Selling Power Blog

How AI Automation Will Change the State of Sales

Today’s post is by Jessica Munday, a content marketing specialist at Automation Hero, an intelligent process automation (IPA) company combining RPA and AI for next-level businesses.

 

Sales productivity is the number one challenge for 65 percent of B2B organizations. It’s an industry-wide problem that heavily impacts revenue margins and a company’s bottom line.

The biggest inhibitors to productivity are the inefficiencies within the sales process. According to Salesforce, the average sales rep spends 64 percent of his or her time on non-selling tasks – 25 percent of which are administrative tasks.

The burden on sales managers grows as executive leaders push for higher revenue gains. The solution managers have discovered? Implementing sales AI to automate inefficient processes that prevent sales reps from selling. These technologies make it so the data entry and busy work are still done, but salespeople have more time to sell and drive profits for the company.

Rapid Growth in Sales Tools

The current sales tech landscape has more than 700 tools – up from around 300 in 2015. Growth in the sales technology space will continue to accelerate over the coming years, resulting in a flooded market with thousands of productivity tools.

While many of these tools promise to increase productivity, the number of vendors and products out there add even more noise and confusion for sales managers. In this hyper-growth market, managers can find it difficult to select the right tools for their business needs. They waste time comparing and evaluating vendors to find “the needle in the haystack.”

Many of these basic productivity tools add even more steps to the already-inefficient sales process, further preventing sales teams from selling.

What Makes Sales AI Better

Sales AI tools differ from traditional sales technology because they’re built with intelligence to improve the sales process and enable salespeople to be as productive and sales focused as possible. Sales AI optimizes the sales process through automation and augmentation.

Automation is when an intelligent machine performs low-level, repetitive tasks automatically with little assistance from the sales rep – and, as previously stated, sales reps spend a majority of their time on administrative tasks. Sales automation cuts down that time by performing tasks like CRM data entry, researching contact information, scheduling meetings, and drafting emails.

Augmentation is designed to elevate human intelligence to help people work smarter. Augmenting the sales team’s intelligence leads to sales reps making smarter decisions. Tasks that can be augmented include “next-step” engagement recommendations, prospecting, and cross-sell and up-sell suggestions. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, 30 percent of all B2B companies will add intelligence augmentation to augment at least one of their primary sales processes.

Sales AI Adoption

A Forrester survey shows that 46 percent of companies are looking to implement AI systems specifically for their sales and marketing teams. Salesforce says it’s the top growth area for sales teams, with adoption expected to grow 139 percent over the next three years.

Early adopters are already seeing results. Eighty-three percent of the most aggressive adopters of AI and cognitive technologies say their companies have already achieved either moderate (53 percent) or substantial (30 percent) benefits. Research shows that high-performing sales teams are 3.4 times more likely than underperforming teams to already be using AI.

Critical Skills and Habits You Need to Succeed in the AI Era

Today’s post is by Ilan Kasan, co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai, the leader in AI and automation for sales and marketing. Ilan is a thought leader and blogger and a strong proponent that the best sales teams will join forces with AI to exceed their goals.

 

To succeed in the 1950s, salespeople needed a handful of critical skills: connecting with potential customers, listening to their needs, and forming a strong relationship based on trust.

Then came the 1980s and 1990s, and things changed.

Suddenly, salespeople needed to learn how to crunch numbers and work with CRM systems. Administrative skills became a core part of their job. They became documenters and technologists in addition to relationship builders.

Now, we’re entering the AI era, and everyone is quaking in their boots that their job might be overtaken by an AI entity.

We’re not nervous, because we view this new era differently.

We welcome it. We even celebrate it.

By partnering with AI-powered tools, today’s salespeople can delegate their administrative work and focus more on what they have always liked doing and have been valued for: building relationships.

Building relationships, listening actively, and making people comfortable are best accomplished by humans, not technology. Here are the three critical skills salespeople can use to succeed in our new AI era.

Skill #1: Fearlessness

The only way to succeed in the AI era is to embrace it without fear.

According to research by InsideSales, over 20 percent of sales teams that don’t use AI tools say it’s because they don’t trust AI, and 5 percent are scared it will take their jobs. That means over a quarter of sales teams avoid AI out of fear. But, when you have the right solution, you’ll find it’s not as intimidating as you thought.

