Selling Power Blog

Want to Know How to Build a Quality Sales Pipeline?

Today’s blog post is by Jeff Davis, keynote speaker and leading voice on strategically aligning B2B sales and marketing teams to drive growth. He also coaches mid-sized B2B companies on alignment and is the executive director of the fast-growing TheAlignmentPodcast.com. Engage with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

 

If you want to build a quality sales pipeline, stop asking marketing for leads. Instead, start asking for opportunities.

Simply asking marketing for more leads assumes that the traditional linear sales funnel is how today’s B2B buyers make buying decisions. It is not. 

The B2B buying journey has become more complex due to digital transformation. In fact, an estimated 60 percent of B2B deals lost end in “no deal.” Thus, we’re not being outsold by competitors, we just aren’t helping the buyer navigate the decision making process adequately.

Today’s buyer is very connected, with nearly unlimited access to information. They operate within buying groups with, on average, seven stakeholders – all with different (and sometimes competing) priorities. Nothing gets sold until that buying group can reach a consensus.

Because of these challenging factors, sales reps must

• Clarify the true business issue that is causing the buyer’s pain
• Help them uncover solutions that can help resolve their business issue
• Navigate the internal decision making process to create consensus about choosing a product/service 

Thus, talking about your features and benefits to a lead is not an effective way to build a strong pipeline. In fact, 62 percent of B2B buyers say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list based solely on digital content.

To influence buyers, we must engage them much earlier in the buying process. We must find a way to get in front of them at the very moment they first recognize they can no longer tolerate the pain they have been dealing with up to that point.

How can salespeople achieve this? They can’t…not alone.

Buyers are not calling up your sales teams during their research phase and asking for their opinions. They are researching online. And, if you’re not there, they may not even know your product/service exists. Through speaking at and working with many different companies, I have seen this be particularly true with midsize companies that may not have the same brand recognition as their competitors. Thus, building a strong relationship with marketing is an absolute must. 

Marketing has the unique ability to provide content to a vast number of potential buyers in many different ways (e.g., Website, social media, events). Content “sells” 24/7. It should also help buyers understand what they need, why they need it, why they need it now, and why they need it from you. Content is so important to the B2B buyer that 75 percent of them say that the vendor’s content has a significant impact on winning their business.

Here are four ways sales and marketing teams can start working together better.

#1: Schedule standing meetings to review revenue pipeline and marketing campaigns.

Leaders should be meeting at least weekly to discuss pipeline velocity and how sales reps can leverage the work that marketing is doing.

#2: Create educational experiences that bring customers and prospects together.

Educational experiences are a great way to provide value up-front and better understand what buyers are thinking about your product. People are more likely to attend an educational marketing event where they don’t feel like they’re being sold.

#3: Develop tools and resources that help sales reps provide personalized and relevant insights.

Marketing must empower sales reps with tools like ROI calculators, case studies, and customer persona guides so they can frame the conversation in the buyer’s terms and provide personalized insights to help guide the buyer through the decision making process. 

#4: Leverage Account Based Marketing (ABM).

ABM is a powerful way to increase collaboration and focus between sales and marketing as well as become laser focused on a group of accounts that provide the highest potential for revenue – no matter the size of the sales or marketing team.

If you want to stay competitive in the new B2B marketplace, you must become better aligned with marketing. Tell them who you need to get in front of; don’t just ask for leads. This will help you build a more robust pipeline and decrease your sales reps’ time to revenue.

To learn more, listen in on my conversations with B2B experts at TheAlignmentPodcast.com or contact me directly at jeff@jeffdavis2.com to discuss working together on building your revenue engine.

How to Solve Your Sales Performance Problems

Today’s post is by Leff Bonney, vice president, research and product innovation, at VantagePoint and a professor of marketing at Florida State University. Leff serves as director of executive programs for FSU’s College of Business and its Sales Institute, which has been recognized as the premier university sales program in the U.S. 

 

When organizations experience a sales performance problem – and most do –  they look to one of two places for the solution: their sales processes or their sales methodology. The underlying idea is that improving process or methodology to create consistent sales execution will solve the sales performance problem.

