Selling Power Blog

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.

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?

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/.

How to Find Your Next Remarkable Selling Idea

In March of this year, just before social distancing started in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I hosted the Sales 3.0 Conference in Orlando (along with our amazing Chief Networking Officer, Alice Heiman).

During one of the breaks at the event, I recorded a video interview with ConnectAndSell CEO Chris Beall. I always love talking with Chris. He is an original thinker, a true fan of the science of selling, and always has great, transformative ideas to share.

Even as of March 11, Chris could feel the fear taking over the world of business and sales. As he acknowledged in our interview, this fear is not altogether unfounded. However, we must ultimately meet fear with two things: courage and creativity.

We're living in a historic time, and B2B sales teams need creativity and courage. They need transformative ideas to turn customer fears into mutual value. But where will these ideas come from?  

What Makes a Great Selling Idea? 

The American philosopher Mortimer Adler once directed a team of experts, who wrote two books containing the 102 greatest ideas that shaped our world. Adler’s team rated the books of great minds from Aristotle to Albert Einstein and extracted all the great ideas they had come up with in their lifetime. Adler defines an idea as an “object of thought that we cannot touch, or perceive with our senses, but that, as thinking individuals, we can discuss with one another.”

The interesting part is that it is the quality of our conversation that either shrinks a great idea or enhances the idea to the next level, where it becomes transformative. Transformative ideas contain the key to sales success.

Great Ideas Begin with Great Questions

Werner Heisenberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, once said, “Nature does not reveal its secrets. It only responds to our method of questioning.”

A salesperson’s method of questioning can determine the success or failure of a sales call. Customers appreciate a salesperson who leads them to think and causes them to critically examine their situation through the lens of a great question.

While good salespeople persuade their customers with great (but often prepackaged) answers, great salespeople ask great questions that transform the customer’s position from a sales target to a cocreator of the sale.

How The Right Questions Can Push the Sale Forward

Let’s assume we’re engaged in a thoughtful conversation about current events. For example, we might discuss a news item we both read about research being conducted to find a COVID-19 vaccine. Without a doubt, our conversation will reveal our understanding of what’s good or bad, and it may cause us to review what’s right and wrong. The chain of ideas could lead, through artful questions, to a better understanding of what both parties value.

While a conversation about current events leads to a chain of ideas that helps us better understand the world we live in, a great conversation with a prospect will help us understand the customer’s world. As a result, we will be able to generate better ideas for creating customer value with our solutions.

Asking great questions can often lead to great responses from customers. But here is the big challenge: How do we process the customer’s response? By listening actively, we will get much closer to the great selling idea that will add value to the customer’s business.

Listening to the customer is similar to catching a baseball. It takes an agile mind and body to catch a ball thrown by a professional player. One customer may throw a curveball, another may send a fastball, and yet another could launch a knuckleball. The goal of active listening is to catch more balls, which ensures complete understanding of the customer’s true situation.

Five Qualities that Can Yield Great Selling Ideas

Top salespeople develop the five qualities listed below and, in turn, come up with the great selling ideas that lead to more sales.

1. The ability to recognize and understand a great idea during a conversation with the customer. This is the starting point for all good selling. Top salespeople speak two languages: the customer’s language and the company’s language. In essence, great salespeople are like ambassadors who speak the language of the host country and their own county.

2. The ability to analyze an idea. Top salespeople will look at a customer’s problem from many different angles with the help of smart questions. Examples: “What would be the cost of doing nothing? If it turned out that we found a solution, what would be the impact on your business?”

The salesperson’s job is to extract enough information from the prospect to be able to define the core problem and establish a value for the solution.

3. The ability to objectively compare one idea with another. Top salespeople will lead the conversation to an observation point, at which the customer can objectively compare where the path leads by adopting solution A or pursuing solution B. Comparisons are near impossible when salespeople are unable to appraise a situation objectively.

4. The ability to place the ideas on a map that lead to the best solution. Great salespeople are like mapmakers, and they show their customers where they are on the map, how far they can go, and how to get there.

