Join Us for the “To The Point Innovative Strategies” Webinar

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Join John and three other experts on Thursday, April 30th at 4PM EST/1PM PST who will cut to the chase to provide contrarian insights on how to navigate in this new environment. You will get perspectives from Strategic, Financial, Sales and Growth capacities that can be applied straight away to make a difference.

Forget the rest, join the best! See you on Thursday.

John will be discussing how to sell value when everyone else is selling themselves. There will also be 3 other expert speakers. Click on this Zoom Meeting link to register .

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Adapt Your Approach: Selling in Uncertain Times

selling in uncertain times

Introducing a new program to help sales teams, and others in customer facing roles to navigate the new world. We have partnered with The Brevet Group again to bring you this exciting offering.

Selling in Uncertain Times (SIUT) includes a series of virtual training modules covering the mindset, skillset, and toolset sales reps and management need today. The content will inspire and equip your sellers to connect with buyers in these uncertain times.

Each session is customizable to your organization and the program can be launched immediately. The series modules include highly actionable buyer insights, best practices, virtual selling skills, and practical tips and tactics.

Our content will be continuously updated to reflect the changing market conditions.

For many companies, buying has changed again, which means that sales teams and their leaders have to adapt. And amongst the chaos in the current environment, adaptation must come quickly. So here is an offering for your teams to utilize to navigate through this maze.

SIUT will help you through. The perspective comes from conversations with customers and prospects and how to help them to better understand the value you can bring.

I have already spoken with several of you about this, and look forward to getting started. Call me directly (858 518-7039) to discuss how we can customize and deliver this for you, or get you ready to do the delivery.

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Selling in Uncertain Times

For many companies, buying has changed again, which means that sales teams and their leaders have to adapt. And amongst the chaos in the current environment, adaptation must come quickly. So here is an offering for your teams to utilize to navigate through this maze.

“Selling In Uncertain Times” will help you through. The perspective comes from conversations with customers and prospects and how to help them to better understand the value you can bring.

I have already spoken with several of you about this, and look forward to the conversation to get started. Call me directly (858 518-7039) to discuss how we can customize and deliver this for you, or get you ready for the delivery.

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Eight Tactics For Gaining Access To The Decision Maker

Over half the problems encountered by salespeople are caused by their inability to gain access to the decision maker. Failure to be in front of the person with the ultimate authority to approve the purchase will, in every case, eliminate your ability to get a positive decision.  You will, however, get lots of stalls (“I need to run it by…”) and plenty of “think it overs.”

Since one of your biggest challenges is to gain access to the decision maker, let’s take a moment to look at some proven tactics that will help you accomplish this difficult task and help you avoid spending your time with the wrong people.

1. Assume it. Early in the sales cycle ask, “When am I meeting with the decision maker?” If you get some push back, you need to say, “I’m confused, why not?”

2. Ask for it. Simply state, “I’ll need to meet with the decision maker.  Can you arrange the meeting?” (I’m confused, why not?)

3. “Company policy.” “It’s company policy that we meet with the decision maker.”  (Maybe it isn’t, but maybe it should be.)

4. Bargain for access. Some lower level folks who want to protect their “turf” or have an ego trip may deny you access until you’ve “proven” yourself. In cases like this it’s important to find out under what circumstances they would introduce you to the decision maker. When you’ve found that out simply state, “So if I understand this correctly, in return for proving to you that we can adequately address your challenges, you will introduce me to the decision maker. Right?”

5. Justification. “I need to understand the issues from everyone’s point of view. If I don’t understand what the decision maker’s issues are, my proposal may miss the mark. That’s probably not a good strategy for either of us, is it?”

6. “Biggest concern.”  “My biggest concern is that I won’t be able to meet with the decision maker during this process and that might impact my ability to completely understand the company’s challenges and ultimately present a really good solution. Can we avoid that?”

