Selling Power Blog

Debunking Myths About Selling Virtually

Today's blog post is by Justin Zappula, managing partner at Janek Performance Group.

 

 

Historically, change can be difficult, especially after people devised and developed systems that work. That's why many sales professionals were skeptical of selling virtually. As one of the oldest professions, selling has always been about meeting people, locking eyes, and shaking hands. It’s how buyers and sellers create trust, form relationships, and build partnerships. No doubt, you’ve heard the naysayers. “You can’t trust over the internet!” they say. “Virtual is impersonal.” Well, as change brings challenge, it also welcomes its troublemaking cousins, rumor and misinformation. Let’s examine and debunk several myths and misconceptions about selling virtually. 

Selling Virtually is a Fad
Remember the earliest home computers, like the Commodore 64? While some saw potential, others dismissed the beeps and blips as a fancy calculator and passing fad. Though many think virtual was born of necessity, virtual selling was gaining momentum before the pandemic. A prepandemic study by Bain & Company showed half of all sales transactions were already taking place virtually. Now, in research by McKinsey & Company, more than three quarters of buyers and sellers prefer digital self-service and remote human interaction over face-to-face. Simply put, virtual isn’t going away.

Buyers Don’t Like It
Another myth is buyers do not like virtual. This is refuted by data. As shown in McKinsey research, buyers are still buying. In fact, 70% have no problem making large purchases virtually, even for transactions over $50,000. The same study goes further: almost 30% of buyers would spend over $500,000 virtually. Factor in the convenience, ease, and savings, and it’s easy to see how virtual will continue to grow as organizations switch to hybrid forms of engagement. 

Complicated Technology
We all know some people are naturally inclined to resist technology and can take time getting comfortable using the latest tech routinely. The good news is, selling virtually has some simple tools to enable sellers to sell effectively. Though “web conferencing” and “virtual collaboration” may sound daunting, Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others are quite user friendly. 

Selling Virtually Limits Interaction
After years shaking hands with clients, virtual is an adjustment. While the skills are like face-to-face, selling virtually requires adaptation to effectively interact and engage. Things we take for granted in-person, such as body language and expressing empathy, are different. Virtual sellers must be better active listeners and master eye contact and body language. They must learn key skills, like switching their eye line between the camera and the screen, and use their bodies to convey emotion, smiling, nodding, and leaning. Virtual interaction is different, but it does not have to be limited.

Selling Virtually Makes It Harder to Build Trust
Maybe because selling was face-to-face for so long, people didn’t consider alternatives, but trust is built on communication, honesty, and mutual respect, not physical proximity. It’s like having friends or family across the country. So long as sellers remember the keys to building trust, such as eye contact, comfortable body language, competence, empathy, it doesn’t matter whether buyers and sellers are feet or miles apart. True, as with interaction and engagement, building trust virtually requires effort, but once earned, it’s a bond that transcends distance.  

Less Collaboration
Twenty years ago, virtual collaboration was almost an oxymoron. Phones, email, and texts have a place in selling, but people work better when they see each other. Whether collaborating with team members across town or clients across the world, today’s technology connects us no matter where we are. Now, multiple users can share and edit documents simultaneously. 

Civilizations must topple primitive beliefs for societies to progress. Of course, this is not always easy. Beliefs can be sacred. They are passed through generations because they are productive or comfortable. However, technology often renders some old ways and practices ineffective or even obsolete. While the COVID-19 pandemic forced buyers and sellers to boost their virtual efforts, virtual has always been the future of selling. This is not to say it will replace face-to-face interaction, but with the savings on travel and time, more organizations will transition into hybrid models that combine in-person with selling virtually to provide the best of both worlds.

For more helpful advice on how to advance your selling and sales management skills, visit Janek's resource library.

How to Create a Breakthrough in your Prospecting

Today's post is by Eric Lofholm, President and CEO of Eric Lofholm International, Inc.

 

Imagine you were a master prospector. How many more sales could you make per month? In this blog post, I will share with you how I became one of the best prospectors in the world and how you can do it too.

