Join us in Philadelphia Feb 5, 6 and 7: Eagles to the Super Bowl!

Our existing customers are rolling in the new year, and two new organizations have just brought us on board to help them to drive revenue. We will be conducting a Workshop in Center City Philadelphia from Monday, February 5 until Wednesday, February 7. Please let us now if you’d like to meet with John or join the Workshop for a view into how we help companies to drive revenue.

As a lifelong fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, my family was THRILLED to watch the Eagles beat the Minnesota Vikings, and earn their third trip to the Super Bowl. Growing up in Pennsylvania, the Eagles were, and still are, a significant component of the community in that region.

13 years ago, I attended the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida as the guest of my close friend Tom “Coach” Hannum. We had an amazing experience during that long weekend. The attached picture is from the game; what memories!

This year, the Eagles will WIN-the score will be 24-19. Let’s GO EAGLES!!!!

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How to Hire Amazing Sales Candidates

Today’s post from SellingPower.com is by Jamie Crosbie, CEO and founder of ProActivate. ProActivate has a unique sales talent acquisition model that provides working and winning sales and leadership talent through an in-depth sales behavioral interview process.  

It’s a nail-bitingly tense moment. Everyone is holding their breath, focused on the drama of the launchpad. The countdown drones on. “10…9…8…”

Will the rocket shoot skyward? Or will it fail spectacularly? If you are a sales leader, you already know what pressure is. You live with it. Every. Single. Day.

One of the biggest sources of your stress is probably the performance of your sales team. You are accountable for everything that happens on your watch. Somehow, you have to hire them, pull everyone together, train them, and hold their hands if need be, to launch them into the sales stratosphere. To do that, you need to hire sales reps who burn brighter than the sun.

Where Are the Shining Sales Stars?

Let’s be honest here for a moment: top talent doesn’t respawn like a video game. It would be easier if they did. According to a recent infographic on Glassdoor, in which they asked 1,000 professionals about their plans to change jobs, 68 percent of the respondents stated that they plan to find a new job within the next year.

Only one in five said they had no plan to head for the exit sign anytime soon. Of course, this is a small study, but it dovetails nicely with a recent Bridge Group SaaS Inside Sales Survey that showed a massive 34 percent turnover rate in sales departments (20 percent of which was involuntary and not linked to internal promotions).

So, again, where do you locate talent?

Stop with the Job Boards

Here’s the deal. Hiring from job boards is like trying to find NASCAR drivers at the local  mini-golf course or go-cart racing track. The rocket man (or woman) you are looking for is not going to be skimming job boards. They are out there working (possibly for the competition).

To find and hire the real sales stars, you have to invest in sourcing and targeting them in a meaningful way. Skip the outdated recruiting methods and go into hyperdrive instead.

Step One: Figure out Who You’re Looking For 

First, you need to figure out what you are really looking for in a sales candidate.

What skills do your team members really need in order to succeed? Make sure to highlight those skills from the get-go. If you are advertising for a position, provide specific details about the qualifications. If you are not getting stellar results from a posting, do not simply keep re-running it. The results are likely to be more of the same.

Even though many companies want to slash training budgets, investing in your people should be a priority. Your team needs to be developed, but companies don’t always want to spend the time and energy required to grow their own. It may take a bit of convincing to prove the value of grooming your people to succeed.

Step Two: Go Forth and Find ’em

Next, go where qualified candidates are. There is no single silver bullet, but social media and niche market advertising are more likely to turn up those with “the right stuff” than a rehashed Craigslist ad. Your best bet is to create a flexible strategy rather than simply playing rinse-and-repeat with what doesn’t work.

Actively cultivate relationships by reaching into talent communities such as professional groups and education meetups. Millennials especially are more tuned in and, if you want them, you have to court them in the same way you seek to engage your clients – using market savvy to source and recruit them.

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Keep Your Sales Kickoff Simple

Over the course of a 30- year sales career, I have attended over a hundred Sales Kickoff (SKO) meetings. In some cases, I was the attendee; in others, I was a manager/leader within the organization. Over the past decade, I have often been a speaker/facilitator to help my customers get their year off to a strong start.

