Selling Power Blog

Four Ways to Get Video Right for Social Selling

Today’s post is by Matt Singer, CEO of Videolicious, the leading employee video creation solution that leverages patented, automatic video editing technology to make business-quality video creation possible for every employee. Prior to Videolicious, Singer sold hundreds of thousands of products through the TV shopping channel QVC.

 

When LinkedIn revealed that video posts now get three times the engagement of text posts on their platform, it sent shockwaves through the social selling community. Knowing that video provides such a significant engagement advantage means creating more video – and creating video with the best possible quality – is critical to making social selling initiatives effective.

In hindsight, it makes sense: If part of the goal of social selling is building the brand of your reps and helping them forge more personal connections online, how could someone truly get to know your reps simply by reading the articles they post or the text comments they make?

Video showcasing your sales team’s voice, emotional energy, domain intelligence, and passion enables prospective customers to emotionally connect in the same way they might in person at a conference or on-site pitch.

Here are four strategies for making the most of the tremendous opportunity of video social selling.

#1: Choose video topics that showcase your reps’ consultative selling chops.

The most successful salespeople can provide value throughout a sales process by not just selling, but also educating customers on how to understand a product’s positioning in a space, the value created, and how to deploy. Thus, when it comes to picking topics for social selling videos that are either shared to the general feed or via an InMail, every rep can either draw upon their own high-level experience advising customers or they can pull from messaging developed by marketing.

Given the complexity of many B2B products, reps can share a variety of learnings, topical analysis of impact, different use case education, and value stories. The goal here is not a direct pitch but an offer to educate based on the specialized expertise your reps have developed. Reps who can master this type of video creation can signal to prospects that engaging with them will be valuable, informative, and worth their time – which is a priceless competitive advantage.

#2: Leverage product marketing footage wherever possible.

The early days of LinkedIn video featured clip after clip of just raw shots of reps’ faces for minutes on end. No video with any professional level of quality showcases a single shot of anyone’s face – it’s simply too raw and monotonous to be visually engaging.

Fortunately, most companies today professionally produce video on a one-to-many basis for their marketing campaigns. These videos feature product demos, screen flows, and value proposition representations (e.g., people in a room working efficiently and happily together for HCM products). These are high-value assets that should be incorporated into social selling videos whenever possible. Companies spend tens of thousands – or even hundreds of thousands – of dollars creating this content. LinkedIn is a great forum to personalize it with a rep’s consultative presentation, using the product marketing footage as “b-roll” (overlaid on top of the shot of the rep to highlight and illustrate concepts in key moments).

#3: Personability is the key opportunity of the video format.

Video’s unmatched power is to give people the chance to experience a rep’s persona prior to engaging. That means it’s incredibly important for the salesperson to come across as personable and likeable on camera.

Many sales professionals are likeable by trade, but the camera can cause people to freeze up with fear. Thus, training reps to develop their on-camera presentation can pay big dividends. It’s not rocket science, but it is a specialized technique just like acting or public speaking. Locking eyes with the lens; smiling at the camera; thinking happy, warm, high-energy thoughts during delivery – these are some of the tricks of the trade that make videos showcases of great personalities.

Being nervous on camera can make the rep appear disengaged, which can be disastrous for social selling. This is the blessing and the curse of video: It shows people’s true colors, but this facet is not any different from handling an in-person sales pitch successfully – the skill is well within reach of any professional salesperson.

#4: Go broad and targeted with videos in the feed and InMails.

There are two main channels for video in social selling – videos for the feed that build a salesperson’s brand, and videos for one-to-one engagement for LinkedIn messaging or InMails. Both can pay dividends in social selling.

While feed videos can amplify a company’s positioning, domain expertise, and thought leadership, the one-to-one videos allow reps to demonstrate their specific understanding of the challenges prospects face. It’s very hard to write a short InMail message that proves a rep’s understanding of a prospect’s business and explains how their company can help. But a video can give a salesperson the right amount of time to show they understand the prospect’s products, market, and challenges.

