Selling Power Blog

How to Deliver a Great Keynote Speech

Today’s post is by Sara Carter, an experienced tech expert who established her blog, Enlightened-Digital, to share her passion with others around the Web. After 15 years in the industry, her goal is to bring information on all technology to the masses. Her philosophy is to create each article so anyone – whether a consumer or technology expert – can understand the content.

 

Delivering a successful keynote speech can be daunting. There are so many ways to go about addressing your company or group of attendees that organizing your structure and approach can seem overwhelming.

However, if we take a look at some influential CEOs and the keynote speeches they’ve given, we start to see they’re all leveraging similar techniques or rules – but doing so with some unique variations. All (impactful) keynotes seem to follow the same principles:

• Connect with the audience
• Deliver the new data or products (commonly referred to as the “meat” of the speech)
• Reconnect with the audience

Let’s break down how some of the best in the business get this done.

#1: Connect with the audience.

As a CEO or executive of an organization, it can be hard to relate to each employee across the company. It’s crucial for a speaker to connect with the audience right away to ensure they’re engaged and absorbed by the presentation when the key components of the speech are delivered.  

Telling a personal story is a great way to immediately come across as just another employee who has another life outside of work just like everyone else in the audience. When the listener comes to realize that their CEO or executive team member is more than just their title, they are more likely to empathize with them and care about the message that follows.

Stories are the tried-and-true method of connecting with an audience – but another way is to simply change the dynamic. For example, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd sits behind a desk for his entire speech at Oracle OpenWorld last year. He has a cup of Starbucks coffee in front of him, and even a cup of pencils. He doesn’t open with a story, but his presence on stage is so relaxed he doesn’t need to. He comes across as a relatable talk show host just hanging with the crowd – and that plays incredibly well with the audience.

Whatever your technique, the key is to make sure the audience empathizes with you and can relate to you. Once you’ve accomplished that, you can move into the “meat” of the presentation.

#2: Give them what they came for.

Now that you’ve made the audience feel comfortable and interested in what you have to say, it’s time to deliver the central message of the presentation. The middle of any keynote speech is reserved for the informational portion of the conversation. What differentiates good keynote speeches from great ones is the kind of information being shared.

Take Elon Musk’s keynote for Tesla Energy from 2015 as an example. Musk’s vision to develop wall-mounted batteries to support his continued quest for powering the globe is revolutionary thinking. How can you boil down all the material and broad information into digestible slides? He does a fantastic job of highlighting the shocking or adding “wow” moments into his speech. For example, Musk shows a graph that highlights the growth of carbon emissions up to the present day, and their predicted rise in the future. This graph is not only hard to forget; it helps prove his larger points and support the overall vision for not just Tesla, but the world.

Musk also used slides with mostly images instead of predominantly text. The information the audience needed to understand came from him – not the slides.

It’s impossible to mention corporate keynote speeches without bringing up the master, Steve Jobs. Jobs’s speeches became iconic for the products he revealed, of course, but many would argue the way in which the products were presented was even more important. Like Musk, Jobs used slides in his presentations, but they were almost always simply one image or word. Jobs’s personality and leadership skills lay in his ability to simplify the complicated. Everyone in the world could understand his vision immediately. By limiting his presentation to single images or words – and using storytelling as a means to express his ideas – he turned Apple products into more than just physical devices. They became ideas or expressions of personality.

Watching Jobs’ 2007 iPhone announcement is still a thrill ride. Even though it was a short 11 years ago, it’s hard to imagine a world in which the idea of merging your music, phone, and emails into one device was actually new. All Jobs needed to do was cycle through three photos to build extreme anticipation until his big reveal. Introducing a complicated product with simple imagery was the key. Now anyone who saw that can easily explain it to the next person, and the next person and so on.

#3: Reconnect with the audience.

Most CEOs don’t have the luxury of launching new iPhones or unveiling software that can change the world. They have to give performance updates filled with numbers and other data. Even if you’re required to deliver that kind of information, make sure to reconnect with your audience when concluding your speech and they’ll be much more likely to remember some of your points.