Exceed.ai’s virtual assistant enables sales teams to make the best use of their time by taking over repetitive administrative tasks, freeing sales reps to focus on the things only humans can do. Exceed.ai assistants can:

• schedule calls and book meetings,
• make initial contact with cold leads,
• qualify them,
• identify the best time to reconnect with potential customers, and
• unfailingly follow up on new leads through natural, two-way conversations over email and chat.

Sales teams that use Exceed.ai experience up to an 80 percent increase in new sales opportunities and a 67 percent drop in the cost of qualifying leads.

When you let go of your fear and really partner with your AI sales assistant, working alongside it effectively, you can prioritize your time more efficiently and convert more leads into sales opportunities.

Skill #2: Relationship building

The biggest benefit of sales in the AI era is that salespeople are now free to dedicate the bulk of their time doing the things AI can’t do, like banter, joke, find common ground, and build genuine relationships with potential customers.

Human nuance, demonstrating emotion, and connecting with people are what salespeople were born to do. But, in the past two decades – when nearly half of their time was required for emailing; communicating back and forth to establish, confirm, and reschedule meetings; following up; and documenting every interaction – their true sales skills set, including fostering relationships and closing deals, became stymied.

AI has created the opportunity for salespeople to excel at exactly what they were hired to do. AI tools can free salespeople to cultivate the skills buyers value. Research by Salesforce reveals that 75 percent of buyers expect companies to understand their needs, and 79 percent want to interact with a salesperson they trust. Today’s buyers want to trust their vendors and suppliers, and that can be done only if salespeople listen carefully to what buyers need and want.  

Skill #3: Cross-collaboration

Entering the AI era doesn’t mean salespeople will suddenly become “lone wolves,” sitting together with their AI assistant, set apart from the rest of the marketing and sales teams. On the contrary, skills as a team player will be more important than ever, and more productive.

AI will make sales teams smaller – placing each representative in a holistic unit that unites sales, marketing, and customer service. Salespeople will have to grasp the big picture, considering all the interactions among the three departments. Only salespeople who recognize and prioritize cross-collaboration will succeed.

Salespeople also have to embrace greater transparency within the team and let go of their pride in doing everything themselves. It’s going to require a completely new perspective, where every sale is truly a joint effort. They’ll need to be willing to share information, leads, and insights openly and freely, learn how to intelligently delegate to their AI partner, and become willing to hand over leads for someone else to complete the sale.

Use AI So You Can Sell More

With the advent of AI, salespeople can fully embrace interpersonal skills, relationship building, fearlessness, and other uniquely human skills, and leave the administrative work to technology.

Salespeople must abandon their fear of AI and learn how to delegate to it, then polish their relationship building skills. Visit Exceed.ai to learn how.

How Sellers Can Win in a World of the Subscription Business Model

Today's blog post is by Charlie Thackston, president and founder of SOAR Performance Group, a consulting and training company focused on helping clients achieve new levels of performance through go-to-market strategy, sales approach, and sales skills. Charlie is the author of Change Velocity: The Secret to Leading a Successful Sales Transformation. Connect with Charlie on LinkedIn.

 

A new generation of buyers has grown up with the subscription buying model, a model promoted every day through the proliferation of apps offering everything from fitness to finance – all delivered at the tap of a finger.

In his book, Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future – and What to Do About It, Tien Tzuo, founder of Zuora, says executives need to think about how their companies will thrive in a subscription business. According to Tzuo: “If you’re not shifting to this business model now, chances are that, in a few years, you might not have any business left to shift.”

Several of our company’s B2B clients now have subscription business models. Some are native “subscription as a service” businesses; others are traditional transactional businesses migrating to this model.

How the Subscription Business Model Puts the Risk on Salespeople

B2B subscription-based models are having a big impact on sales teams. Why? In short, this trend shifts risk from the buyer to the seller. This is something smart sales leaders are already preparing for (using tools like our change velocity readiness diagnostic can help).

From a deployment perspective, buyers subscribe only for services they need in the moment and reserve the option to add to that subscription only if the demand for service expands. Buyers who are unhappy with the capabilities or service provided have the ability to terminate the subscription within the bounds of a defined subscription period.

From a traditional selling perspective, this would have been called “land and expand.” The main difference between the traditional selling perspective and a subscription business model lies in the contracting.