The key is to still reduce that elevator pitch video into 90 seconds or less for optimal engagement while maximizing all the components above – the consultative chops, product marketing footage, and personability. Get this combination right and the 3x engaging that video can bring will pay off with higher response rates, more meetings, and more closed deals.

Why Cloning Your Sales Superstars Is a Big Mistake

Today’s post is by Tracey Wik, president and managing director of GrowthPlay’s talent and organization effectiveness practice. Hear Tracey present “Secrets to Scaling Your Sales Force,” at the Sales 3.0 Conference in Las Vegas on October 25-26.

 

“Janet is my best seller and, if I had an entire team filled with people like her, I’d be sitting on a beach with an umbrella drink in my hand. If I’m going to scale this business, I just need you to help me find more people like Janet.”

This is what my client, a sales executive at a global medical device company, told me at our first meeting. We were working with her to redesign her sales organization and create tools for her sales managers. If things continued business-as-usual, she was most likely going to miss her targets. My client’s solution? “Interview Janet. Take what she says and turn it into a playbook everyone can use.”

I wish I could tell you this was the first time a client was focusing on cloning a sales superstar. I hear a version of this statement far too often. Conventional wisdom says that the shortest pathway to scaling a sales organization is to do the following:

1. Study the selling techniques of your “A” players (i.e., top 20 percent)
2. Identify the techniques they use to persuade customers to buy
3. Train the rest of the sales force to use those winning techniques

In reality, this is a terrible plan. Here’s why.

Sales Superstars Often Exhaust Resources

Most sales execs recognize that their top reps are expert at bending and stretching their companies’ processes to take care of customers…and, as a result, they are often difficult to manage. So, in reality, sales managers are paying the sales superstars twice: once in allowing them greater resources than the others, and then again with much higher compensation when they consume the resources necessary to win sales.

In fact, you’re probably familiar with the management challenges posed by sales superstars. There’s the top seller who carelessly advises other, less skilled reps to get on the phone with clients too early in the sales cycle. The superstar who somehow manages to have four customer-support individuals (who are supposed to share work among the entire sales force) working only on his projects. The leaderboard-winner who closes huge deals on a handshake and no specific plan for how to accomplish the work – leaving others to “figure out the details.”

Why It Makes Better Sense to Invest in Your Middle Performers

You’ll get much better results if, instead of trying to get everyone to act like your number one sales star, you invest in your mid-range performers. Think about it. If you actually managed to train your mid-range performers to do what your top seller is doing to be successful, you’d have to massively increase the number of support personnel, thereby adding to the cost of sales!

If you want to improve sales performance by leaning on mid-range performers, I recommend this three-step approach:

1. Understand the market you are in or want to target. Investigate what those customers value and how they make purchasing decisions.
   
   
2. Build a go-to-market strategy that includes matching seller roles, activities, and behaviors to specific customer segments.
   
   
3. Organize those activities to create your company’s own specific sales process. Spell out the critical activities that advance sales and close deals – and that you want everyone to replicate.

Once you have the above framework in place, you can decide what your middle performers need to learn to increase their sales.

Don’t fall for the fatal flaw in the logic behind cloning. Chances are that it won’t work in the first place – and you might regret it even if it does.

How to Eradicate Your Self-limiting Beliefs and Boost Sales Performance

Today’s post is by Steve Kraner, president of Software Sales Gurus. Steve helps his clients identify the optimum approach to selling through continuous split testing to provide specific, detailed guidance for sales conversations with today’s technology buyers. Contact Steve at 703/966.0192.

 

Your sales teams’ sales skills are driven largely by their current mental map. This is why a salesperson – who believes she has to discount to win – ends up yielding to the slightest price pressure.

Let’s examine a few of these kinds of self-limiting beliefs and explore how they impact sales performance.

A Salesperson’s Incorrect Beliefs Are Self-reinforcing

Belief: Let’s say a salesperson believes he is constitutionally incapable of holding his own in a conversation with a powerful authority figure.

Response: His belief drives his behavior in the presence of such a person. He may fidget, shift his eyes about, or giggle inappropriately.

Result: The response impacts the outcome. The CEO will probably notice the salesperson’s discomfort and will probably respond negatively, thereby reinforcing the original belief. The salesperson is now more certain he cannot hold his own with authority figures.