I have asked participants in audiences all over the world, “Do you need to prospect more?” Virtually every hand goes up in agreement. If salespeople know they should be prospecting more, why don’t they do it?

The answer is an obvious one: fear of rejection.

I, like millions of salespeople, started off my career dealing with fear of rejection from prospecting. Despite this, I called, and called, and called. With each call I got a little better. The improvement was so small I couldn’t see it, but I was getting better.

In 1999 I started my sales training company. I continued to prospect to sell my sales coaching services. While coaching salespeople on dealing with fear of rejection, I became a good prospecting coach. I kept prospecting and coaching others to prospect until one day I experienced a major breakthrough that allowed me to master the art of prospecting. 

Here is what I realized. The rhythm of prospecting is no, no, no, no, no, no, yes. In other words, the majority of the time I prospect, I get a no or the prospect ignores me. With this understanding I developed the mindset that no’s are no big deal. 

I then developed a second mindset. Before I share that, let me first share a problem millions of salespeople deal with daily. They experience a no in prospecting as rejection and they experience a no from a sales presentation as rejection. The opposite is true as well. They experience a yes in prospecting as a win and a yes in sales as a win. 

Here is the conclusion I came to: If I look at sales in this way, it is win or lose all day every day—and the majority of the experiences are “lose”  unless I am prospecting at greater than 50% or closing at greater than 50%.

So I developed this mindset: When I prospect I win. When I book the appointment I double win! I win no matter what. When I run a sales appointment I win. When I close the sale I double win! I win no matter what. I have said these sentences to myself repeatedly  to burn these ideas into my subconscious mind. 

So while other salespeople face an emotional rollercoaster in their prospecting on a daily basis,  I am winning no matter what. This mindset gives me the confidence to boldly, confidently prospect anyone.

I used this mindset to have the confidence to cold prospect NBA hall of famer Rich Barry. I wanted Rick to do a 30-minute coaching session with my son in basketball, so I cold-prospected him over Facebook Messenger. To my surprise, he responded to my message with his phone number and invited me to call him. I was able to successfully book a coaching session for my son by offering to barter marketing services with Rick. My son and I flew to Colorado and spent three hours training with Rick Barry. This was all created with a mindset: When I prospect I win! When I book the appointment I double win. I win no matter what!

Eric Lofholm is one of the world’s leading sales consultants. He has been helping salespeople all over the world make more sales since 1999. Would you like to receive Eric’s Prospecting Mastery Course for free?  If yes, email him at eric@ericlofholm.com. Mention this blog and he will send you the course for free.

Want to Grow Sales? Preparation is the Key to Winning in Sales

Today’s post is by Tim O’Connor, president of Uptrend Partners.

 

 

The difference in competitive advantage between winning and losing a sale is often razor thin. How can you tip the scales in your favor? The answer is the P2P Ratio™. What is the P2P Ratio? Consider a world-class athlete like Simone Biles, recognized as the top gymnast in the world. If Biles executes a world-championship floor routine in 90 seconds, this is her performance time—the numerator in the P2P Ratio. The denominator is preparation time. Biles practiced for many months to make her floor routine flawless. Clearly her preparation time is enormous in proportion to her performance time.

What does this mean to us in the sales profession? Our performance time occurs when we interact directly with a customer. Too often, we rely on our ability to “wing it” in the moment. Instead of improvising, we should focus on preparing in detail, so we can execute with precision during our critical performance time. 

Best practices for sales preparation include:

• Researching each customer to understand their business challenges. Studies tell us the first thing decision makers want from salespeople is to understand them and their business. To meet this expectation, we need to research the company and individuals we will meet—preparing ourselves to be credible in their eyes.
• Anticipating their business issues and how we can help address those problems. Based on our research, identify where we have been able to help current customers solve similar problems.
• Identifying where we may be differentiated in each pursuit. This means setting aside the company “Kool Aid” and honestly assessing where we are unique. If you sell a commodity, then how will you differentiate yourself? Responsiveness? Professionalism? Service? 
• Preparing diagnostic questions in advance. Use questioning techniques to steer the customer in your desired direction. Use TED questions (tell me, describe to me, explain to me) to open a broad topic and follow them with MOM questions (how many, how often, how much?) to quantify the current situation. Generally, the seller that discovers the most information via deliberate questioning techniques is at a great advantage in winning the deal.
• Developing relevant success stories of current clients that were in similar situations. The best stories finish with tangible metrics the customer values, such as “They were able to increase revenue by 37%,” or “They were able to reduce operating costs by 23%.” Solid metrics resonate and make the customer want to learn more about your solutions.

