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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:
- 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!
John and the FSS team traveled to Rome in the first week of February to work with a global commercial translation services company.
Many of us have attended sales training classes or retreats that weren’t very valuable or impactful. Why is this? There are several key attributes that sales trainings must incorporate in order to be successful.
They are:
- Learning relies on self-discovery. Many sales leaders do a good job talking to their sales teams, but not necessarily training them. In order to really learn, sales teams need to come to key concepts on their own. The art of good training lies in fostering that discovery.
- Practice, practice, practice. Training is about teaching a new skill or behavior, and in order to master that, sales associates need a safe environment to practice what they’ve learned and receive timely, constructive feedback.
- Training shouldn’t be theoretical. Training should be specific and applicable – sales associates should be able to use what they’d learned right away to achieve better results.
- Training without process is pointless. Once trained, sales teams need process to incorporate their new skills into a regular operating cadence. This tactical execution is critical if training is to lead to sustainable, repeatable sales growth.
Sales leaders tend to be great sales performers, as well as great people developers. The best leaders are able to effectively recruit, coach, and inspire. But, most sales leaders do not have the expertise to facilitate great training. And considering the cost of putting on a training event (travel, facilities, curriculum development, lost sales time), this is one area that companies can’t afford to get wrong.
Although training alone does not equate to sales results, a great training platform coupled with excellent recruiting, a well-defined process, and effective leadership is critical to sales success. You can’t produce repeatable revenue without effectively training your sales team.
What does it mean to giver buyers permission to buy? Dictionary.com defines permission as “authorization granted to do something; formal consent.”
As a salesperson, you might not think you need to give buyers permission to buy. They are free to do what they want: buy or not buy, buy from you or buy from your competitor. Where does the concept of permission come in?
It’s not actually permission from you. It’s you as the salesperson helping the buyer to give themselves permission to make the purchase.
Buyers are often more sophisticated than sellers give them credit for. They are also more risk adverse and they will second guess their decisions. Simply stated, buyers are not going to buy until they are comfortable that they have all the information they need to make a good decision.
You as the salesperson can help them get to that point. Here are five ways you can help the buyer give themselves permission to buy from you by ensuring they believe they have all the information they need:
- Understand their needs. As you get to know the buyer, ask targeted questions that will help you really understand their needs and the problem they are trying to solve. Use active listening skills and repeat back to the buyer what you think they are saying so they know they are heard.
- Build trust. Buyers won’t buy from a salesperson they don’t trust. If a buyer senses the seller is genuinely interested in helping them address a need, he or she is much more receptive to sharing information when asked questions, as well as more likely to trust the salesperson. When a seller appears to be pressuring the buyer to make a decision, the buyer becomes wary of the seller’s intentions and may defer the decision or say no.
- Help buyer discover the solution themselves. By building trust and asking the right questions, you will be able to paint an accurate picture of how the buyer will use your product to solve their problem. They need to get to the “aha” moment when they can actually picture who will use the product and how.
- Establish value to overcome barriers. Buyers will have barriers based on value. They will do research online on their own to overcome enough of these barriers to be willing to engage in a conversation with a seller—and this conversation is critical. According to an article at com, “Forrester research indicates that the conversation with sales reps is still a strong source of buyer influence.” Once in the conversation, the seller must understand what the buyer perceives as value of the product and build more value on that basis to overcome additional barriers.
- The cost of NOT doing business today. There was a time when sellers were encouraged to close early and often. In today’s tight market place, this approach no longer works. Buyers are increasingly risk adverse and decision making has expanded to include a larger group of people. When a salesperson can help the buyer calculate how much waiting will cost them in a week’s time, a month’s time or a year’s time, that dollar value will help underscore the need to close quickly.
As a seller, you’re not the one granting permission to the buyer to buy. But you can help the buyer to give themselves this permission with these five tips.
Our team was in New York recently meeting with The Board of a prospect organization. Winter has arrived, and we send our holiday greetings from the 60th floor overlooking the Hudson River and Central Park.