A Subscription Business Model Gives the Buyer More Flexibility

Historically, the goods or services purchased by the customer came with a long commitment period. In a subscription business model, customers have an earlier chance to cancel their contract. This new flexibility is the reason selling is not what it used to be.

As customers buy only what is needed, the sales value per contract is typically smaller. This shifts the real focus to the usage and adoption of the subscribed services and is the reason customer success manager is one of the positions in greatest demand at the moment.

Before the rise of the subscription business model, the roles established to support the customer after the sale were called customer service, customer support, or customer operations. I find the shift in job titles interesting: Clearly, it’s because adoption and expansion have become integral to the success of the subscription model.

How Chief Revenue Officers Must Operate in a Service-as-a-Subscription World

For chief revenue officers, the new focus on sales strategy and selling skills must go much further than “Land, Adopt, Expand, and Renew.” Instead, they must focus on account-based engagement.

All points of engagement – from marketing to sales to customer success – must be understood, and each must build the relationship while delivering value to the customer stakeholders. This is the focus of account-based engagement. The full continuum of account interactions includes:

• Targeting the right accounts with digital marketing strategies
• Engaging the accounts using relevant content
• Driving interactions across social media platforms for effective digital and personal interactions with sales teams
• Driving adoption, identifying expansion opportunities, and renewing accounts with minimal churn  

The movement to account-based engagement will be a sales transformation for both native as-a-service companies and those looking to move from traditional transactional business to as-a-service. Understanding where your organization is in terms of driving this change will be important for this sales transformation.  

So, how can you prepare your organization and your salespeople to succeed in a subscription economy? Use the SOAR Performance Group Change Velocity Readiness Diagnostic to help you identify your needs and craft a plan for the future. Complete the full assessment and I’ll send you a free digital copy of my new book, Change Velocity: The Secret to Leading a Successful Sales Transformation.

Managing Sales in a Rapid Growth Environment

Today’s post is by Norman Behar, chairman and managing director of the Sales Readiness Group (SRG). He has over 25 years of senior sales management experience and is recognized as a thought leader in the sales training industry. His blog posts and white papers are frequently featured in leading sales enablement publications, including ATD, TrainingIndustry.com, and Selling Power.

 

Did you know a typical sales professional may rely on six or more cloud software applications (i.e., the sales stack) daily? Think of how many of the following you use all the time:

• Email (e.g., Outlook, Gmail)
• Business applications (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics)
• Sales engagement (e.g., Outreach, SalesLoft)
• Virtual meetings (e.g., Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting)
• Team messaging (e.g., Slack, Chatter)

Most of us working in sales can’t function properly without many of these cloud software solutions. That’s why so many SaaS companies have sky-high valuations and aggressive growth rates to maintain them.

Managing Sales in a Rapid Growth Environment

In many cases, pre-IPO cloud software companies are held to ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) growth rates of over 100 percent; after going public, growth is expected to exceed 50 percent. Even the very largest cloud software companies (e.g., Salesforce, Workday, and LogMeIn – all of which have annual revenues in excess of $1 billion) are still expected to post double-digit sales growth.

These hyper-growth environments put extreme pressure on the sales organizations of SaaS companies in terms of hiring, onboarding, training, coaching, and managing sales teams. In addition, they typically have highly specialized sales roles that focus on specific business objectives. While the actual titles may vary, a typical SaaS company will have sales roles that include:

• Business Development Representative (BDR) – Identify and qualify new customers and/or opportunities
• Account Executive (AE) – Sell into qualified (or what are perceived to be qualified) opportunities
• Account Manager (AM) – Manage large or strategic account relationships with a focus on growth within the account
• Customer success manager (CSM) – Emphasis on renewals and upgrades
• Sales Engineer (SE) – Focus on aligning solutions with “use cases” (pre-sale) and implementation (post-sale)

While growing and developing talent is critical for each of the above-listed functions, the greatest challenge typically falls on the frontline sales managers. Managing sales in a high-growth environment can be particularly difficult because accelerated growth rates typically result in the promotion of top sales performers into sales management roles.

The Challenge with Promoting Top Sales Performers into Frontline Sales Managers

While top salespeople have instant credibility based on their sales success, they generally have little to no sales management experience and usually struggle with this transition.