5. The capacity to assign a value to each idea. Top salespeople will break down the value of the final solution into concrete numbers: time saved, money saved, troubles avoided, reduction in cost, gains in productivity, etc.

The big idea is not to prepackage ideas before visiting the customer, but to engage the customer and then co-create the idea that you placed on the map before the call. In the ideal scenario, your customers will end up thinking that it was actually their idea that created the solution. The smart salesperson will always give the customer the credit, while he or she gets the commission.

Join Me for the Virtual Sales 3.0 Leadership Summit

During the coronavirus pandemic, courage and creativity will lead to transformative ideas among sales teams. And your ideas will give you the cutting edge you need to win and remain competitive.

I'm excited Selling Power will partner to produce the new Virtual Sales 3.0 Leadership Summit on May 28. Top B2B sales experts and sales leaders will be on hand to answer all your pressing questions (live) about how you can succeed and thrive amid via virtual selling and making human connections with customers.

My good friend Chris Beall will be there -- he's already shared some interesting data on LinkedIn illustrating how sales reps are using ConnectAndSell to connect with customers in high volume while they work from home. Our agenda so far includes these topics and more will be announced soon. 

• Creating a Revenue Resilient Sales Team
• How B2B Decision Makers are Responding to the Coronavirus Crisis
• Six Great Strategies for Selling in Tough Times

Register now for this FREE event and as a bonus you'll receive 500 free prospects from our data partner, MountainTop Data. 

In the meantime, keep asking questions that move the sale forward. I wish you good luck and good selling! 

 

Is Your Sales Culture Strong Enough to Overcome Adversity?

Today’s guest post is by Shannon Holmes, president of DoubleDigit Sales. Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn.

 

When daily routine, work life, and business have been upended by a crisis, you’re suddenly faced with the task of establishing a new normal for your sales team. How you lead during this crisis will determine how well your sales force is positioned for success when the situation recovers.

As your team turns to you for guidance, the best way you can offer support is to nurture a strong sales culture – the attitudes, behaviors, and values consistently demonstrated by your sales team. A strong culture will help your team stay motivated and engaged during this time.

To start, take stock of your current sales culture. Your sales culture plan for this year serves as a great guide. Reflect on each element to determine what stays the same and what needs to adapt given the current reality. Then, you’re ready for action.

Be a Great Sales Coach

Although your schedule is likely hectic right now, it’s critical that you dedicate time to managing your sales team. One-on-one coaching conversations help salespeople build confidence and skills, with the outcome of achieving consistent results.

Adapt your approach to the individual. Together, determine the frequency of your meetings given the current context (e.g., you may want to meet more frequently than usual) and format (e.g., phone call vs. video). 

The winning formula to coaching your team is to question better, confirm more, and respond less. Before providing your feedback, encourage your team members to self-reflect – and listen to what they share.

Instill Confidence by Developing Skills

Your sales team will need to be skillful in handling the tough client conversations they’re facing. More than ever, salespeople must be consultative and agile in order to be a good partner.

With work-from-home policies – and, potentially, lighter workloads – in effect, now is an opportunity to fine-tune your team’s sales skills. Explore virtual sales training solutions offered in a series of bite-sized sessions that enable individuals to apply their learning immediately. Training will help your team stay sharp and focused through challenging times.

Engage Your Idle Sales Team 

In many industries, buyers will not be making purchase decisions during this crisis. That said, having fewer opportunities doesn’t mean your team should sit idly. Brainstorm together and get creative.

Develop an empathetic approach to selling that reflects company values and respects the sensitive nature of this situation.

Perhaps your product can meet a new need that has arisen in the marketplace. Or, lead with the heart and simply check in on clients instead of trying to sell. Brainstorming with your team will not only bring about tactics that support them, but also generate excitement during a tough sales period. 

Build Routine to Stay Connected

Lastly, it’s crucial to your sales culture to maintain rhythm and routine amidst this uncertainty. Communication is more important now than ever, so review your schedule to identify meetings that need to be added or removed.

Determine the format of meetings based on the value they will bring. Not all require video, though face-to-face time with your team creates connection. Calls, messages, and emails will also be helpful as you continue to engage with individuals.

