Selling Power Blog

Remaking The Discovery Call For a Virtual World

Today's post is by Ben Taylor, MBA and content marketing manager at Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

The sales professional’s virtual discovery call is more challenging than ever because customers’ needs are constantly changing as they respond to the pandemic. Moreover, uncovering these needs from a screen only adds to the difficulty.

As a result, the virtual discovery call must become a precise instrument that sales professionals use to identify and uncover these challenges and determine if their product or service is a fit and can deliver value for customers.

Here we examine what sales professionals need to do during the discovery call to understand these evolving needs, fully grasp the customer’s challenges, and allocate their time to value-creating opportunities.

Develop a Targeted, Three-part Model

Sales professionals face two key challenges on a virtual discovery call: Time is short, and the customer might be unclear on what needs are most pressing. To overcome these challenges, the sales professional needs a targeted approach that can work within the confines of a limited schedule.

1. A Questioning Strategy
   
   Sales professionals need to know what they will ask the customer. A funnel approach is helpful because questions begin broad and become more specific as information is revealed. At first, the sales professional’s questions should explore the customer’s core objective and why it is important. Next, follow-up questions should examine how the customer’s current circumstances differ from what they believe is ideal. Remember that questions should not be limited to just the customer’s needs. Sales professionals should also learn the internal decision-making process, timeline, and budget.
   
   
2. Floating Ideas
   
   After hearing the customer’s responses to the above questions, a sales professional can float ideas—articulating their experience to build credibility, stimulate conversation, and spark a detailed conversation about needs and challenges. By floating ideas, the sales professional engages the customer’s priming bias. With continued exposure, the customer becomes more receptive to an idea. However, the act of floating an idea must be done with caution because the sales professional must first have a full understanding of the issues.
   
   
3. Check For Additional Needs
   
   By checking for additional needs the sales professional avoids missing critical details that may have been overlooked in the initial dialogue. This step is also an opportunity to help the customer prioritize their needs. Checking for additional needs and understanding priorities all tie to the core skill necessary for the discovery call: listening. The sales professional should spend at least 70% of their time asking questions and listening, and no more than 30% of their time floating ideas.

Prepare for the Virtual Challenges

Some of the most valuable information learned in a discovery call occurs when the customer volunteers information. Trust is a precursor to this event, however, it can be difficult to establish over a virtual interface. Research from social psychologists at Stanford offers some clues on how to overcome this challenge.

Understand Each Buyer’s Role

Trust emerges when there is a clear understanding of the roles within the group. As the Stanford researchers explain, “role-based interaction leads to more rapid development of trust than does person-based interaction.” If the sales professional understands the role of each decision maker, they can address individualized concerns. Increasingly, buying decisions are made by a group of stakeholders. Therefore, the sales professional will need messaging that speaks to everyone.

Engage All Decision Makers

Second, sales professionals must ensure the virtual discovery call engages all of the decision makers. Research in The Role of Trust in Global Virtual Teams, shows “the critical link between communication early in the life of a virtual team and early trust.” Developing trust requires not just stakeholder attendance—it also demands stakeholder’s attention. Success comes from not confusing the two. The presence of a stakeholder in the call does not represent their agreement that the solution has value. Sales professionals can confront this hurdle by asking specific individuals questions rather than presenting an inquiry to the group.

Address Overarching Needs 

Third, building trust requires an environment in which individuals in the group become co-dependent. The same Stanford research shows that interdependent groups are another precursor to trust. Sales professionals should adopt this finding by using the virtual discovery call to understand how their solution not only addresses individual needs but also the larger, overarching needs of the organization.

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To learn how Richardson Sales Performance can help your sales succeed in today’s setting download our brief: Perfecting the Virtual Discovery Call, or contact us at +1-215-940-9255 or at info@richardson.com. Follow us on LinkedIn for more insights on effective selling.

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What Sales Can Learn from Sports

Today's post is by an internationally recognized sales training and enablement expert, Mike Kunkle, VP of Sales Effectiveness Services at SPARXIQ.

 

Sales managers lead and guide a sales team to success, just as a coach does for a sports team. One lesson the business world can learn from sports is the value of effectively coaching a team. Since a coach helps someone achieve their personal best, a sales manager who is equipped with a coaching mindset can connect with and develop their sales reps to help them realize their full potential. When managers coach their reps instead of simply providing directive feedback, they maximize sales effectiveness.

Strategic Coaching in Sales

At a high level, sales coaching is a formal developmental process where sales managers partner with their reps to improve performance. Sales managers encourage their reps to take responsibility for their growth by helping them determine areas of development, create action plans, and take steps to improve their performance.

Coaching focuses on your team’s strengths, making each member better. Sports coaches focus on emphasizing their players’ strengths, and train to improve their players and guide them. In sales, instead of telling the reps what to do, sales managers can act as guides to help reps uncover the best strategies to achieve their goals, which creates a development partnership. To build the most effective sales coaching development programs, managers must know what, how, and why to coach.

