this fit into their overall strategy/priorities/vision, what are the personal wins for each person involved in the decision, ……..”
The sales person thought he knew the answers, but struggled. He realized that he had jumped from “discovery,” to “pitching” before he really understood all the stuff critical to his sales strategy and winning the deal.
We decided to do a little research. It took just a few minutes–we went to the company website. We started understanding more of their strategies, priorities, and what might be driving the need to change. We went to Google and pretty quickly we found a number of press releases, speeches, presentations the company had given about their strategies and priorities. This particular project and its impact on the company were mentioned several times. In fact, the key executive we had been trying to reach had been interviewed a number of times–including his priorities around this particular project.
We went to LinkedIn and started looking at the profiles of each person involved in the project. We were trying to discern their biases, motivations, experience with these solutions, and the personal wins. Again, the profile of the key executive was rich with information. He had posted a number of presentations and video’s in his profile. It was clear the executive was a real visionary, he was driven to achieve certain things in the organization, and he had a strong strategy.
I know what you are thinking, why didn’t the sales person do any of this up front? He really should have, in hindsight he recognized the error. He had fallen into the trap too many of us fall into—listening for what he wanted to hear, rather than really trying to understand what the customer was trying to achieve.
To his credit, once we started to see the problem, he came up with a new strategy. Through the research, we had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but he still needed to reconfirm everything with the customer–understanding their strategy, priorities, the views of each person involved.
He wrote a very short email to the decision maker. In that email he indicated his understanding of the key issues–but posed some very good questions about what they were trying to achieve. In one sentence, he explained the experience my client had helping similar organizations on this issue. He finished the email, leveraging some of the executive’s quotes on his vision and the importance of the project in implementing the strategy. Then he asked for a meeting.
Late the other night, I got an email from him, it was titled, “Some Magic Happened!” He had forwarded me the response from the executive. It was the kind of response any sales person dreams of. The customer was impressed with the knowledge and understanding of his and his company’s issues/strategies/priorities. He was intrigued to learn more about how my client might help them address the issues. He was flattered by the reference to his quotes and visions. He was eager to meet, share more about what they were trying to do and learn more about my client’s ability to help.
After weeks of emails and phone calls focused on “Let me tell you about my product,” shifting the approach to focus entirely on the customer and the individual had completely changed things.
The door is now open. The sales person has a long way to go, but he now has a strategy that puts the customer and what they want to achieve at the center of everything he is doing with them. This stuff works! It’s not trickery, manipulation, or any great sales technique. It’s simply focusing on the customer, understanding what they want to do, learning from them–then helping them learn. It’s really that simple!
Take a look at your most important stalled deal. Do some research on both the company and its people. Try answering for yourself the questions I posed earlier in this post. Then go to the customer and ask them, let the words come from their mouths, probe, verify, validate, quantify. Be interested in them and what they want to achieve.
This article was originally posted to the Partners in Excellence Blog by David Brook on June 23, 2015.
Make Every Sales Call Matter
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on January 5, 2015
There are really only two things a salesperson controls; who they call on, and what they say when they get there. Ideally a seller should be spending more time preparing for and executing on the ‘what’ as he is deciding on the ‘who’. After all, no matter how well you have refined your target market, figured out the ideal buyer persona, and sharpened your competitive positioning, nothing happens until you engage with the customer.
But research shows very few of these engagements are that well planned. It’s all too rare a sales person has a detailed plan of what he wants to achieve on the call. What are the desired outcomes? Why might you fail? In the absence of a Call Plan many sales interactions leave a lot to be desired. In fact, 64% of all sales calls are ineffective.
Making every sales call matter – matters. This is where the magic is supposed to happen. It’s the salesperson’s opportunity to progress the sale, to deepen relationships and to uncover and address vulnerabilities in the deal. It’s his opportunity to show that he is a credible individual who can bring his own insight to the conversation, and create – not just communicate – value, all the time advancing the deal.
Unfortunately, most of the time, there is no value created by the salesperson. Only 25% of senior business executives are prepared to take a second meeting. Two-thirds of the time business executives are turned off by the lack of preparation by the sales person. They say that they don’t find a lot of value in sales conversations. We should not find it surprising business executives who are being pursued by sales people play hard to get, using their executive assistants to screen callers, interrupt meetings, or delegating the entire interaction to a subordinate.
The harsh truth is that most sellers are not adequately prepared for sales calls. The consequences go further than you might think. If you waste an executive’s time – the most precious currency they have – your stock has fallen. The likelihood of progressing the sale has been damaged. Your value is questioned. Any business you win will be on price alone. Research suggests the purchase experience is the most significant arbiter of customer loyalty. When your customer loyalty is damaged even before you start. You have a steep hill to climb if you ever want to use this executive to refer you to their colleagues. You’ve wasted their time – so why would they subject their treasured relationships to an ineffective sales call?
