Selling Power Blog

It's Time for Sales Managers to Focus Beyond Numbers

Today's post is by Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates. She is a sought-after speaker, and author of ValueSelling: Driving Up Sales One Conversation at a Time.

 

Recently, The Indicator from Planet Money, an economics-focused podcast, gave one of its dubious Indicators of the Year awards to employee “ghosting,” in which people quit their jobs without any advance notice. Deemed the “tackiest trend” of 2018, the practice of workers just failing to show up one day is a symptom of a very tight labor market and, perhaps, mismanagement. After all, if someone feels valued, he or she is less likely to leave an employer – let alone in such grand, bridge-burning fashion.

Even if you are certain your sales team members won’t leave you in the lurch, every sales manager should be concerned about turnover and its potential impact on productivity and morale. Finding and onboarding new talent takes time and energy. Additionally, millennials (who now make up the workforce majority) generally value mentoring and skills growth more than previous generations.

That’s why every sales manager should be focused on retaining his or her top performers and grooming those with strong potential. Too often, however, today’s sales-team leaders remain fixated on making their numbers – without realizing those numbers might be easier to attain if they spent more time coaching.

Sales coaching isn’t as easy as it looks. Many reps who rise to management positions do so based on their own sales processes and business relationships. Coaching demands a different mindset: You must be passionate about helping someone else achieve their sales dreams. And you must do so in a way that works for them.

Where to start if coaching doesn’t come naturally?

Make sure all salespeople work from the same playbook

While individual sales practices and personalities vary, the basics and fundamentals of selling should be consistently applied throughout a team. Find a sales methodology everyone can follow. Ensure each rep has access to sales tools that assist their efforts.

Sales teams typically are a mixture of newer account executives eager for formal training and seasoned professionals needing to master newer technologies. Providing ongoing sales training and tune-ups makes it easier to motivate and monitor team members as they move through sales cycles.

Be the subject-matter expert for your team

To make sure you earn the respect of your team, you must stay in the know – which is not easy at the breakneck pace of change happening today. Find ways to keep up with what’s happening in your own company, territories, and industry so your team members know they can turn to you for expert advice. A big part of coaching involves learning how to collaborate with different personalities and work styles. This can be done more easily if you too are receiving professional coaching from someone fluent in sales and business communications.

Make your sales coaching measurable

Yes, there are the numbers we all chase each term. But there also are metrics used in coaching that help show whether your advice and counseling are getting traction. First, work with each rep to determine their strengths and weaknesses – and then how to overcome the latter. Often sales problems boil down to competence and confidence issues. By providing the right sales tools and training, you can help bolster someone’s ability to better communicate with prospects and upsell customers.

One reason sales managers don’t invest in their own coaching skills is time. They are too busy to learn how to better connect with their reps and enhance everyone’s ability to communicate value. That mindset, though, is short-term thinking at its worst. Invest the time to become a better coach – sooner rather than later. Your own long-term sales future may depend on it.

How to Get New Salespeople Generating Revenue Faster

Today’s post is by Steve Lunz, executive vice president of Imparta Inc., and a prominent expert in the sales enablement and talent development industry.

 

For most companies, the sales team is the primary engine of organic growth. So it stands to reason that adding new sales talent and increasing the size of your sales team will accelerate your growth rate.  

But, if you’re in a B2B market with a relatively long sales cycle, it can take up to a year for a new salesperson to generate significant revenue – even though the cost of that hire starts affecting your balance sheet on day one. As a result, if you want to maintain or increase profitability, there are only so many new salespeople you can bring on board each year. Unless you can get new hires generating revenue faster, this can become a major barrier to growth.

The Problem with New Sales Hires

Many companies are struggling with this issue right now – especially with sales headcounts and budgets under pressure. Even companies that aren’t pursuing aggressive growth targets are still hiring to address attrition and the deliberate churn of poor performers. And the reality is, from recruitment to guarantees to onboarding, hiring a salesperson is a very expensive process.

Adding to that expense is the fact up to 25 percent of those new salespeople won’t succeed. So, to get an accurate sense of what this process really costs, you have to spread the cost of the 25 percent who don’t make it across those who do. For a salesperson earning a $110,000 salary, the first-year cost before commission can be as high as $270,000.

The overall P&L impact depends on when they are hired; but, without question, the cost is a larger number than most people realize. If you are hiring enough salespeople to make a real difference in your revenue, their costs will also make a real difference in your profits.

The Impact of Reducing Time to Revenue

The good news is, if you can reduce the time it takes for a new hire to start producing, you can significantly reduce your exposure and even make the case for bringing on more salespeople to accelerate growth. For a B2B business with a field sales force and a typical sales cycle of 6-9 months, reducing the time to revenue from nine months to five can reduce your net cost in the first year to zero – unlocking much more rapid growth in the business.