It’s important to approach sales coaching strategically, rather than simply providing feedback to rep behavior as it happens, by asking these questions:

• Do the sales reps know what to do and why to do it?
• Do they know how much and how often to do it?
• Can and will they do it?
•  Are they doing enough of it and are they doing it well enough?

Directive and Facilitative Approaches in Coaching

The answers to the above questions provide direction for coaching opportunities. Just about every sales activity is coachable, including territory optimization, account planning, prospecting, presenting, and negotiating. The best practices learned from these various coaching areas inform the performance improvement solutions needed to solve specific skill gaps for individual reps.

Coaching should be learner-centric. Your approach to training and coaching should adapt based on your rep’s current needs. All coaching should be respectful and engaging to the learner, but the models you use may vary. There are two simple approaches for teaching and validating knowledge and skill that will guide reps to more effectively use what they know and improve what they do. Both approaches are effective when used properly.

Directive approach: Telling, discussing, showing, and validating knowledge and skill

Facilitative approach: Questioning, listening, involving, engaging, and leading

What Sales Coaching Can Do for Your Sales Force

According to David Brock, CEO, Partners in EXCELLENCE and author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide, many sales managers aren’t aware that coaching is a key part of their job and don’t have role models to learn from. The value of coaching is inherently clear and there is a lot of data to support its efficacy. For instance, companies that provide real-time, deal-specific sales coaching increased revenue by 8.4% year-over-year, which is a 95% improvement over companies that don’t provide that level of coaching.

We’ve gathered 15 expert pieces of advice regarding the impact sales coaching has on a company and the consensus gives praise to training sales managers with this mindset. As Carole Mahoney, founder and Chief Sales Coach of Unbound Growth says, “Companies who make sales coaching a priority sell more, do it faster, and keep both their customers and sellers longer. All of this leads to revenue growth that costs less.”

In my eBook about sales coaching, there are guidelines on how to integrate coaching activities into daily, weekly, and monthly workflow to a standard practice. This eBook provides a glimpse into our program that helps you create a coaching culture. There is a better way to achieve mastery levels and maximize sales effectiveness, and that way is sales coaching excellence. Use sales coaching to develop a more well-rounded and successful sales team.

The Top Three Sales Coaching Challenges Facing Sales Managers Today (and How to Fix Them)

Today's post is by Brian Trautschold, co-founder and COO at Ambition, the leading sales coaching and gamification software used by in-house and remote sales teams across the globe.

 

You’ve heard it time and time again: Sales coaching is the number one thing sales managers can do to improve the performance of their reps.

But not all sales coaching programs are created equal – which is why we wanted to understand what’s happening in the real world, right now. What does sales coaching look like for a typical sales team, and, most importantly, is it actually making a difference?

We surveyed sales leaders and reps from mid-market and enterprise sales orgs, and our survey affirmed what we know to be true – that sales coaching matters (a lot). But many managers are struggling to run sales coaching programs that directly impact performance, due primarily to common challenges sales managers face.

Here are the top three problems that contribute to ineffective sales coaching, plus some actionable tactics sales managers can use to improve their programs.

Challenge #1: Lack of Manager Training

According to our survey, 98% of managers said they were in a front-line selling role before moving up to a sales manager role. It’s a big percentage, but it’s not surprising: The sales management world is full of former all-star sellers – many of whom, unfortunately, get their big promotion, a pat on the back...and that’s about it. 

This begs the question: Who’s managing the managers?

The bottom line is that sales management isn’t the same as selling. It’s a different role with completely different responsibilities, skill requirements, and measures of success. Through no fault of their own, managers often lack the training required to coach, motivate, and pull the levers that lead to positive, lasting behavior change in their reps. 

When managers don’t know how or when to coach, it either doesn’t happen effectively or it doesn’t happen at all. If this sounds familiar, take heart: There are ways you can take charge and hone your sales coaching skills – or at least get the ball rolling.

The Solution

• Start a dialogue: Communicate with your supervisor or leadership team about where you’d like to grow as a sales coach. Sure, it may be intimidating or feel like you’re admitting a weakness – but consider what it would be like if the tables were turned and one of your reps approached you seeking opportunities to improve in their role. It actually shows commitment to your team, your desire to be successful as a sales manager, and a high level of self-awareness. If you’re having that conversation, know what you’re asking for ahead of time: Are there specific resources you need? Is there a course you’d like to take? Be specific and solution oriented.
• Identify professional development opportunities: The sales world loves an event – and sales coaching is always a hot topic. From Webinars and seminars to conferences and retreats, there’s something out there for everyone. Also: Don’t underestimate the power of community. Seek out sales associations or LinkedIn groups, jump into Reddit or Quora – you’ll find a lot of people asking and answering the same sales coaching questions you have.
• Request feedback: Surveying your employees can be a humbling exercise but, if you do it right, it’s worth it. No matter how green or seasoned you are, seeking out regular feedback from your team can take the guesswork out of what’s going well and where you can do better. Be sure you do this in a variety of formats: Of course, people may feel more comfortable responding anonymously – and you may get some very honest answers – but be sure to provide opportunities for open dialogue, too.