Sales is an easier job when we slow down and do the hard work of preparation before each customer encounter. The investment in raising your P2P Ratio is worth the time and effort; as the most prepared seller will win almost every time. 

So, if you want to grow your sales, expand your P2P Ratio. You can see an example of the P2P Ratio here.

To learn more, you can reach Tim O’Connor at timo@uptrendpartners.com. Connect with him on LinkedIn. 

3 Sales Coaching Tips To Inspire and Engage Your Sales Team

Today's post is by Mark Cox, CEO and founder of In the Funnel Sales Coaching. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

 

As sales managers, our main objective is to influence the future behavior of our sales teams to achieve sales targets. Period.

This is done by: 

1. Setting high—but reasonable—expectations
2. Providing guidance on how to achieve those expectations (i.e. sales playbooks, sales processes, strategies, and tools) 
3. Providing effective sales training (outsourced or in-house) to enable the team to achieve those expectations

Once these three foundational elements are in place, we need to actively manage our teams with a formal sales management cadence to effectively: 

• Coach the team
• Motivate the team
• Inspect the team

Though this may sound simple enough, there’s a catch. 

The Challenges of Sales Management 

We constantly face everyday challenges that prevent them from achieving our goal.

Our three key stakeholders (customers, CEOs, salespeople) have ever-expanding expectations. The pace of change is relentless and every once in a while, the economy/ environment kicks us in the tail to ensure we don’t get too comfortable sleeping well (see current turbulent times).

As a result, our coaching programs can suffer and so can our sales teams.

According to research from BlessingWhite, only 23% of people being coached thought that the coaching had a “significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction.” Amazingly, 10% even suggested that the coaching they were getting was having a “negative effect.”

On the other hand, statistics also show that coaching matters and is directly related to sales performance. According to the Sales Executive Council, sales managers that were rated as highly effective coaches outperformed sales managers who were rated as ineffective coaches by 19% in revenue production.

This means spectacular coaching is a crucial sales management responsibility and strategy if we want to build and sustain a top-performing sales organization that can yield exponential sales growth.

How to Improve Your Coaching Program

Here are three strategies to improve your coaching program as part of your sales management cadence today.

• Scheduling coaching events
• Stop giving advice and start asking better questions
• Understand the six types of sales coaching

1. Schedule coaching events

One-on-one meetings and time in the field with your salespeople are the opportune times for sales coaching. 

When coaching in the field, ensure you reserve time to review the client call/ presentation after the activity. According to Michael Bunga Stanier in his excellent work the Coaching Habit, “People don’t learn when you tell them something. They don’t even really learn when they do something. They start learning, start creating new neural pathways only when they have a chance to recall and reflect on what just happened.”

We suggest reviewing a customer call or event by asking the sales rep to identify three things she liked and three things she would do differently next time. Then we (as the sales leader) share our opinion on the same. This allows the salesperson to first self-diagnose, thereby creating the learning moment.

2. Stop giving advice and start asking better questions

You may think you know the answer to the issues and challenges that your salesperson is facing. If you give them the answer today, you can guarantee that they will be back for a similar answer next week. 

This creates a dependency cycle—they come to you for all of the answers in the future. The kind of people you want on your sales team are intelligent, driven, and humble. They want to develop and learn. You need to give them space to allow for this.

Try this as a process for your next coaching moment:

• Assess their situation
• Create great questions to help them come to the same assessment
• Align on your go forward plan together
• After the coaching event, ask them to send you an email summarizing the go forward plan or the key points of what you discussed

It is tremendously difficult to stop yourself from giving the answer when this issue seems so obvious to you. You want to be helpful, you want to show value, and you want to feel like you made a significant contribution as a sales manager. You think the best way to do that is to tell them the answer. 