One thing I’ve learned that is sure to kill an SKO is when the organization tries to do too much in a small window of time. It’s easy to see how this can happen. Companies spend a lot of money to fly in team members from across the world, and it’s tempting to want to “take advantage” of having everyone in one room.

But, trying to jam too much information into one SKO almost always backfires. When attendees are bombarded with information from product development, customer service, operations, sales & marketing, strategic planning, learning and development and senior leadership; the result is a jumbled mess. Sales people walk away overwhelmed, confused and unmotivated.

Instead, here are a few ways to avoid information overload and create an inspirational and tactically beneficial SKO:

  • Require that pre-work be done by attendees: What information can be delivered virtually that doesn’t have to be presented via a PowerPoint deck?

 

  • Make the main session and breakout sessions fewer and shorter

 

  • Build in follow up/feedback from attendees: Don’t let the sessions be passive—require that attendees provide specific feedback on how they will use the information shared to win more opportunities and improve their overall performance as a sales team.

 

  • Coordinate Content: Have one person review all the content to make sure the material has clear connections and avoids redundancy

And last, but not least……

  • Limit the Awards Given: Nothing will bore attendees more than a drawn-out award event that gives out too many trophies.

 An extreme example of reducing the scope of an SKO is eliminating the event entirely. Some companies have gone this route, but I don’t recommend it. SKO’s have an important purpose in bringing a sales team together for face-to-face collaboration and learning.

So, here’s hoping that your next SKO adheres to my recommendations above. Some will say “more is better”. I suggest instead that “better is better”. If you can keep your content focused on painting an overall vision, providing tactical tools, and seeking to inspire, your SKO will be a success.

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Sales Strategy Turned into Sales Process

John Golden, the Chief Strategy Officer of Pipeliner CRM, interviewed me recently to understand the most important topics related to the creation and implementation of sales process. Listen in below on the topics we cover this week, and the recommendations made on how you can drive revenue through a customized sales process.

Q: You get your sales strategy down and you’ve done your proper homework and you want to translate this into a functional and well defined sales process, what are the first steps?

A: Well the first steps are to understand how people are buying from you, who are those individuals and what are the activities that they will be taking on as they determine what needs are in the organization. How will these individuals go through and make a purchasing process? How do they acquire products or services? Before we get into the selling and the misnomers of a sales process, we want to make sure we understand what’s happening on the customer or the prospect side to actually procure your product or service.

Q: One of the things I’ve come across a lot in the past is: you lay out a sales process but people interpret the stages differently. Define what happens within a sales process stage.

A: Yes, we define what happens in a sales process for the customer or prospect first, then we go in and figure out what things the seller or people who are supporting the seller should be doing during those stages. Are you advancing or are you continuing in stages? What’s the exit? The exit has to be agreed from one stage to the next by the prospect or the customer. We put these things in and don’t want it to be burdensome in a sales process. It doesn’t have to be contractual every time but we do need to get an agreement that we’re moving forward and it’s based on the definition within those stages.

 

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Sales Methodology is Dead: Long Live Your Customized Sales Process

It’s been thirty years since the inception of sales methodology as a product or service offering within the overall sales training industry. In the 80s, training programs like SPIN Selling, Solution Selling and Professional Sales Skills (PSS) were developed with the purpose of teaching sales teams to sell more effectively. This intellectual property (IP) was then licensed to organizations for their internal use. The burgeoning sales training field was accelerated with the Information Technology (IT) revolution in the late 80s, and even further with the explosion of the Internet in the 90s. And it remains ubiquitous today, as nearly all sales organizations have attempted to adopt one or more training methodologies to improve their performance.

We often speak to sales leaders who have been through two, three or four different methodologies and have become fatigued with the various iterations of what is the “best” way to sell. Too often companies try to get a certain methodology to work within their unique markets without taking the time to customize the steps, tools and content that will be used to approach their customers. This never works – instead of improving sales effectiveness, you instead lose the confidence of your team as they’ve invested their time and energy in a failed program.