This has been the common approach to sales force improvement for decades. But it’s still not working. While sales results are changing, it’s not for the better. According to the LinkedIn State of Sales Report:

• Over the past five years, investments in tech and training have all increased – to the tune of $28 billion
• Over that same period, quota attainment, rep turnover, productivity and sales VP tenure have all decreased
• 65 percent of sales reps are missing quota

Consistency in selling only works if the right things are done consistently well. Until now, companies have operated on the assumption that the “right thing” means choosing the best sales process or sales methodology and requiring salespeople to stick to it.

New research has discovered that not only is this assumption faulty, but it is also causing the very problems companies are trying to fix. According to the findings of a multi-phase study by the Florida State University (FSU) Sales Institute, by investing significantly in a singular sales methodology, organizations are investing in the creation of an average or underperforming sales team.

There Is No Best Sales Methodology

Initially, FSU researchers set out to determine the answer to a question they are frequently asked by sales leaders: “What is the best sales methodology?”

Four studies and a year later, it turns out the answer to that question is: none.

Here’s how they got there. In the initial study, the FSU team asked 783 sales reps from eight different industries to self-identify their individual sales style. They then correlated those styles with sales performance. The thinking was that whatever method/style was chosen by the most high performers would be declared “best.”

The results: High performers were most likely to identify as Challenger or consultative sellers while low performers mostly identified as product or relational sellers. These results, which validated prior research done by the Sales Executive Council, seemed to indicate that a disruptive or consultative approach to sales yields the best results.

FSU might have stopped there had it not been for a thought-provoking comment by a top-performing seller who’d been asked to participate in the study. He told researchers he found it hard to answer the questions because the type of seller he was depended on the situation. This got researchers thinking: Was the same true for other high performers? And had they simply checked one box to get the study off their to-do lists?

The seller’s remark caused the researchers to question the validity of the initial study and changed the course of FSU’s research. Operating on a new hypothesis, the research team designed a new study that, instead of asking participants to self-identify their selling style, asked them to describe the various selling situations they face and explain their approach for each situation.

The results of the new study were very different – and gave researchers the “Eureka!” moment they’d hoped for.

Top Sellers Align Their Approach with the Sales Situation at Hand

The second phase of the study, which evaluated 1,500 salespeople from three different industries, found that the scenario dictated the type of approach high performers used. Where low performers’ toolkits had only one or two approaches to selling, high performers revealed significant variance in their tactics, using up to five different strategies depending on the situation. In this second study, no single method dominated.

These were extraordinary findings in a profession that has long believed that finding the single right approach for a specific company and using it consistently is the formula for winning sales performance.

To validate these groundbreaking findings, the researchers created a third study. They wanted to see if the problem lay in the situation, not the approach. The research team created situations they felt represented accurate depictions of what sales teams face every day, then asked salespeople to describe what they would do in those situations.

They also asked respondents to explain the details of both a successful and an unsuccessful opportunity pursuit for each scenario. The results were the same. High performers changed their approach to match each situation while lower performers used a singular style of selling regardless of the sales situation.

In the final phase of the study, FSU built a training program aimed at teaching sales agility at a company that agreed to alter its sales approach based on FSU’s findings. Researchers learned the company’s high performers used four distinct selling strategies to reach five distinct types of buyers.

After documenting the five buyer types and the selling strategies that worked best in each case – then training all sellers in the company to identify a buying situation and leverage the correct approach – the results were overwhelmingly supportive of the earlier conclusions. By using an agile approach instead of a single approach, win rates soared and a significantly higher number of reps made quota.

The conclusions were inarguable. While many high performers have long been seen as “rogue” agents who don’t stick to company-directed methods, it turns out the “deviant” selling behavior that has long plagued managers is actually the key to their success. High performers:

• Don’t use a cookie-cutter approach
• Adapt their sales strategy to each unique situation
• Use the strategy with the best chance of success
• Are least likely to use a singular sales methodology
• Have a very different-looking pipeline than lower performers

Based on this research, sales leaders need to stop seeking the “best” sales methodology for their company and instead ask, “What three to five methodologies are right for the three to five situations our sales teams face on a regular basis?”

As more and more companies are discovering, that’s the millions-of-dollars question that’s the key to turning around lagging sales performance.