As we approach the end of 2019, it’s time to look forward to the year ahead—starting with an assessment of your sales team’s performance over the past year. How did they do? Where do the need to improve?
More importantly, how do you measure their performance so you can answer those questions?
To remove the subjectivity and help you take a quantitative approach in evaluating your team, we’ve developed a list of questions that get at the answers. Use the questions to distinguish the producers from the laggards. And use these questions to determine which skills your salespeople need to improve on in order to meet and exceed goals.
Also see if you can match the question posed with the corresponding sales skill. (You’ll find the answers at the end of this article.)
Questions for quantitatively measuring sales performance:
- How many of the qualified opportunities in your current sales pipeline were initiated by the seller?
- What title(s) most commonly appears in the field for primary point of contact? Is that a decision maker’s title?
- How well matched are your company’s product or service capabilities with the prospect’s business objectives?
- What value (outside of product/price) will the prospect’s organization be able to identify while working with your company?
- How much research does a prospect do before engaging with a salesperson?
- Who on your sales team held the margin line in the negotiations, and who caved to the buyer’s pressure?
In addition to answering these questions, also evaluate your team individually. How well can the individuals on your teams execute each skill? By using the questions above, managers can identify who has which skills and where improvement is needed. This is how your qualitative analysis of skills can be analyzed in relation to the quantitative assessment.
Here’s an example of the kind of insight you can gain: We worked with a company that calculated the cost of every sales call to be $400.00. They discovered that many of the calls were to prospects who would never produce enough revenue to cover the cost of the calls made. The managers were then tasked to analyze how well the reps could execute each step, and then identify where coaching was needed. As a result, the reps’ overall skills improved, the amount of time spent on the wrong prospects was reduced, and revenue results increased with fewer overall calls being made. In essence, the focus is on the quality of the calls versus the quantity of calls conducted. All because they took a quantitative approach using these questions.
And as promised, here are the skills that match each question above: 1) New Business Development 2) Accessing Key Players 3) Qualification and Positioning 4) Establishing Value 5) Opportunity Management/Forecasting 6) Negotiation.
As we approach the end of 2019, it’s time to look forward to the year ahead—starting with an assessment of your sales team’s performance over the past year. How did they do? Where do the need to improve?
More importantly, how do you measure their performance so you can answer those questions?
To remove the subjectivity and help you take a quantitative approach in evaluating your team, we’ve developed a list of questions that get at the answers. Use the questions to distinguish the producers from the laggards. And use these questions to determine which skills your salespeople need to improve on in order to meet and exceed goals.
Also see if you can match the question posed with the corresponding sales skill. (You’ll find the answers at the end of this article.)
Questions for quantitatively measuring sales performance:
- How many of the qualified opportunities in your current sales pipeline were initiated by the seller?
- What title(s) most commonly appears in the field for primary point of contact? Is that a decision maker’s title?
- How well matched are your company’s product or service capabilities with the prospect’s business objectives?
- What value (outside of product/price) will the prospect’s organization be able to identify while working with your company?
- How much research does a prospect do before engaging with a salesperson?
- Who on your sales team held the margin line in the negotiations, and who caved to the buyer’s pressure?
In addition to answering these questions, also evaluate your team individually. How well can the individuals on your teams execute each skill? By using the questions above, managers can identify who has which skills and where improvement is needed. This is how your qualitative analysis of skills can be analyzed in relation to the quantitative assessment.
Here’s an example of the kind of insight you can gain: We worked with a company that calculated the cost of every sales call to be $400.00. They discovered that many of the calls were to prospects who would never produce enough revenue to cover the cost of the calls made. The managers were then tasked to analyze how well the reps could execute each step, and then identify where coaching was needed. As a result, the reps’ overall skills improved, the amount of time spent on the wrong prospects was reduced, and revenue results increased with fewer overall calls being made. In essence, the focus is on the quality of the calls versus the quantity of calls conducted. All because they took a quantitative approach using these questions.