7. Peer to peer. “Our president (EVP) wants to come to the meeting and wants to meet your president.  Sorry, I have no control over this. Will you let him know?” Obviously this tactic gets other people involved, but sometimes that’s important.

8. Asking for help. People want to help other people. Use comments like, “I’ve got a problem and I need your help” or “I’m a little confused.” You’ll be surprised at how much mileage you get from this tactic.

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Getting Your Customers to Talk About Their Objectives

business people talking

People are best convinced by reasons they themselves discover, so getting your prospects to define their own objectives and challenges is critical to getting their buy in throughout the sales process. The following are three types of questions designed to get your prospects talking about their challenges, as it relates to achieving their objectives.

Open Questions.  Your prospect has discussed his or her primary business objective.  Now, how do you get them talking about why they aren’t accomplishing that objective?   These questions are designed to do just that. They uncover the tip of the iceberg, and are the first step in the discovery process.

  • “What are the main concerns you’re having with respect to…..?”
  • “Usually people come to us for help in one or more of the following areas (list 2-3 problems you solve for people).  Are any of these issues for you?”
  • “Tell me more…” or “Tell me why…”

When you ask questions like this, look for the prospect to make statements like:

  • “My sales are not where I want them to be.”
  • “We’re spending too much on…..”
  • “We’re not happy with…..”

Cause Questions.  Now that you have the problem defined, the next step is to look for the reasons for the challenge.  What’s causing the disparity?  Typically there are several causes.  Pay close attention as these are the issues you will ultimately try to resolve for the prospect. This information leads you to your presentation.

  • “What are the reasons this is going on?”
  • “Why do you suppose this is happening?”
  • “Do you know what’s causing these problems?”

It’s vital for you to understand, even better than the prospect, what’s causing their challenges.  You’ll hear things like:

  • “Our current supplier is having quality and delivery problems.”
  • “We don’t have the right software and our people need training.”

Keep Them Talking. Learn to direct the conversation and keep your prospects talking.  When they are talking, they are giving you valuable information. When you’re monopolizing the conversation, you’re losing an opportunity to discover what will motivate them to take action.  Add these types of questions to your repertoire and you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the issues.

  • “Tell me more about that.”
  • “What else is there?”
  • ”Is there anything else?”
  • “Could you be a little more specific?”           

With these three types of questions, you should be able to encourage prospects to fully define their key challenges, which is a critical first step in the qualifying process.

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Redefining the Elevator Pitch

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Formerly, an elevator pitch was a short summary designed to describe your company or product.  As the name implies, it should be short enough that it can be delivered during the span of an elevator ride.

Why the brevity? The truth is that when you are “cold calling” into a prospect, ten to fifteen seconds is all you have to make an initial connection and get permission to continue the conversation. In light of this, it is critical that you can quickly establish trust and pique interest.

Today’s prospects are receiving so many incoming sales calls, that they are particularly wary of being “sold.” The old way of delivering your company’s message is no longer good enough.

Let’s take a look at how elevator pitches have traditionally been made and how they should evolve to become more effective in today’s selling environment.

The Old Elevator Pitch

The call starts with, “I’m Bob with XYZ Printing. How are you today?” 

The “clever” segue into the sales pitch, assuming we still have the prospect on the line, goes something like this.  “We’re the premier printing company in the area.  We’ve been serving the local market for over 20 years and have the most advanced digital printing equipment in the area.  Our specialty is quick turnaround and competitive pricing.  I’d like to set an appointment to meet with you to show you how we can save you time and money on your next printing project. Would Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning be better for you?”