One of the best examples of establishing this connection at the end of a speech wasn’t even from a CEO; it was in a TED Talk by Benjamin Zander. His closing story, about a boy whose life was completely changed by the music Zander was teaching, served as a great way to both prove his point and endear the audience.

Another great technique is to close with inclusive language. Listen to Gregg Renfrew’s closing speech at the Beautycounter Leadership Summit last year. As founder and CEO, she needs to ensure she’s still relatable to her employees. She continuously uses “we” and “our” to create common ground between herself and the audience.

Final point: Tell your story

There’s a great quote from an article on Toastmaster that reads:

“People rarely come up to a speaker three years after a given presentation and say ‘I’ve been thinking about your fourth point on leadership.’ However, what they do say is, ‘You know, I still think about that story you told about raking leaves with your son.”

These are the kinds of impressions great CEOs leave with their keynote speeches. Connect with the audience, show them the products or data, then reconnect. It’s that simple.

How Do We Define Sales Enablement?

Today’s post is by Bob Junke, founder and CEO of Adventace® and author of the bestselling book, Create the High Performance Sales Environment®. He’s the creator of the Adventace Sales Management System™, a Salesforce-based application that enables a high-performance sales environment. You can reach him at [email protected] or 724/443-2383.

 

The definition of “sales enablement” should serve as a beacon, and help us identify what we need to do to make sales enablement successful.

Search for “sales enablement definition” online and you’ll get plenty of results. At the Sales Enablement Society conference in Dallas this past October, the Definition Working Group unveiled their definition:

Sales enablement ensures buyers are engaged at the right time and place, and with the right assets by well-trained client-facing staff to provide a world-class experience along the customer’s journey. While utilizing the right sales and performance management technologies, in addition to synergizing cross-organization collaboration, sales enablement optimizes the selling motion in order to increase pipeline, move opportunities forward, and win bigger deals more efficiently to drive profitable growth.

I’ve worked with companies for over 25 years on sales enablement initiatives – spanning five continents, including many industries, and involving companies ranging in size from SMBs to large multinationals. In my view, success or failure hinges on incorporating a number of key factors in any initiative – which, in turn, should be articulated in our definition.

Although the Group included many of those factors, I respectfully submit that others need to be accounted for. For example, a supporting framework is required where executives drive sales enablement efforts top-down and sellers receive consistent, proactive coaching from sales managers.

Further, in my view, the definition should precisely reflect the alignment required between the buyer’s journey, sales process, and content.

With that in mind, here is my definition:

Sales enablement is a strategic discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by identifying the steps in the buyer’s journey, aligning the sales process to that journey, and providing the right content at the right time and in the right format to the sales team as it executes those steps. Ensuring success requires a committed supporting framework.

By applying this definition, I’ve seen companies achieve 1,900 percent improvements in key sales enablement metrics in less than two quarters – and increase product sales from as low as 207 percent to as high as 647 percent.

Why are the factors mentioned in my definition important?

Aligning buyer journeys with sales process and content is imperative. Companies should

1. Identify the solutions they provide and the steps buyers take in their journey that lead to successful sales for those solutions.
   
   
2. Identify the corresponding steps from the sales process that align with each step in the buyer journey.
   
   
3. Develop content to help the sales team successfully complete each step.

The result is a buyer-centric approach to sales enablement.

As more fully described below, the supporting framework includes key roles played by executives, sales managers, marketing, and a cross-functional development team. It also includes training, technology, predictive metrics, and alignment of compensation plans to metric-based sales enablement objectives.

Corporate efforts, including sales enablement, fail unless they’re driven by executives top-down. More than just leading, they must own sales enablement. If they don’t, many sales managers will apply proactive coaching processes inconsistently and, in turn, sellers won’t embrace sales process or content as being integral to their success.

Sales managers are the linchpins of the sales operation. Typically, only about 15 percent of salespeople are “eagles” – those natural-born sellers who excel on their own. Consequently, a key goal for sales operations is to create eagles. This requires the integration of three key elements:  

Element #1: A  sales process that provides sellers with the skills needed to execute under pressure.  

