San Diego State Adds Sales to Business School Curriculum

SDSU just announced the addition of a series of Sales courses to the College of Business’s Marketing Department.  John (above) was pleased to participate with Dean Michael Cunningham as a speaker at the Kickoff event held on campus on May 8, 2012.  John, an active SDSU alumnus, was a recognized for his leadership in the field of sales and building enhanced sales competencies for his customers.

“Business and industry has a steady demand for qualified sales professionals and San Diego State University is one of the few major universities that has stepped up to educate our students to fill this critical corporate need,” said Dr. Michael R. Cunningham, dean of the College of Business Administration at San Diego State University. “The contemporary sales professional requires the ability and competencies needed to develop networking skills, relationship building and analytical proficiencies which are primary elements in the College’s sales educational initiative.”

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Top Deal Killing Mistakes Made by Intelligent Sales People

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The technical sale requires people who can grasp the intricate (or scientific, medical, etc) nuances of a product and are smart enough to articulate them in a simple, easy-to-understand manner.  These sales people are amazing to me.  Many times they are recruited to change seats from the buyer’s seat to the seller’s role.  This seller may be an electrical engineer in the computer hardware industry or the chemist in the life sciences industry (to name two) who are recruited to sell those types of products.  They are geniuses in their perspective fields, but have some deal killing tendencies that need adjustment.

 

The first step to making a shift is awareness.  Here are 4 ways for sales people to better align their time to work on the most qualified opportunities.

  1. Begin with the right person.  Entering the sales process at the user level almost guarantees a long selling cycle. Ideally, you start with the ultimate decision maker.  Remember in the beginning you are referred to whom you sound like.  You’re smart and you’re enthusiastic about science.  You will be referred to the person inside the organization that sounds like you.  You may have found someone that shares your passion, but they may not be the decision maker.
  2. Focus on usage instead of technical aspects of product. The focus of our selling process is to have buyers focus on how to use your product or service, not what the features of product are in an unknown environment. Technical information too early (we realize that you know the product inside and out) can kill the deal. Success stories are a better approach and they also reassure the buyer that others have successfully used your product.
  3. Talk Less.  By not making the buyer feel like he is in control of the conversation, you are likely to stimulate objections.  Being patient and asking good questions around business issues will provide greater insight in what the buyer needs and the value you can provide.  Recently, when training medical devices sales people we covered the list of questions they could be asking the buyers that would properly position their product’s capabilities.  They all responded that they already knew the answers to these questions so why ask them? The answer is: artificial patience.   You may know the answers, but the idea is to get the buyer involved.  Buyers are best convinced by reasons they discover. 
  4. Close when buyer is ready.  Understanding the buyer’s needs and the ideal time to close are keys to success.  As sellers become more experienced, they run the risk of moving the buying process along too quickly.  Buyers must be allowed to arrive at a buying decision and the seller needs to facilitate the process.  A sequence of events will help everyone see the steps to the process and understand the logical deal flow to closing.

 

Understanding deal killing/impatient behaviors will help the technical seller become the business partner the buyer is looking for and, if mastered, close ratios and revenue will increase.

 

Flannery Sales Systems helps companies to define (or refine) and implement a repeatable sales process.   Increasing revenue through the sales process is the ultimate goal. We work with a broad cross section of industries with a specialty in life science and medical device companies. We are confident that we can enhance your results.

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The Top 3 Milestones for Sales Success

Over the past few years, the majority of the work that we have done with customers is on defining (or refining) their sales process. This was necessitated by the dramatic changes exhibited in buying behavior during the pandemic. And indeed, the most important aspect of our customer’s sales processes is that it mirrors how their customers buy from them.  During conversations in both a formal and informal settings, we are asked “how many steps should there be in the sales process?”  If we knew that exact answer for each of our customers, we would be retired and they would have Instagram-like success!

So instead of trying to pinpoint the exact number of steps in a sales process, here are the must have, Top Three milestones that each team/seller must have in place to assure success. Please note that very few of our B to B customers have only 3 milestones (or stages), but when pushed to the wall, here are the 3 you can’t live (or sell) without:

1-     Access to the Key Players (Decision Maker): there is nothing new to the notion that you must get access to all of the key players, but the budget scrutiny that many organizations have placed on all expenditures since 2008 has made this step even more difficult. A clear articulation on how all important titles would benefit from the usage of your product/service is a mandatory requirement for completing this stage.

2-     Clear Understanding of Value: once you have the access as described in #1, can the individuals understand the value that your offering provides. Without this, you will be dancing in the dark when it comes time to go into the evaluation phase.

3-     An Approved Implementation Plan: approved as you co-develop the opportunity with your customer/prospect, not after the deal is signed. This sole step can help you to determine your “pole position” deep into opportunity development, and the seriousness of the participant’s gauges how “sticky” your solution will be thereafter.

One of our customers in the Medical Device industry was struggling to get into conversations with the key players in their existing customer base on a new offering they had obtained through an acquisition. The offering was an existing diagnostic test with a new enhanced feature.  The challenge was that the enhanced feature  provided a benefit that had never been completely commercialized. We sat down with a cross functional team from their organization and built a pro-forma model of what impact the solution had on the existing practices in the testing environment, and who would benefit from this.  They went searching for data to substantiate their assertions of what value this add-on widget could provide.  They found a reputable research company that had done a study that provided the information they were looking for.  We were able to help build a dollar value and a testing value into a pro-forma model (Benefit Summary). The Benefit Summary provided all involved with a complete understanding of the value of their new enhanced feature.

Next, we helped them to create a prototype of an Implementation Plan that correlated with how they could roll this out to their customers. Once completed, the sales process plan was delivered and executed with their main customers.  As a result, they have successfully sold an additional 12% in total revenue on this product alone in an $80 million dollar division.

What are you or your organization waiting for to drive more revenue? Let us help you to define (or refine) these steps and start picking up incremental revenue now!

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