Flannery Sales Systems recently traveled to Richmond, Virginia. In this video, John discusses what you have to look forward to in our upcoming blog posts and newsletter, including guest posts from sales leaders like Brian Dietmeyer and a straightforward look at how FSS can help you sell more.
It would be great if I could sell to you. But I imagine that you will only buy from me if I can help you to sell more.
In order to do that, there are a few things I need to figure out before you’re ready to buy from me.
1. Who do you sell your stuff to? By this I mean what type of company.
2. What job titles do they usually have in the types of companies they work in?
3. What challenges do those customers have when they don’t have the things that your stuff helps them to do?
4. If nothing changes regarding the challenges that those customers face, what is the financial impact?
5. Do those prospects know enough or care enough about those challenges to make a change?
If they do, proceed to #6. If they don’t, you may need to tell them a story about someone who you worked with that didn’t realize the challenges they faced and how your stuff helped to fix it. See if they care. If they do, proceed to #6. If they don’t, move them into your call back file for later and move on to the next prospect.
6. Once those challenges are shared, and there is a reasonable amount of impetus to make a change, describe how your stuff can help them to address and fix the challenges.
See if you can help the customer to quantify the value that they could recognize with an improvement. If you can you have a qualified opportunity. If not, you may have to tell another story about how you helped someone to address the challenges and what the value was for them. If they agree, you may proceed. If not, put them in the same call back sequence as #5.
That’s it – six things I need to understand before I can effectively sell to you. And, guess what, they’re the same six things you need to understand before you can effectively sell to your prospects and customers.
People have been studying the science of learning for thousands of years – dating all the way back to the time of Plato and Socrates in Ancient Greece. Educators seek to improve the way they teach students, parents look for ways to improve the way their children learn, and organizations strive to improve the development they offer to their personnel.
At Flannery Sales Systems, we are also staying on top of the latest in learning development, as we seek to make a lasting impact for our clients. The science of learning is constantly evolving, and we continue to adapt our curriculum to leverage the latest in learning advancements.
Here are some learning practices that we employ daily in our work with our clients:
What advancements in learning will we see in the coming years? While we don’t know for certain, we can be sure that they will include ideas new and old, and leverage technology and edu-tainment to reinvent the way people develop and grow.
This is a question I often ask Sales Managers.
Many of them respond that they do on the grounds of fairness. They try to distribute their time evenly between all team members and provide similar opportunities for coaching and development.
While I appreciate the intent, I disagree with the practice. At the end of the day, being a great sales manager doesn’t lie in giving your reps a similar dose of the same medicine, but rather in tailoring your prescription to each individual, which will likely result in a disproportionate amount of your time and energy spent with some reps and not with others.
Here’s what I recommend:
First, divide your team into thirds in order of performance – top 10%, middle 60% and bottom 30%. Many managers find this exercise difficult, as they’re reluctant to label certain reps as bottom performers. But it’s a critical first step in optimizing your coaching time.
Next, allocate your time with each rep according to his or her grouping.
Contrary to popular opinion, the bulk of your time should not be spent with the top performers (because they’re the most valuable), nor should it be spent with the bottom performers (because they have the most room for improvement). It should actually be spent with the middle 60%. The middle performers are the group that has the most to gain from focused skills coaching, and statistically speaking it’s with this group that you will see the biggest performance lift.
Of course you should still allocate time for your top performers. But your time with this group should be spent focused on retention rather than skills coaching – are they happy in their current position? Is there anything you can do to make their jobs better? Where do they see themselves 3 years from now?
Very little time should be spent with bottom performers. These team members can be an extreme “time suck” with very little payoff, and allocating the bulk of your time to coach the bottom tier very seldom translates into sales results.
So, is this a fair management strategy? Maybe not. But it is effective. It allows you to align your time and talents with the sales reps that stand to make the biggest gains, thus improving your ability to impact overall team performance and revenue generation. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what you were hired to do?
Part II
Earlier this week, we discussed the importance of helping your team avoid discounting, especially during Q4 when sales reps are eager to close business and buyers are ready to play hardball.
