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A successful sales team recipe

As sales leaders, we all know that crafting a skilled, productive sales team is essential to our ultimate success; experts consider the keys to building a successful team a balance between art and science: a careful combination of skills, experience, education, and personality traits. New research, however, reinforces what we at ValueSelling Associates have long believed to be true: there’s a recipe for success we can all follow to develop a successful sales team.

salesOf course, the right leadership goes a long way in shaping our teams, and  a recent study from Software Advice supports that managers should seek to hire for certain fundamental skills, education, and experience. Following this recipe will yield success every time.

Education: Part of being a great salesperson is connecting with customers and knowing what they want. That means developing our writing, listening, and business acumen, all of which education can teach us. According to the study, 67% of sales industry employers involved in the study require candidates to have a degree in higher education, and the remaining 33% regard experience as an equal substitute to it.

Experience: Software Advice’s research indicates that 72% of employers look to hire folks with industry-specific sales experience. and if it’s technical or management experience, even better. We agree: the most successful sales professionals have a deep understanding of the customer’s business, that is built by working in the industry they serve.. Having knowledge and experience specific to customers’ needs and their industries enables us to better understand what specific issues they face, and how to best  communicate with them. That experience translates to the ability to deliver and communicate customer-specific value.

Skills: At the end of the day, it is critical that the sales rep knows what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.  Sales is a communication process that is based on a number of different skills. Education and experience are great to build upon, but they won’t suffice alone. Our sales teams need the right expertise and abilities to actively listen and manage an effective sales call and conversation. Negotiation and presentations skills are among those critical for sustainable success in the sales profession.

Sales Process: Once you have the key ingredients, it’s important that they are mixed and blended properly. Every world-class organization has a well-documented and defined sales process.  Adherence to the sales process allows sales teams to leverage best practices, communicate with a common language, and productively allocate resources.

Building a world-class sales organization rarely happens by accident.

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When anxiety is a good thing

Ever wonder why some buyers effortlessly make decisions to move forward, while others never engage or take action? When momentum with your prospect stalls, it could be time to shake things up. We need a fresh approach to turn cautious prospects into active clients.

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Consider this: Prospects expect a sales pitch. They expect us to tell them what we’re all about. Rather than tell our prospects what might happen if they don’t do anything, we need to be prepared to ask questions that allow them to imagine the negative consequences of their own inaction. In the few seconds it takes for them to consider their anxiety, it’s likely that their unique personal motivators will surface. Then we can offer our solutions to ease their anxiety and fix their problems.

Let’s dig into the best practices for telling stories that establish credibility.

Example anxiety questions:

  • “Are you confident that you can eliminate the backlog of IT requests without increasing costs?”
  • “What’s the impact to you if the cost of management initiative is delayed?”
  • “What would be the impact on your ability to raise capital if financial information is not readily available?”
  • “Are you confident that you will be able to support management’s 35% annual growth plan without impacting costs?”
  • “How safe will your job be if revenues don’t increase?” (This question practically guarantees anxiety!)
  • “I noticed that your return on assets is below the industry norm. If this situation continues, what will be the impact on your stock price?”

When asking an anxiety question, we need to integrate what we know about prospects and/or their industry. Being specific makes it more effective. We can also trigger an emotional response by making a direct connection, such as referencing war stories about people the prospect knows or leveraging relevant third-party information. The question should require prospects to imagine the future. Along the way, we must be careful to avoid insulting them or damaging the trust and rapport we’ve already established.

Asking anxiety questions is a reliable way to reignite the sales cycle. By reshaping prospects’ perspective of what they need and want, we can lead them to focus on a future in which we provide the solution. We have to begin with the end in mind. In other words, we start with the value we believe our products or services can bring. Ultimately, by cultivating a sense of urgency within our prospect, we can shorten the sales cycle, which will have a direct impact on our success.

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Telling stories to establish credibility [template]

In today’s world, there are a few realities that every sales professional is acutely aware of. The first is that there are many alternatives available for every prospect you have. Not only are there alternatives that are competitive to your solution, but you are often fighting for capital to even have your solution on the purchasing agenda in the first place. The second reality is that in most cases, our prospects are beginning their “buying process” without us. They are searching the web for alternatives and researching viable options without a sales person getting involved.

This poses a challenge for many sales professionals: How do we establish our credibility online?

unnamed-5Effective sales professionals have always been effective communicators. One way to communicate is through storytelling. We use well-crafted stories that build our credibility with prospects, and we capture not only their interest, but also their belief in our capabilities and our ability to relate to their world. Telling stories is a valuable way to connect with prospects and illustrate how our products or services can positively impact their business. We want to share stories that communicate our credibility and expertise in the field, whether they are in the form of an email, social media post, or webpage. Today, we not only need to be able to tell our stories in a conversation, we also need to be able to tell our stories online to capture the interest of our prospects.

Let’s dig into the best practices for telling stories that establish credibility.

1.     It’s not about us. It’s not about our products, our services, or our company. It’s about the prospects’ world, their challenges, and their business challenges. Our stories should start and end by focusing on the prospects’ situation, with our solutions playing a supporting role to them. What are the prospects’ current situations? What business objectives or imperatives can we contribute to? How will things be better when we’ve helped them fix their problems? Putting prospects in the starring role of our stories helps them see how our solutions can make a difference in their unique situation.

2.     Reasons to do business. The best stories we can tell are ones that resonate with prospects and show them how we can solve their business issues. By knowing our prospects and their needs, we can adapt our stories from working with past clients to highlight similar circumstances in the present situation: what business issues did we solve in the past that the current prospect is facing now? What led the past client to select us? We need to work these reasons into the story.