Element #2: Content helps salespeople adapt selling skills to buyer preferences, as well as the solutions the sellers provide.  

Element #3: Proactive coaching provided by sales managers, with the goal of identifying and helping sellers overcome deficiencies (which may include opportunities, pipeline, and/or skills) and achieve peak performance. Specifically, sales managers must consistently execute several tactical functions, including opportunity assessment, pipeline management, managing to key predictive metrics, and skill development.

The content development team should be cross-functional – comprising, at minimum, representatives from

• Marketing, who must keep their finger on the pulse of external factors impacting markets and the resulting impact on buyers, their needs, personas, etc. Marketing must then translate that information into valuable market and buyer information, along with leading the content development effort.
  
  
• Sales, who bring important perspective on buyers and their actual use of your solutions. This will also garner support and buy-in from the sales organization.
  
  
• Product/service personnel, who understand the capabilities their solutions provide to help buyers.  

This team should report directly to the executives driving sales enablement.  

Let’s next discuss how to deliver sales enablement to the sales team. Technology must support a logical workflow to train, develop, and aid in the execution of sales efforts, including

• Training new hires and/or new solution training
• Pre-call planning
• Conducting sales calls
• Generating post-sales call deliverables to set up sales cycles
• Conducting sales cycles along with generating appropriate deliverables throughout

Management should use predictive metrics specific to sales enablement to pinpoint specific performance anomalies related to key steps in the sales process – which, in turn, enable managers to determine whether an individual seller has a skill and/or other deficiency. Once pinpointed, surgical corrective actions can be taken.

Finally, compensation plans should be formulated that provide the sales and sales management teams with the incentives needed to achieve sales enablement objectives, based on achievement of predictive metric goals.

Two-Way Trust as the Foundation for Business Growth

Today’s post is by Jeanne Bliss, author of Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers­­­­, and president of  CustomerBliss, where her clients include AAA, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, Johnson & Johnson, The U.S. Postal System, and Brooks Brothers.

 

Focus on earning the relationship – not making the sale.

When I work with B2B companies around the world, one of the first things we do is a “trust audit.” We take a magnifying lens to key interactions and paperwork to determine if customers feel a balance in the communication and the terms of the relationship.

Take your contract experience, for example. One of the activities we frequently do is bring different stakeholders into a room with leaders of the organization. We discuss every stage of the experience. And the stage that includes the contract is often one of the bumpiest conversations.

Take a look at your boilerplate that is the starting point for customer terms. Is it clearly laid out? Are the terms stacked in your favor? What percent of the content is fine print?

How about the process for negotiating the contract? Your process may not be like this, but these discussions often resemble negotiations at car dealerships. Requests made are sent somewhere to be discussed and processed. And there are often long periods where customers are waiting for a response.

Across the rest of your customer journey, is the relationship balanced? Could your actions be perceived by your customers as protecting you and not them? Any terms of engagement or rules that demand customer trust but do not provide trust in return?

For example, a global manufacturer client of mine frequently manufactured customized specifications for each client. This process had to begin with a basic prototype that was then customized.

These prototypes were quite valuable to the firm and always accompanied on delivery by a term sheet and set of actions and fees that would be passed on to the client if the prototype were damaged or not returned. However, they also expected the client to turn over their IP and property as part of the development process – with no equivalent protections in place.

Why wouldn’t this manufacturer trust these very large B2B customers when such large eventual business was at stake?

Often, these practices are legacy rules. But they make customers stop and pause. And, if they happen enough, they might open the door to competitive bids. (This actually happened to my client.)

So, take some time and do a trust audit of your business practices. Across your customer journey – as you are providing samples, showing a demo, writing a contract, or onboarding or serving after the sale – are there places where you are holding all the cards? Reverse those practices to bring balance back to those relationships.

Focus on earning the relationship, not making the sale. It will change the tenor of your relationship with the customers you can’t risk losing.

This idea and practice was adapted from Jeanne’s 23 years as a chief customer officer and consultant. It is a key idea expressed in her upcoming book: Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers.