Does that sound familiar?  It probably does and there are many problems with this approach:

  • “How are you today?”  Every telemarketer in the world starts the call by asking about the prospect’s “well-being.”  While this is an honest attempt at politeness, prospects know you don’t really care, so it comes across as insincere and makes you sound like a telemarketer.
  • The “compelling” pitch by the printing salesperson sounds like the other printing company that called the prospect yesterday.  They said they were the best in town and could save him or her time and money too.  Whom should he or she believe
  • “Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning?”  How many times have we heard that over-used alternative choice close?  Nearly every salesperson uses it.
  • The salesperson wants an appointment but doesn’t want to take the time to find out if there’s any pain.  This is the typical product pusher’s strategy and the prospect knows it.
  • The easy blow off that the prospect can, and often does, use is to say, “Just send me some information about it.”  And you know how sincere that request is.

The New, Improved Elevator Pitch

Never fear, there is a better way. Take a look at this new, improved approach.

This call starts with, “I’m Bob Smith with XZY Printing.  Thanks for taking my call.  Can I take about 20 seconds to tell you why I called, then you can tell me if we need to talk further?”

When you get permission, you say, “I’ll be brief, right to the point.  We’re one of the leading commercial printing companies in the area.  Typically companies switch to us because they’re upset with long turnaround times, concerned about the inconsistent quality of the final product, or frustrated that their printer can’t offer any creative ideas to improve the job.  Are any of these issues for you?”

Or, you may want to give a specific example of how you’ve helped a competitor with a specific pain, something like “We recently helped [competitor’s name] save $2,000 per month on printing fees and reduce their turnaround time to 48 hours. Is this something that would be helpful to your business?”

If the answer is affirmative, you then go on to explore the pain further.

If the answer is negative, you could conclude the call quickly by saying, “Sorry to have bothered you.  Have a good day.”  And make another call.  Remember, you’re trying to find that gold nugget quickly and not waste time with people who are not good prospects.

There are many benefits to this approach:

  • It’s different.
  • You won’t have done anything to destroy rapport.
  • You won’t sound like every other salesperson that calls.

Your ability to differentiate yourself in your initial call with a prospect will dramatically improve your success at developing new business. Try our new and improved elevator pitch for yourself and see how it works for you.

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Turning Simple Habits Into Top Sales Performance

Your sales team is one of the greatest assets your company has. A late businessman, William Clement Stone, once said, “Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.”  But how do you maintain your company’s strong standing and keep the company moving forward? One way is to turn simple habits into effective sales strategies.

Here are some great practices to help maximize your sales performance:

  1. Analyze Your Success – Don’t wait for the metrics and stats given to you by your manager to track your progress. Analyze each sale and failure to see how you can improve for the next time. Not only will this help you for future sales, but will also show your manager how on top of your work you are. It’s a win-win.
  • Encourage Your Prospects to Engage Before the end of a Meeting – Many sales people wait until the end of a meeting to allot time for questions and comments. Why wait until the end? Tell your prospect at the beginning of the meeting to ask questions or explain their concerns when one arises. This small change can increase your closing ratios significantly.
  • Never Skip a Follow-up Opportunity – Most sales don’t close on the first contact, maybe not even on the second. It can take multiple touches to get your potential clients to trust you and your product. Do not hesitate to follow up. These opportunities just may be your actual sale.
  • Know What You Want – Have a purpose before starting your sales. What goal do you want to achieve? The best sales people know what they want before starting so they know how to manage their buyers and every action they make gets them closer to success.
  • Celebrate – Celebrate after each sale. This is a habit that can be done with the rest of your team. Hang up a bell that you can ring each time you close a deal or find something else to let others know you’ve helped the company get one step closer to your goal. Celebrating is a great way to boost morale.

As a sales rep, you are a key player in your business. Focus on building simple habits that reinforce key selling behaviors and, when implemented, help create effective sales strategies. Are there other habits your sales team uses to maximize performance? We’d love to hear them!

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3 Ways to Motivate Your Sales Team — Without Stressing Them Out

This article was published in The Harvard Business Review, written by  Scott Edinger

It’s widely accepted that if you are in sales, you will have a quota. Achieve your quota, good job. Miss your quota, bad job. Miss your quota by a lot or miss it multiple times: no job. This creates stress for individual sellers and the sales organization as a whole.