Challenge #2: Lack of Performance Visibility

The best kind of sales coaching is data-driven sales coaching. According to our survey, however, only 27% of managers have excellent visibility into their reps’ progress against goals.

It’s hard to coach if you don’t know how your reps are performing, what they’re struggling with, or where their skill gaps lie – and that story needs to be told by data, not just by feelings, hunches, and anecdotes. When sales coaching sessions aren’t structured around data, they’re at best fluffy, and, at worst, emotional or even confrontational.

When managers don’t have accurate, accessible data, it’s often because they’re using a CRM, spreadsheets, or even whiteboards to keep track of their team’s performance – all of which become a hassle and a time suck for managers who just want to know where their team stands.

It’s also a problem when reps lack visibility into individual or team performance. That’s because they don’t have the opportunity to develop any kind of self-awareness around their progress, strengths, or weaknesses. If they can’t evaluate how they’re doing, they can’t prepare for their one-on-ones or proactively contribute to their own development.

The Solution

• Track the right KPIs: Having visibility into data is helpful only if it’s meaningful data. Be sure you’re tracking the right metrics for your team. It’s not just about the Big Number; you should have insight into the daily sales activities that drive deals down the funnel and the weekly or monthly sales objectives that will ultimately lead to your team hitting (or exceeding) quota.

• Go real time: Real-time insights are valuable for your weekly one-on-ones because you’ll know you’re working with very current numbers and not just a snapshot of what happened last week, month, or quarter. But real time is also important because it allows you to coach beyond your sessions, so you can step in and recognize wins the second they happen or offer support before your reps veer too far off track.
  
  
• Provide teamwide visibility: Again, your reps need performance insight just as much as you do. Whether your team is in the office or remote these days, you can leverage a sales leaderboard as well as real-time alerts and triggers to keep progress against goals front and center.

Challenge #3: Lack of Structure

Structure and consistency are critical to coaching effectiveness, but many managers struggle to launch or maintain a program that checks either of those boxes.

It comes down to bandwidth: According to our survey, more than half of managers said time was a key resource they needed to effectively coach and manage reps. 

Where do the hours go? Many managers spend significant chunks of their days in leadership and department meetings or handling administrative tasks (like running reports) – or they find themselves sucked back into a selling capacity.

It’s no wonder there’s little time for meaningful coaching: Whereas one-on-ones ideally would happen on a weekly basis, both managers and reps report getting far fewer coaching opportunities than they actually need.

It’s not just frequency that’s a problem, either. When a one-on-one does happen, it’s often focused heavily on pipeline and deal review. Those are important items, for sure, but they don’t make for a true coaching session.

The Solution:

• Get automated: Leverage sales coaching software that will help you cut out the sales coaching tasks that can be put on autopilot – like tying sessions to KPI data, sending questions ahead of time, and recording notes and action plans. 

• Pick a format: Don’t reinvent the wheel every week; it’s fine to have a similar format for all your reps. The key is to ask the right questions and make sure you give your reps a chance to reflect on and answer them before your session. There are countless sales coaching methodologies you can tap into or sales coaching templates you can use to get started. 

Despite its potential value, sales coaching can become an afterthought – and it’s often because of the challenges sales managers inherently face. If you’re not seeing results from your sessions, it’s not because sales coaching doesn’t work; maybe your strategy just needs some attention. 

By putting in the time, effort, and resources to develop your own coaching skills and launch a program the right way, you can expect to see meaningful, measurable, and ongoing ROI. Download the full Sales Coaching Challenges report.

When Sales Are Slow, Use the Time to Talk With Your Customers

Today's post is by Austin Ries, a content marketing manager for Zoho. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. 

 

 

Analysts have long sounded the alarm about the inevitable market transformations and crises that all businesses will face. Enterprises that survive transform themselves into organizations that innovate quickly during times of change and disruption.

A global pandemic and economic fallout twice as big as the Great Recession may not have been the crisis they had in mind, but here we are, two-thirds of the way through 2020, and nothing is business as usual. It was a historically bad second quarter in the United States. Consumers halted spending and businesses cut investments resulting in a 9.5% reduction in GDP, 19 straight weeks of more than a million unemployment benefit filings, and the temporary and permanent closures of millions of small businesses.

