Selling Power Blog

How to Evolve Your Sales Process

Today’s guest post is by Bill Butler, CEO of Journey Sales.

 

 

 

How can sellers take control of today’s sales cycle?

Today’s buyer is well educated, always connected, and likely to move in any direction at any time. So why are sellers relying on a one-size-fits-all sales process built around CRM systems?

The CRM system is a management tool for internal reporting, and it’s not agile enough to handle an evolved sales process – it’s like a football team using one play all season long. We often guess or interpret buyer activity, but to drive an effective sales process, we need actual data on buyer behavior.

At Journey Sales, we decided CRM needed some help. By adding our Smart Rooms to Salesforce, we allow companies to engage customers in a secure and personalized space that’s available 24/7. Once the sales team invites a buyer into a room, buyers can do the following:

Work independently or with sales, invite colleagues, and collaborate. These personalized experiences support the buyer’s entire journey.

Access relevant content that delivers powerful insight. Many buyers prefer thought-leadership content early in the sales process. Toward the middle of the process, they want product differentiators. At the end, they want proposals. You can nurture the customer’s Smart Room with content to increase insight and engagement.

Stay in touch with sales. Sellers get real-time alerts when a customer enters a Smart Room. This way, sellers can review the customer’s “digital body language” to increase engagement. Compare the engagement index across multiple opportunities to improve predictability.

The new sales process is about delivering powerful insight to everyone involved in a decision. More than five people, on average, participate in a B2B purchase decision, so consensus building is critical. Smart Rooms are designed for closing deals, but they benefit the entire customer life cycle:

• Acquisition – close more new customers

• Expansion – improve new-product introduction and cross sell

• Onboarding – effectively share best practices to drive customer success

• Retention – continue education and engagement to improve retention

Companies need a sales process that consistently and predictably grows revenue. Engaging the buyer along the buyer’s journey is the new sales playbook. Take control of your sales cycle so you can turn average reps into star performers, successfully launch new products, and drive predictable sales growth across the entire organization.

You can learn more about Smart Rooms by going to journeysales.com, or visit the Salesforce AppExchange.

What Salespeople Can Learn from Kenyan Marathon Winners

Today’s post is by Sam Kariuki, a sales trainer and strategist based in Kenya. He is the author of The Guy Who Fired His Boss: Discover the Secret Entrepreneur in You. 

 

Kenyans have dominated top positions in marathons for years; most of the top 10 fastest marathon runners in recorded history have been from Kenya. What can salespeople learn from these running superstars? Here are four important principles world-record champions can teach you.

1. Winners thrive on passion.

If you want to fly high, then you need to spend time with eagles, not chickens.

Although most world-record holders come from the Rift Valley Province of Kenya, and no one is sure whether genetics, diet, or environment accounts for their success, there’s a single place they come to train: the town of Iten. In fact, athletes from around the world (including Mo Farah, Paula Radcliffe, and Stephen Kiprotich) have trained in Iten.

They come to Iten to practice with the Kenyan superstars. They want to see what Kenyans do, but they also want to be consumed by the passion for winning that burns in Kenyan runners.

When this passion consumes you, you will want to pursue the goals that champions want to pursue. You will want to do whatever they do to win. When you spend time with people aiming to exceed their quotas, break records, and win trophies, then you are likely to start desiring the same.

If you want to become a sales superstar, you need to have the passion and drive of those who consistently win. You need to care about the things they care about; you need to start feeling how enjoyable it is to win. Ordinary runners won’t bother to reduce their time by a second, but a fraction of a second becomes an obsession for champions.

2. Winners stretch beyond their comfort zone.

Salespeople need to spend time with those who put them in a position to stretch beyond what is comfortable. If you run with those who have consistently beaten world records, you are likely to perform beyond what you thought your physical abilities and skills could allow. You will be pushed to endure more than the ordinary. You will be forced to run longer distances. Your muscles will be stretched and become sore. You will wake up earlier. You will avoid unhealthy foods. This ultimately sets you at a level higher than where you were before you started practicing with the champions.

3. Winners have a strong mind-set.

In Iten, you meet many people who believe they can set new records, beat the world’s finest, and achieve greatness in the world of athletics. You meet young men and women practicing without shoes who believe that they will shine on the world’s biggest stage and pull themselves out of poverty. They have seen hundreds of others do that; therefore, it is not hard for them to believe the same.

Ordinary people have ordinary beliefs; champions have the beliefs of champions. Sales superstars have the beliefs of superstars, while ordinary salespeople have the beliefs of average salespeople. When you spend time with superstars, your ordinary beliefs are altered.