How to Prevent Burnout in Salespeople: Seven Steps

Today’s post is by Samantha Caine, client services director at Business Linked Teams.

 

In a 2016 CSO Insights report, it was revealed the annual turnover rate for salespeople is 20 percent. Some organizations are missing the warning signs of stress, burnout, or dissatisfaction in their employees and this is leading to low productivity and high staff turnover – both poisoned chalices for the all-important bottom line.

If an organization is to safeguard its reputation, retain its selling power, and recruit high-caliber sales professionals, it must learn how to successfully manage and react to burnout. These seven steps can make all the difference for sales managers.

Step #1: Explore whether the sales professional’s job description can be changed or improved.  

A job description defines a salesperson’s key responsibilities and functions. A well-written job description ensures each individual’s output complements the output of the team and the organization at large to ensure efficient productivity on all fronts. Poor job design can result in unnecessary stress for individuals who take on tasks that should ideally be shared among the team. This kind of stress can lead to burnout among individuals as well as the entire team.

Step #2: Define objectives clearly.

Without a clear set of objectives, sales teams are effectively flying blind – lacking purpose and direction. Business leaders should understand the objectives of their workforces as they are likely to have signed off on the hiring of each individual. Burnout occurs when these objectives aren’t clearly communicated to individuals who can all too easily get stuck in a cycle of working hard at the wrong set of targets – only to find their efforts are questioned or go unrecognized and unrewarded.

Step #3: Invest in good sales training.

To excel in their roles, sales professionals require the correct skills, knowledge, and behaviors. While many will bring exemplary sets of these to the table when they join the business, further development is often required to align the individual’s skills, knowledge, and behaviors to the business and its specific objectives. Sometimes an organization’s objectives shift and change, requiring further development to bring the workforce in line with those changes. Ensuring that adequate training is provided will help the workforce excel – removing the stresses associated with struggling to fulfil targets without the necessary skills.

Step #4: Provide visible and consistent support.

Without sufficient levels of support, employee stress can escalate. The results are downturns in efficiency and higher chances of burnout. Being able to open up and talk about stresses and anxieties is essential to maintaining a happy and productive workplace. Even when support systems are in place, employees can be unaware of them; therefore, it’s important to ensure every individual is aware of the support available.  

Step #5: Conduct regular reviews.

Feedback is essential to keeping employees on track with a clear idea of the areas where they might need to improve and what they need to achieve. Reviews should take place regularly, with a set of targets given to each individual to complete before their next review. Providing feedback and objectives in bite-size chunks will ensure individuals don’t lose their purpose and can accurately track their own progress – leading to higher employee satisfaction.

Step #6: Encourage a healthy work/life balance.

“Work hard, play hard” has become something of an overused mantra in the business world – and it shouldn’t be assumed that all employees will share this principle. Some might want to work hard, then relax. Others will talk about working smart instead of hard. Businesses need to understand that the ideal work-life balance is different for everyone and, however they envision this, it should be supported. This means recognizing when employees are striking a poor balance and ensuring they get the downtime they need to maintain personal happiness alongside productivity in the workplace.

Step #7: Provide feedback on employee performance.

Career progression is a big incentive for employees to work to the best of their abilities. Providing individuals with a clear view of exactly what they’re working toward will increase motivation and reduce negativity when they are exposed to additional stress from time to time. Sales managers can use regular reviews as an opportunity to communicate opportunities for progression as well as to provide feedback on employee performance.

Getting the workforce into shape and working efficiently with minimal chance of burnout must begin at the management level. As leaders in the workplace, sales managers should have the right training in place to recognize and react to the signs of burnout in themselves. Importantly, managers should also oversee their sales team to ensure maximum productivity is being achieved while maintaining a high level of employee satisfaction that will be passed down through the ranks.

How to Use Conversational Sales to Keep Up with Modern Buyers

Today’s post is by Armen Zildjian, VP of conversational sales at Drift. He has led sales teams for decades at companies like LogMeIn and Sophos.

 

After two decades in sales, I’ve seen a lot. But one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced is building customer-centric sales teams.