Plenty of jobs are stressful and have objective measures of achievement. But there is a special kind of stress reserved for the sales function. When the numbers are down, the reaction from management is to turn up the heat on the sales organization. At a global technology conference last year, I asked an audience of CEOs what they do when they are behind on their numbers. “We beat on the sales team to bring in more,” one CEO immediately said. Everyone laughed. The follow-up comments and questions revealed that this approach was common across the group of 70 CEOs.

While it is the sales team’s job to bring in business, simply cranking up the heat to get the numbers you want can produce an environment where stress backfires. Too much stress in any professional situation will mask talent and lead to poor decision-making. Our ability to focus, solve problems, and accurately remember details declines dramatically in the face of excess stress. We’ve all seen it happen when someone “chokes” under pressure.

When sellers are under inordinately high pressure to close deals, they may become overly aggressive and damage (or end) promising sales cycles. Pushiness and other desperate behaviors reduce sales effectiveness and cause margins to shrink. If your team is selling any kind of complex solution, most customers will become non-responsive when pressured.

Stress can cause entire sales teams to behave as if any business is good business. Need a discount to make the deal easier? Sure! Wrong kind of prospect or problematic deal? Who cares, we have a number to make this month. The attitude is “any revenue, at any cost.” Sellers become myopically short-term focused, just as they’ve been directed. This approach has long-term consequences for the business: mounting losses and failure to create a compelling sales experience.

In an effort to produce maximum effort and create urgency in a sales organization, leadership will apply mounting pressure, drilling down on the importance of making the monthly or quarterly number. In most cases, leaders believe they are pushing hard in the spirit of driving for results. While it’s important to a point, leaders risk pushing to a point of diminishing returns.

You can clearly see how stress affects performance in the below graph, originally created by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. Their research illuminates how performance on tasks improves with increased physiological or mental arousal. Stress does help us get the job done — but only to a point. Too little stress, and you’re in the weak performance zone; too much anxiety, and performance is impaired. In the middle, an optimal level of stress produces what we’d call peak performance. The technical term for that zone is eustress, which is exactly where leaders should set the pressure to create optimal results.

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Instead of just dialing up the pressure on sales to hit the numbers, leaders can maximize performance by engaging with sellers in these three areas:

  1. Focus on creating an exceptional sales experience. The sales experience is a vital differentiator when customers evaluate their options. Research indicates that the sales experience influences approximately 25% of the decision criteria in B2B selling. The sales experience includes creating value for customers by helping them to see issues or problems they hadn’t considered, opportunities they weren’t aware of, and solutions they haven’t anticipated. This requires sales professionals to apply research, strategic thinking, and acumen to the customer’s circumstances so they can create value in the experience, beyond the product or service they are selling. These nuanced elements of the sales cycle suffer when the focus is on closing a deal within a specified period of time (month, quarter, or year-end).
  2. Focus on the sales process (not the outcome). The sales process is a road map to creating the kind of sales experience that customers value and that differentiates you from the competition. If you want to create a process that will help your sellers sell, match it to how buyers buy. In each phase of the sales process, there are a few key actions that influence whether or not an opportunity will progress to the next stage. Work with the sales team to understand where they need leadership help. This may include discussing creative approaches to gain access to key decision-makers, planning sales call strategies around critical issues and investing in SMEs to support the sales process and demonstrate capabilities.
  3. Focus on coaching to improve performance. Consultative selling of sophisticated solutions requires expertise that is never fully developed in training programs. It requires skill development from practice in real situations, which comes from coaching. When leaders focus on building sales talent, they are investing in a competitive advantage for the business. Leaders can provide good models of what to do, followed by practice, clear feedback on specific skill improvements, and follow-up to incorporate feedback into performance —not just once, but over and over again as a skill set is honed to proficiency and then mastered.