We call those salespeople who can generate revenue within five months “sprinters.” Sprinters are not only fast revenue generators; they also tend to be more likely to exceed their targets year after year. Partly, this is because the same factors that led them to early success remain relevant – and partly because they are made more confident by that success.

How to Speed Up Revenue Generation

To understand how management actions can affect the “ramp-up” of new salespeople, we researched a wide range of new hires and the revenue they generated in their first year. The following diagram shows what we identified as the main factors affecting sales ramp-up, along with key management levers to pull.

You don’t have to take every action listed here (and you will be doing some already), but the importance of the issue warrants a systematic approach. After all, your profitability and business growth literally depend on it.

Find more tips on reducing the break-even time for new salespeople in our white paper.

Five Things You Do Wrong in Product Demos

Today’s post is by Parth Mukherjee, head of product marketing at Chorus.ai, the conversation intelligence platform used by the fastest growing B2B businesses. Chorus.ai records, transcribes, and analyzes business conversations in real time to coach reps on how to become top performers. Learn more at https://www.chorus.ai/.

 

Sales reps spend a significant portion of their time in the sales process doing product demos. But are they delivering those demos effectively?

Chorus.ai, a leader in conversation intelligence solutions, analyzed more than three million sales call recordings in 2018. Our advanced AI automatically recognizes screen shares and machine learning algorithms to pinpoint the kind of sales behaviors that impact win rates.

Based on this data, here are five common mistakes reps make when delivering product demos.

1. Forgetting to keep your video on when sharing your screen

Keeping your video on can impact your win rate. That was the conclusion of a recent Zoom-Chorus joint research study that showed win rates increase with more prolific use of your Webcam.

Additionally, closed deals had 77 percent of meetings with videos on, while lost deals had only 65 percent meetings with videos on. Being able to see each other – even when you are doing a product demo – is an important way to establish rapport and observe the prospects’ response to your demo.

2. Saving product demos for subsequent calls

A lot of sales reps try to focus on discovery and qualification early on and, when prospects ask about the product capabilities and features, they point to the next call. (“We will do an in-depth demo for you at the next meeting.”) This is usually a sales rep’s attempt to herd more people into the meeting and run a more effective demo. Doesn’t sound like a bad approach – except our research suggests otherwise.  

Giving prospects a quick sneak peek into the product during the discovery call results in more won deals. It ensures buyers see enough value to invest more time with you. So, don’t shy away from giving the prospects a product demo on your initial call.

3. Not segmenting discovery questions

Again, discovery is not just a phase. Like any relationship in which you keep discovering new things about a partner, you can do deeper discovery after you have started a product demo. A little demo during discovery and some discovery during your in-depth demo seems to be the right approach.

In most won deals, demos are spread out over two separate calls. One call should be heavier on discovery, and the other call should be focused almost completely on the product demo.

4. Keeping demos too short and sweet

Sometimes reps tend to do shorter demos because they’re not yet comfortable with the product or lack enough sales engineering support. They want to focus on value props and ROI instead of product features.

Data suggests you had better get comfortable running longer demos. It helps get the prospect deep into the product. As a standard best practice, customize the demo based on the pain points you uncovered during the discovery call. Then the demo duration becomes a leading indicator of deal winnability.

So, the longer you demo, the more likely you are to win the deal. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But ask yourself – do your sales managers and reps use the demo duration to determine the probability of winning the deal? This can be a factor you use to improve your own sales forecast.

5. Forgetting to engage the prospect during the demo

Demos do not mean endless pitching. Yes, when you are sharing your screen and showing off the great stuff in your product, you will talk more and listen less. Compared to the discovery phase of the call, reps need to talk more.

However, you still have to engage the prospect. Top reps ask questions every three-to-four minutes in a demo and create an engaging moment every eight minutes – even when they demo.

For more information, download our complimentary, ungated resource (available as a PDF or a Google Drive file) on how to deliver great product demos. Print it out, pin it near your desk, and use it before and after every product demo.

Three Amazing Productivity Tips for Your Remote Salespeople

Mike Schultz is the bestselling author of Rainmaking Conversations and Insight Selling, director of the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, and president of RAIN Group, a global sales training and performance improvement company. He and RAIN Group have helped hundreds of thousands of salespeople, managers, and professionals in more than 73 countries transform their sales results and unleash their sales potential. Follow Mike on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.  

 

Sales managers face myriad challenges managing remote sales teams.

When seller and manager are in different places, though, one challenge stands above all else: ensuring sales productivity.

Seventy-one percent of companies don’t believe their sellers manage their time and days effectively. If you want your remote sales team to be productive, this has to change.

Here are three habits – from the Extreme Productivity System (XPS) – to help your remote sales team control its time, get in the zone to be highly productive, and achieve the best possible results.