Major shifts have occurred in buying behavior, as well as new strategies for customer engagement. Current sales methodologies have components that work and others that don’t. A customized sales process is good because it is designed solely for your organization, one that includes tools specifically geared for your teams and your customers. You can leverage the investments you’ve already made to make your sales organization even more effective.

What is certain with customization is that sales teams are much more likely to participate in a sales process that is uniquely theirs. A collaborative process helps create wide-scale buy-in from marketing, customer service, inside sales, technical support and other customer-facing departments.

If your organization has tried to adopt a sales methodology without success, or just needs some fine-tuning in your current process, please consider Flannery Sales Systems’ expertise to give your sales managers and teams a customized sales process approach. Visit our web site at www.drive-revenue.com. There are sure to be several questions and topics to consider, but whether you do this with us or with someone else, just remember — YOUR SALES PROCESS is the answer.

Pipeliner CRM visually empowers sales teams with their precisely customized sales processes. Download a free trial now.

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Ask A Sales Leader: Ayham Al Masri

Ayham Al Misri in Dubai Frb 2016-1_resized

In this month’s Ask A Sales Leader we are pleased to hear from Ayham Al Masri. Ayham is the Sales Manager for RS Fitness in Dubai, UAE. Ayham and his team just went through our program, and read below to learn more about how his team is improving results in the field.

  1. Describe how your customer facing teams use your organization’s sales process.

By spending a longer time on solution development, learning as much as we can about the client and the project, understanding better the key players and their primary business objectives and the challenges.

We then try to show the client the financial impact of these challenges and provide solutions to address them. After that we can move into presenting the solution and provide added value to our offer.

Once we have established value, we can then later negotiate and close the deal.

  1. What is your Management’s approach to Coaching sales reps?

Our approach to coaching revolves around making sure that our salespeople complete what is written above, and then being well versed with the products and services we sell, and how they help the customer meet their business objectives.

I also help my team to create valuable relationships by putting ourselves in the buyer’s position. This is the key to effective Coaching.

  1. How do you reinforce sales skill development for sales reps?

To open up to learning new things related to the industry, and being committed to the products and services they sell by being more involved in events and training programs.

  1. What advice would you give to other sales leaders/reps?

My advice would be that if Sales reps don’t want to learn new things, its fine. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated by the industry and competition.

Those who refuse to learn and improve, will definitely one day become redundant and not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard, expensive way and I don’t think anyone would want to put themselves in that position.

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Give your Prospect the O-K to say N-O

No_picIf you’re in sales, at some point, you have probably challenged yourself with the attitude that when a prospect says “no” that’s when “real” selling begins, because “no is just the first step to yes”.  Our type A personalities are programed to believe that a “no” is a failure.  While it can be disappointing, it is inevitable if you have a career in sales.  Review these tips to remind yourself that N-O is O-K.

1.  Be open to the fact that not everyone is a perfect fit for what you sell. 

This realization will keep your objectivity clear, reminding you that you are not a failure for not selling to everyone.  In fact, if you push the sale when “no” is really the best answer for a prospect, you can be pretty sure that “no” would have been the best answer for you too.  When the customer realizes that they were “sold”, your persistent push to “yes” can become your biggest nightmare for the next few years, when trying to satisfy an unhappy customer who wasn’t a good fit in the first place.

 2.  Re-evaluate your role. 

Instead of thinking that your job is to convince people to buy from you, take a customer-focused approach, having a desire to help a prospect solve a problem or reach a business objective…with your product or service, of course.  The ultimate success is when a prospect starts convincing you that he has a problem and needs your help.  When your approach is to understand their needs, the dynamics change dramatically, and you end up with a happy customer who tells one person, and they tell another, and so on.  Now that’s a “yes”!

3.  Any sales technique that puts the buyer at a disadvantage is inappropriate.

When your goal is to resist a “no”, you create an atmosphere of pressure that will turn an interested prospect into a defensive prospect. Buyers hate pressure. Pressure kills rapport and trust.  A wise sales person will try to remove the pressure and build trust by actually giving a prospect the opportunity to say “no” early in the conversation. Interestingly, the more opportunities you give a prospect to say “no”, the fewer “no’s” you will actually hear.