However, when you do this, you are missing out on an opportunity to develop your employees.  It is your duty to make people who work for you better. Too many sales managers believe it is the salesperson’s duty to enable us to hit our numbers.

Remember, when you tell them the answer, they don’t always internalize it or commit to it.

3. Understand the six areas of sales coaching

When coaching your sales team, be intentional and work with them to ensure they understand and are aligned on the following areas:

• Mindset (extremely important during the isolation of these turbulent times)
• Skills and capabilities 
• Territory management
• Activity/funnel
• Opportunity 
• Sales process

We can either coach a situation or we can coach the person. One fixes an immediate problem and the other creates someone who will fix these problems without us in the future. Both are necessary.

Join our upcoming FREE sales webinars where we help leaders create high-performing sales teams.

Five Reasons Companies Fail to Hire Top Sales Talent

Today's post is by Andy Miller, CEO at Big Swift Kick.

 

 

We all know that hiring the wrong salesperson is expensive. Research shows that high-tech companies lose as much as $2 million per year on a bad sales hire. They lose revenue, damage reputation, impact market share, and hurt the culture to name a few. 

Below are five reasons many companies fail to hire top salespeople. 

1. Inaccurate promotion of the job 

Many companies have failed to review and update how the sales position has changed due to a change in strategy, new products/services, working virtually, etc. This contributes to unintentionally misleading job ads.

Interviewers tend to put on a positive spin on the position, opportunity, and/or market position and avoid any dirty laundry for a more attractive presentation.

Is it a surprise that 61% of new hires say the realities of the position differ from the expectations set during the interview process?

2. Poor approach to sourcing candidates

We informally surveyed 200 sales managers and asked them where they found their best sales talent. The number one source was referrals at 47%, yet companies offer no or low referral fee.  

For recruiting online (job boards, job search engines, and social media) accounts for 72% of all externally sourced hires.

3. Gut-based selection process

Research shows most interviewers subconsciously make a go/no-go decision in the first five minutes of each interview. That barely gives candidates enough time to make small talk before the interviewer has sealed their fate. 

Gut instinct favors style and likeability over substance, objectivity, and hard data. 

If you just trust your gut, you’ll make poor hiring decisions. Your accuracy of picking a successful candidate by gut is 38%.

4. Improper use of assessments

Of all the different candidate selection methods, the number one predictor of a sales candidate’s success is an assessment! 

You can increase your ability to identify high-performing salespeople by as much as 91% using the correct type of assessment. But it can’t be just any assessment.

We looked at 39 so-called sales assessments and disqualified 36 for lack of predictive validation, including Myers-Briggs (MBTI) and DISC.

Here is what you need to ask every assessment company. Is this specifically designed to measure salespeople? Does it have multi-measurements (not just behavior, personality, skills, or attributes)? Are the questions asked in a sales context? Can they provide the technical manual that has proof of “predictive validation” by an independent third party?

5. Lack of structured interviews

Companies need to shift from unstructured to structured interviews. A highly structured interview requires predetermined questions and a rating scale to measure and compare candidate answers. 

Also, interviewers receive training on how to interview and recognize the 10 types of interview bias. Highly structured interviews have a predictive accuracy of 57%.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to hire stronger salespeople. If you would like a free consultation I can be reached at amiller@BigSwiftKick.com. Get a free copy of our Guide for Hiring the Best Salespeople here.

How to Identify and Quantify Value-Added Benefits to Maximize Your Competitive Advantage

Today's post is by David Jacoby, Managing Director at the Sales Readiness Group. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

 

Think of the last time you won a close, competitive sales opportunity. What tipped the scales in your favor?

In sales situations where it’s difficult to differentiate your solution from the competition’s, you often win by offering your buyer extra services, or value-added benefits. These are extra services beyond what you provide with your primary product or service at additional cost to the buyer.

Chances are you're already providing your buyers value-added benefits, but you're likely not getting credit for them.