Why? Because it’s a moving target. Buyer behaviors are always evolving – and sales teams need to keep up with them. Technology plays a key role here. Software development is getting faster every day, and so is the way consumers adopt this technology. Here are some of the most recent examples:

• Real-time Messaging – It’s how people prefer to communicate today for everything. This can be seen in the growth of WeChat and Facebook Messenger, but also in business applications like Slack and Skype for Business. Clearly there’s a demand for immediate responses.
• The On-demand Economy – Companies like Amazon set a new standard for how long it should take to buy and receive something (i.e., the Amazon effect). Buyers can now pay for things with one click and receive them within days. We’ve seen this expectation spread to other industries as well, from car rental to flower delivery. Which leads to the next trend.
• The Mass consumerization of B2B – This “on-demand” lifestyle has spread to B2B. Consumers now have the same expectations in their professional lives when it comes to speed and delivery. And there’s no longer only one buyer in an organization. More people than ever before are swiping their card for business solutions, across different levels and departments. This is one of the reasons the SaaS industry has been multiplying.

Despite these massive changes in consumer behavior, most sales organizations haven’t adapted to meet these new expectations. People want fast; but, in B2B especially, I see so many sales leaders using slow, outdated methods. These methods are grounded in people buying on their terms, not the consumer’s – insisting on endless forms and drawn-out conversations. I even saw one HBR study saying 65 percent of customers spent as much time as they’d expected to need for an entire B2B purchase just getting ready to speak with a sales rep. There’s nothing “real-time” or “on-demand” about that.

So what’s a sales leader to do? This is where conversational sales comes in.

Conversational sales is all about giving your best leads a direct, real-time line to your sales team. It’s about removing the friction in the buying process so buyers can have the conversation they want to have, when they want to have it.

But what does that look like for sales teams?

At Drift, this means moving the sales rep further up in the sales process – sometimes talking to prospects when they first land on our Website. In other situations, it simply means picking up the sales conversation wherever a buyer prefers to engage – whether through email or a one-on-one conversation on your Website. And 100 percent of the time it means engaging with people in a consultative way – not with an aggressive sales pitch.

Look, I get it – making your team available for this level of service may seem daunting at first. But there are plenty of technologies and AI-driven solutions that can help protect your time while giving your prospects the buying experience they demand.

For example, sales reps are able to engage prospects right from the start with a live chat tool driven by a bot. This automates the lead qualification process, leveraging a basic script of questions that help you figure out if the prospect chatting in is the right fit for your product. It’s a win-win – consumers get the real-time service they expect while sales reps are able to dedicate their valuable time to the best leads.

And this technology is just scratching the surface. There are tons of other solutions on the market and being developed that can be leveraged for conversational sales – from one-click prospect meeting scheduling to “smart” outbound email sequences that connect to your real-time messaging. Outbound reps are able to take their prospecting to a whole new level.

The Takeaway: Technology That Enables Conversations

The specific tactics and technology are less important than the greater opportunity – which is to remove the barriers to conversations. Actual conversations are where a great rep shines anyway.

As world-class sales trainer John Barrows predicts, “I think AI is going to make good sales reps great, great sales reps incredible, and average sales reps irrelevant.”

Sales teams that embrace the idea of leveraging technology to create better conversations will have a competitive advantage. It’s the best way to be helpful to modern consumers and, as CEO David Cancel says, “Helping is the new selling.”

Sales Coaching Is Important: So Why Aren't You Coaching?

Today’s post is by Mike Esterday, CEO of Integrity Solutions, the sales performance, customer service training, and coaching firm based in Nashville.  

 

Sales leaders and managers: Before you read further, pause for a moment and reflect on a couple of questions:

1. How much did you coach your sales team this week?
2. How much last week?
3. More to the point: How much have you coached your salespeople at all?

If your answer to one or all of those questions is “not much” or “hardly ever,” you’re not alone. In fact, you’re pretty much in the mainstream, according to new research that we conducted in partnership with the Sales Management Association (download the full report here).