After every meeting, you always want the customer to feel that the meeting was a good use of time, and there was more take-away from the meeting than was expected. Satisfaction or quality is always a function of expectation and performance. If you don’t perform to the customer’s expectations then they’ll be disappointed, and that’s not good. You, your colleagues, and the customer, should all be clear as to the customer’s expectation of the call. That’s a good place to start.
Making every sales call matter – matters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An Effective Strategy Equals Winning More Sales
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on May 16, 2014
For the past two decades, business-to-business selling has been conducted in basically the same way. Salespeople directly approach customers armed with facts, features, and the benefits of their products to convince customers to buy. However, customer decision making has changed and today’s buyers are smarter and more sophisticated than ever. In addition, competitors have not sat idly by. They’re focused on defeating you so they have educated themselves about your products and sales tactics.
Sales success today requires a new way of thinking about sales strategy. The question is, what is the right strategy?
In his classic book Strategy, famous military historian Lidell Hart detailed the “indirect” approach to war. In painstaking detail he described the superiority of the indirect strategy over the direct strategy, using examples throughout the history of warfare. He theorized that the outcome of every major war from Roman times through World War II could be attributed to the grand strategy the parties selected. Instead of a brute force direct attack to overwhelm the enemy, the victors always chose to battle indirectly. When forced to fight, the indirect strategy involves using surprise, intelligence, logic, and human nature to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.
For example, at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, the smaller Carthaginian army under the command of Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army using the indirect strategy. Hannibal placed his weakest infantryman in the middle of his line to give the impression of vulnerability while positioning his heavy infantryman and cavalry on the flanks. As the battle progressed, his flanks closed in on the surprised Romans and they were vanquished.
Hart argued the indirect approach was not solely a war strategy but also an influential philosophy that could be applied wherever opposition to new ways of thinking exists. He said, “The direct assault of ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook.” For example, “The suggestion that there is a bargain to be secured is far more potent than any direct appeal to buy.”
Here are seven principles of the indirect strategy and their business-to-business sales application.
1. Employ psychology. The first and foremost principle is that the indirect strategy is a psychological operation (“psy-op” in military jargon) based upon understanding, predicting, and influencing human nature. In sales, winning requires earning the trust, respect, and friendship of another human being. The victor builds the strongest customer relationship. The secondary psychological goal is to sew doubts among your enemies, because a halfhearted warrior is more than halfway to losing.
2. Plan your overriding strategy. During a long sales cycle of several months or more, it’s easy to focus on individual battles and lose sight of winning the war. The sales cycle is reduced to a series of battles without an overriding grand strategy. Salespeople become fixated on the next customer interaction, proceeding from the initial sales call to the sales presentation, then on to the product demonstration and evaluation. However, all salespeople are like generals who should create a strategy to win their wars long before the first battle begins. The successful military leader preplans how and where he will attack in accordance with the resources at his disposal. The victorious commander achieves his objective through calculated maneuvers to gain the advantage and counter tactics to neutralize his enemy’s advantages.
3. Know your enemies. How well do you know your competitors? How much time do you spend studying their websites, products, and marketing collateral? Do you take the time to perform an honest win-loss analysis after each engagement? Most salespeople argue that they simply don’t have enough time for these types of activities. However, history repeats itself for those who don’t learn from the past.
4. Be the first on the battlefield. As a rule, it is always best to be the first salesperson in an account. The chance to understand a customer’s environment first, establish relationships, and set the criteria for the selection process has obvious advantages. But if you work for an underdog company that competes against industry favorites, being the first on the battlefield is the difference between success and failure.
5. Get privileged information from spies. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote about the indirect strategy when he said, “Knowledge of the enemy’s position can only be obtained from other men. Hence, the use of spies.” These words are still true today. In order to win any complex sale you need proprietary information that only a spy can provide. These spies are members of the selection team, other company employees, or business partners. They provide valuable information about the internal machinations of the selection process and inform you about the thoughts of the various selection team members. Without a spy, you never know how well you are positioned in an account or what the enemy’s next move will be.
6. Understand how the objective is organized. All battlefield commanders need location-based information so they can map the way to reach their objective. Similarly, salespeople need a complete understanding of how the evaluators are organized within their company because political power during the decision-making process goes far beyond the lines and titles on an organization chart.
If you are involved in selling an enterprise solution, you already know the importance of understanding the inner workings of the various departments within a company. Your product might be purchased by the information technology department and used by accounting and manufacturing. Therefore, it’s critical to map out the political interrelationships between evaluators and their respective departments of the organization.
7. Create turning points. The indirect strategy is based upon creating turning points which cause enemies to lose momentum they can never regain. Like a battle, every deal has a critical moment, or turning point, that determines the winner and the loser. In sales, information can be used to create turning points which eliminate competitors. Your expertise on the customer’s industry, understanding of best practices, knowledge of unflattering facts about your archrival, and the willingness to raise critical issues the customer is unaware of can be used to create turning points.
For the sales warriors of the business world today, the difference between being hailed as a hero or branded a failure hinges on winning. But in order to win, you must know the steps it takes to develop a winning strategy. Winning is everything in sales as it is in war. In the words of master strategist Napoleon Bonaparte, “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
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