Types of value-added benefits

Here are a few common examples of value-added benefits:

• Support services: services provided by your company, not by you personally. Such services include free training or a 24-hour customer service hotline.
• Consulting services: services that you offer, such as providing your expertise on use or implementation. But be careful! Consulting services can require an extensive time commitment on your part, so offer these only to high-potential accounts.
• Personal services: enhancements that you bring to an account. For example, you make an urgent delivery yourself. Some sales professionals simply tell their customers, “If you have a problem, just give me a call.”
• Promotional services: help you give to buyers to help them grow their business or do their jobs more efficiently. Examples include point-of-purchase materials, advertising, free samples, job aids or tools, and technical guides.

Use these categories to trigger your thinking and help you identify which value-added benefits you can offer buyers. Of course, any such value-added benefits should relate to the buyer’s needs— otherwise they won’t value it.

Quantifying value-added benefits

To maximize the competitive advantage that value-added benefits give you, it’s important that you quantify their value. Buyers will have a greater appreciation of your total offering when you identify and present the why value-added benefits actually add value.

Not all value-added benefits (e.g., personal services) have an obvious value. However, whenever possible, make them tangible and memorable by quantifying them.

Here are a few ways to quantify value-added benefits:

1. Benefit to buyer

When you can’t quantify the value the buyer receives, a back-up option is to quantify the cost to your organization of providing the benefit. For example, “Based on your volume, our free shipping will save you $500 per month.”

2. Convert numbers to bottom-line values

Try to quantify using dollars rather than percentages or time when possible. “This could save you up to $8,000 a month,” is more impactful than “Your efficiency will increase by up to 10%.”

3. Link value-added benefits together

Look for as many value-added benefits as possible. Often when you identify one benefit, it leads to others that you might not have considered.

Here is an example:

“To save you start-up time, which was one of your priorities, I’d like to offer you training and access to our high priority technical support. If you do have problems, you’ll be able to get access to a technician within one hour without any extra charge. Of course, if you have any urgent issues, you can always call me directly.”

Value-added benefits can make the difference between winning and losing in a competitive situation and help reinforce why selecting your solution is a good decision. So, before your next sales presentation, identify and quantify specific value-added benefits for your buyer.

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To access complimentary expert sales, sales management, and sales training resources, visit our learning center.

How Neuroscience Can Improve Sales Performance in Weeks, Not Years

Today's blog post is by Evan Sanchez. He is Sales Excellence Practice Lead of Think-X.

 

The changes to our working environment as a result of COVID-19 have been dramatic, to say the least. To find success in 2021, smart leaders are turning to neuroscience to identify performance gaps, make better hiring decisions, improve team performance, and reduce stress in a matter of weeks, not years.

Using neuroscience allows us to uncover thinking patterns that contribute to a high-performance mindset with a fast and scalable process. At first, you may think this is another assessment, but neuroscience diagnostics such as the Think-X Discover dive into the subconscious to find drivers of success as well as the barriers. Performance thinking barriers often sabotage underperformers and make hiring for performance-based roles very difficult. These tested findings and clinically validated activities are proven to create thought shifts that lead to better performance and less stress.

Why is this important to sales?

• In sales, A-players produce 5 times what a B-player produces and 10 times what a C-player produces.
• A-players typically produce 60-80% of all revenue, and they do it faster.
• You can invest in more sales training and more technology, but the ROI will not be maximized if barrier thinking is present.
• If you trade up barrier thinking you can recapture lost ROI from past training and technology implementations that failed to produce expected results.
• You can hire more efficiently and effectively.
• You can develop talent by improving the performance thinking.
• You can lower stress and anxiety that negatively impacts performance (perhaps needed more today than ever before).
• High levels of stress due to change can cause A-players to underperform and burn out.

How do you know you need this?

If your team has all had the same training on sales, product, or service, and you have followed your company’s hiring process, but you still have a wide gap between A-, B-, and C-players, you have to focus on improving the team’s mindset and performance thinking capability. The key performance drivers include:

• Ambition
• Confidence
• Emotional intelligence
• Empathy
• Systems thinking

Typically, the core performers (B- and C-players) have some of the key performance drivers listed above. However, barrier thinking patterns contribute to a negative or conflicting internal dialogue promoting a fixed mindset—the belief that things will never change or there is no need to change. In times of uncertainty and stress, this thinking can override learned behaviors as the stress triggers the flight, fight, or freeze reactive behaviors that lower performance. Most newly adopted training, agility, and capability to change goes out the window at this point.