The impact has been especially acute for salespeople who have had to pivot their approach now that trade shows, customer visits, and in-person meetings are no longer an option. We are in a moment when, according to McKinsey & Company, a reported 90% of sales happen remotely, and sales leaders are desperate for new ways to connect with customers and define success across their department.

This is an important and necessary response to the current moment, and for a future that no one predicted at the beginning of the year. The warnings are now a reality. Survival depends on making adjustments and embracing new ways of caring for customers, primarily through listening and sharing feedback.

Listen to your customers

Listening to your customers has always been a fundamental part of sales, but it's especially important now when businesses are rethinking expenses and looking for new ways to save. Salespeople can proactively reach out to customers to hear how they're handling the current climate and its impact on their day-to-day operations.

One of the most effective ways you can build loyal and long-term customer relationships is through routine customer surveys. By connecting your online survey builder with your CRM or email marketing platform, you can combine NPS and CSAT survey responses with the respondent's data inside your CRM to get a complete picture of your customer's current mindset, and respond accordingly.

And because you sent the surveys from the CRM, the responses are automatically synced and stored inside the customer contact, so sales, marketing, and support can view all the responses and be aligned. This unified approach to customer experience is no longer a differentiator. The modern customer expects it.

Remember, these are not surveys to sell upgrades or extend contracts. Leaders and reps have to approach clients during this time without an agenda and with the simple intention of listening. It's about making a human connection where you understand their hardships and goals, and how they're approaching an uncertain future.

Spread the word

The insights you gain after client conversations and interactions shouldn't end when your meeting does. That's when you share the information with your sales teams and begin brainstorming creative and strategic ways to respond.

Some companies are doing this through daily team stand-ups or video calls to relay feedback to customer-facing teams and top leadership. Openly sharing customer mindsets and perspectives across the organization unites the team around a common goal of supporting the customer with creativity and empathy. From there, everyone can rally to address challenges innovatively, such as creating new content—live and recorded webinars, podcasts, and interactive infographics—about the new ways of working and sharing it through personalized emails or on social media.

Ultimately, this is a moment for practicing empathy. It's a moment for using the time you would have spent traveling or meeting prospects in person to put yourself in your customer's shoes and work to make their lives easier so they stay your customer for a long time.

Current events are impacting everyone differently. Many companies are treading water, slashing budgets, and doing everything possible to survive. Others may be moving ahead like nothing has changed and need a new solution to achieve their business goals.

But in a time when nothing is certain, one thing is: You won't know the answer unless you ask.

A full view of a customer's needs is only possible when customer-facing teams work from the same platform. Sign up for a free trial of Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho's customer experience platform, and learn how a unified technology stack can accelerate your upmarket growth.

How to Reach Your Sales Quota in a Year of Uncertainty

Today's post is by Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates. She is a noted speaker, author, and consultant. In a career spanning over 24 years, she credits her mastery of the ValueSelling Framework® for her own meteoric rise through the ranks of sales, sales management, and corporate leadership positions. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn.

 

Mid-year is an ideal time to reflect, recalibrate, and re-energize. Many people are feeling worn out by the first half of 2020, and the uncertainty of the future exacerbates the fatigue. As a sales professional, your livelihood anchors on achieving quota, so now is the time to refocus. With the right approach and mindset, you can put yourself on track to meet – and even exceed –  quota by the year’s end.

Selling Power and ValueSelling Associates partnered to survey more than 300 B2B sales professionals about their quotas. Specifically, we wanted to learn about the key elements that contribute to a salesperson’s ability to consistently achieve sales quota. Here’s what we learned and how you can leverage this information for your benefit.

Why are sales teams missing quota?

Our survey clearly shows that salespeople who aren’t coached or trained properly tend to fall off the quota attainment track. When looking specifically at the data from salespeople who said they were likely to miss quota, 89% said they lack a formal coaching program, and 62% said they lack formal training on how to communicate value to customers.

This data reinforces the importance of training sales reps on how to sell value, not just products and features. If they felt comfortable with this skill, they’d likely be closer to achieving quota. When it comes to sales leaders, survey responses suggest a few key approaches that help their reps reach quota: prospecting to keep a full sales pipeline, having a defined sales process, and communicating value when speaking with prospects and customers. We’ll explore these factors in more detail below.

1) Keep the sales pipeline full

When we asked sales reps – who were not on track to make quota – if they had enough leads in their pipeline, 69% said no. This is a sales leader’s perpetual quandary: To keep the sales pipeline full, they must establish a common goal for lead generation and create a disciplined approach to prospecting. Our survey results also show that many sales leaders believe reps neglect their prospecting efforts. To address this issue, there needs to be a consistent framework – and sales reps must have patience and discipline in the prospecting process.

2) Create a simple sales process

Once the pipeline is solid, salespeople need a simple, repeatable process to close the deal. This is easier said than done. Many sales teams make the mistake of creating a process that has too many steps or inadvertently causes their reps to devote time to non-selling activities. If a sales process isn’t easy to follow, it won’t be followed at all – and reps will forfeit winning results. A simple process lets you get your foot in the door and be on the way to a successful sale.