4.  Provide an easy exit. 

Although this behavior is contradictory to what a prospect would expect from a sales person, give this a try:

Susan, we may get to the end of our meeting today and find out that our company and our potential solutions may not be an appropriate fit to your business challenges.  If it is apparent that there is no point in continuing this discussion, I want you to understand that I am okay with you telling me that.  I will not try to convince you otherwise if that is your decision.

There are two winners in every sale:  The one who wins the business, and the one who gets out the earliest, realizing that they will not win the business.  It’s simple but true:  N-O is O-K.

 

 

 

 

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Sales Kick Off Services

sales_1

Our customers have relied on us to enhance the impact at their Sales Kick Off meetings with a dynamic speaker sharing a similar, but outside-of- the- company perspective. Focusing on the core areas for selling success, some of the topics we cover include:

  • Prospecting
  • Referral Prospecting
  • Discovery
  • Getting to the Decision Makers
  • Establishing Value
  • Identifying Buying Influences
  • Negotiating

 

We assimilate the information and techniques that top performers are using to win business, and put it into a simple process that all can follow. This allows attendees to take away the steps they need to be successful right after the meeting. Management also has a blueprint for what to look for in the near term, and our follow on services show Managers how to Coach to the skills described.

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Improve Your Odds on Opportunity Development: In Horse Racing and with Sales Process

The 2018 Del Mar Thoroughbred Horse Racing Season held its Opening Day in Del Mar, on July 18th, with racing fans talking of “odds”,  “win, place or show”, “handicap”, “homestretch”, and ultimately, “winning the purse”.  Last year, Flannery Sales Systems held a round table discussion with 18 business people talking about making it through the backstretch of 2017 with Sales Process; looking at “handicaps”, avoiding getting “shut out”, and “winning the purse” more often, more quickly, and with better forecasting odds, to help them place bets on winning more deals to drive Q3 and Q4 revenue.

For serious racing fans, betting on the right thoroughbred requires an in depth understanding of the horse and the dynamics of the race; It’s more than just a gamble.  It’s a process.  For sellers, a formalized, documented, repeatable Sales Process can help take the “gamble” out of winning a deal. CSO Insights says that the win rate on forecasted deals in 2016 was 46.4%-less than HALF “came in”.

 

Our round-table discussion centered around four main topics with expert comments shared and bulleted beneath each topic.

  1. Establishing a Customer’s Buying Process Stages (Determining “Odds” Based on an Understanding of a Prospect’s Buying Process)
  • “A real Sales Process is based on how your customers buy; it is more than a few stages designated in your CRM.”
  • “Process keeps everyone in the office on the same page.”
  1. Understanding a Prospect’s Needs (Avoid getting “shut out” by selecting opportunities best suited to your solution)
  • “People think they understand my products, but they don’t really understand how to USE my product to help them reach their goals.  That is my job, but I have to understand their NEEDS first!”
  • “’Avoid show-up and throw-up’ and the ‘harbor tour’ by understanding the prospect’s needs BEFORE offering your solution.”
  1. Identifying, Developing and Enhancing Selling Skills Associated With Each Stage (Reducing “Handicaps”)
  • “Most managers are “deal coaches”. A true manager will help elevate the SKILLS of their reps.”
  • “We try to hire the skill set, but need to follow-up with training on specific skill deficits. We’re not sure what those deficits are.”
  1. Monitoring Progress from Stage to Stage with Prospect Verified Outcomes (Measuring “Furlongs” all the way to the “Homestretch” for the Win!)
  • “It’s hard to tell if opportunities are moving forward or stuck.”
  • “Confirm a prospect’s urgency and their time commitment to the project.”

Applying process, and supplementing it with a Sales Skills Coaching program (a trainer and a jockey?) increases win rates by 11%. Our customers have recognized these results, and are off to a winning season!  We welcome the opportunity to speak with you about where to get started. So let’s speak soon, as the horses are on the track!

 

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