Remember to inject some fun, too. Book informal video calls where a team member hosts a workout, a board game lunch, or coffee time. In formal ways or otherwise, staying connected boosts team morale.

The reality we’re facing right now is complex, and we’re all figuring out how to navigate it. Focusing on your sales culture is the best way to help your team remain strong through adversity. This time of crisis will pass and, when it does, your sales team – and culture – will be more resilient than ever.

To learn more about driving sales culture, visit doubledigitsales.com.

How to Skyrocket Win Rates by Multi-threading Your Deals

Today’s post is by Devin Reed, head of content strategy for Gong. Previously Devin worked for six years in SaaS sales. 

 

You’re riding high on a deal that’s certain to close. The prospect has budget, need, and a clear-cut timeline. The prospect even has authority to say yes. In short, you have all of the “BANT” ingredients to ensure a successful deal.

Then it happens. Or, in this case, doesn’t happen. Your main (and, as it turns out, only) point of contact on the deal goes dark. Silent. Gone. 

You’ve been ghosted.

Did your contact go on an impromptu vacation? Did he or she leave the company? While both are possible, it really doesn’t matter. The deal is dead.

If you only had...insurance – or deal insurance, to be specific – you would’ve avoided heartbreak (and won that deal). But your BANT criteria is missing a critical element: influence.

Why Multi-threading Is Insurance for Sales

Multi-threading is insurance for salespeople working toward the close. Multi-threading means building relationships with multiple stakeholders within your deal. It’s also your ticket to winning influence in an account. How do I know this? 

The Gong research team analyzed 53,632 sales opportunities (and the sales calls and emails within them). We found that most deals start with one point of contact. But deals that are ultimately successful have triple the number of participants from the buyer’s side for the second meeting. Multi-threaded deals are a defining characteristic of sales success.

Here are some other insights we discovered. 

GONG LABS DATA POINT #1: Successful deals include at least three people from the buyer’s side in meetings across the sales cycle (phone/Web conferencing). 

By contrast, deals that are ultimately lost show that it’s often a struggle to get more than one point of contact to attend meetings. The first person they connect with is often the only person they ever speak with.

The success gap really widens when you look at the unique number of prospects involved in a deal via email.

GONG LABS DATA POINT #2: On average, winning deals involve eight points of contact via email. Losing deals only make it to three points of contact via email. That’s a 243 percent difference in engagement.

Three Critical Advantages of Multi-threading Your Sales Deals

1. Get deal insurance in case your champion goes dark. 
When you rely on a single person to close your deal, you’re only a single person away from losing it. This is single-threading, the “unhealthy opposite” of multi-threading.

Even if your champion is the decision maker or economic buyer, investing in their direct reports is worthwhile. You may have a verbal yes, and it may feel like the deal is pretty much done.

Until that single point of contact disappears.

You need additional contacts that will continue to give your deal momentum or, at the very least, supply you with information and deal updates. Any update is better than radio silence. 

2. Win over the decision-making committee. 
Healthy deals can take a quick downward turn when priorities shuffle, budget restraints set in, or bandwidth becomes limited. Each circumstance has the potential to hold up your deal, but multi-threading can tackle them all.

Multi-threading means you are never fighting obstacles alone. The ability to tackle several threats at once is especially important for companies attempting to go up-market and for sellers chasing larger, more complex deals.

3. Get deeper insight from multiple sources about potential deal obstacles. 
Every deal in your pipeline has a surprise – a hidden truth you have yet to uncover. That’s why you’re never truly in control of your deal until you learn the full truth, and that requires numerous information sources.

You uncover unknowns by triangulating the truth with your stakeholders. This means asking the same questions to multiple contacts and seeing whether the answers align. 

If they do, great! You have your path to a deal. If they don’t align, then you’ve found a hiccup in the buying process before it’s found you. Now you can get in front of it and continue the buying process.

Build the Path to a Successful Close

Now that you know the importance of multi-threading, you need plays you can put into play today. That's why we created our Multi-threading Playbook, so you can keep influencers engaged throughout your sales cycle. Download it today and get three ready-to-fire multi-threading plays so you can stack the odds in your favor to win more deals.