3) Help reps communicate value

Sales professionals who are on track to attain quota say their ability to communicate value is a major contributing factor to their sales success. And, although 72% of sales leaders report they teach reps how to communicate value, most salespeople identify a need to work on their ability to communicate value to prospective buyers.

This is particularly true for reps calling on executive buyers who have less time and patience for reps who don’t yet share their level of business experience and acumen. Sales reps need to know how to speak the language of business and not just rely on talking about product features and benefits.

When sales leaders empower salespeople with the ability to communicate business value to the prospect, reps can gain more traction. Those efforts typically result in higher levels of motivation to prospect more frequently and routinely – resulting in an uptick in sales results overall.

Summary

Meeting and surpassing quota is all about selling behaviors. Our research demonstrates that salespeople who do not receive the proper training or coaching tend to underperform and miss their quotas. It’s easy to point to a lack of pipeline, process, or training. What’s more helpful is a positive mindset, persistence in prospecting, and a willingness to learn and gain new skills.

To learn more about our research, download the ValueSelling Associates e-book: The Three Keys to Sales Quota Attainment along with the accompanying infographic.

5 Pandemic-Proof Sales Skills

Today’s post is by Brett Keirstead, CRO of GlobalVetLink and author of We Are All Sales, People. His book is written to celebrate what makes salespeople great throughout their lives at home, work, school, and in the community. Connect with Brett on LinkedIn and follow him on his blog, We’re All Sales People.

 

The headlines are everywhere:

“How to sell in a pandemic”

“Selling will never be the same”

“What lies ahead for sales?”

“Is traditional selling dead?”

Throughout my 30 years in sales, one thing has remained constant: The more complex the situation, the more important it is to focus on the fundamentals. I have observed 5 key attributes that help salespeople succeed in any situation – good or bad. These skills are especially important for the next generation of remote salespeople, who may not have access to the watercooler advice that influenced many of us at the beginning of our careers.

1. Know yourself

All great sales professionals know their product – its features and benefits, its value to customers, and the problems it solves – inside and out. But the best salespeople know themselves equally as well as they know their product. Are we aware of how we communicate and make others feel? Do we know our strengths, weaknesses, biases, and blind spots? Are we open and honest in our disclosures? Taking great care to present yourself in the most professional manner is the key to earning trust and achieving success when times are tough.

2. Sincerely understand others

The ability to truly understand your customer increases the odds of a successful sale. The world’s most delicious bread won’t sell if it’s pitched to someone who is gluten intolerant. Great salespeople use their natural curiosity and interest in others to ask the questions that help their clients achieve their goals and solve their problems. When times get tough, many people shift their focus inward. Salespeople can’t afford to make this mistake. They must take the time to meet their customers where they are – not where the salesperson wants them to be. Showing a genuine interest and curiosity in others is foundational to sales excellence.

3. Sell win-win deals

One-sided deals don’t make good salespeople. Instead, successful professionals look for mutually beneficial outcomes – a win-win for the customer and themselves. In uncertain times, it’s easy to lose this perspective and focus more on your own self-interest. Take extra time to review each proposal and request and examine whether they are truly mutually beneficial. Are you being reasonable? Is your customer also getting a fair deal? You may selfishly win a short-term proposal in a one-sided deal, but you will miss out on a potential lifetime relationship.

4. Negotiate

Even in the best of times, salespeople lose a deal 75% of the time and suffer rejection 10 times that throughout the process. Crisis situations can make customers seem even more inflexible and dogmatic. When they encounter pushback on their perspective, they might become upset or angry. Now is the time to de-escalate tension through greater flexibility. Winning a deal often means compromising on price and terms, and it’s important to accept that as a natural course of business. You must be graceful, learn from each experience, adjust your strategy, seek common ground, and push forward. People have fluid circumstances in their life and the willingness to give a little will be a refreshing experience that will help win a customer’s respect and business.

5. Persist through close 

A deal is not done until it closes. Verbal commitments, handshake agreements, or spoken promises do not count. In good times, when people are more apt to take risks and the buy cycles are more stable, you can have a greater confidence in a prospect’s words. But in uncertain and volatile times, sellers must stay vigilant. Circumstances can change on a moment’s notice. Stay connected with your client, reaffirm your value proposition, and follow your close plan. Assume nothing and keep following up until the deal is done.

In hectic times, I have always found that a renewed focus on these 5 basic principles will steady the ship for you. Be self-aware, understand your clients’ needs, find mutually beneficial outcomes, be flexible, and remain vigilant until the close. If you execute these core ideas, you can weather any sales storm you encounter. Good selling everyone!