In a nutshell, here’s what we found in our survey of hundreds of sales managers: 76% say coaching is strategically important. Yet most admit that they don’t do it.

Our survey also showed that nearly everyone defines coaching differently. And here’s the kicker: Managers who coach regularly—even if not particularly well—have teams that perform better. What’s more, managers who are really good at coaching—and stick with a consistent routine—have teams that perform dramatically better than others.

Our research findings are also clear on what people say about why managers don’t coach. The biggest reason given by most sales managers? They say they simply don’t have the time. But we see that as a convenient dodge.

As we all know, we find time to do what we value and what we believe will drive productivity. And here our research findings provide important direction: The average manager spends about seven hours a week coaching, if he or she coaches at all. But we found that those who coached at least 10 hours a week see a significant increase in their employees’ productivity—in fact, up to a 9% boost.

This isn’t about working more hours each week, though; it’s about working those hours differently. And for good reason. Coaching more drives better performance.

Our new research results confirm what many of us have known for some time: Sales coaching provides important leverage in an organization. But too often it is seen as a reactive activity—something to turn to when a salesperson has a problem or a set of challenges that need to be addressed.

Sales coaching might also be considered when someone’s at risk of quitting, or when you have a new employee who needs coaching to get up to speed or build confidence around your products/services. But coaching’s most important function is proactive, and it’s particularly powerful when it’s targeted at building motivation, purpose, and drive. The best of coaching is to build people—to get them to see a higher definition of their own abilities and empower them to strengthen their performance.

As we know, most people do more of what’s expected of them by their managers. And because only about 40% of the managers we surveyed said they are coached by their leaders, the message internally is loud and clear: “If I’m not being coached, and I’m not being held accountable to coach, then I’m not likely to do much of it.”

Of course, if everyone from sales leadership to managers to the front lines saw how valuable coaching is in its ability to improve performance and help the best get even better, sales coaching would be elevated and prioritized. In fact, that’s the way it’s already viewed in the top-performing organizations, which overwhelmingly tend to have excellent, established coaching cultures.

To join the ranks of the top performers, follow this six-point plan for building a more robust sales coaching culture.

1. Define sales coaching. Clearly state what your organization believes sales coaching is and what it isn’t. (It’s building and developing people, not performance evaluation.)
   
2. Implement a coaching system. Create a simple, structured approach that anyone can use, so that they’ll actually make time to do it, which will yield concrete results. The system doesn’t have to be time consuming to be highly effective.
   
3. Build accountability. Make sales coaching a part of everyone’s performance evaluation. Senior leaders must coach managers and hold them accountable to coach. It needs to be clear that everyone is responsible for coaching, and that the role is proactive vs. reactive.
   
4. Coach to motivate. According to our study, this can lead to a 15% increase in performance.
   
5. Focus on everyone, including high performers. The biggest performance, business, and talent retention lift often comes from coaching people who are already good at what they do.
   
6. Share best practices. This will maximize the impact and develop more coaching ability.

For more information, download the full Sales Coaching Practices Research Brief.

Tips to Empower Sellers and Marketers with Content

Today’s post is by Erica Karnes, a content specialist for Highspot, the sales enablement industry’s leading platform for content management, customer engagement, and analytics.

 

By now, it’s no secret that sales is a much more layered, complicated process than even a decade ago. According to the 2018 State of Sales Enablement report, nearly 70 percent of sales reps reported they are experiencing more complex sales processes. Modern shoppers want knowledgeable guides, wholly equipped to lead them through their purchasing journey.

To meet these growing expectations and to be fully equipped to jump into these buyers’ conversations, sales reps need on-demand access to content and training, enabling them to clearly connect and communicate with potential buyers.

Anticipating needs = alignment

A solid plan for sales success involves sales readiness. In short, sales and marketing teams must be aligned. After all, it’s an accepted fact that buyers will continue to expect unique shopping experiences, tailored to their own particular desires. Sales reps are expected to not only respond accordingly, but anticipate these changing needs – often in real time, and on a case-by-case basis.

