Posts Tagged Sales Training
Ten Reasons Why Salespeople Fail
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on January 13, 2013
I have yet to meet a sales professional who doesn’t want to succeed, who doesn’t want to exceed quota and make more money. But the reality is salespeople still fail. Sometimes it’s a temporary slump, sometimes (unfortunately) it’s a career-long trend. In the work we’ve done with sales organizations, managers and individual reps, these are the 10 most common reasons why salespeople fail.
1. No experience
Honestly, this is a bit of a false crutch & excuse. If you have the right drive and make-up, you can succeed with zero previous sales experience. I’ve seen it happen countless times. Of course, a raw, inexperienced new sales professional can’t succeed without the proper support, training and management to help them accelerate through the learning curve.
2. No plan
If you come to work every morning waiting for the good leads, you’re going to fail. If you’re waiting for the phone to ring, reacting to what comes into your email inbox, that’s not exactly a recipe for success. And yet, many salespeople work without a plan – reactively and opportunistically going through the month or quarter without a strategy. Just because you have a plan, doesn’t mean you’ll always follow it. But if you don’t have a roadmap, how do you expect to get where you want to go?
3. No discipline
Sales can be incredibly difficult. Oftentimes, it’s not even fun. The daily grind, the never-ending activities required to get through the “no” answers and find the ready-to-buy prospects, that not only takes a ton of work but requires daily discipline to stay focused and actively on the path to success. Look at the most successful reps and you’ll find men and women who get up early, power through their calls, and do what it takes – every day – to make their number.
4. No training
This is more than just product training, which is critical. Every rep should know the details of their product or service, but that’s table stakes. They also need to understand the market into which they’re selling, as well as who their target prospect is – what they care about, what their problems are, and what they’re trying to achieve independent of your product or service. And this training needs to happen far more often than the annual sales kick-off meeting too. For world-class sales organizations, training and reinforcement is a regular, ongoing habit.
5. No support
To be successful, sales professionals need tools to help them work smarter. They need sales support and operations resources to provide the infrastructure, tools, processes and other execution best practices so they can spend more of their time in front of customers. And they need a proactively supportive management team, including managers who know that coaching requires more than just reinforcing process, but also proactively helping reps solve unique sales problems.
6. No leads
This is another place where many sales professionals find a perfect excuse for why they’re not hitting the number. In some sales organizations, reps are given leads for follow-up. Some leads are qualified, some are not. But even when reps aren’t handed leads, they’re responsible for finding their own. Yes, this can be a pain-staking, inefficient process. Yes, this can directly impact an individual reps ability to close more business. But you have two choices when face with no leads – get some yourself, or go somewhere else.
7. No motivation
Motivation can come in a variety of formats, of course. It can be material, such as a new boat or stereo system or exotic vacation. It can be fundamental, like putting your kids through school. But whatever it is, motivation to succeed drives performance and ensures consistent execution for reps who don’t let failure take hold.
8. No adaptability
The way you were taught to sell 20 years ago might not be as effective today. The tools you used, the approach that once worked, might fall flat today. If you aren’t able to adapt to the changing market, the changing customer – you’re likely to see declining results. Successful sales professionals constantly adapt their strategy and execution to what’s changing and working around them.
9. No customer insight
Gone are the days of one-sided selling (if they ever existed in the first place). Gone too are the days when the prospect allowed you to ask them questions to which they already knew the answer. Reps today fail in part because they don’t take the time to understand their customer before making an approach. This is far more than just having a solid introduction or insights to break the ice. This is about getting to the root needs your customers has, and differentiating yourself as someone who isn’t there just to sell, but to teach and enable the outcomes the prospect needs and/or has envisioned in the first place.
10. No focus
There are so many things that can distract you during the day. Things that feel important, maybe even feel urgent, but are neither. It’s incredibly difficult to stay focused on what’s important, what will truly push your results forward. But that’s why so many reps fail, and so few consistently hit their number.
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This article was originally posted to Heinz Marketing on January 8, 2013
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The Ten Best Sales One-Liners of All Time
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on January 5, 2013
Great sales managers are great coaches. More often than not, they’ve worked deals “from soup to nuts,” and have “carried a bag” as individual contributors to sales teams early in their careers. Now it’s their job to motivate and develop inside and outside account executives to achieve goals and advance their careers.
To successfully motivate their teams, managers should first make themselves equal, rather than different. This often requires managers to “talk the talk” and make their points fast while educating teams.
What follows are ten of the best sales one-liners, Ever! Call them clichés, truisms, or idioms, whatever. Executives, sales managers, customers, industry pundits, and other sales reps use them all the time. This is only volume 1, and there are a whole lot more where these came from. Enjoy this first installment, and share with us in the comments which one-liners you use and hear most, as well as which ones you’d add to the list.
Ten of the Best Sales One-Liners. EVER!
- Just tell them what time it is; they don’t care how you built the watch.
- There’s no need to engineer the Starship Enterprise when all they need is budgetary pricing.
- If you can’t thoroughly demo your product, you’ll die on the vine.