Seeing champions practice, feel pain, and be human demystifies them. When you discover that the champions are just like you, then you start believing you can become like them. If you keep pace with them during practice, then you believe you can do the same in the real race. That is how many pacesetters from Kenya upstage the stars for whom they are supposed to set the pace.

4. Winners behave like champions.

Watch and model the behaviors of the sales superstars. Wake up at the same time they wake up, prepare for a call the same way they do, build rapport as they do, care for customers as they do, follow the same steps when making a presentation, and you will see the same results.

Remember, you don’t have to travel to Iten to feel the spirit of Iten. Iten can be a place in your organization or city where you can meet sales champions. It can be a biography that you read or a group of superachievers you spend time with or shadow. The more winners you study and emulate, the more you’ll succeed.

How to Supercharge Your Sales Pipeline with Predictive Intelligence

Amanda Kahlow is CEO and founder of 6sense. Prior to 6sense, Amanda spent 14 years as the CEO and founder of CI Insights, a big-data services company that used multichannel analytics to help enterprise companies generate as much as $300 million in net-new business. 

 

What would it take for your sales team to stay on top of the pipeline and effectively manage sales opportunities? Better incentives? Micromanagement? Magic?

We say the answer is predictive intelligence.

Every day, your buyers and prospects are leaving digital footprints, buying signals that indicate whether they are in the market to buy, what products they prefer, and perhaps the vendors they are considering.

By tying together billions of rows of time-sensitive data, predictive intelligence distills all these digital signals into insight that sales professionals can use immediately, leading to faster close rates and increased sales.

For example, our customers’ sales teams receive regular alerts about new prospects that 6sense has found and regular notifications about prospects’ progression through the funnel. All this valuable information is captured with no extra work required from the sales teams.

The results are tangible. Here are two ways predictive intelligence helps sales teams better manage the pipeline. 

1) Fill your pipeline with new prospects who are ready to buy.

Think about how fast you’re going through leads. If you’re running through them, you’re not alone; ample lead supply is a common pain point for sales. The predictive intelligence platform by 6sense alleviates this issue by identifying entirely net-new prospects who are either in the market to buy your specific product or actively looking at other options in your industry. Say a company is showing intent to buy your type of product but hasn’t discovered your brand. The 6sense predictive engine will detect that this prospect is in the market to buy and will inform your sales team, who can jump on the opportunity.

One of our customers used 6sense to identify business that resulted in the third largest deal in the company’s history – and this prospect was about to buy from a competitor! Another 6sense customer was able to double its opportunity sizes, and 70 percent of those opportunities were net-new prospects who had never “raised their hands” and were not in marketing-automation or customer relationship management systems.

2) Get a full-funnel picture of all your prospects.

So now that you have plenty of new leads, what about everyone else? Your reps must understand where potential buyers are in their journey. With predictive intelligence, that’s possible. 

Say you want to sell to 10 specific people; however, if their activity doesn’t indicate that they’re in the market to buy, then you know you don’t need to focus on those 10 prospects for the time being. Instead, jump on the ones who are showing active interest in your products. Stop guessing and start selling. One of our customers told us that, before using 6sense, 33 touches were required to convert a lead to an opportunity. After using 6sense, it took only 10.

Interested in learning more? Hear Amanda Kahlow, CEO and founder of 6sense, speak at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on April 28. Or contact us now.

Two Reasons Predictive Analytics Drive Outstanding Sales Performance

Today's guest post is by Lisa Fiondella, CEO of reFocus Analytics. Hear her speak at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia on March 16, where she will present “Innovating for Sales through Big Data and Analytics.”

 

Throughout high school, I really enjoyed math (with the exception of 10^th grade geometry), and college statistics was actually fun. I can still hear our teachers telling us that we’d use math every day of our lives, while my classmates and I snickered at the thought. Other than counting the money in my measly savings account and comparing the total to the price of a really cute pair of shoes, I just didn’t get the connection. 

When I decided to make sales my profession, I never dreamed that math could have such a profound impact on my own sales performance or that one day I’d develop and leverage an analytical approach to creating sales growth. After all, selling is a “people profession” and traditionally associated with such skills as

• allowing customers to express their needs,
• creating trust,
• negotiating effectively, and
• proving you and your company offer the best solution for the customer’s business.