Pressurized performance

Of course, it wouldn’t be sales as we know it without constant deadlines and ever-present pressure to succeed. Sales reps are widely familiar with the expectation to create results as fast as possible – even while connecting with multiple potential customers in real time.

In order to land a sale, reps must know what they’re talking about – and know what they’re talking about immediately. Often this involves locating and utilizing a piece of content that speaks directly to a specific buyer’s specific scenario. Sorting through archives of shared content – often outdated or tailored to match some other buyer’s particular preferences – is a time suck that can make or break a deal.

Likewise, material intended to train sales teams (such as information detailing the latest product launch, or announcements covering company-wide messaging points) must also remain updated, accessible, and organized in a manner that saves sales reps precious time.   

Here are some tips to find out if your sales and marketing teams have easy access to updated, relevant content that will help them close deals.  

Tip #1: Perform a content sweep.

Evaluate where each piece of content is stored within your organization, and determine a home for each set of materials. Consider the following:

• Does your sales team have a sole, established place for sales-related content and training?
• Are all materials aligned according to buyer persona, buying stage, etc.?
• Where can these be accessed (e.g., online within a CRM system, inbox, via mobile)?

Tip #2: Conduct a sales training and content audit.

Establish if and how sales reps have the tools and know-how to successfully land sales. Delve into the following:

• Have reps completed assigned sales training?
• Does your sales team fully understand and utilize core company concepts?
• Are reps making use of the ideal kind of content – and at the correct  time?

From here, you can begin to examine the internal pipeline and establish how to measure quota performance.

For an integrated means of storing, sorting, analyzing and accessing relevant content – both for buyers and for onboarding sales reps – sales enablement solutions offer an ideal system for organization. Companies vying for relevancy within today’s competitive market are only continuing to adapt sales-centric technologies. With a system managing your content, sales reps will have the time they need to truly sell.

The Q4 Killer and How I Really Hit My B2B Sales Quota

Today’s post is by Phil Terrill, business program manager and former account executive for Microsoft’s Inside Sales organization.

 

I never really imagined sales would be my career until I closed my first cloud deal as an inside sales rep at Microsoft in 2016. At the time, I made the deal with a small company – and it was worth about $32,000. I was beyond excited about the effort that went into that win. (Now, I know you might be thinking that’s a tiny deal, but consider the average deal size at the time was $10,000 to 15,000. I felt really good.)

Fast forward to summer 2016. I had just been handed my territory in a brand-new role and was off to the races.

My territory at the time was just shy of $8.5 million, but my thinking was not about the size of the portfolio. The entire time, I was evaluating how I would tackle 168 accounts as the new guy.

In preparation for the year, I took a step back and did the following four things to really help me crush the year and kill Q4 – leading to a blowout of my quota.

Four Ways to Blow Out Your B2B Sales Quota

#1: Attend your customer’s quarterly earnings calls.

One of the most unique approaches I had with my territory was viewing it through the lens of a business owner.

This is common feedback, but I took it one step further. I actually attended the quarterly earnings calls of my top publicly-traded customers – and what I learned on those calls was invaluable. Understanding the financial position on top of industry trends provided me true insight into my approach, allowing me to tactically go after my customers. I learned so much that any shareholder would want to know!

And aren’t we all shareholders with our customers – invested in their success?

If you cannot get on an earnings call, though, do not worry! There is plenty of information available on customers, but it may take a bit more hunting than you expect. Invest the time to know your customer. It will help when talking to C-level executives or selling across an organization.

#2: Humanize your interactions with customers.

Sometimes, I did not even sell to my customers when I talked with them. Often, I would spend more time getting to know them as human beings.

The approach transferred into my discussions when it came to our solutions. I was able to take the influence or trust that had been built and humanize the technology so it would make sense for the customer. There were some conversations where customers would ask me if they should buy and I would tell them “no” or “wait” – showing that not everything will always be recommended or a go-forward answer. At the same time, injecting the financial element (acquired either from earnings calls or some other source) to drive my recommendations was powerful. Leaders don’t make decisions from their gut; they make decisions based on  data.

#3: Leverage your sales process, but don’t feel you have to follow it “perfectly.”