- You prospect’s got a finely-tuned BS meter.
- You can’t expect to take a fishing boat out and just watch the fish jump into the boat.
- You won’t get by on just personality and good intentions.
- It’s better to lose in the 1st round than in the 15th.
- If you’re going to lose, don’t lose alone.
- If all you’ve got is a hammer in your hand, then everything will look like a nail.
- From a strategic perspective, this deal’s carved in butter.
Learn them. Know them. Live them
6 Steps to Enable Your Sales Team to Sell with Insight
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on October 12, 2012
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, it should come as no surprise to you that buyer behavior has changed dramatically. I’ve come across a number of well-written research documents, such as Base One’s “2012 Buyersphere” report and Forbes Insight’s “The Rise of the Digital C-Suite” study, that highlight how this is playing out in the marketplace. Simply put, buyers are more educated, better prepared, and further along in their buying process when they engage sellers.
So, what does this all mean for a company, its sales force, and its ability to compete? Here are 6 steps to leverage “insight selling” to help your team engage buyers early in their process and shape a solution that gives you the best odds of winning:
1. Understand the forces driving your customers to change. Changing external forces such as new technology, competition, or regulatory requirements, as well as internal forces such as new leadership or strategic initiatives, drive organizations to change. Whether driven by external or internal factors, change creates opportunities for providers who can help companies navigate the change. To be successful, you and your sales team must stay on top of the latest trends so that you can guide your clients to capitalize on those that are worthwhile and steer them clear of pitfalls they should avoid.
2. Determine how your organization can uniquely enable these change imperatives. This requires you to reframe your value proposition to address the change your buyers face. You need to determine how you can help them navigate the change process, the benefits they will realize, and the investment (e.g., financial, emotional, or time) required on their part for success.
It’s not enough to be able to say, “We’ve been in this business for 50 years.” That can make you sound old and stale. What have you done lately? Can you demonstrate to prospects that you and your people are at the cutting edge? What makes you better than other companies offering the same service?
3. Proactively educate the buyer on the change imperative and solution options. Be a source of knowledge and insight to raise awareness of the issues driving change and potential solutions to navigate the change. This happens both at a macro level in marketing through research and thought leadership programs and at a micro level by helping your sales reps identify prospects in flux and engage in an insightful dialog around the issue and potential solutions.
Remember our premise above: buyers are more educated and better prepared than ever before. This gives you an opportunity in your marketing to provide research, thought leadership, and practical case studies addressing common issues so that as buyers are getting educated on the matter, insuring you’re already on their radar.
However, don’t assume that your customer is aware of the need or how to solve these challenges. External forces, such as regulatory change or technological innovations, may not be front-page news in the mainstream media. Your organization has to keep its finger on the pulse of the forces that create need for your solutions. You need to help your sales team connect the dots between the emerging challenge and your ability to help. Savvy buyers will be skeptical of following the latest trends, and rightly so. It’s up to you to help them realize what trends to pursue and which to avoid.
What’s the best way to do this? There’s a lot of debate around whether your sales reps should lead with questions or with insights. Much of this depends on your prospect and their level of familiarity with the issue. Sometimes, prospects won’t know what they don’t know, and other times, they will know more than you do. It’s important not to patronize your prospects or speak over their heads. As such, we believe that it is best to either phrase your insight as a question (“How have you prepared to deal with issue XYZ?”) or to state your insight and follow up immediately with a question (“Many organizations we work with have done ABC because of XY&Z; have you considered that concept?”).
4. Proactively educate the buyer on how your solution is typically bought and sold. You sell your solutions every day, but your buyers may only buy a solution to a problem once in a lifetime. You need to tell them how to buy and why that is beneficial to them. This will surface other players in the buying organization who influence the decision and who need to be on board with the solution.
There is some recent thinking on the usefulness of asking questions to better understand the buying process. We believe that not asking these questions is a lost opportunity. The mutual sharing of information around the buying and selling process with prospects that you’ve motivated to change will help you avoid missing key influencers in the sale and help you refine your value proposition to address their unique concerns.
Chances are that what you’re selling will have a greater impact in your clients’ organizations than your buyers’ immediate business unit. Explore with your buyers the “ripple effect” throughout their organization, and use that as an opportunity to engage influencers in those areas.
5. Ensure your sales reps have the knowledge and skills to educate clients, position your value proposition, and cover their bases on a complex sale. With so much information available on the internet, it is easy for you to assume that your sales reps are following developments in their field and can confidently engage in business discussions with buyers. While your sales reps may all be active consumers of industry news, this is seldom sufficient. The biggest risk is that they will misrepresent the issue or your company’s solution or exaggerate the benefits in their enthusiasm to win business.
You need to provide your sales reps with your company’s position on the issue, solution guidelines, and expected benefits. This should be a collaborative activity with your marketing and product teams. Insight selling works most efficiently when your marketing team works on the front end by doing the research on the issue, market, competition, and thought leadership – while your product team creates the roadmap and pricing policies.
Then, you need to arm your sales reps with this material. Teach them to communicate your value proposition to different buying influencers involved in the decision-making process, and the process to advance the sale to closure.
