Your Sales Productivity Depends on Whether Sales is A Job or Profession

Someone posed the question: Based on your years of experience, if I could only give one piece of advice what would it be?

Decide early on whether sales is a job or career. If it is a career don't let anyone control the rate at which you learn. Focus on improving your sales productivity, sales effectiveness and efficiency. Buy books and training programs, go to seminars, read blogs, white papers, and articles to stay current and uncover new trends.

Learn, learn, learn! Become a learning machine. Google everything you don't understand and everything you think you understand.

Learn about your: clients, customers, prospects, market, products and competitors. If your company offers sales training or implements new sales tools, be an early adopter. Don't whine and complain, get after it and figure out what you need to figure out in order to improve your sales performance. Learn about the sales process, strategy and tactics. Learn what works and why it works.

Learn how to measure your own sales performance. Learn how to identify, track and trend your key performance indicators (activities and results). Learn what it means to be productive, efficient and effective.

Learn how to ask good questions and how to listen. Learn about your client's, customer's, and/or prospect's buying process, their customers and competitors. Learn what they value and how to connect what you hear and understand about them to your solution.

Sales is one of the best careers in the world. It warrants the effort it takes to become an elite high performance professional. Development is a process not an event, so develop a life long mindset of continuous performance improvement and actively seek out mentors along the way.

Never stop learning how to improve your sales performance! Focus on improving your sales effectiveness, sales productivity and efficiency.

Breaking Through The Sales Force Field

I was browsing through a sales forum the other day and ran across the lament of a person new to complex selling that felt he was left dangling when his manager and mentor left the company. Currently, he's under quota and his new Sales Manager apparently has little or no interest in his development. He said he was committed to succeeding despite the circumstances and was looking for guidance from fellow forum members.

Yikes! What a dilemma. All I could imagine was a giant force field of obstacles (an invisible barrier) keeping him from becoming successful. First and foremost I had to applaud this person for taking responsibility for his own development. But what should he do besides look for another job?

If you have to figure out how to improve your sales effectiveness by yourself, start at the beginning of the sales cycle. Systematically trouble shoot your approach to selling to identify where things begin to break down. Next isolate the activities or tasks you're not performing well and work on them, then move to the next area. Don't jump around.

The Sales Cycle:

1. Demand creation
2. Winning and closing opportunities
3. Retaining customers/clients
4. Obtaining additional business and/or referrals from existing customers/clients
   

Here are a few high level sales cycle trouble shooting questions to start with.

Demand Creation:

1. Are you targeting the right prospects in your territory?
   
2. Are you effective at prospecting by phone and in person to fill the front side of the sales funnel - can you set appointments?
   
3. Are you setting appointments at the right levels in the prospect's organization?
4. Do you prospect consistently to keep the funnel full?
   

Winning and Closing Opportunities - The Sales Process

1. Are you effective at identifying and meeting all the people that have power and influence and do you understand their role in the opportunity?
2. How effective are your questioning and listening skills? Can you:
   

• Create Interest
• Evaluate the Situation
• Prioritize Objectives
• Propose Options
• Tailor an Agreement and Close
  

Retaining Customers/Clients

1. Have you identified the metrics they will use to measure the success of the implementation?
2. Have you identified the metrics they will use to determine if the solution you sold meets performance expectations?
3. Have you scheduled periodic meeting during the installation and implementation phase to build satisfaction?
   

There's a lesson here for all of us. Be proactive - read books, blogs and articles, attend seminars and online webinars, hire a coach, or find a mentor regardless of your company's commitment to training. It's your career so take control of it.

Does Your Team Sell Transactionally or Are They Trusted Advisors?

What I find very interesting is that both selling tactics exist in the market and are successful...to a certain extent.

From the perspective of the buyer, competitive pressures among vendors and the rise of the internet positions many products and services as commodities.

What does this mean and why is it important to sellers?