This is caused by the presence of that barrier thinking and is often a blind spot. These blind spots – or what we call breaks – include: 

• High self-defeat
• High need for reassurance
• High controlling
• High skepticism
• High self-consciousness

What if we could identify the barriers holding one back from thinking and performing like the top 10%? 

That’s right: better thinking and better performance!

How do you start using performance thinking neuroscience strategies?

Each employee starts with a personal benchmark of score ranges in each of these performance drivers. By analyzing the profiles of the top 10% in each role, the data will point to conclusions about what these individuals have in common that makes them successful in the organization.  For an example, you can go here to see our most recent study and top performer templates.

Through a combination of individual and team data, managers can benchmark and measure performance drivers needed in the new remote environment, identify leaders, and provide employees with fast, accurate, and personalized feedback that can immediately impact their day-to-day activities. A much larger part of the core will become A-players. If you are a sales professional looking to improve your performance in 2021, please sign up for a diagnostic here.

If you are a sales consulting or training company, I suggest you reach out and explore our revenue generating strategies and partnering opportunities by contacting me to learn more by emailing me at evan.sanchez@think-x.com.

What to Expect as a Sales Training Buyer

Today's post is by Ken Valla, President and Co-Founder of The Valla Group, a modern sales training organization. Follow The Valla Group's LinkedIn page for sales effectiveness insights.

 

The inherent problem is that the economic model of most sales training providers is at odds with your desire to truly improve sales performance. You need modern, innovative, quality, and research-based content, customized for your unique business situation. This content creation process takes money, time, knowledge, and experience in selling. It is easier and more profitable for most sales training providers to continue to promote their decades-old approach and innovate lucrative services.

If you are someone who buys sales training, does this situation sound familiar?

The sales leadership of your company wants to implement a new sales methodology. You’re tasked with finding and sourcing a provider. This new methodology is supposed to transform your business, enabling your salespeople for future success in your evolving and fast-paced industry. This is a big part of your company’s growth strategy, it’s a big deal for you and your company, and you are driving it.

While evaluating current sales training providers, you notice most have been around for ages. Their latest offering has more to do with how they deliver training versus what the training actually teaches salespeople, and the content is basically the same as what they sold 10 years ago. But now they have a new reinforcement app (so maybe your leaders won’t notice the content is stagnant).

Their pricing models are also the same: Pay per person for the content or license it for a certain number of years, and all services and customization are extra. Also, if you don’t renew, you will lose access to the content and need to rip it out of your other trainings or systems it’s integrated into.

Already, you might feel like you’re in a bind.

You ask, “If we pay per person, will we have access to all the components of the offering to drive change and transform our company?” You hear, “Yes, we have consultants and can offer a great services package to drive your transformation.” This also comes at a cost.

“Can we embed this into our new hire process?” “Yes, if you pay us to T3 your facilitators and if you keep buying more participant guides per person.” 

“How about reinforcement?” “Yes, that is what the new subscription-based app is for.”

Everything you touch, try to change, adopt, sustain, or measure is all available for a fee, and always requires the sales training vendor to either do the work or be heavily involved. Why shouldn’t you be able to have more control of your own sales training programs? Why should you have to pay for a company to do what you could do internally? 

The Problem with Most Traditional Sales Methodologies

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s because this is how the industry has rolled for a long time. 

The inherent problem is that the economic model of most sales training providers is at odds with your desire to truly improve sales performance. You need modern, innovative, quality, and research-based content, customized for your unique business situation. This content creation process takes money, time, knowledge, and experience in selling. It is easier and more profitable for most sales training providers to continue to promote their decades-old approach and innovate lucrative services. 