Signal “Do Not Disturb” (and Let Sales Managers Know Why)

Just because you work alone doesn’t mean you don’t get interrupted all day. Perhaps nobody knocks on your door, but email, messaging, and phone distractions are incessant.

People are distracted every 11 minutes. Then, after a disruption, it takes an average of longer than 23 minutes to get back to task. All those emails and messages add up to a mountain of wasted time – preventing sellers from focusing.  

Sure, you need your team to be available for meetings. However, encourage them to signal “Do Not Disturb” when they’re concentrating on something important. This might mean they snooze their chat, turn off their phone, and close their email when they need to concentrate.  

As a sales manager, of course you need access to your sellers! That doesn’t mean they react instantly every time you (or anyone) pings them.  

Working on a big proposal? Prospecting all afternoon? If they are, encourage them with their technology (but, even more importantly, in their minds) to signal “Do Not Disturb” so they can focus.

People can wait. You can wait. Priorities can’t.

Get Your Remote Sales Team into the Zone

If you want your salespeople to maximize effort per work hour, encourage them to get in the zone.

The zone (also known as “flow”) is a mental state where an individual performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

To get in the zone, sellers need to establish a daily routine of obsessed, planned sprints.

Sprinting is a form of timeboxing, a common technique in many project-management and software-development methods. Timeboxing allocates a specific period of time (or time box) to a pre-planned activity.

To start, encourage your sellers to work on a specific task for a minimum of 20 minutes using a visual timer (counting up). During this time, there’s no stopping, no distractions, and no task-switching – just intense focus on that one task. If something comes to mind in the middle of a sprint, have them write it down and revisit it later.

Once they’ve mastered sprinting, they can take it a step further and relay. A relay, just like a race, is four consecutive sprints, with short breaks in between.

Sprinting and relaying will be extremely powerful and effective for your team. It will train them to remain focused no matter how hard the distractions come at them.

Time sprinting is one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. Sales managers can help remote sellers block off time on their calendars to plan sprints around their most important sales activities – and hold sellers accountable for sprinting during that time.

Ignite Proactivity

According to RAIN Group’s research, extremely productive people are 2.7 times more likely than others to say they are proactive.

Proactivity can be a challenge – especially for remote sellers. It’s hard to get started on big, complex, or overwhelming tasks. Here are a few ideas to help ignite proactivity:

• It’s proven that people who commit to doing an activity on a certain day, at a specific time, and in a certain place are more likely to achieve their goal. Sales managers can help remote sellers be more proactive by encouraging them to add important activities to their calendar. Once the activity is on their calendar, they’re more likely to do it.
  
  
• Say, “3, 2, 1…Go” and just get started. You have only a few seconds to get started on something before your brain tells you it’s too hard. Don’t let your brain win. Dig in and get started.
  
  
• Encourage sellers to use positive self-talk. When you feel positive, you’re more likely to get started on important activities, push projects forward, and be proactive. Find out what self-talk is holding your sellers back (e.g., cold calling doesn’t work, our solutions are too expensive, we never win against this competitor, etc.) and help them change the statement to something positive (e.g., I have value to bring to this buyer, I can make a plan to beat this competitor, etc.).  

If you manage remote sellers and want them to exceed expectations – achieving great sales success – help them adopt these three habits. Those who do will be on their way to achieving their best results.

Six Predictions on What 2019 Has in Store for Sales

Today’s post is by Mark Magnacca, president and co-founder of Allego.

 

 

As we come back to work in the new year – refreshed and ready to hit the ground running – it is once again time for both reflection and planning for the year ahead.

There’s no doubt the business of selling has seen rapid change in recent years, as game-changing technologies and increasing competition have transformed how sales reps develop and deliver compelling presentations, where and when sales training takes place, and even the way reps interact with one another to share information and insights.

As sales teams across the country ring in 2019 at their national sales kickoffs, here are a few predictions we think will become more noticeable in the year ahead.

#1: Collaboration between Sales and Other Organizational Functions

Alignment between sales and marketing has always been top of mind, but 2019 will see increased focus on the alignment of sales with all business functions.

Sales reps on the front lines of customer engagement and intelligence gathering take the pulse of market pressures, customer needs, and prospect demands. With competitive pressures continuously increasing, HR, R&D, legal, and others will begin to see the value in aligning more closely with the real-time feedback and insights from sales.

#2: Team Selling Accelerates

It takes a village to train and enable a sales force in today’s competitive markets – particularly in highly complex or regulated segments such as life sciences and financial services.

Sales teams today need increased knowledge and integration. Salespeople must be willing to share valuable peer-to-peer insights, instruction, and learning with each other.