1. The amount of vendor and product information on the internet allows for in depth comparative analysis of features, benefits, and vendors before a meeting with a salesperson is necessary
2. Features, benefits and vendors are starting to look the same to buyers, so that leaves price as the only real differentiator in the buyer's mind
3. This places downward pressure on profit margins as buyers beat up the salesperson on price or the transactional salesperson believes the only competitive advantage is price

Now here is where things get interesting.

I ask Sales Mangers and Sales Professionals "When you're in a competitive situation and it's down to you and two other vendors, what percentage of deals do you win?" The answer is usually somewhere around 33 percent or one in three. That means the Sales Representatives of the competing vendors are taking turns winning in competitive situations.

These numbers hold up when the vendors in the geographic market are all selling using transactional selling tactics. I need to point out here that when price is the only real differentiator the buyers are not loyal to any one vendor.

Consultative, strategic, and collaborative selling gained popularity through a few key landmark books that studied how elite high-performance Sales Professionals sell.

These sales tactics promoted the idea that vendors could differentiate themselves from competitors by transitioning their Sales Professionals away from transactional selling to value or solution selling. Meaning the Sales Professional repositioned themselves as a trusted or strategic advisor.

From a skill perspective Sales Professionals don't discuss their products or services (solutions) before having a discussion about the prospects business objectives, obstacles, solution performance requirements, and success metrics no matter how much experience they have in the industry.

Due to increased competition, these selling tactics became sales strategies that the vendors' Executives and Sales Mangers implemented to address several high priority business issues:

1. How do we increase our win rates in competitive situations?
2. How do we preserve margins?
3. How do we reduce customer/client churn?
4. How do we increase customer/client loyalty?
5. How do we increase deal size?
6. What does our market value?
7. How do we increase market share?
8. How do we reduce the cost of sales

Lets go back to the situation I described above where all the competing vendor's sales tactics are transactional. Once one of the vendors starts repositioning themselves as a trusted advisor their:

1. Win rates in competitive situations dramatically increase
2. They charge a premium for their products and services - profit margins go up
3. Clients and prospects view the vendor as a valuable resource/partner - customer loyalty goes up and churn goes down
4. Deal size increase due to selling full solutions
5. Market share increase
6. Cost of sales go down

This is a very long way of getting to the point that the era of selling products using tactics that assume an understanding of the prospects business without going through a questioning process that focuses on the prospect's business first, is rapidly coming to an end.

For the Salesperson who's sales tactics are transactional, that find themselves competing against high-performance Sales Professionals who's sales tactics focus is on asking questions and becoming a trusted advisor, the competitive future is not bright.

It won't matter how many times the transactional Sales Representatives calls, leaves voice mail messages, sends letters, faxes, emails or meets with the prospect in an attempt to keep their name in front of them.

In a head-to-head competition a well trained Trusted Advisor will win almost every time. In fact, transactional behaviors will only magnify the differentiation and value of the trusted advisor and the vendor they represent. This is about competing and winning.

What's The Difference Between Training and Development?

Yesterday, I completed another Sales Management Leadership Program workshop. As a facilitator and coach it's gratifying to see the lights go on when Managers realize the difference between training and development. So I thought I'd take a moment to discuss it.

Training is an event. Development is a process.

Training has a beginning and end. Participants are exposed to knowledge and skills associated with new concepts during the event. Many companies think, all we have to do is conduct some training and everyone will embrace the new: strategy, system, method, process, procedure, tactic or tool. They will go back to work the next day, use the new way and execute flawlessly within a short period of time.