All of these are human interactions and far removed from mathematical calculations, but as I moved from an individual contributor role to sales management and eventually to running a business, I learned that combining the “people” element of sales with the math of predictive analytics can be a powerful combination. 

How so? We’ve heard the statistics about how today’s buyers buy. Based on my own experience leading large, complex sales organizations and testing many approaches, I believe that predictive insight is the way to achieve outstanding performance. Here are two reasons why:

1) Predictive analytics tell you what’s likely to happen with your customers, markets, and business performance.

You can use this insight to build strategies around resource and organization planning, territory assignments, account assignments, and quota development. This provides a much clearer picture of revenue potential – much more so than historical sales reports (or the traditional gut instinct of the salesperson and sales manager).  

2) Predictive analytics allow sales leaders to more effectively execute business activities. 

That’s because predictive insight can be applied at an account or individual sales-representative level. For example, if a manager understands the revenue potential of a particular rep’s account book, then individual level quota and performance measures can be established. This approach helps sales leaders focus on the right actions and measures that will propel the company to greater levels of sales success. 

Sales today is a brave new world. While some of the old ways of selling still work, a predictive approach is ideally suited for sales leaders who want to achieve outstanding performance. This means you must be willing to learn how to win using methods that are different from what you used in the past.

How Baseball Can Make You a Better Seller

Today’s guest post is by Garcia Glover, managing partner at Axle Sales Partners LLC, a sales-training company that helps organizations build high-performing sales teams by arming their salespeople with the proprietary Axle 60/20/20 Sales Approach™.

 

As a 20-year, business-to-business, outside sales practitioner, and now as managing partner for a sales-training company, I often find myself using baseball analogies in my sales “pitches.”

That’s probably because sales and baseball are what I know most. A baseball scholarship paid my way through college, and I was a college coach for a number of years. I started in professional sales selling copiers door-to-door before everyone had a cell phone – hell, before everyone had a pager. (You may be asking, “What’s a pager?”) But before you dismiss me as old and out of touch with today’s selling environment, let it be known that my last full-time sales job was in 2011, selling for a large multimedia company.

I’ve used many baseball analogies in sales over the years, and my favorite is this: selling, like baseball, is a team sport played by individuals. In baseball, an opposing batter hits the ball to the fence, then the outfielder picks up the ball and throws it to a teammate. That player in turn throws it to another teammate standing at a base. Now that’s great teamwork! When that same outfielder goes up to bat one-on-one with the pitcher, however, the team can’t help.

Selling is the same: the sales team can be supportive in many ways, but when a rep is one-on-one with a buyer, the team can’t help.

Recently, my thinking about sales and baseball has gone deeper than analogies when I started looking deeply at the parallels between my baseball experiences and selling. My new thought process began when a sales prospect asked, “Your sales training isn’t elementary, is it?” My immediate response was no. Later, I began to wonder what she meant by “elementary” and what would be wrong if it were. I thought back to my coaching days and remembered that players had to constantly work on the “elementary” fundamentals to become better ballplayers.

So why are salespeople (and managers) reluctant to work on the so-called elementary aspects that are fundamental to their sales game?

Maybe it’s because we in sales have become so enamored with 50,000-foot views, technology, big data, complex processes, and systems that we’ve lost focus and don’t have time to work on the simple stuff that really makes and keeps us successful. In baseball, we used an acronym, ACES, which we recited at practice to remind the ballplayers about what it takes to get better. ACES is simple and straightforward and proved to be effective:  

Attitude: Your attitude is what you bring to everything. Maintain a positive attitude, because it’s what enables you to get up (no matter how many times you’ve been knocked down).

Confidence: This isn’t swagger. It’s the silent, inner confidence you build by knowing that you’ve done everything possible to prepare for and win the game.

Execution: This is the planned approach you take to achieve peak performance. The key is to set goals and have an executable plan to reach those goals.

Skill: Skill has nothing to do with talent. Skill refers to the acknowledgement of your strengths and weaknesses. Exploit your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses until they become strengths through learning and dedicated work.

ACES can apply to any vocation, especially sales. I had no idea that my experience as a baseball coach and player would make me a better seller. So my advice for anybody in sales is this: Don’t lose focus on the elementary stuff, no matter where it comes from, because it could possibly make you better.

Four Selling Skills I Learned from David Sandler

David Sandler had a winning smile and a refreshing, no-nonsense attitude. I felt privileged to spend time with him when I interviewed him years ago for Selling Power magazine and had no idea that he would pass away only four years later in the prime of life.