And as promised, here are the skills that match each question above: 1) New Business Development 2) Accessing Key Players 3) Qualification and Positioning 4) Establishing Value 5) Opportunity Management/Forecasting 6) Negotiation.
This article is written by Dennis Hoeft, an experienced Sales & Marketing Executive with 30+ years experience leading, selling, managing and merchandising in highly competitive product and sales environments.
Attending an industry conference is a costly endeavor: various factors such as transportation, lodging & meals can add up quickly. Add to that your time and effort, and well, that’s quite an investment! If you are planning to attend a conference this year such as PITTCON, it’s important to get the most out of these events in order to maximize the return on your investment. Here are 10 ½ tips to help you do just that:
1) Plan well in advance; most conferences provide an exhibitor list as well as a list of attendees, so prepare a list of key people you want to meet.
2) Several weeks prior to the conference, set up meetings with the key people you identified on your list; if you try to approach someone during the conference without an appointment, you might be out of luck if their calendar is already full.
3) A few days before the conference, confirm the meetings that you have previously scheduled.
4) Plan to spend some time ‘walking the floor’; attendees should spend this time looking for new and innovative exhibitors. Exhibitors should use this time to stay on top of their industry and find out what the competition is doing.
5) Network; this is a great opportunity to make new contacts and expand your professional circle.
6) Sit in on different seminars; try to learn something new about your industry or profession.
7) Attend the various social events: dinners, cocktail hours, etc . . . meet new people, network, now is not the time to sit back & relax!
8) Bring plenty of business cards to hand out; and, when you receive someone’s card, write pertinent notes about that individual on the back of their card immediately after you meet them.
9) At the end of each day, do a quick re-cap to see if you accomplished what you set out to accomplish; adjust the next day’s schedule if you missed something important.
10) When the conference is over, review your action items to make sure that you have captured & summarized all of them.
And finally….
10.5) When you get back to your office, FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UP! Address all of your actions items. Connect with new contacts on LinkedIn. Reach out by email and phone to build these relationships. Do what you said you were going to do.
You’ll be glad that you did!
We live in a cynical world. Americans trust government and politicians less and less, but it’s not just Washington D.C. that has shaken our confidence. American trust in the media has declined, and even our trust in each other. A study done in 2013 found that almost two-thirds of Americans trusted each other, and we can safely assume our trust levels have declined since then given the political climate of recent years.
The reasons behind that decreasing level of trust in institutions and each other are complicated and sometimes unclear. But the result is the same: People trust less and that makes your job harder, because you need trust to sell.
Sales Requires Trust
Although you didn’t do anything to make the prospect not trust you, it’s still your job to earn that trust. Yes, it seems unfair, but consider this: If you take the time to earn that prospect’s trust and your competitor doesn’t, who will get the sale when that prospect is ready to buy? The person they trust. So be that person.
It’s easier than it sounds because trust is not to be taken lightly. In order for someone to trust you, they must take a risk. And once trust is violated, it’s that much harder to re-establish the trust you’ve lost. You no doubt recognize this to be true in your personal relationships where trust is vital, but it is true in your professional relationships too—especially when you’re in sales.
7 Ways to Earn Trust in a Cynical World
So what are you to do when you’re the victim of a societal drop in trust that’s affecting your ability to sell? Takes steps to be a trustworthy person in the eyes of your prospects. Below are seven ways you can easily do so:
- Be genuine. Our days are full of fakes, from the staged images on Instagram to the phony posts on Facebook. Although we’re immersed in social media which in theory means we’re connected to all kinds of people, most of what we see is misleading because people are rarely authentic in such a public arena. The last thing your prospect wants to deal with is yet another poser. So be yourself. Authenticity can’t be faked.
- Be a person of integrity. Follow the rules. Be polite to strangers. Say please and thank you. Respect your prospect’s time. Don’t bad mouth other people or companies. Be someone above reproach.