As a leader, you have the greatest influence on the stress levels of your team. Pressure may create diamonds out of coal, but you are working with people. Getting results is the primary objective, but incessantly pushing for sales to hit a number can have diminishing returns. The downstream effects may also be hazardous to the overall health of your business. Focus your efforts on actually making people better at their jobs, building capability for improved performance, and the numbers will follow.

Scott Edinger is the founder of Edinger Consulting Group. He is a coauthor of the HBR article Making Yourself Indispensable. His latest book is The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness Within Your Company. Connect with Scott at Twitter.com/ScottKEdinger.

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How Can We Help? Selling Skills and Coaching in an Online Environment

The current environment has required business leaders to make critical decisions to ensure the health and safety of their employees. Our team at FSS has done the same and will take all precautions to maintain our health while continuing to support the ongoing needs of our customers. “How” we support the needs has been modified, although these pieces have been in place for a while.

Reinforcement of Existing Sales Skills and Coaching

You know that sales training is important, and continual reinforcement of selling skills by First Line Managers is the key to improvement. That’s why we developed the FSS Online Learning Portal (OLP) 5 years ago. With six video tutorials, each 5 to 7 minutes long, the OLP offers sales management the opportunity to develop their reps’ critical selling skills without having to leave the office. The OLP also features an e-toolkit with helpful tips and documents to support each stage, a reinforcement quiz, the Manager’s Coaching Room, all supported with live Zoom coaching sessions.

For New, Custom Built Solutions from a Distance

We also have a full suite offering called the Virtual Workshop Exchange (VWE) that provides participants with a Workshop environment, complete with leader-guided discussions, interactive Q&A, sales tool kits and role play exercises. We still believe that live, in-person workshops are the best method to establish initial capabilities, but we will have to wait and see when that becomes possible again in light of the situation.

To take your sales team to the next level, check out the OLP or the VWE. To learn more, contact John Flannery at john@drive-revenue.com or 858-518-7039.

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The Sales Relay: Going for the Gold

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We have a lot of exciting things to look forward to in 2020. One of my personal favorites is the Summer Olympics, which are coming to Tokyo this July. The event I’m most looking forward to is the 4×100-meter relay race. This is consistently one of the most popular events in the Olympics for both spectators and tv audiences alike. It’s an athletic endeavor which combines both speed and endurance, great individual performances as well as cohesive teamwork.

I was recently thinking that the 4×100 relay can be compared to a great sales process. How? Keep reading: 

  1. Leg 1 – REFINE: The opening leg of a relay is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important stages of the race. It’s critical for runners to get out of the blocks quickly to establish their team’s position. Similarly, the “Refine” stage of a sales process is where sales teams hone the steps they will take to build a steady, repeatable revenue stream. This includes how leads are generated and moved through the sales funnel.
  • Leg 2 – BUILD: The second leg of the relay is where runners build a steady, consistent pace in order to hold onto their positions. The runners are taking inventory of their positions, maintaining steady speed and lining things up for a clean handoff.
  • Leg 3 – DELIVER: In the third leg, runners rely on stamina in order to set their teams up for the best chance to win in the final leg. Getting ready for that transition to win is critical to delivering the best case possible for success in the end.
  • Leg 4 – REINFORCE: The final leg is where relays are won and lost. The first three legs may go well, but if runners in the anchor position don’t finish strong, their teams won’t come out on top.  In the same way, your sales team may have a solid sales process, but without ongoing reinforcement of sales skills, your overall performance will fall short. Sales managers must be equipped to provide timely, personalized rep coaching to reinforce the skills needed to consistently meet and exceed sales targets.

Like the talented athletes that will make up Team USA’s 4×100-meter relay teams this summer, your sales teams will rely on certain strategies to ensure success. One of the most critical is a well-defined sales process that will help sales teams get off the blocks quickly and maintain their stamina all the way to the finish line.

For more on ways sales process drives revenue, click here.

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