A Salesperson’s Actions Are a Manifestation of His or Her Beliefs

If you want your salespeople to act differently and improve sales performance, you will need to help them identify incorrect, self-limiting beliefs. It’s not easy. Self-limiting beliefs are mostly injected – and rarely inspected. Most of us are familiar with the old saying: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It may actually be more accurate to say, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

Your beliefs are not who you are. They are who you learned to be.

Here are four suggested leadership techniques to challenge and change self-limiting beliefs:

1. Weekly game film review with the team. As part of ongoing sales mastery sessions, I use call recordings to critique and directly impact the entire team’s beliefs. When a salesperson hears a peer engender a laugh in response to disarming honesty, they begin to believe it will work for them, too. When a teammate generates engaged answers to all 10 questions of the need diagnostic, they envision themselves doing it.
   
   
2. Lead by example. If you lead a call, allow your salesperson to witness you say “no” to a discount and get the order, their mental map is updated. (I guess it’s obvious, but, if the leader does not believe, that must first be corrected.)
   
   
3. Reverse seminar. Ask a senior-level client to speak with your team on her industry and how they use your solution. This impacts beliefs about the value of your solution and its value in the eyes of senior people.
   
   
4. Pass this link – How Your Beliefs Impact Sales Success – on to your team and use it for a discussion at your next sales meeting,

Changing beliefs is difficult but, once the mental map updates, sales performance is improved instantly and (in many cases) permanently.

My next Software Sales Bootcamp is September 5-6, in Reston, Virginia. Please give me a shout if you’d like to explore a private program for salespeople or sales managers anywhere in the world.

What Do Prospects Think When Salespeople Fail?

Today’s post is by Dave Kurlan – a 2012 inductee into the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame, a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, and sales development expert. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group (named the top sales assessment tool for seven consecutive years) and Kurlan & Associates (a global sales consulting firm). He has written two books, including the bestseller Baseline Selling, and his blog – Understanding the Sales Force – was named the top sales and marketing blog for six consecutive years.

 

To the casual observer, salespeople don’t make mistakes, fail, or lose business. Instead, they see people who may or may not be knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, and kind.

When I listen to salespeople on recorded calls with prospects, in role plays, or when personally observing them sell, I hear nearly a mistake per minute! These mistakes include – but aren’t limited to – the 15 listed below:

1. Didn’t listen to a response and asked a new question instead
2. Asked a stupid or useless question
3. Rushed to the next milestone
4. Didn’t ask for explanations
5. Failed to keep an explanation simple
6. Question was too complex
7. Didn’t uncover a compelling reason to buy
8. Didn’t build value
9. Was afraid to talk about money
10. Didn’t learn about the competition
11. Didn’t nail down a budget
12. Bored the prospect with too much unnecessary information
13. Failed to identify, talk with, and/or engage the decision maker
14. Failed to recommend a needs- and cost-appropriate solution
15. Failed to build a relationship

That list is but a sprinkling of the things salespeople do incorrectly – and your prospects won’t notice any of them.

My son played in approximately 45 baseball games this summer, and I saw his teams make so many mistakes. However, the casual fan would have simply said, “They lost – what a shame.”  They didn’t recognize that the team failed to execute a run-down, a hit-and-run, or a suicide squeeze. They wouldn’t see that the pitcher failed to locate his pitches, that infielders didn’t charge the ball on slow grass, or that outfielders didn’t communicate with each other before fly balls dropped. They simply lost.

It’s the same with prospects. They don’t know why – they just know the outcome.

And, unlike baseball, where players get coached after mistakes and losses, salespeople go right back out there and repeat the same mistakes because most of them aren’t being coached or aren’t being coached effectively.

Objective Management Group (OMG) has data from the evaluations and assessments of nearly 1.8 million salespeople. The table below shows the percentage of salespeople and the various amounts of coaching they receive.

On Demand	41%
Quarterly	9%
Monthly	10%
Bi-weekly	6%
Weekly	16%
Multiple Times per Week	7%
Daily	3%
Never	12%

As you can see, 12 percent are never, ever coached while only 10 percent receive coaching more often than weekly. Also, 41 percent – almost half – get coached only if they ask for help.