In reality, what we see is a temporary positive change in behavior in some of the learners... but after awhile things seem to slowly drift back to the way they were. Maybe it doesn't drift all the way back, but the positive impact we expected fades rapidly and eventually falls short. In fact in some instances we experience an outright revolt as most of the team resists applying what was learned:

The list of reasons we hear from the learner for not applying what was learned is long:

• I don't have time to do it that way
• It doesn't work as well as the old way
• I don't remember how to do that
• I couldn't figure out how to do it under these circumstances
• I've gotten good results for a long time doing it the old way, why should I change now?
• The training was good in theory, but this is the real world
  
• The list goes on and on

But there is another often overlooked list... the Manager's list

• I've got production pressures so we can't focus on this right now
  
• It slows things down
• I never agreed with this
• I don't understand why this is important to the company
• I can't get everyone on the same page
• The information on how to apply this is confusing
• The compensation, recognition, and rewards system still reinforces the old behaviors
• I didn't get the training my team got
  

Why doesn't a training event create the sustainable behavior changes we're looking for? The answer is simple and straight forward.

There's no way around failing our way to success. This is an uncomfortable proposition, so people naturally resist change.

If that's true then how do we realize the return on investment as advertised? How do we effect sustainable positive behavior change?

Sales Productivity Secrete #3

We develop our people through our daily relationship with them in three areas: Job Skills, Business Maturity, and Adaptability.

Sustainable behavior change takes time. The more complex the new thing is the more time it takes to become proficient. The more disruptive the new thing is the higher the resistance to change. People learn and embrace change at different rates

Both scenarios require a focused communication strategy that continuously:

• communicates the value of the new way to the company and learner
• clarifies the gray areas to reduce confusion
  
• reinforces practicing and applying of the new behaviors.

How do we do that?

Through collaborative coaching, but I'll discuss that in another blog.

What are your thoughts?

Top 6 Things A Salesperson Wants From Their Manager

A number of years back Applied Concepts Institute conducted a survey with their clients to find out what salespeople wanted from their Sales Manager. Several thousand salespeople with tenure of 1 year or greater participated in the survey.

The top six things (in order) Salespeople wanted from their Sales Manager were:

1. Build a positive daily relationship with them
   
2. Communicate effectively
3. Have consistent, logical behavior
4. Be a respected teacher and coach
5. Listen before providing feedback
6. Help create a sales strategy

I was wondering do you think that these are still the top 6 things Salespeople want from their Sales Managers?

Improving Sales Productivity Begins and Ends With the Sales Manager

So you want to improve your sales team's performance.

There are so many places to try and squeeze additional performance improvements out of your team. The question is...where do you start?

Do you start with better tools like Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? Maybe implementing opportunity, account, and territory management methodologies would work. How about improving sales skills? You could train them in value/relationship/consultative/collaborative/strategic selling or negotiation. The truth is if your company is weak in any of these areas you could experience improved performance by addressing them head on. I'll discuss this in future blogs.

I can hear some of you groaning already. I know you invested thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement new tools, processes, methods, and training before, but it didn't stick or you got marginal returns on investments.

Sales Productivity Secret #1


No matter what you choose to improve, if you don't focus on the Sales Managers first the improvement initiatives will only deliver short term results.

The Sales Managers are the key to sustainable performance improvement.

Why?

Because they are responsible for hiring, training, developing, directing, planing, coaching, communicating expectations, measuring success, and managing change on a daily basis. This is where the rubber meets the road!

I have worked with hundreds of Sales Managers from small businesses to fortune 100 companies over the last 5 years and the vast majority of them were great salespeople that got promoted to Sales Manager. Most of them have spent years struggling to develop the heart of a manager. Most have developed their management systems and skills through trial and error or imitating previous managers.

Each quarter brings constant pressure to hit the numbers and each year the pressure mounts as their companys' raise the bar. Sooner or later the relentless drive to bring in the numbers causes the Sales Manager to fall back on what they know created success for them in the past. Instead of leading and developing the sales team they become "super closers" that get the job done by setting the pace, directing activities and closing sales.

So what's wrong with that?

If your company does not require the sales manager to carry a book of business (they have a personal quota or list of accounts to call on) then they are doing the salesperson's job. The very skills that made the Sales Manager such a great Salesperson are the obstacles to developing an Elite High-Performance team.

The Sales Manager's role should be to develop a management system that continuously improves the performance of themselves, the team and the individual sales professionals, in addition to managing the business.

What are your experiences or opinions?