This team-based approach is critical because sales reps who share knowledge, intelligence, and experience can outperform the individual rep and create significantly greater organizational value. In 2018 we saw teams adopt team selling models and peer-to-peer learning – and adoption will accelerate in 2019.

#3: Sales Compensation Plans Incorporate Team Contributions

For decades, sales teams exalted the star sales rep as a “lone wolf,” but those days are behind us.

However, as cited in prediction #2, market pressures such as increasingly sophisticated products and services, along with more educated buyers, are aligning to make team selling a market necessity.

To help instill this team-centric culture, organizations will begin revising compensation models to value team achievements. Modern technologies can help managers build an internal sales community where reps are encouraged to continuously share insights gained from the field, provide peer-to-peer coaching, and seek knowledge from the wealth of information and experiences their team has attained.

#4: Socially-responsible Purchasing

Socially-conscious buying has been important in consumer purchasing habits for years (think Patagonia). As millennials continue to make up a larger segment of the workforce, we’ll begin to see socially-conscious purchasing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) play a bigger role – not only in B2C, but increasingly in B2B purchase decisions as well.

Therefore, in the coming year, sales reps will need to learn how to carefully position their company as socially responsible during SaaS/B2B sales pitches so they can more effectively influence and sell to multiple generations of buyers.

#5: Personalized Sales Training Moves from Idea to Reality

Sales organizations will continue to recognize the importance of training content that is targeted to reps’ individual needs and specific selling situations.

Instead of one-size-fits-all training materials, sales organizations will realize the value of providing reps with customized skill- and scenario-based learning that aligns with existing competencies, knowledge gaps, active deals, and more. Useful, relevant material motivates learning, and motivated people learn better.

Delivery of this content will be aided by AI and predictive analytics, which will help surface relevant content based on a sales rep’s active deals, their prospect’s stage in the sales funnel, and their individual learning preferences.

2019: The Year Ahead

Looking holistically at these predictions, there’s mounting evidence to suggest that the structure of the sales team will change to reflect a more collaborative and team-based approach to selling – and, for many teams, this change has already begun. With more complex products and increasingly informed buyers, sales team culture and collaborative selling are now more important than ever. As we dive into 2019, keep a close eye out for how these trends will affect your reps and your bottom line.

Who Helps You Climb the Ladder of Sales Success?

Today’s guest post is by Chris Champagne, president and CEO of Champagne Consulting Group Inc, a specialized consulting practice focused on helping salespeople maximize their potential – enabling outstanding results in their sales performance.

 

To truly excel as sales professionals – and separate themselves from their competition – every person in the sales profession needs an equal measure of inspiration, selling skills, and coaching.

I’ve been working in the sales profession for more than 25 years. Over the past three years I’ve coached and delivered sales training to hundreds of salespeople and sales leaders across the world. Along the way, I’ve also observed a wide variety of sales approaches that use various degrees of art and science.

The Source of Sales Inspiration

Recently I had a conversation with my dad, Horace, who happens to be Canada’s first “Master Pastellist,” a designation awarded yearly by the Pastel Society of Canada. Although he’s been a professional artist for more than 40 years, he also spent 20 years in sales.

People often assume that painters are inspired from some divine source to accomplish their great works. That’s why the most revelatory paintings often evoke strong impressions or emotional connections. But my dad and I acknowledged that works of art are also the product of lots of diligent work, honed skills and coaching/mentoring. The years of practice behind the scenes include research, skill development, experimentation, collaboration, failure, and revelation that contribute to the finished piece.

In the early years of my dad’s art career, he spent countless hours in museums studying the masters, specifically Tom Thompson and the “Group of Seven.” He also invests time reading about Picasso, Van Gogh, and Matisse. He shared with me how hard these artists worked when they were not in front of the canvas and how important collaborating to learn from each other was also critical to their success.

What Experienced Salespeople Understand about Buyers

Of course, he stressed talent and an underlying passion are other essential elements in both his success as an artist and as a salesperson. Where there is passion, there’s also inspiration.

Many of the more experienced sellers have clearly figured out the “art” of building relationships as the foundation of their success. However, relationships alone won’t be enough to sustain a successful sales career. Buyers won’t make purchases just because they like you personally. They need you to bring many other skills to the table, including demonstrating a tangible return on investment. In today’s selling environment, you can’t just be inspired – you also need proper coaching and an investment of time to hone selling skills.

The Ultimate Source of Your Sales Success

Are you getting the guidance/coaching you need to succeed? Are you taking the time on a weekly basis to improve your selling skills?

Who are the sales professionals in your “Group of Seven?” As it turns out, this group knew the value of meeting regularly to share their opinions, successes, failures, support, and encouragement – with the ultimate outcome of improving their craft.

If you are looking for ways to be both inspired and instructed, let’s talk. I invite you to reach out to me on LinkedIn to start our initial conversation.