Can you see the contrast? Ballplayers get coaching immediately after a mistake or a loss while most salespeople get coached only when they ask for it.

And sure – you can blame their sales managers. Only 8 percent are any good at coaching and only 18 percent are strong sales managers, so most of these pathetic statistics are the result of pathetic sales managers.

Can we place all the blame on the sales managers? Hell no! Salespeople are perfectly capable of taking responsibility, stepping up, and arranging for private sales coaching. It depends on their

• Awareness – do they know they could be much more effective?
• Desire – is it important enough?
• Commitment – are they willing to do what it takes?

Take it upon yourself to improve in any way you can. Read a book like Baseline Selling. Watch an online video like the one below on how salespeople who need to be liked struggle more than salespeople who don’t. Enroll in training or get a sales coach.

How Sales Pipeline Coaching Leads to Quota Achievement

Today’s post is by Michelle Vazzana, CEO and a founding partner at Vantage Point Performance, a leading global sales management training and development firm. She is co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance. Vazzana is also author of Crushing Quota: Proven Sales Coaching Tactics for Breakthrough Performance, due out in October 2018.

 

One of the most important things separating great managers from their less-successful peers is how they choose to spend their time with the salespeople they manage. Sounds a little obvious, doesn’t it?  

But it’s not just time spent; it’s time spent engaged in meaningful pipeline conversations.

Our two-year research efforts into the practices of high-performing sales teams showed a strong correlation between team performance and pipeline management. High-performing managers held dedicated meetings to talk in depth about early-stage deals. Could there be an easier, more obvious pathway to improved sales?

We received data from 512 sales managers across 12 industries around the world. The goal was to identify specific management practices that led to a higher percentage of sales reps at or above quota – with an emphasis on practices that led to higher participation across entire sales teams.

So, what’s a “high performing” manager? Those with 75 percent or more of their team members at or above quota the previous year. Forget about using revenue numbers to assess performance. We’ve seen too many instances where superstar salespeople skew revenue production upwards, masking the true performance of their sales managers. In fact, when we examined manager effectiveness using revenue attainment as the measure of success, the average managers (or middle 50 percent) were hovering just below quota. This seems like fairly good news until you dig a bit deeper.

The lowest performing managers and the average managers had the same percentage of their salespeople making quota. This means 75 percent of managers in our study had only 48 percent of their salespeople making quota. Contrast that with the top 25 percent of managers, who had 65 percent of their salespeople at quota. It’s only by examining the proportion of sellers on a given team making quota that a manager’s true effectiveness can be evaluated. The more salespeople at quota, the more effective the sales manager. Period.

Now that we’ve shown you the evidence behind the success resulting from pipeline coaching sessions, let’s look at three keys to make it work for your team.

1. The Magic Number is 3

Managers who spend about three hours per month in pipeline discussions with individual sellers produce 11 percent higher average revenues than managers who spend less than that number of hours per month per salesperson per month. There’s something magic about the three-hour point, so dive deep into individual opportunities during your allotted time.

2. Make a Commitment

Managers with great team results schedule appointments for their opportunity planning discussions, while low-performing managers are more likely to have ad hoc meetings. In addition, high-performing managers were significantly more likely to coach fewer opportunities – and coach these opportunities in more depth. Of course, all managers scrub pipeline data to create a forecast; however, the best managers then move beyond inspection into high-impact coaching conversations.

Here’s a real-life example. When Vantage Point began working with sales managers at a large global company, average close rates were 25 percent of forecasted revenue. Following our suggestions, managers began meeting with reps twice a month for focused discussions on early-stage deals and close rates climbed to 37 percent. Eighteen months later, close rates were at 54 percent. The takeaway?  The pipeline coaching conversations doubled the company’s close rates. With such a simple solution at hand for all, failure to institute this practice is tantamount to sales management malpractice!