The first skill we discussed is teaching your reps to prove value. If you missed that post, take a look here.
The second key skill is negotiation.
You’ll often hear sellers say, “he’s just a good negotiator,” as if it’s something people are born with and you either have it or you don’t. Nothing could be further from the truth. All sales reps can be trained to be great negotiators. Here’s what they must know:
Have a negotiation plan – you must be prepared for a negotiation – you can’t just “wing it”. Before walking into any closing meeting, sellers should assume that the buyer is going ask for price concessions and have a plan in place to respond.
Know your floor – calculate the lowest price you’ll go in order to preserve margin and revenue opportunities for you and your company.
Push back – remind your buyer about the agreed-upon value of your product and/or service and ask if anything has changed, or if they’re prepared to deal with the cost of not moving forward.
Offer other concessions – be ready to offer your customer other concessions that aren’t related to price, things like extended warranty, training, a dedicated service rep, etc. These offer your customers value without eroding your margins. But…if you do offer something, be sure to ask for something in return. What can your customer give you? Think about things like exclusives, referrals, testimonials, etc.
Be prepared to walk away – there are times when a buyer will not move forward without unreasonable discount requests, and good sellers must be prepared to walk. This can be especially hard in Q4, but it is essential to upholding the value of your offering. Tell your buyer, “I’m not going to be able to offer you the discount you’re requesting. But, what I would like to do is take some time to think about our conversation today and get back together next week.” Sometimes knowing that they’ve pushed you as low as you’ll go is all a buyer needs to move forward.
Practice – as with all skill development, practice is key to mastery. Role-play negotiations with your reps to get them prepared for big meetings. Have them practice pushing back and offering non-price concessions in exchange for something of value to your organization. The more they practice, the more successful they’ll be when they go to close business.
In summary, Q4 is upon us. It’s time to focus your team on proving value and smart negotiating in order to help them avoid discounting and maximize revenue achievement.
Part I
Q4 is upon us. How are you going to focus your team in the coming months to successfully close business and maximize revenue potential? One way is to avoid discounting. This may be easier said than done, especially in the fourth quarter when buyers are working hard to get the best deals possible. But, there are two proven methods of avoiding price discounts that we teach our clients in nearly every workshop we run.
The first is to prove value.
Proving value is one of the most fundamental and important skills we work on with our sales reps, and it is central to any customer-focused selling methodology. In order to avoid heavy discounting at the end of the sales cycle, sellers must thoroughly understand their customers’ primary business objectives, the key challenges they face that prevent them from achieving those objectives, and the financial impact of doing nothing. Then, they must align their product/service capabilities with those challenges in the form of a question, such as “if you had a printing service that could turn around jobs in 24 hours and offers free delivery, would that solve the challenge you’d mentioned related to compressed timelines and skyrocketing costs?”
Once that value has been established, when buyers ask for the discount at the end of the sales cycle (and they will ask for the discount), sellers can return to the value they had both agreed their product or service would bring. When asked for the discount, a seller might say, “during our previous conversation, you agreed that using our printing services would save you an estimated $50,000/yr in rush charges and delivery fees. Has anything changed since our last conversation?” Reminding buyers of the value of your solution and the cost to them of not changing is key to closing business without price concessions.
For more on the questions sellers should ask in order to thoroughly establish value, take a look at our three-part series “Helping Your Customers Achieve Their Objectives”.
The second method is skillful negotiation, and we’ll cover that in our blog post later this week, so stay tuned.
Flannery Sales Systems traveled to New York last week to conduct a training workshop. In this video, John talks about our upcoming content for the month of October. With the beginning of Q4 upon us, we’ll be focusing on how to effectively coach your reps to hold margin and maximize their revenue performance. Click to play video.
Flannery Sales Systems traveled to Arizona this month to conduct a training workshop and attend the Anytime Fitness conference. Fortunately, John was able to prepare for the fitness-related show with an impressive hand stand during his tour of Facebook earlier in the month (if you missed it, take a look here…be sure to scroll down to see the photo). In this video, John talks about the importance of content customization for his clients.