This makes them service companies first and content companies second. They make their money selling services (people or technology platforms these days). The implication to you—the person tasked with finding the right partner to buy the right sales methodology for your teams—is that you are completely tethered to the provider. You have limited flexibility with their content so driving a transformation over time requires you to be joined at the hip with them and have deep pockets on a continuous basis. This also raises another challenge: How do you leverage the existing resources on your training and enablement team if the provider is doing all the work?

Expect Better

You shouldn’t have to be stuck in a bind. Successful adoption of a transformative sales methodology happens when your sellers can relate to the situations that a modern methodology addresses, when it is adapted to your unique business situations, and when you can leverage your own internal resources who know your business best.

And should you really have to pay for every little thing? Future sales training financial models will be most attractive when they enable you to use content. Unlimited. Untethered. Ongoing.

If you are a sales training person and you are looking to buy a new sales methodology that is tailored to your unique needs, you should expect:

•  Content in a sales methodology to be modern, research-based, and flexible
• The ability to leverage your own internal resources and put them to work with the new content and not at a charge on every move
• Not being “nickel and dimed” for services
• Flexibility in leveraging the content with the ability to develop derivative works
• A perpetual license to the content so you can use it without the fear of what it takes to unwind from your business the day you stop paying for the content

These aren’t big asks. This is what you should be requesting of your sales training partners, because they are required if you are going to be successful with that big initiative you have been asked to drive.

Ditch the Pitch: Use a Value Positioning Statement

Today's post is by Bill Cates, CSP, CPAE, President at Referral Coach International.

 

 

The dreaded elevator pitch!

Yes, you need a succinct and confident way to tell people what you do, but some methods of creating this short message can come across and cheesy, vague, or worse—confusing.

Your value positioning statement (VPS)

Because clarity is critical, I favor a straightforward approach. Don’t let your creativity or cleverness get in the way of clarity.

There are three main reasons to have an effective value positioning statement:

1. Gives people a sense of the work you do—in a way that they can identify with immediately
2. Demonstrates who you do it for, so they can see if it pertains to them (or if they know someone to whom it pertains)
3. Conveys one or more benefits in a way that taps into an emotional response

Why an emotional response?

The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has demonstrated that at the heart of every decision is emotion. Yes—facts, statistics, and evidence are important, but at the end of the day, those all create an emotional response. When an analytical client wants to know the details of what you do and a logical reason for why you might recommend a solution, it’s because they want to feel comfortable about their decision.

The Radical Relevance Value Positioning Formula™

There are no right answers, only right answers for you, because if you don’t craft a VPS that you can write and speak naturally, with confidence, then it’s worthless.

What does the brain want?

Neuroscientists will tell you that the brains of your prospects are wired to look for two main things: what problems you solve (or prevent) and what opportunities you provide.

For most people, solving and preventing problems usually carries a bit more weight than looking for opportunities. With that said, I think it makes sense to hit both of those triggers.

Step 1: Your expertise

You are an expert in your area of focus. Don’t run away from this concept. Your prospects are looking for “experts” and “specialists.” Using this concept conveys confidence and credibility.

Step 2: Who you serve

By describing who you serve the best – for whom your processes are geared – you will become more relevant to that prospect. Or if you’re speaking to a center of influence, you’ll be teaching them about who they should send your way.

Step 3: What they want (the benefits)

Whatever your prospect wants are the benefits. The clearer you are about your ideal prospects, the easier it is to speak in terms of what they want—how they will benefit from your work.

Step 4: Value in action

You’ll see from the following example, that steps 1-3 do a pretty good job at explaining what you do and how your clients benefit. But, in my opinion, you want to bring your value to life with either a real-life example or letting your belief in your value show through.

Financial advisor example

My expertise is in financial planning for successful business owners.

I work with fast-paced owners and entrepreneurs who want to focus on what they do best—running their business and making money.

(Value in action) I’m like a financial quarterback for my client. I put the right team in place to make sure they have all the right insurance in place, a benefits package that helps them retain their best employees, and that all their investments are working as hard as possible for them.

The true test

Creating the right VPS can be difficult. I tell my coaching/consulting clients, “It’s hard to see the picture when you’re in the frame.” You might come up with something that feels right in the moment, but when you try saying it to someone, you think to yourself, “What was I thinking?”