How to Create a Sales Culture That Keeps Improving

Today’s post is by Duane Sparks, chairman and founder of The Sales Board. He is the author of Action Selling, Customer Relationship Professional, and Action Selling Leadership. Contact him at dsparks@thesalesboard.com.

 

The primary role of all sales leaders is to deliver profitable revenue to the company. To be a great sales leader, therefore, you must focus on how that can best be done. If you want your sales team to function as a well-oiled machine for producing revenue and great margins, you need to do a great job of creating an environment for success.

In other words, you need to create a great sales culture. To do that, you have to put the people and processes in place to produce enough revenue and profit margin to achieve the goals set in front of you. The key word there is “processes.”

A process is a set of linked actions that are taken to create a desired outcome. When it comes to the sales leadership process, our desired outcome is profitable revenue. Just like Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Kaizen, or any other continuous-improvement methodology, sales management needs to be a process...a set of linked actions designed to function within an overall sales improvement system.

Here’s a great example of a complete sales leadership process:

The nine “Acts” are linked actions – sub-processes, if you will – that support the three primary roles of a sales leader (plan, organize, and coach). Put them all together, and you have a great sales-management process – one that lets you create a sales culture that just keeps getting better and better.

At this point, let me just offer a few observations about the critical importance of processes to effective leadership – and to sales leaders, in particular.

• Every outcome is the result of a process.
• The most successful leaders manage processes, not people. Good processes allow you to better manage the people who work for you.
• Documented processes are necessary for achieving high-quality results. If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t understand what you are doing.
• Only a process can give you continuous improvement.
• The best people can be brought down by a bad process. Fix the process, and good people will succeed in their work.
• The greatest sales gains occur when every employee who has contact with customers is able to follow the same sales communication process. That’s when a great sales culture emerges.

Not all processes are critical. The most important are those that are executed often, have a direct link to individual sales performance, and underlie business growth. If sales leaders are going to be great at the key roles of planning, organizing, and coaching, they’ll need to deploy processes like those described in “The 9 Acts of Leadership.” These are the most critical processes to the long-term success of every sales leader:

1. Goal setting process
2. Sales cycle process
3. Hiring process
4. Process for measuring results
5. Sales call process
6. Sales coaching process

Because these processes are performed repeatedly, small improvements in them can add up to huge benefits. Take your sales cycle process, for example. A tweak in how well salespeople orchestrate their sales activities can get you significantly more sales, a sizable acceleration in sales cycle velocity, and an improvement in gross margins. Fine-tuning your sales cycle process can produce big gains as small improvements are consistently applied.

Just like an effective TQM methodology, the best sales cultures have common processes that are reliably deployed. When these processes are consistently completed, sales goals are achieved, an unbeatable sales culture is developed, and your sales team runs like a well-oiled machine.

Which Is the Best Lever to Pull for Sales Performance Improvement?

Today’s post is by Jeff Seeley, CEO of sales and leadership training company Carew International, as well as a frequent keynote speaker, columnist, and blogger. Find him online or connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

Sales leaders are always searching for the fastest, surest route to improved sales performance.

Many ponder the role of digital sales automation and enablement tools in their quest for sales growth. Do sales enablement tools represent the solution to our sales pain, or are they a distraction from other high-impact factors?

The answer will be different for each organization – and largely depends on where the greatest gaps in your organization’s sales process exist. A thorough examination of your current sales capabilities and pain points is essential to select the best route for sales performance improvement across your sales team.

The Link between Sales Performance and Sales Process

First, consider the weakest links in your sales operation and organization. Do you see flaws, bottlenecks, or limitations in the operations process itself? Or are you seeing a low percentage of “wins,” suggesting selling skills may be the issue? Insight on this initial consideration will help you set priorities.

Sales enablement and automation tools – like CRMs, market intelligence, and prospecting tools – really focus on the efficiency of your process, saving sales professionals’ time for “high-value” customer interactions and expanding each sales professional’s capacity for all sales activities. These tools can also be very effective in identifying problem areas and weak spots, like logistical problems related to shipping, billing, or reporting.