Should You Really Pursue That Sales Opportunity?

Today's post is by David Yesford, senior vice president of Wilson Learning Worldwide and contributing author to several books, including Win-Win Selling, Versatile Selling, The Social Styles Handbook, and The Sales Training Book 2. 

 

Are your salespeople spending a lot of time on deals they don’t win? As win rates go down, expectations go up – that next deal better close! That next opportunity better be a big one! Margins need to be higher! Do something! Make more calls! Find more prospects! 

Do you know what creates frenzied salespeople? Activity for activity’s sake, without a clear direction to invest in high-probability sales opportunities that bring profitable business to your company. 

So how do we transform unqualified sales activity into informed and focused outcomes? If your goal is to help salespeople and sales managers invest their time on opportunities that represent the greatest value and opportunity to win, use the following three questions to inform the discovery dialogue and provide a structure to pursue the right business.

Three Questions to Focus on the Right Sales Opportunity

1. “Will the customer buy from someone?”

To conduct an intelligent, informed discussion around, “Shall we pursue this sales opportunity?” the first “Yes” comes from a moderate to high probability the customer will buy something. 

This doesn’t mean the customer will buy from you; it just answers the question, “Will the customer buy from someone?” If there is low probability, you may need to rethink whether pursuing the opportunity is worth your time and resources.

The signs are usually clear. Look at the following metrics: 

• Is there a strategic importance for the investment? 
• Is there a compelling event pushing the customer toward a buying decision? 
• Is there a budget? 

If you can’t find evidence of a situation in the company that will cause the customer to buy from you or one of your competitors, it’s time to make a “No Go” decision. If you got out now, how would that help your win rate and profitability?

2. “Will the business, if won, be good for my company and me?” 

Let’s face it: Salespeople love to win – and hate to lose. As a result, they tend to focus on the time and resources already invested in the pre-sale pursuit of the deal; however, they must also include in their assessment the profitability of the opportunity and the post-sale costs of resources needed to deliver, implement, and support the sale.

If you can’t collect compelling evidence that answers, “Will the business, if won, be good for my company and me?” with a resounding “Yes,” the sales opportunity may evolve into a deal you wish you would have lost.

3. “Will the customer buy from me?”

If you have said “Yes” to the first two questions, then the next “Yes” needs to come from your discovery around, “Will the customer buy from me?” From your customer’s perspective, does your offering match their needs better than the competition’s offering? Is there a competitor better aligned with the customer on value? Are your salespeople offering a clear competitive advantage and do they have credibility with all decision makers?

Uncovering this type of evidence enables everyone involved in a sales campaign to discuss the relative strength of your competitive position. And, if your salespeople lack evidence, it is incumbent upon the salesperson, sales manager, and/or support staff to have a dialogue, ask questions, listen, and determine the strength of your competitive position for increasing win rates.

Consider each of these three questions in order. If you don’t know the answers, stop and find out before considering the next question or deciding to pursue the sales opportunity. 

Time is too valuable to spend on pre-sale activities that won’t deliver the sales results you  seek. Energize your competent sales force by encouraging your salespeople to use these compelling questions to better inform their sales discovery process.

Wilson Learning was named one of Selling Power’s Top 20 Sales Training Companies in 2019. Find out more about how Wilson Learning can help you develop your sales force.

How to Become a Sense Maker to Your Prospects and Buyers

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

 

If you’re in sales and you feel like it’s getting harder to win deals, it’s not just you. The world of buying and selling has gotten much more complex. That’s why we’re focused on empowering salespeople to help prospects and customers make sense of a complex world. Our offerings help sales teams do that in three ways. 

Three Ways to Become a Sense Maker for Customers

1. Increase trust and lower skepticism. Recent Gartner research shows that customer skepticism of brands is high, despite the proliferation of high-quality and readily-available information about offerings and purchase options. Their recommendation is to help prospects make sense of their options.  A good integrated CX platform that aligns every customer interaction gives  salespeople insight into what information customers already have. If customers have raised questions, the platform will let salespeople know; which opens up opportunities for salespeople to reach out not just with another white paper or case study, but to answer the customer’s specific question.
    