Because Microsoft is a massive company with a large sales force operating around the world, it has a sales process. However, when I was an account executive, my focus was to get to the customer conversation and not worry about perfecting the sales process.

The sales process is the guideline, corporate framework, or proverbial “North Star” to shoot for during the sales cycle. However, in reality, great sellers are able to leverage the sales process while knowing when to be flexible and go off script to ensure customer engagements are authentic. Forget perfecting the process, and perfect being yourself.

#4: Do right by your customers.

Do right by the customer and you will kill everything – quota, expectations, pressure, stress, and whatever else we deal with as sellers.

It is more important to build a sense of empathy that translates to a “customer first” mentality. The impact of driving toward the customers’ goals is the beauty of what successful sellers do really well.

While driving toward the goal, focus on building influence, trust, and commitment from the customer. The sales cycle breaks when trust is not established or the customer is not committed to the transformation.

At the end of the day, did these four principles work for me? Of course! Remember, my territory was $8.5 million in existing business. When the fiscal year ended, my territory had grown 44 percent year over year,  and my total attainment was 124 percent to target (target = 100 percent). Keep in mind: Payout starts at 75 percent attainment, so what I am sharing was definitely effective for my approach. I hope it helps you, too.

Peak Performance Mindset: Hack Your Sales with Accountability Partnerships

Today’s post is by Jamie Crosbie, an accomplished senior executive with a proven record of sales leadership success. Contact Jamie today at 214/720-9922 or [email protected] and find out how to take your business to the next level with Peak Performance Mindset Training.

 

So, you want your team to sell more?

Of course, you do.  

What company doesn’t? Assuming you have a solid product or offer a stellar service, selling really comes down to your sales team. Your revenues rest squarely on the shoulders of the men and women who represent you. Which is why you need to keep them lit up like a massive 4th of July fireworks and BBQ cookout event.   

That’s where mindset training comes in. Research has shown there are two main factors in reaching any goal. The first part of the equation is providing an incentive. We’ll save that topic for another day. Suffice it to say you need the right kind of juicy carrot to dangle to motivate your team. After all, people are not widgets – and what motivates one might not work so well with others.

Once you have a well-considered incentive structure in place, you need one more factor to keep the sales machine humming. One that, if thoughtfully implemented alongside targeted incentives, can increase the likelihood of achieving sales goals (or any goals for that matter), by as much as 95 percent.

The Big Sales Hack: Accountability

Having your team members become accountable to themselves, one another, and the leadership team is simple. Pairing accountability with other mindset tools can boost employee performance across the board.

There are, however, a few caveats to bear in mind (as always).

Simply setting sales goals in not enough. We are not talking about numbers here, but the overall structures, mindsets, and habits that create the results you are seeking. This is where the famous Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) helps.

The rules states that 80 percent of results stem from 20 percent of the causes. In other words, 20 percent of your sales force is carrying most of the load. They are exhibiting, even if they do not know it, certain mindset skills and behavioral habits that help them perform day in and day out.

These are what you need to pinpoint. Once you identify the specific high-impact behaviors that move the needle, you know which habits to encourage. Remember: When setting goals, you can use the acronym S.M.A.R.T.

Keep your Goals

• Specific – what key behaviors do you want to encourage?
• Measurable – what transparent metrics do you need to put into place?
• Achievable – what is the specific sales territory in question really capable of providing?
• Results oriented – what works and why? (And, equally important, what doesn’t work and why?)
• Time bound – when do you want to achieve what?

Be sure to remember that not all goals are created equal. You need to prioritize and focus on what really gets results. Your accountability system must also be simple – fitting into a large schema – and offer tangible, trackable results.

Additionally, your accountability system needs to be – well, for want of a better word – accountable, too. The last thing you need is a meaningless box that gets mechanically checked off, or an accountability program that is so involved it cannot deliver in real-world situations.

Don’t be afraid to refine your program heavily until you get the results you are looking for. The whole idea is to keep your team engaged with an understanding of what they are doing and why. Remember: Adapt and overcome; rinse and repeat.