On the other hand, skill development addresses the effectiveness of your sales team during customer interface – building customer relationships, diagnosing customer needs, and delivering winning sales presentations.

What Does Your Sales Team Need to Win More?

Do your salespeople need more opportunities to sell – or better skills and a higher close rate when they do get opportunities? In conversations with sales leaders, I often approach this consideration with the following baseball analogy: Which is most needed by your sales team – more “at bats” (opportunities) or a better hit (close) rate with the opportunities that cross the plate? A severe weakness in either realm will significantly hamper sales growth efforts. If a batter can’t hit the ball (or close a sale), it doesn’t really matter how many at bats (or leads/opportunities) he or she gets. Likewise, the best batter in the world won’t score any runs (or close any sales) if they don’t get chances at the plate.

Both baseball and sales require specific skills for success. Whereas, on the baseball diamond, field skills and batting average define the player, in sales, professionals need core communication skills and processes to build relationships, diagnose customer needs, cultivate trust and credibility, and maximize influence with customers. But, in both cases, enablement tools can create an environment for success – that point leading up to and surrounding application of skills and knowledge.

Coaches observe every pitch/at bat for strengths and weaknesses, things a player can improve upon, or things they did well. Sales managers use the ride-along approach in much the same manner – to observe strengths and weaknesses. Baseball managers also watch the data very intently for trends and patterns, as should sales leaders. Sales enablement tools, much like Sabermetrics in baseball, can show rep trends across myriad metrics related to stages in the sales cycle, buyer types, purchase habits, etc. This insight can indicate if skill development is needed to further define which skills are the priority.  

Prioritize Your Greatest Sales Performance Needs

Sales and baseball are both endeavors that rely on key insights as well as exceptional skills for winning sales performance. In a perfect world, sales leaders and sales professionals alike would love more opportunities and a higher close rate, but limited time and resources typically force us to prioritize and focus on our greatest need – be it improved selling skills or sales operations.

Sales enablement tools can identify trends and gaps, increase the efficiency of your overall sales and delivery operations, and potentially improve customer satisfaction as a result. Sales skill development is deployed to improve the win rate with the sales opportunities presented to your team, improve customer relationships, and extend the customer life cycle.

How to Align Sales and Customer Service to Drive Higher Revenue

Today’s post is by Anita Greenland, vice president of sales at The Brooks Group, where she brings 25+ years of customer service, sales, sales management, and sales training experience. Anita is responsible for leading and executing The Brooks Group’s sales growth strategy.

 

Excellent customer service translates into increased revenue for your organization. When your customers are happy, they’re more likely to stay with you, spend more, and refer your business to others.

Be sure you’re maximizing the benefits of happy customers by aligning your sales and customer service departments with these six tips.

1. Build a customer-focused culture.

Most customer service team members understand that their job is to help the customer by solving the problem or providing support.

Extend this customer focus to your sales team as well by encouraging a culture in which every interaction with a client has the goal of providing value.

Coach your salespeople to continue relationships with customers even after the sale has been made. They should reach out to ensure expectations were met, and schedule regular relationship, business, and strategy reviews.

2. Clearly define your promise to the customer.

Everyone in your organization should be crystal clear about what value your offerings provide your customers, and the promises you make to them in your marketing, sales, delivery, and service processes.

Too often, sales teams make promises that customer service reps can’t deliver on, or customer service representatives are unaware of the needs and demands that customers communicate to sales teams.

By clearly defining what you offer and how it benefits the customer, you help teams create a clear and unambiguous experience for each client.

3. Create open lines of communication.

Sales and customer service shouldn’t operate in silos.

Create open lines of communication and hold both service reps and salespeople accountable for sharing problems and challenges with each other, as well as knowledge and insights. Encourage team problem solving and reward collaborative behavior among departments.

When a customer has a problem, a well-trained service rep can often both solve the problem and guide the customer toward more products and services. It’s critical that your service reps are skilled at identifying untapped revenue opportunities and handing the customer over to sales when necessary. 

4. Identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Customer service reps spend their time helping clients resolve issues, which provides the perfect chance to identify untapped revenue opportunities.