3. Early-stage Deals

Our study required sales managers to indicate the typical position of deals in the pipeline that they typically coached. Low performers were far more likely to coach deals in the late stages, whereas a significantly larger percentage of high performers oriented their coaching to the early-stage deals. In addition, low performers were more likely to use scheduled time to update the forecast and clean the pipeline. High performers were more likely to use their scheduled time to develop the best strategies for opportunity pursuit.

Sellers working for high-performing managers spend their time pursuing only solid deals and, therefore, have higher close rates. How so? Top-flight managers closely examine the deals reps put into the pipeline. They ask challenging questions to make sure the deals are real – and discard those that are not. Conversely, low-performing managers appear to focus on the size of the pipeline rather than its quality. As a result, low-performing managers tend to have sellers with unhealthy pipelines – full of unwinnable deals.

When sales managers make this one simple change to their management approach – when they add scheduled, in-depth, one-on-one discussions about early-stage deals to their regular pipeline scrubs – team performance improves remarkably. What have you got to lose by trying this approach with your team?

Two Common Mistakes That Undermine Sales Leaders

Today’s post is by Jeff Seeley, CEO of sales training company Carew International, Inc. and a popular keynote and motivational speaker. Find him on Twitter @jeffreybseeley and on LinkedIn.

 

In today’s environment, sales metrics are everything! No longer are sales assessed quarterly or annually. Somebody – in sales operations, senior leadership, and even regional or divisional leadership – is looking at the numbers daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Through all of this, it’s not just the sales team’s performance that will be assessed. Those numbers also reflect our leadership effectiveness. Questions abound: What is affecting our sales performance? Is it the competition, market, inadequate sales ability, or incompetent leadership?

One key to unraveling that mystery is understanding what we, as sales leaders, can and cannot control – and where our time and effort are best spent. Here are two common mistakes that can hinder your success as a sales leader.

Mistake #1: Trying to bridge selling skills gaps with coaching.

Organizations currently spend more than $66 billion dollars annually on sales enablement tools, with marketing automation alone expected to surpass $25 billion within five years. Salesforce has projected its growth to $60 billion in annual revenue by 2034.

In reality, the most sophisticated sales/marketing enablement tools and the most brilliant leadership and coaching cannot compensate for a lack of selling skills, ability, or tenacity. Sales professionals must have communication skills to build relationships and foster trust, credibility, and rapport. According to a Salesforce survey, over 51 percent of organizations are focusing on the customer experience – and 79 percent of business buyers want to buy from a “trusted advisor.” Software will accomplish neither.

How can sales teams create exceptional customer experiences and transition to a trusted advisor role without the skills and specific processes for diagnosing customer needs, handling objections and resistance, and building collaborative teams? Without these foundational skills and methodologies, sales professionals are doomed to fail. If sales leaders don’t recognize that reality, they risk pouring endless hours and capital into “black hole” sales representatives who will never get it!

You can’t afford to be the sales leader who spends significant time working with unproductive sales reps via product training and monitoring of sales metrics – essentially doing the under-performing sales professional’s job at the expense of time spent with higher-potential team members.

We also need to be aware of the nature-versus-nurture aspect to sales excellence. The majority of sales professionals will realize dramatic performance improvement with proper training and reinforcement. Pareto Analysis is alive and well in most sales organizations, where approximately 20 percent of sales teams are significantly underperforming – or, worse, in a state I call “quit in place.” This population does not have the ability or nature to connect with customers, cultivate a relationship, move to that trusted advisor role, or create a collaborative environment. These individuals represent the anchor on your sales metrics.

Sales leaders must be able to diagnose whether sub-standard sales performance is a lack of selling skills (which can be learned), or a lack of reinforcement of skills. The “baptism effect” of dunking the sales team in sales training (and expecting results on training alone) has proven over 40 years to be ineffective.

Then there is sales ability (which sometimes cannot be learned). Some individuals just don’t have a high likability factor and really cannot connect with their customers and their own teams. We have all experienced the uncomfortable reality that certain people just cannot connect the dots. As leaders, we know it when we see it. We sometimes struggle to address it.

Ultimately, we must understand that neither is a situation that can be remedied by coaching alone or that will go away if ignored. As leaders, we must be willing to face reality and take action to remedy the situation – be it skill development or a personnel change.