Last week I had the opportunity to take a tour of Facebook (FB) in Menlo Park, CA. The offer to visit the campus was extended to me back in April during the conference I spoke at in Riga, Latvia, where Iris Oriss, Director of Internationalization and Localization for FB, was the keynote speaker. Iris is responsible for managing the deployment of the 65 plus additional languages that FB supports worldwide.
During our two meals together at the conference, Iris and I shared fascinating conversation around the vision she builds and executes on for FB, her family and travels, and her thoughts about Hillary Clinton in 2016. I found 2 of the 3 topics of interest. Anyhow, at the conclusion of the conference, Iris invited me to come tour FB, and my reply was “Hell, yes!”
My key observations from the tour include:
1- FB doesn’t have Rules, they have Values: this means that all employees are provided with broad parameters to get the job done, and share the common company mission of “helping people to share and make the world more connected”.
2- Hacking is a Good Thing: despite my previous connotation of the word (pilfering data), Iris assured me that the Hack-a-thon mentality is designed to embrace creativity in pushing innovation, and not just following a set of rules for coding (see #1)
3- Iris has a Global Window to the World: her travel schedule makes me look like a homebody, and her position requires that she understands how to connect 7 billion people through 65 languages that her team manages. She will be published in a MIT publication in the next month; I will send it to you if you wish.
4- My upper body strength improved in Menlo Park (see picture #2): must have been the amazing quality and range of food served on campus.
5- It Takes a Village: and that is what FB has in Menlo Park, a beautiful campus that is well appointed but not overdone. A place that enables 7,000 employees to thrive and create connections worldwide
6- FB Cares: about their employees, the environment and everything on this planet. The Facilities team gently re-located a mother and litter of baby foxes who took the campus as home. And have a look at Internet.org to see the dedication that Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders have to sharing technology with all people.
Many thanks to Iris for the great experience – one I will not forget.
The following is a guest post by Jackie Meyer, a former customer and current colleague of Flannery Sales Systems.
The idea of 180 Degree selling is not a new sales methodology, rather it is the strategy of selling internally into your organization. Most sales books, seminars and classes teach how to sell into an external customer, but what about your internal customer? Everyone in business has internal customers, and they range from the C-Suite all the way down to your subordinates. Selling 101 has taught us to find the Coach, Fox or Sponsor inside the organization to which we are selling, and if this is your unofficial title in your organization for the third parties you partner with, take note of how to find success as the leader of any project you need to get off the ground.
Do Your Homework – What is the situation in the organization or market that would help you support the project you need executed? Are there secondary research reports that can help you with your facts? Have you interviewed people internally to get their thoughts and identify their needs – rather implicit or explicit? Most importantly, how and what are the internal politics you need to manage?
Build Your Concept Pitch – With the data you have collected so far, what correlations can you draw? Do you need to include some education about the project to help others understand its scope? What are the organizational weaknesses you need to consider, and how will you overcome them? Set expectations of what the project can and will do so there is no second guessing for both you and others in your organization.
Provide Project Options – Most people do not like to be told what to do, so provide options with pros and cons. Do not assume everyone understands the opportunity costs involved or that there is money to pay for the project you want to spearhead. In fact, in most cases the money is not budgeted. You must determine how you can mine for it or even plan for its future in the next quarter or year.
Beta Test Your Pitch – You might think you have it all figured out, but after gathering all your data, circumstances and people often change. Find your own coach, fox or sponsor within; gather their feedback on your pitch; and fine tune your knowledge and budget.
Commercialize Your Pitch – Plan it far in advance so you can work through how best to present in order to ensure your content is absorbed in the various minds of the people from whom you need to gain approval. Can you apply the ‘so-what’ test to everything you plan to say? Can you address likely objections that will come your way? Are you confident under pressure? If not, seek help from a trusted friend or colleague to practice your pitch. Besides the fact that Mom was right – practice makes perfect – remember how you need to influence your audience and brush up on your Aristotle philosophy on the art of persuasion.