2. Get insight into your customer’s emotions and sentiments. Again, the salesperson who sends the most information is not necessarily going to walk away with the deal. Buyers won’t make time to have conversations with salespeople who waste their time or can’t bring an additional level of value to the conversation. That’s why it can be so helpful to use a CRM solution with embedded AI technology that not only provides sales reps with data about the sale at hand, but also analyzes language in the email to detect the emotional tone and overall mood of the customer. With this insight, reps can prioritize customers who need help identifying value, and plan an appropriate response based on their sentiment.
   
   
3. Create fluid internal conversations. Nothing annoys buys prospects more than getting the same message from multiple people on your team. The less in sync you are with your team, the more disorganized you look to your customer. Avoid sending duplicate messages and annoying customers by unifying your customer-facing teams with a single technology stack. Conversations will be  fluid across reps and departments, so customers never receive duplicates of the same ebook or testimonial.

Sales Success Today is about Making Human Connections 

When customers are struggling to make sense of information and reconcile inconsistencies, effective sellers can use this moment to stand out by making a human connection. 

Instead of overwhelming the customer with additional content or data to dispute a competitor's claims, guide them through the evaluation process, fight the urge to tell them what to think, and patiently work to find answers that guide them to a purchasing decision they won't later regret.  

Sense-making sellers will be the salespeople of the future. As AI continues to advance and handle more mundane daily tasks, reps can focus their attention on developing and utilizing these types of skills to connect with customers with empathy and authenticity. 

Along with empathy, being a Sense Maker requires active listening and creative problem-solving. The good news for sales reps is that these are the skills they use every day, and soon will help them get to the end of the tunnel faster with happier customers on the other side. 

Your customers deserve a better experience, and with Zoho CRM Plus, you can give it to them. Sign up for a free trial today and learn how a unified technology stack can accelerate upmarket growth. 

How to Increase Your Odds of Selling Success

Mark Shonka and Dan Kosch are co-CEOs of IMPAX Corporation, a global sales training and performance acceleration company. Follow them on LinkedIn here: Mark | Dan

 

In selling, one of the greatest tools we can leverage is passion. A key question to consider is, “Passion for what?”

The Problem: Passion Misalignment

Many of us have passion for what we sell, and that’s good. However, not everyone will share this passion. Most people we sell to will not understand the ins and outs of our solutions well enough to develop a true passion for them. 

We, along with our competitors, have muddied the waters. All of us tell the customer that we are the best at what we do, and the customer comes to the conclusion that all of us are really good (and, therefore, pretty much the same). When that happens, they often look to the next common denominator – price – to create the next level of differentiation. 

Certainly there are exceptions. Some customers really do develop a passion for our solutions, and those people become true advocates and net promoters.

What Is the Customer Passionate About?

Many of our customers and prospects have passion, but it’s not for our solutions, or anyone else’s. Their passion is usually focused on their own personal and professional life. 

On the professional side, their passion is usually centered on their business and driving the kind of results that delight their customers and constituents and make them successful in whatever way they measure success. 

What if, as business development professionals, driving critical business outcomes that are important to our customers was our passion, too? Not a passion for the sale, the commitment, the commission, the implementation…but the actual result. Everything we do would be done to drive the outcome. The customer would see it, and our team would respond to it. As a result, our odds of success in selling would certainly go up.

Creating Alignment: Passion for the Outcome in Selling

Consider something as simple as the job description used for business development roles. Today, typical sales professionals might describe their job in this way: “Our job is to understand the customer’s needs and position our products and solutions effectively – compelling them to commit to us.” 

Instead, what if even the description drove toward outcomes? 

“Our job is to understand our customer’s business and needs better than anyone else, and leverage our company’s solutions to help customers drive the critical business outcomes they desire.”

This concept is the essence of what we at IMPAX call the Business Fit – how two companies, working together, can drive critical business outcomes for the customer. To understand and articulate the Business Fit, you have to understand the customer’s business and needs and get to a senior-level decision maker who cares about these outcomes. 