Mistake #2: Overmanaging top-performing sales professionals.

The flip-side of investing time and energy in sales professionals with no real potential is overmanaging sales professionals who don’t need it. The reality is people do not leave companies; they leave their managers. Sales metrics conversations can lead us to relatively unproductive interactions with our best performers. In a recent interview with Selling Power magazine, I compared effective sales leadership with the dynamic of a great jazz band, in which the talented musicians are given a great deal of latitude and work off of one another to achieve their best performance. The most effective leaders understand that great talent needs to be facilitated, supported, enabled, and optimized – not controlled or micromanaged.

This is becoming more relevant as our sales teams become younger. Collaboration is the number one leadership skill needed for our top talent. With this segment of your sales team, the perspective should not be one of, “Are they doing things the right way?” It should be, “What can I do to help them be more successful?”

Sales leaders should be focused on how to make the best use of top reps’ time and talent, what barriers they are encountering, and how to remove them. They should be considering what internal resources are needed to drive value creation for customers – particularly the 79 percent of customers who want and need to buy from a “trusted advisor.”

And trusted advisors are exactly who our top sales team members need to become to facilitate continued growth and success, so let’s not get in their way. If we want to achieve excellence as sales leaders, knowing what, when, and how to work with our team members is more critical today than coaching skills themselves.

How to Turn Your Negative Thoughts into Positive Action

Today’s post is by Jessica Rector, keynote speaker, number one best-selling author, and inner communication expert. For more information, please go to jessicarector.com or contact her at 817/523-1529 and jessica@jessicarector.com.

 

What are you saying to yourself about yourself?

Your inner dialogue is  the foundation of everything you do…and everything you don’t do. And it’s often the last thing you think about – if you think about it at all.

When was the last time you said to yourself any of the following?

• I can’t.
• I shouldn’t.
• What if it doesn’t work?
• What if it fails?
• What if I get another rejection?

Organizations often focus on sales techniques, sales strategies, and sales scripts – which is like putting the cart before the horse. Your inner conversations dictate how effective your sales techniques, strategies, and scripts are. That’s why it’s so important to learn to take control of negative thought patterns.

Here are three steps to get you started.

Step #1: Write down your negative thoughts.

Every time you have a negative thought, write it down on paper, on your phone, or in a document. Do this consistently over the course of a week, and you’ll be shocked at how many negative thoughts you have.

Once you write it down, put a note next to it saying where it happened, why it happened, or who it happened with. Concentrate on what triggered the negative thought. How were you feeling before you had it? Were you insecure or uncomfortable? This way, when that situation happens again, you’ll recognize the trigger and know how to prevent the negative thought – or immediately turn it around.

Step #2: Reframe your negative thoughts.

How can you turn your negative thoughts around and into positive action? Your brain is constantly talking to you. Which part are you listening to?

If you say to yourself, “My team isn’t working well together,” your brain will list all the ways it’s not working together well:

• You’re a bad leader
• They don’t like you
• They don’t listen
• You don’t have experience to lead them
• Who do you think you are?

However, if you reframe your thinking, it changes everything. So, instead of saying to yourself, “My team isn’t working well together,” reframe it to:

• How can my team work better together?
• What does my team need to work better together?
• What tools can I provide my team for them to work better together?

When you do this, your brain will answer these, too.

• Create an open dialogue with my team to find out the challenges
• Team building exercises
• Ask them what they need from each other
• Have all of them take the Love Language test, share the results, and practice using them daily
  

Step #3: Take action based on your reframing.

Have you ever had a really great idea or thought and not done anything with it? Yes, we all have. The longer you think about doing something, the less likely you are to do it – because you talk yourself out of it with your negative thoughts.

(Should I call that prospect? What if my team doesn’t respond the way I want? What if I fail?)

You ask yourself these things and then decide not to do anything, because your (negative) thoughts make you believe things that aren’t true.

Take Action

The only way to create massive change is to take action. Most people who think they have to take massive action get overwhelmed and don’t do anything. Instead, remember: One small action taken consistently over time creates change.

What one small action will you do today to turn your negative thoughts into positive action to create change?