Coach your service reps to ask probing questions to truly understand the customer’s needs and what they value, and consider providing resources to help them map complementary options. They should be very comfortable with your product offerings and skilled at when and how to work in an upsell or cross-sell.

5. Make problem solving a team effort.

Successful customer service teams have the ability to defuse potential issues. Your team should be equipped to turn an otherwise negative situation into a chance to build customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Train your customer service reps to respond quickly and adapt their communication style to match the client they are dealing with. Then, be sure the issue is recorded and communicated with the client’s sales rep (and any other team members who may interact with the client).

It’s possible to recover and even benefit from a customer complaint. In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review found that customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

The key is to have all hands on deck when an issue arises, and work as a team to deliver the best solution.

6. Invest in customer service training.

According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing happy customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling to a new customer. However, a large majority of customer service departments lack the skills necessary to positively influence customers’ future buying decisions.

IMPACT for Customer Service is a training program that teaches your team how to serve and delight customers – and translate their efforts into additional revenue for your organization.  

Whether you’re looking to train a dedicated customer service team or would like to improve the effectiveness of any of your client-facing team members, this program can take your organization’s customer service from average to remarkable.

Learn more about the IMPACT for Customer Service program and request an info packet here.

How to Improve the Way You Coach Millennial Sales Reps

Today’s post is by Justin Zappulla, managing partner at Janek Performance Group.

 

Millennial sales reps don’t always see the world the same way as their sales managers.

Technological advancements often signify divides between generations. But there may be no sharper divide than that between the Information Age Gen-X/baby boomers and the Digital Age millennials.

The globalization of digital information, awareness, and communication has created a generation far different from its predecessors. As a result, astute sales managers will recognize that coaching millennial sales reps will require tactics different from older sales reps.

Three Ways to Adapt Your Sales Coaching Style

Here are three basic tips to help you adapt your sales coaching style to millennial sales reps.

Tip #1: Use structure and guidelines.

Many millennials grew up in an environment where their day was carefully plotted and scheduled, with many after-school activities, sports, etc. Their educational system emphasized standardized test scores, resulting in teaching to exams – a process that necessitated instruction in a specific structure and format.

For a considerable portion of millennial sales reps, hearing the phrase “figure it out” can be alarming. When your formative years had a built-in structure and clear guidelines, you might naturally find the open waters of uncertainty and vagueness disturbing.

When coaching sales reps of this generation, use structure and guidelines – both in the sales coaching session itself and the skills and accounts being coached to. It will make things much easier for your reports and it has the side benefit of forcing you, as a sales manager, to clearly articulate and define a given skill or your organization’s processes and expectations. This, in turn, will have positive effects on the rest of the sales team.

Tip #2: Make technology your friend.

To paraphrase Bane from the recent Batman film franchise, millennials were born in technology, molded by it. This extends into the generation’s daily life, where a large portion will look up how to do something via YouTube instructional videos, for example.

You, too, can use technology to your coaching advantage with millennials. (Explanatory videos not only appeal to this age group but will aid older visual learners on your team.) Also consider gamification apps for sales training reinforcement, and using technology to provide feedback, disseminate data, and distribute metrics information.

Tip #3: Give consistent and frequent feedback.

It’s inaccurate to say millennials have poorer interpersonal communications than previous generations. Rather, the form of communication has changed. Rather than face-to-face, much conversing takes place via text, social media platforms, and other forms of digital communication.

In fact, there’s even more communication in the digital, global society than we’ve ever had before – it’s just that less of it occurs face-to-face. Given this increased, real-time discussion, particularly against the background noted in our first point, your millennial sales reps will expect consistent, frequent feedback on their performance.

So provide that feedback on the expected timelines. It’ll make you a more effective sales manager because you’ll be able to 1) spot issues before they become serious and 2) develop a closer relationship between you and your team members.

Adapting to Sales Coaching Changes

Yes, sales managers are being asked to adapt during a time of massive change. (Don’t forget: Generation Z also began entering the workforce last year.) But change also brings opportunity. Try these tips and you’ll strengthen and improve your company’s sales coaching culture, and get a greater return on your efforts.  

For more advice on how to advance your sales coaching skills, visit Janek’s resource library or sign up for our free monthly newsletter.