You can purchase Brett’s book “We Are All Sales, People” on Amazon. 

Powerful Sales Interventions to Succeed in This Crisis

Today’s post is by Richard Barkey, founder and CEO of Selling Power Top 20 training company Imparta. Richard is an expert in sales, negotiation, leadership, and account management, and is a sought-after keynote speaker who has run Webinars for more than 15,000 sales leaders and professionals since the beginning of the pandemic. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

In the middle of a crisis, should you add training to an already-heavy sales workload?

I’m not impartial, because I run a training company. But I can tell you that, for my team, the answer is emphatically yes. New buying behaviors are creating intense new sales challenges around the whole buying cycle, and salespeople are busy precisely because they are fighting fires they are not fully equipped to put out.

Let’s take a couple examples. 

Dealing with Requests for Price Cuts and Extended Payment Terms

Even organizations that have done well through lockdown are limiting budgets and saying no more often, in advance of the likely recession. That has an effect on new deals, but it’s also driving procurement teams to issue repricing letters, and to demand extended payment terms from their existing suppliers. 

For a company with a 10 percent net profit margin, an across-the-board 5 percent price cut would slash profits by 50 percent. And, for many organizations, a 5- to 10-day increase in days’ receivable can cut cash headroom in half.  So, resisting these pressures is business critical.

The fundamentals of positional negotiation remain unchanged: Power comes from how good your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is, relative to the BATNA your customer enjoys. It’s critical to assess what alternatives they have – and, at a time when supply chains are changing fast, those alternatives may not be as good as they were. These requests are often sent out as blanket emails, and procurement only expects 60-70 percent compliance.

On its own, though, positional negotiation can destroy trust. Salespeople also need to create value for both sides through principled, insight-based trading. Give things one side cares about more than the other, and get things where the reverse is true. The pandemic has created new opportunities to do this, because those priorities are being driven by new needs, new decision priorities, and new risks. 

You can see more details on our Website.

Unlocking Stalled Deals 

Your customers are on a journey – from their initial reaction to the crisis, through a stage of brutal prioritization, to adapting to the current normal, to planning to take advantage of the changed environment, and finally toward recovery. If you’re selling to a customer who is still at the start of that journey, you may well struggle to get much traction. But, once an organization has started to adapt, you can unlock stalled deals. 

However, to do so, your teams need to understand the psychology of how decisions are being made right now. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, developed a theory that we have two systems of thinking: System 2 (the conscious, reasoning self) and System 1 (the faster, more intuitive thinking that actually governs much of what we do – but calls on System 2 when it needs help). 

At times of stress like a pandemic or global recession, decision makers (even very senior ones) use System 1 thinking even more than usual. If we try to influence them using only System 2 thinking (facts, figures, and logical arguments), we may fail to achieve our goals. We also need to understand and work with their intuitive decision making, with all its flaws.

One example of this is loss aversion. Buyers make decisions with an eye toward avoiding a loss two to four times more often than they do to achieve a gain. So, we need to frame deals in those terms, and to contrast the pain of not acting directly with a compelling vision of the future. 

Equally, research shows that buyers are averse to being given a single option. You can drive successful outcomes by offering at least two choices as a way forward, even if there was a single solution on the table before. 

You’ll find more insight here into how to unlock deals. 

Business-Critical Interventions

These are just two examples of the business-critical issues your sales teams face right now. Across a wide range of companies and sectors, we’ve identified a total of 12 common ones, from mastering virtual presence to virtual sales management. 

We’ve created business-critical interventions for all of them to help you address these very current challenges. How many of these do you recognize?

Leverage Your Core Sales Skills During This Pandemic

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

 

While many states and countries are gradually in the process of re-opening, there remain restrictions and a need to navigate a new sales normal. Additionally, an economic crisis is clearly part of the COVID-19 fallout. All of this has created a business environment where sales can be achieved, but through a different process than we are used to. However, it’s important to remember that, regardless of the state of the world, your industry, or business in general, there is a path forward to sales success.  

1. Adapt your skills to the current environment 
The sales process has likely changed. We are connecting with customers in different ways, there’s a greater emphasis on remote selling, and there is a vital need to think creatively in meeting the unique challenges of an economy overshadowed by a pandemic. But the good news is, you’ve developed core selling skills that can be applied to the new environment – just a bit differently.  

Things like knowing how to open and close, being a trusted advisor, identifying needs, tailoring a solution, offering insights and ideas to get customers to think differently – these are all core selling skills sales professionals have honed over the years and are still critical in today’s unique environment. They are applied a bit differently, as the communication medium has changed. Lean into Web-based tools with video, if possible, and get comfortable working phone and email. While face-to-face interactions will be limited, you still can connect deeply with your customers by leveraging the core selling skills you’ve learned to rely on.  