So, your VPS needs to pass the “will-I-actually-say-it?” test. And don’t be surprised if your VPS evolves over time until you settle on a standard response that will fit most of your situations.

Bill Cates, author of Get More Referrals Now, Beyond Referrals, and Radical Relevance, and a highly sought-after international speaker. He is also a Selling Power 2021 Leading Sales Consultant. To learn more, go to www.ReferralCoach.com. Bill can be reached directly at:  BillCates@ReferralCoach.com.

Three Secrets to Hiring the Best Sales People

Today’s post is by Nigel Green, a sought sales advisor and author of Revenue Harvest.

 

Forget the resumé. 

If you’re hiring salespeople, you already know that no two interviews are alike. The objective is to find talent with both tangible and intangible characteristics that will easily segue into their role at your company. Every candidate has a different backstory, expectation, and range of talents, and the quicker that salesperson becomes productive, the better the situation is for everyone. As the sales leader, it’s your job to ask the right sequence of questions during the interview in order to understand what drives this person, how they operate in a professional setting, and how they respond to challenges, all of which are strong indicators for success in a selling role. 

The ideal candidate will have the willingness, intelligence, passion, and skills necessary to develop a successful sales career under your coaching. But how do you pull these characteristics out of the candidate during the interview process? 

I’ve interviewed hundreds of salespeople in my career, and it’s a difficult task. To add to the gravity of this decision is the fact that making a bad hiring decision costs thousands of dollars and invaluable, unrecoverable time. In order to find the ideal salesperson, there are several central attributes that I look for, and I’ve found three that are the most important to me. I call them the Three Cs: character, chemistry, and competence. These three characteristics can be assessed in an interview by asking the right questions and actually listening (to improve your listening, read this) to the responses the candidate gives. 

Character 

When I hire people, I always look at the person’s character first. You want to hire a salesperson who isn’t afraid to be real—a person you can trust to get the job done and who holds themself accountable when they mess up. In order to evaluate a candidate’s character, you need to know where they are coming from, how they arrived, where they are, and where they see themselves ending up. 

For me, an indicator of strong character is when I can hear a candidate, confidently, talk about mistakes they have made and what they’ve learned from them. If I ask a candidate, “What’s your biggest weakness?” and they provide a response that resembles, “I work too much,” or “I’m too competitive,” then the interview is over. Those aren’t real weaknesses. I’m looking for something like, “I struggle managing conflict,” or “I tend to wait until the last minute to finish my reports.” These are real opportunities to improve. 

Chemistry 

Looking for chemistry highlights the importance of compatibility—to work with someone and to work with a team, we’re going to have to jive, not just in a relationship, but also with our habits, goals, and work ethic. You aren’t looking for someone who just wants another job. The best salesperson will care about what they are selling, who they are working with, and how they are getting it all done. 

Discovering chemistry with a candidate provides valuable insight that can prove beneficial to the organization and goes beyond their basic qualifications and/or typical answers to standard interview questions. I like to ask a candidate what was the last book they read. If they can’t remember, then we aren’t going to work well together. I’m not judging them for not being a reader, but rather observing that I believe leaders are readers, and I’m looking for leaders. 

Competence 

Competence is the attribute most hiring managers look for first, but it ranks last for me among the Three Cs. While your best candidate will impress you with what they initiate on their own and how they take responsibility for their own professional growth, it doesn’t mean that they have to know everything right out of the gate. If you have solid character and we have great chemistry, then competence is something I can teach you. The right talent will train themselves—they will put in the long nights studying or on the phone with other team members until they master their craft. 

I understand the importance of hiring quickly; not having a full team makes it difficult to reach your growth goals. But making a bad hire can be a costly mistake, which is why I always say, “Slow to hire, quick to fire.” Better hiring is achieved by process not intuition. An ironclad hiring process is detailed in my book Revenue Harvest.

Your ability to determine if a seller is going to perform is linked to the quality of your interview questions. Here is my go-to bank of 70+ sales interview questions.