As an added bonus, nearly all of us would agree that passion is compelling and leads to superior results in sales and account management roles. But can we get there? Compared to passion for developing RFP responses, updating CRM, putting out fires, and sifting through hundreds of emails that don’t apply to us, developing a passion for customer results is exciting and easy to accomplish!

Eight-Step Plan for Ultimate Trade Show Sales Success

Today’s post is by Mark Stralka, CEO and founder of Mobile Locker. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

Have you been successfully generating sales at trade shows? Not sure?

You’re not alone! 

Most businesses that invest time and money in trade show marketing aren’t sure it’s paying off.

Our eight-step plan will help you optimize your efforts. If you follow it from beginning to end, you’ll increase your chances of success at trade shows. Plus, you’ll be able to calculate a concrete return on your investment in them and have the information you need to improve event sales over time.

Step 1: Define your reasons for participating in trade shows.

Decide whether you’re trying to:

• Find new customers
• Build business relationships
• Connect with current clients
• Raise your brand profile
• Demonstrate expertise
• Introduce new products or services

Maybe it’s a combination. 

This step is fundamental. You can’t succeed unless you know what you’re trying to achieve. 

Step 2: Identify your target audiences.

Once you understand what you want to accomplish at trade shows, decide who you want to connect with. Once you define your target audiences, you’ll be able to:

• Find the trade shows they attend
• Understand what motivates them
• Deliver messages and personal and virtual interactions they’ll respond to.

Step 3: Set measurable goals. 

Leverage information from steps 1 and 2 to come up with clear, defined business goals. Here are some examples.

• Number of new leads or customers
• Dollar value of sales tracked back to trade show interactions
• Number of meetings with current customers
• Percent increase in sales tracked to event efforts

Step 4: Find events that align with your goals.

It’s not enough for trade shows to have plenty of attendees in your target market. They should also offer meaningful ways to interact with them.

• Do you want to demonstrate industry expertise? Look for events with well-attended breakout sessions and other speaking opportunities.
• Are you trying to generate leads? Find trade shows that encourage personal interactions and opportunities to exchange contact information.
• Looking to spend quality time with prospects and current clients? Seek out events that allow for coffee, cocktail, and meal breaks.

Step 5: Develop assets that command attention.

Once you understand the people in your target audience, you can create trade show assets that speak to their needs, including:

• A booth that features messages and images that get them to stop and take notice
• Experiences that will help them live their lives or do their jobs better
• Break-outs that feature speakers and topics they won’t want to miss

Step 6: Decide how to capture contact information.

Many businesses leverage the badge scanners provided by trade shows to gather lead data. 

The issue: The information from scanners is limited and not available to sales reps right away.

A better alternative: Use Mobile Locker’s business card scanning app to snap pictures of attendee business cards. It will convert the information on them to data that’s usable right away. Plus, it scans the Internet for other information that can be used to qualify prospects on the spot. Learn how Mobile Locker’s trade show tool kit can help you.

Step 7: Build a follow-up plan.

If you delay following up with the people you meet at trade shows, your competitors will beat you to sales. You must have a follow-up plan ready to go as soon as events are over.

It should include:

• Priorities, including which leads are acted on first
• How leads will be distributed
• How quickly follow-up should happen
• What messages and materials must be developed to support follow-up efforts
• How tracking and results reporting will take place
• Who will manage the follow-up process

Make sure sales reps are fully trained on the follow-up program before the event begins and identify a contact who can answer questions. Mobile Locker’s app for sales makes it easy to train reps and distribute sales materials.

8.  Measure success. 

Compare your projected goals with your actual results to determine whether your trade show marketing and sales efforts were successful.

Don’t give up if you didn’t succeed at everything. By following this step-by-step plan, you have all the information you need to fine-tune future trade show sales efforts and do even better in the future.

Want to learn more tips on how to optimize the ROI of your next trade show event? Download Mobile Locker’s complimentary Trade Show Lead Booster™ guidebook!