2. Pay even more attention to communication style preferences
Communication styles are one of the most critical gateways to understanding and connecting with buyers. In times of stress and strife, like COVID-19, they become even more important. Being able to talk to someone who is in sync with you in your preferred communication method is a huge relief, and it’s an opening that sales professionals can use to establish trust, build rapport, and engage in a productive sales dialogue. 

However, the environment has changed. Even with the relaxing of some restrictions, face-to-face is still less likely to take place. Consequently, sales professionals will need to use other strategies to discern communication styles – verbal clues like tone and words used, and writing elements such as content, length, and syntax. When possible, the use of video can be a tremendous asset. Being able to read the body language of your customer – and them being able to see the same – is a significant advantage. 

3. Short-term problems could take priority over long-term solutions
Because pandemics involve a great degree of future uncertainty – no one knows precisely how long it will last, for example – long-term strategizing will likely downshift to a lesser priority for buyers. After all, if you don’t know what the world will look like in the future, it can be difficult to make plans based on that.

Thus, sales reps may find they need to align with buyers’ most pressing short-term concerns over long-range issues. That doesn’t mean future scope is completely out of the equation, of course – one can make models and projections based on an array of possible futures – but addressing immediate problems could not only represent a win now but strengthen your position on future deals as well.    

4. Resist the trap of diving too deeply into non-business discussions
The pandemic response at the local, state, national, and international level has tragically become politicized. One of the things sales professionals need to be aware of is buyers who have strong opinions about the strategy employed to deal with COVID-19. Sales professionals need to be aware of the risks associated with diving too deeply into this dialogue.  

Despite the chaos affecting the entire world of business and sales, core selling skills are still critical to engaging and influencing buyers. Shifting strategy to work through different communication channels, emphasizing relationship building, strongly considering communication styles, and balancing both short-term and long-term goals are all ways to effectively keep the sales pipeline full.

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

Three Ways AI Guidance Can Help You Sell Better in a Black Swan Environment

Today’s post is by Amit Pande, CMO and head of Strategy at Aviso AI. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

The year 2020 has already been a year of tumultuous twists and turns unlike anything we’ve seen in recent decades. It has brought concepts like “Black Swans” – unpredictable or unforeseen events, typically with extreme consequences – into the mainstream. Experts even say what we’ve just seen in the first half of 2020 may be the new norm for the decade: unpredictability. 

Here’s the truth: Surviving novel problems requires novel solutions. From a revenue perspective, old approaches, technologies, and biases won’t just hurt us – they have the potential to sink entire companies. If we learn the right business lessons from COVID-19, we can be better prepared for future uncertainty. 

Using novel technologies such as AI will be absolutely key to remaining afloat through troubled waters. Here are three ways we believe AI can enable your selling success even through all-virtual WFH collaboration, deviant markets, and a general mood of chaos. 

1. Stay close to the ground with AI understanding of markets and buyer behavior.

Companies can benefit from applying the power of AI both to who they sell to and how they sell. Leaving this sensemaking task to human brains is fraught with specific risks – humans don’t look far back enough, broadly enough, or objectively enough. 

A starting point with AI can be looking at similar challenges experienced in the past, and how revenue forecasts dropped in those situations – for example, previous recessions. At Aviso our AI Research team has found that the extent of the impact your industry faces depends on a variety of factors: financial resilience, sales cycles, geographical exposure, churn versus new customer acquisition rates, account sizes. All these considerations should be modeled into your business to forecast future quarters. 

On the buyer engagement side, AI can also help you develop more empathy for the impact on prospects so you can adapt the way you sell. For example, applying AI to actual email and calendar engagement – and even chat conversations – will give your sales teams a better understanding of prospects’ pain points and how to create a virtuous cycle with them.  

2. Collaborate as one virtual team with revenue-focused AI “war rooms.” 

Working from home is the new normal. From team SKOs, on-site demos, and field sales, revenue teams are rapidly digitizing all their operations. How do you keep up velocity virtually? In times of rapid change, just “watercooler” collaboration (e.g., Slack or Zoom) is not enough. During remote work, teams suffer from deeper cognitive biases. Good news looks better than it should, and bad news often doesn’t enter the discussion. These biases can compound and spread across CRM, forecast calls, and deal reviews, and inhibit timely actions. 

We recommend using digital “revenue war rooms” where sales leaders and teams can plan and execute during these uncertain times. Ideally, these rooms combine the best of Zoom, Slack, and CRM-like tools while keeping end-to-end encryption and also augmenting sales collaboration with AI insights, live chat, video, file sharing, and “to-dos” prioritization. 

Such rooms serve as a virtual collaboration space to move deals – drawing in other go- to-market members such as customer success, marketing, or legal, for help when needed.