- Keep your word and do what you say you’ll do…even if it’s a little thing. If you schedule a phone call for 10:00 a.m., don’t call in at 10:03. If you say you’ll email a document by the end of the day, get it sent, even if you have to stay late to keep your promise.
- Ask questions. Ask what you can do for the other person. Ask about their jobs and what they struggle with and wish they could do better or differently. Show a genuine interest in the other person as a person, not a potential sale.
- Keep people informed. Let’s say they have placed an order and there is some kind of delay. Let them know about the delay, even if you think it won’t really matter in the long run or the delay seems like a minor issue. It will mean a lot to the customer that you kept them in the loop.
- Be kind. This world is sadly short on kindness these days. Be kind even if you get nothing in return for it.
- Trust first. Trust requires risk and vulnerability. If you trust first and open yourself up in that way, it will be easier for your prospect to trust you in return.
None of these is an overnight solution to your (and our) trust problem. Rather these are seven “ways of being,” if you will, that you must make daily habits so you’re seen as a trustworthy salesperson all the time, not just when it matters most because money is at stake.
But it’s worth the time and effort, because people buy from people they trust. So be that person…and help to make the world a better, less cynical, place at the same time.
If your sales conversations with buyers seem too focused on price, they probably are. Why is that happening? Because the buyer only sees what you’re selling as a commodity, meaning interchangeable goods indistinguishable from the competition’s.
In a buyer-seller relationship, the verb commoditize often applies. It’s what the buyer tries to do to you during a sales cycle, to make you think that your product or service is interchangeable with other brands so they can beat you up on price.
Does that sound familiar? Probably! No matter what you’re selling, at some point in the sales cycle, usually near the end after the deal is forecast to close at “the end of this quarter,” the buyer starts treating your product or service and even YOU as a commodity. You will suddenly hear them say things like, “I can get the same thing elsewhere for a lower price.” They would happily replace you too as well with a different salesperson. That is unless, of course, you’ll admit that they are right by discounting the price.
How Buyers Get the Seller to Only Talk About Price
You know that your products or services aren’t the same as the competition’s, but you probably find yourself in this price-focused situation more often than you would like. And now you’re “buying in” to the idea that yes, it is just a commodity you’re selling. Buyers repeatedly tell you that the criterion for product or service selection in your industry is based on “best price,” so you’ve become convinced that you have to discount in order to win business. And now you too are price-focused.
Here’s what typically happens: You meet with a potential customer, anxious to describe or demonstrate the high-quality, amazing, customer-friendly, popular, easy-to-use, etc. capabilities and benefits of your offering. The customer seems interested and asks you for a price quote. Back at the office, you convince your manager that you could “win this” if she’d just discount a little bit.
What has happened? You let the buyer make it about price and you fell for the idea that you’re only selling a commodity. You were guilty of prescribing your products or services without first diagnosing the unique needs of the person you were talking to. And that’s a form of selling malpractice. You accepted the product or service and even yourself as a “me-too” solution, allowing commoditization to occur.nAt Flannery Sales Systems, we’ve heard stories like these for years, in every industry we have worked in.
You set yourself up as a commodity by failing to position the unique capabilities of your offering in order to differentiate your product or service within a competitive environment. Your customers didn’t have the experience to know what separated you from your competitor. It was your job to assist them in making a valuable connection between their needs and your unique selling proposition so they could see that your organization could provide them with something that the competition couldn’t. You missed the opportunity to win.
Differentiation Takes the Conversation Away from Price
Flannery Sales Systems helps organizations develop a process for diagnosing the potential needs and objectives of target customers, and providing those customers with specific objectives that they should be focused on in their industry. In doing so, we can help you position your unique products or services in a way that a potential customer will see your differentiator as a “must have,” avoiding the “It’s all the same to me” scenario. You have the option: position your own goods, or your competition will do it for you, and you’ll end up with the limited options of discount or be dismissed.