The importance of frontline sales management was recently highlighted in an article in the The Wall Street Journal, “The Economy’s Last Best Hope: Superstar Middle Managers,” which cited a Gallup study noting the compelling positive impact quality management has on employee productivity and engagement.

When it comes to managing sales teams, it helps to keep in mind the quality of your manager will affect the following key functions:

• Hiring – always easier when you have the right people on your team
• Performance management - creating a culture of accountability around sales behaviors and results
• Pipeline management – opportunity management and forecast accuracy
• Sales coaching – personalized coaching to improve selling skills
• Sales leadership – maintaining a positive, highly-engaged team

How Frontline Sales Managers Can Transcend the Daily Grind

Unfortunately, the sheer number of priorities at cloud software companies often leaves sales managers trapped in a daily grind of focusing on urgent tasks, attending meetings, and submitting reports as opposed to training managers to unleash the full power of their sales teams.

The good news is that sales managers can learn to adopt excellent sales management skills and techniques. This is especially necessary at any company where managers are expected to deliver extremely ambitious sales results.

Managing sales in a rapid growth environment require a sales management training program that introduces the knowledge, skills, and tools new frontline managers need to be successful. Then, the organization can help new sales managers make the transition to becoming a high-performing sales manager much more rapidly and with better results.

Click the image below to read more on this topic in our white paper, “Developing Great Frontline Sales Managers.”

Can You Improve Your Frictionless Selling Approach?

Today’s post is by Jay Mitchell, founder and president of Mereo LLC. With a heart for serving, Jay’s others-focused values are inspiring to his clients and peers alike – as reflected in Mereo’s purpose of Seek to Serve, Not to Sell™. Follow Jay’s thought leadership on LinkedIn.  

 

The spirit of frictionless selling hits the mark: How can we make it as easy as possible for our buyers to move through their journeys?

Yet, when we think of frictionless selling, we must consider a key element that will continue to hinder sales and marketing teams from achieving this noble and effective goal, and that is the underlying objective to buy from us and choose our solutions – to “pick me, pick me!”

As long as our goals remain to sell to the buyer rather than to serve the buyer, frictionless selling will fail to amount to an easier buying process and consistent resulting sales. But, if we can truly put buyers first and make their journey as seamless and valuable as possible, then we can manage the true intent of frictionless selling.

The Buying Process Is Full of Friction

Marketing and sales teams are making it too difficult for buyers to find solutions to their pains – so much so that CSO Insights found less than a quarter (23 percent) of buyers would turn to vendor salespeople as a top three resource to solve their business problems.

According to Forrester Research, B2B buyers believe only 8 percent of sellers are focused on driving a valuable end result for the buyer. No wonder most buyers choose to engage sellers later in their journeys – because they do not perceive any value in doing so earlier; moreover, their experience is that sellers are too invested in their own motives and not what is in the best interest of the buyer.

This is an issue because buyers are often unaware of all their pains or their real underlying issues. Status quo is rarely the best answer for any buyer. Yet overcoming status quo is not a simple task for buyers to process on their own – let alone recognize.

When buyers traverse today’s selling environment, they do so without true guidance, for fear that a seller will be focused only on trying to make it as easy as possible to get the buyer’s money – rather than to provide the buyer real solutions.

Yet operating without the insights of a trusted seller has not fared well for buyers, either. Upwards of 60 percent of B2B buying journeys end in no action (Aberdeen), and more than 40 percent of B2B purchases are followed by second-guessing (Harvard Business Review).

Serve Buyers by Reducing Friction and Adding Value

Frictionless selling is part of the equation. There must be an equal balance between the ease of the buyer’s journey and the value gained from it.

This can happen only when we realign our motivation to “Seek to Serve, Not to Sell™.”

For a buyer:

• Selling means product-pushing. Seeking to serve means securing a solution to a problem.
• Selling translates to an exchange of products and services for money. Seeking to serve translates to relevant and meaningful (aka valuable) interactions.
• Selling lands deals. Seeking to serve builds long-term relationships and indefinite moments for both parties to create more value.

The truth is, we should not be focused on removing the friction from the selling but, in true Seek to Serve fashion, to remove the friction for the buyer.