3. Vigilantly apply AI to predict forecasts and recalibrate pipeline numbers.

A key challenge faced by companies in crises is that CRM data loses its trustworthiness. This is due to many deals drying up as poor economic conditions lower buyer intent. CRM becomes a lagging indicator of business. More so, if you are using a spreadsheet, it is nearly impossible to forecast during COVID-19 due to the large amount of rapidly shifting variables constantly influencing potential revenue outcomes. 

Re-assessing both forecasting strategy and pipeline quality is critical to revenue success. Using a machine learning approach to forecasting sales – preferably with a tool that applies advanced data science to learn your organization’s selling patterns – will help your team get smarter over time. AI pipeline analytics can help with objective, unbiased inspection. 

Comparing start-of-the-quarter pipeline and new pipeline added to ending pipeline predictions can reveal when and where you need to strengthen revenue strategy. Playing the long-term optimization game is key to sustained revenue; see if you’re on track to creating sufficient pipeline one, two, and three quarters out. To round the process out, find out if your pipeline is the optimal mix of opportunities that will gear your team for success.

Confidently close your next quarter with an AI Guidance Compass 

Aviso is here to help companies recover from the impact of COVID-19. Get Aviso AI complimentary for 90 days to understand your business better, collaborate more effectively across your revenue team, drive more revenue, and reduce the burden of CRM. 

The Power of Optimism and Realism in Sales

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

 

Conventional wisdom tells us that, with a positive attitude, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to. But what if we’ve been misled? 

What if ignoring the bad and focusing only on the good is actually preventing us from reaching our full potential? 

Sales Leadership Lessons from the “Stockdale Paradox” 

This concept was presented as a primary lesson in the famous business book Good to Great by Jim Collins, in which he discusses the Stockdale Paradox, a concept named after James Stockdale, a Navy admiral and POW during the Vietnam War. 

As a POW at Hoa Lo (the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” of Vietnam POW camps), Stockdale lived to recount his story of the many difficulties he endured. He recalled how he and his comrades were constantly in survival mode – every person mentally and physically battling to stay alive. 

Surprisingly, the first to die, he said, were the optimists. Talk about a challenge to conventional wisdom! According to Stockdale, it’s because the optimists always had their minds set on arbitrary deadlines, such as “We’ll be out of here by Christmas…” and then, “We’ll be out of here by Easter,” rather than mentally planning for surviving the reality at hand. When release deadlines came and went, they lost all hope and died of broken hearts.  

What did Stockdale do differently to make it home seven years later? He was both hopeful and realistic. He told himself he would be in prison for at least five years and set his expectations accordingly. He balanced the hope he had, of returning home, with the cold, hard reality that he was unlikely to get home anytime soon – hence, the Stockdale Paradox. In other words, he hoped for the best while taking a long-term approach to plan and prepare for the tough years ahead.

Facing Uncertainty in Tough Times

The Stockdale Paradox is applicable to careers in the sales field. A profession in sales can be brutal, and the current uncertainty only makes it more difficult. Universally, as the economy starts to reopen, we are unsure as to what lies ahead. Customers are concerned about their companies and, even more importantly, about themselves and their day-to-day lives. 

We are all experiencing the personal deflation that accompanies rejection from a customer – and have felt the pain and helplessness that comes after working tirelessly to pursue a deal only to learn we’ve lost to unexpected events. In such a situation, the optimists will respond by saying, “That’s okay. I’ll get the next deal I’m after.” 

As we learned from the Stockdale Paradox, although a hopeful mindset is necessary in tough situations, simply hoping for the best won’t win the next deal. Something is missing – the optimists lack a sense of reality and perhaps a plausible plan for overcoming challenges. 

Sales professionals should always be able to articulate how they intend to win the deal and help their customers. Optimism without a realistic assessment and specific plan to address challenges will not close the deal. Just as it was for Stockdale in the POW camp, long-term planning for reality is the difference between optimists and realists in sales situations. It was clear Stockdale had an objective to go home, and he had a survival strategy to actually make it happen. Likewise, in these chaotic times, we have to balance our short-term optimism with a long-term strategy to address the challenges that lie ahead. 

Balance Optimism with Realism to Thrive Long Term 

When it comes to leading a team of sales professionals, optimism without realism can be detrimental to the business. Blind optimism will result in misled and inflated sales projections; and, without long-term, realistic planning to support our sales professionals’ goals, they will continually underperform.

As sales leaders, does this mean we should stop inspiring our sales teams to be optimistic? No. Using the Stockdale Paradox, we should use a healthy dose of realism to augment the optimism we cultivate on our sales teams – whether this realism takes the form of account strategy review, long-term planning sessions, or selling skill development for your team. Assessing your strategy is necessary for sales leaders to uncover vulnerabilities in strategy or skill gaps that repeatedly hinder your sales team. 

By balancing both optimism and realism, you are preparing your sales team to reach its full potential. 

To learn more about Carew International and sales skill development, visit us at https://carew.com/sales-training-programs/.