6. Reinforce and sustain “Insight Selling” as a key strategic initiative. Even after you’ve done your positioning and solution preparation and training, you need to continually reinforce the behavior change necessary among your sales reps to realize the full benefit of insight selling. Don’t think of this as a sales training or a marketing initiative – it is really a strategic initiative that requires alignment across your organization.
It requires awareness of the issues, value proposition, and solution from top to bottom. The business needs to make the investment in thought leadership, refining solutions, and marketing. In order for the behavior to stick, each level in the sales organization has a responsibility to “own” their part of the process:
- Sales leadership needs to make the investment in sales rep and management development and have the discipline to establish metrics and measure the progress and impact of the initiative.
- Sales managers need to invest in their own continuous learning about the issues, build their ability to coach sales reps in this new selling paradigm, and hold their sales reps accountable for the right activity and effectiveness.
- And of course, sales reps need to embrace a new way of thinking, continuously build their ability to share insights, and engaging customers in business conversations.
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This article was originally posted to The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™ by Dario Priolo on October 10, 2012
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Active listening – a forgotten key to sales success
Posted by Rick Pranitis in GENERAL DISCUSSION on September 5, 2012
When talking about sales skills, the first thing that comes to mind for many is asking questions. Asking questions, however, is not one-way. Often the best questions are ones that build on prior statements – resulting in a sales call that resembles a business conversation with a smooth flow between those participating.
This necessitates the sales person not only hearing what the customer says but actually listening to what’s been said. And, the customer must know you have listened. This means listening isn’t a passive activity – it’s an active sport. What do we know about listening?
Remember the old adage – “in one ear and out the other.” Unfortunately this is one of those cases where the old adage rings true. Research tells us that after listening to someone talk, immediately after you only remember ½ of what was said. And after 8 hours, you only remember ½ of that!
This means sales people need to follow the “100 Percent Rule” – sales people must take 100% of the responsibility for making sure the customer understands them. And take 100% of the responsibility for understanding what the customer says. Let’s explore seven best practices for getting that right:
1. Test Understanding. “That’s a need I haven’t heard you talk about. Before we move on could you just tell me more about …” Testing understanding invites the customer to continue to discuss or explain so you can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of their needs and opportunities.
2. Summarize What the Customer Says. Summarizing is a great way for sales people to demonstrate they understand what the customer’s saying. “From what you have said it sounds like your major concern with the existing support could be summarized this way …” Summarizing restates what the customer said in a way that demonstrates understanding. Here, it is important to distinguish Summarizing from “parroting” – the latter being a bad idea. Summarizing paraphrases only the essentials and is stated in your words.
3. Build Support. “That’s an interesting point – might there be other reasons for building that into the equation? For example, we’ve found in a similar case that …” Building support reinforces or extends the customer’s support or agreement by applying what you have learned from a previous experience or by suggesting its application to a new situation. In a business development conversation it can provide a proactive approach against competitive action and can provide additional answer to the question – Why us?
4. Take Notes. You can listen four to five times faster than someone can talk so use the time to evaluate what is being said and take notes. Do it in a transparent way because it indicates you are interested in what the customer is saying. One unintended outcome from talking notes is often the more notes you take, the more the customer will share. And, of course, by taking notes you’re more likely to recall what was said and what commitments were made
5. Evaluate the Entire Conversation. It is important to not only listen to what is being said, but also to listen to how it is being said, and to what is not being said. Qualifiers or evasive language is informative and the absence of information about a particular issue can be an important signal for future action.
6. Tune into High Fidelity Situations. Sometimes it is important to turn up the volume. When topics enter the conversation such as: new challenges, high risk issues, or key decision criteria, it is time to up your game. Plus it’s a good time to pay attention to non-verbal communication.
7. Be On the Same Page. It’s always a good idea to remember that a good sales call is all about keeping your eye on the customer. A classic trap is doing a really good job in talking about the wrong thing. This means periodically asking and really listening to the response as to whether the topic under discussion is a priority for the customer. If the answer is no – it’s time to change topics.
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Originally posted by Richard Ruff, on the Sales Training Connection – September 16, 2011
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Selling value – an innovative framing
Posted by Rick Pranitis in OTHER CONTENT on August 28, 2012
Anyone who knows me can tell you I am constantly scanning the web for interesting articles relating to Sales and Marketing. This article recently caught my eye, and I agree with the author’s comment it’s a new twist on an old – yet still very much valid – concept of value being key to successful selling.
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Source: www.salestrainingconnection.com
Its Scary, But This Is Still Going On
Posted by Rick Pranitis in OFF-LINE RAMBLINGS on July 31, 2012
Sales trainers over the years have suggested that sales people phrase their questioning so their prospects and customers develop the habit of saying yes during a sales conversation. In today’s sales environment this type of approach can be highly offensive and condescending.
Today’s buyers are intelligent and informed. Using leading questions does little to gain respect or earn a prospective customer’s trust – the real path to “yes”.
I’m interested in hearing what your opinion is on this. I welcome your feedback.
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