Today the Sandler Training organization is growing at a steady pace and his idea of reinforcing learning is helping tens of thousands of salespeople generate more sales. While other sales trainers that I've interviewed taught formulas that began to wear out after a few weeks of use, Sandler was teaching a practical process that any salesperson could use to win more business.

Here are four things David Sandler told me about how to sell. 

1) A sales call is like a Broadway play. 

“A sales call is like a Broadway play performed by a psychiatrist. What I mean by that is that you've got to be an actor who can slip into many different roles and you've got to be a psychiatrist who can see past the intellectual defenses people build around them.” 

2) The salesperson’s attitude in the opening phase of the call matters. 

“Psychiatrists begin with very nurturing questions to establish trust. People feel vulnerable and have learned not to be up front with salespeople. In general, prospects won't tell you about their real problems. Psychiatrists learn very early in their training that what the patient brings to them is never the real problem. Patients can only describe symptoms, the psychiatrist must find the causes, not just relieve the symptoms. The same is true with a prospect. That's why it takes three or four questions about a specific subject before you can go past a prospect's natural defenses. Each answer becomes a little more revealing than the previous one.”  

3) There are five critical steps in the sales process. 

“There are five steps to the formula: well, hurt, sick, critical and well. As soon as you talk to a prospect, you begin by finding a hurt through reversing questions. Then you expand your questions to a group of pains until the prospect is sick.

If you continue to work on that sickness with more questions, you will have a prospect on the critical list. Then your selling job becomes easy, because all you have to do is make him well again. It’s not easy for people to remember intellectual formulas. To help them remember, I tell them a story like this one:

Let’s say you go to see your doctor for your annual physical. A complete checkup will probably cost you about $300. Your doctor will ask you to strip down in the examining room. Then he'll come in and poke at you, hook you up to an EKG, X-ray your chest, then put you on a stress test that can kill you if you're not a runner. He feeds you chalk, he punches you and pokes you everywhere. And you're saying to yourself, 'This isn't worth $300. I should be out there making calls. What am I doing here spending an hour and a half with this guy?'

Finally he says, 'Okay, the examination is over, get dressed and come into my office.' In his office he has a little light box with your X-ray clipped on it. It's a picture of you. The doctor looks at this picture while you're wondering how quickly you can get out of there. You think, 'Let's give him the $300 and get going.' Then he looks at these things closer, turns to you and asks, 'Has anybody in your family ever had kidney problems?' You say 'No.' Then he looks back at that X-ray again. Now, this time he talks to the X-ray saying, 'Now, there is nothing really serious here. I don't think we want to worry too much and we can take our time on this. What are you doing tomorrow morning? I want you to go down to the hospital because I want to check this out. I don't like what I see.' 

At that moment, your mind went from $300 to a blank check. That's what a good salesperson does.”  

4) You must develop the right attitude for success

“Sales success begins with an internal attitude. I want salespeople to generate this attitude in order for them to succeed. When you are sitting in front of a prospect, at some point in the presentation you will hear a little voice inside that says,'This is a lot of pressure, perhaps it's easier outside.' Or you'll hear, 'Let's get out of here, this is too much.' Or, 'This guy is not worth the hassle.' At this moment -- if you let your killer instincts guide you -- you won't give in, but forge ahead and win. The job needs to be done, that's why they pay you. Your boss is not buying your need to be liked; your boss is buying your need to go to the bank. At the same time, you need to be honest and ethical. You can't lie, you can't mislead a customer and you can't break the law to get a sale.”

A version of this post appeared on LinkedIn Pulse. For more information on David Sandler training methodologies visit Sandler.com. 

Four Key Elements of an Effective Sales-Leadership Vision

Today’s guest post is by Norman Behar, CEO of the Sales Readiness Group, an industry leading sales training company that helps Fortune 500 companies develop and deliver customized sales and sales-management training programs. Follow Norman on Twitter: @NormanBehar.

 

It’s very important for sales managers to develop strong leadership skills. Why? Sales organizations that cultivate good leaders are typically better able to do the following:

• transition star sales reps into high-performing sales managers,
• identify and respond to revenue challenges earlier rather than later,
• recognize and replicate key sales behaviors that lead to revenue results. 

(For more insight on how to achieve these results in your own organization, download a free copy of my white paper, Developing Great Frontline Sales Managers.)

Do sales managers need to be charismatic to become great leaders? Not necessarily. In fact, people often assume that charisma is a more important quality than it really is. Although charismatic people might be able to inspire others for a period of time, leaders will not have staying power unless they can combine that charisma with a number of other, more substantial qualities.