If we as sellers have buyers’ best interests in mind and combine that with relevant and insightful knowledge about their industry and pains, we can make it as easy as possible for a buyer to realize the best solution to their pain.

This is no simple feat. It takes grit, hard work, and acumen to move beyond being just a seller to becoming a trusted advisor to buyers. But, when we manage to do so, we gain the opportunity to provide meaningful and relevant interactions that develop long-term relationships – and amount to value for buyers and sellers alike.

For more Seek to Serve, Not to Sell insights, connect with Mereo on LinkedIn.

Three Steps to Gain a Competitive Edge in Sales

Today’s post is by Lance Tyson, president and CEO of Tyson Group. Lance is a seasoned entrepreneur known for training sales talent for some of the biggest names in professional sports and entertainment, including Topgolf, the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, Fenway Sports Management (Boston Red Sox) and the Tampa Bay Lightning, among others. As the author of the best-selling book, Selling Is an Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World, Lance is a leading authority and recognized speaker and trainer who draws on over two decades of sales experience to educate others on how to succeed in sales.  

 

I recently made a visit to the orthopedic surgeon to check in on a shoulder issue. I didn’t walk in the door wanting to sign up for surgery.

After spending a bit of time in the waiting room, I was led back to another part of the office, where a nurse practitioner asked me a number of questions about my health, took notes on my weight, temperature, and blood pressure and interviewed me about my health history. They gathered lots of information about me in order to help the doctor accurately evaluate my condition.

And, all the while, I was evaluating them, too – on the thoroughness of their process.

When the orthopedic surgeon came into the room, he took the time to connect with me personally. He immediately developed a rapport with me, just the way most good salespeople are able to do with their prospects. But, beyond that, he established his credibility by demonstrating his expertise and showing me that he had done this before. His questions were focused, and he was clearly asking them in order to understand me better rather than simply waiting to respond.

When the doctor segued into a diagnosis, he had my full attention. His bedside manner, the questions he asked, and the level to which he appeared to be interested in listening to my answers all played a key role in how I reacted to his diagnosis and my willingness to accept that it was accurate. By the time he moved from the diagnosis into a prescription, I was already sold. I could have opted to get a second opinion or go down another path, but he had already gained my confidence through his open-ended questions and the way he skillfully guided the conversation.

Getting to the Right Selling Solution

In today’s complex selling environment, salespeople need to make the buyer a partner in getting to the right solution. But there’s a common misconception that sales is all about building relationships. In reality, though, sales is about developing three essential elements: credibility, rapport, and understanding the prospect’s needs. Relationships are a byproduct.

Everything salespeople say and do, including their appearance, adds or detracts from their credibility. Credibility yields trust and, in turn, improves rapport.

When a good rapport is developed, the buyer feels confidence sharing more information, which increases understanding. Only when those three elements are established in equal measure can salespeople achieve the right solution and gain a competitive edge.

Four Things Every Salesperson Must Do to Gain a Competitive Edge

That’s why the diagnosis step is critical when it comes to transforming indifference into interest in the buyer’s mind. The job of the salesperson is to

1. address the buyer’s doubts,
2. establish credibility,
3. ask the right questions to get an accurate read on the buyer’s situation, and
4. adjust the diagnosis based on the buyer’s input and needs.

Once you get to the correct diagnosis, the next step is to prescribe a solution. The right solution to the wrong problem is worse than the wrong solution to the right problem, so it’s crucial to get to the correct diagnosis. In sales we tailor the solution as much as possible to the specific needs of the buyer. At this point, the buyer will have lots of questions: What is it? How does it work? Who says so, besides you? Can you prove it? At this point, to overcome doubt in the buyer’s mind, the salesperson needs to give the buyer exactly the right amount of information, and no more, about the solution.

This is a step-by step process and takes place within a fluid world. It might be possible to cover both the diagnosis and prescription in one meeting, or even a conference call. Or, in a more complex sale, it might take three or four meetings to connect, evaluate, and diagnose – leading to a prescriptive presentation. The pace and complexity of a sale are dictated by the marketplace and the product.

Regardless of the time horizon or complexity of the sale, the process and steps remain the same. They can be adapted to suit any situation or customer, but the sequence remains constant.

To learn more about how to gain a competitive edge through the six-step selling process, contact Tyson Group at https://tysongroup.com/contact/.

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.