For example, all great leaders possess a dream or a vision. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his “I Have a Dream” speech. This speech outlined a very powerful vision, and it helped generate an equally powerful momentum that propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward.

Whether you’re naturally charismatic or not, you can develop a winning vision for the future and learn to articulate that vision in an inspiring way. Every sales leader should know where his or her organization is headed over the next six to 24 months. When developing your plan for success, keep these four key elements in mind:

Four Key Elements of a Great Sales Vision

1. The vision must be future focused.
2. The vision must be challenging but achievable.
3. The vision must acknowledge the current situation and provide a clear portrait of what success will look like.
4. The vision must align with organizational goals.

Watch my video interview below with Selling Power founder Gerhard Gschwandtner to learn specific examples of how you can formulate and apply a winning leadership vision. 

What is your sales leadership vision for your organization, and how did you develop it? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

For more insight from Norman Behar and the Sales Readiness Group, check out his white paper, Developing Great Frontline Sales Managers.

How to Get the Best Results from a Sales Territory Plan

Today’s guest post is by Ron Snyder, president of Plan2Win Software.

 

 

 

What is the optimal way to manage your sales territories? Here are seven steps sales leaders can use to get the best results from each sales territory.

1. Establish a process.

Determine how you plan to establish and monitor the progress of territory plans each quarter. A clear progression of action steps helps each member of the team understand what’s expected as the quarter unfolds. This includes having territory managers

• create and update territory plans

• and review the plans at the regional and then national levels.

Support, marketing, and other functions should be included in review sessions as appropriate.

In addition, the process must include steps to maintain continuity from quarter to quarter, such as working on territory, account, and opportunity plans that take longer than one quarter to implement.

For more details on the implementation of the process across the quarter, see our manager’s checklist for territory planning.

2. Review significant trends in your territories and vertical markets in the past quarter or year.

• What are the key trends driving your business?

• What are the characteristics of your top prospects and customers?

• Are there market segments, customers, or products that you could focus on that would significantly accelerate your sales?

• Are there a few special issues with which your team is struggling (for example, a new competitive offering or regulatory requirement)?

3.  Set goals for the quarter or year.

Identify your most important goals across your area of responsibility, either by region, territory, or vertical market. These could include the following:

• Overall sales, revenue increases, or sales of specific products

• New customer acquisition

• Growth in an existing customer base

• Vertical-market or product-specific objectives

4.  Review territory alignments.

Make sure each goal is appropriately allocated based on last year’s results and updated projections.

• Assign or reassign accounts based on revenue potential.

• Identify pockets of new opportunities.

• Consider new ways to focus on specific vertical markets or industry segments.

• Determine and assign quotas for each territory.

• Negotiate and finalize quota, territory, and account assignments.

5.  Help each territory manager and salesperson create individual territory plans.

• Set territory-specific goals, including quota and the objectives required to achieve quota. Examples of objectives may include increasing account share by a certain percentage, selling a new product, or penetrating a new market segment.

• Establish strategies and tactics to respond to key trends uncovered in your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.

• Identify target accounts and opportunities, and create specific strategies and tactics for each.

• Focus on potential key partners, ranging from corporate strategic partners to local partners to noncompetitive salespeople in the territory.

• Generate an action plan, including activities to implement each strategy and tactic. For example, decide with whom you’ll meet and what you’ll do to implement the strategy to penetrate a new target market.

6.  Link the plan to your sales strategy.

Consider how each individual plan works to accomplish its part of the team’s goals.

• Leverage good ideas across the team. One best practice is to gather ideas from each territory manager and plan, and ask territory managers to share new ideas that are producing good results.

• Provide guidance to the group on common issues.

• Allocate resources to top priority accounts and opportunities.

7.  Execute action plans.

Ensure each territory manager and salesperson has created an action plan and is actively working on his or her plan.

The regional manager should review territory plans with territory managers early in the quarter.

Executives should review each regional plan and gain visibility into critical accounts and opportunities gathered from territory plans. In addition, sales managers should be sure to do the following:

• monitor progress in weekly pipeline reviews and other meetings,

• update strategies for top accounts and opportunities,

• ensure critical accounts and opportunities have the resources they need.

Finally, regional managers and/or company executives should be available to participate in critical customer interactions and meetings.

When you plan your territories correctly, you plan to win. To quote the legendary college football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, “It is not the will to win that matters. Everyone has that. It is the will to prepare to win that matters.”