3.     Core components. What turns good stories great is delivering key story elements that resonate with prospects and establish credibility every step of the way. Remember that we need to change what stories we share with what prospects, depending on their situation and needs. To ensure we’re telling great stories, we need to ask ourselves:

    • High level of emotion: Do our stories capture prospects’ attention with a high level of detail and rich description?  Does our story not only have a business message, but also resonate at an emotional level? Examples of these emotions can include fear, anxiety, doubt, frustration, or excitement.
    • Summary of challenges: Have we effectively summarized the business issues our prospects face in this story?  What changed in the customer’s business as a result of partnering with us?  Keep in mind that if we expect a prospect to agree that our solution is the right one, we should first gain an agreement on the problems that our solution will address. We need to use the story to surface the likely problems we can solve.
    • Uniqueness: What sets this story apart from other stories our prospects are hearing? Our stories should highlight our differentiation from other products and services on the market.  Why you and you alone are the best alternative.
    • Measurable impact: Can we prove the impact that we have had?  Numbers resonate, and big numbers get a business professional’s attention.  What was the measurable impact, the result, the bottom line? Why is your story so impressive?

We need to include all of these components and best practices to take our stories from good to great – from clicked-away to credible. In this social-selling world, credibility trumps flashy every time, and credibility will ultimately seal the deal.

To gain people’s interest, we must be interesting!  Where can you tell your story today to attract a potential buyer?  Does your online profile and footprint demonstrate the value you can bring to your potential prospects? Now is a great time to fine-tune your personal message online.

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When you lose the business in B2B sales

When you lose the business in B2B salesIf we only understand sales, we’re just salespeople to our prospects and nothing more. We can’t just be experts in selling. We need to be experts in our customers’ industries, too. When we understand the overall industry, prospects’ business, and their specific issues, we become business experts. That’s the key to selling value, and that’s when a sale can start to happen.

Sometimes we get so focused on selling a product that we fail to show how the product fits into people’s lives and adds value. We get tunnel vision and forget about anything outside our scope of view – namely, the business at large.

It’s time to change that.

There are three steps to securing our position as business experts:

Understand our prospects’ business in depth

It’s not enough anymore to just have some understanding of our prospects’ business. We need to have much more than that, and until we have in-depth understanding of the whole picture at hand – the industry, the competitors, the issues faced – we won’t be seen as experts providing value to the business. We need to dig deeper and do the research. What do industry sources say about this business? What do the trade press, news, and other resources suggest are issues they face? What’s going on in their world? Gaining full understanding of the business and situation at hand helps us know what to expect when we do begin communication with prospective customers.

Prepare to effectively communicate with prospects

Once we have done the research, it’s time to prepare for our communication with a business-like approach. That means having data on hand, deducing how prospects will respond to us , and being ready to speak the language of business. We are business-salespeople bringing sales into the business world.

Maintain expertise in the industry

Once we’ve learned an industry in-depth, it’s time to follow up. That means staying up to date on what’s current in both our prospect’s business and their industry. Have issues changed? What new issues have come up? Read the news, keep an eye on trade press, and rely on sources that specifically serve that industry. When we maintain strong industry expertise, we are prepared to face prospects  as business experts, and that’s how we bring value to the table every time.

As the sales industry becomes increasingly “sales-y,” we can’t forget the business in B2B. Stand out from the crowd by being an expert in business, sales, and value.

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Up your sales in a down economy

Given the slow worldwide economic recovery, it’s an appropriate time to review our core tactics. Many of us are finding our clients and prospects are risk averse. Here are some effective strategies you can proactively use to increase your sales, no matter what the economic climate brings.

You might be asking “Who will buy from me now?” when so much seems to be at risk.
The ValueSelling Framework® has strategies to help you make the sale, even with timid prospects. While the temperature of the economy will dictate some change, companies are still in business and work is still getting done. So the real question is, “What can sales professionals do right now to position themselves for success?”

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ValueSelling Framework basics that will help you exceed your quota:

  • Focus on the positive: It’s very easy to be overwhelmed with negative messages, and bad news always gets more interest than good news. To be successful, however, your attitude is essential. Tune out all the information that isn’t helpful to you right now. Turn off the 24-hour news cycle and the minute-by-minute updates from your smartphone. There is always a lot going on in the market that’s outside your control, so instead focus on what you can control. We are not suggesting that we put on rose-colored glasses. Rather, we should simply find opportunity and positive news wherever we can. Maintaining that positive attitude will help you defend yourself against constant bad news.
  • Focus on empathy: The best salespeople in any industry are the ones who know how to solve their customer’s problems. In uncertain times, people become much more risk-averse, sticking with what they know to be secure and stable. If you’re a problem expert, your job will be to get in tune with your client’s fear of uncertainty. Their fears may manifest in multiple ways, including taking a longer time to make decisions and involving more people to make them. Empathize by offering customers increased understanding and flexibility, and they’ll recognize the security you offer.
  • Focus on real value: Prospects and customers need to understand the real value you offer. When they are uncertain, they spend more time making the decision to buy, and they are concerned about real monetary gains from their investment.  Focus on the real value you are providing to them. Are you positioned to save them money or grow revenue?
  • Focus on preparation: Sales executives are most successful when they’re purposeful, customer-focused, and ready to execute. Spend more time understanding your clients, their industries and markets, and building creative solutions with them. In the end, you’ll spend less time fixing problems in the sales cycle that arise.
  • Focus on qualification: Companies with sales team that excel have customer-centric processes that leverage best practices and repeatable strategies. Their prospect qualification is a multidimensional process, and it doesn’t focus on who has the budget. Just because people can make a purchase – doesn’t mean they will. Your prospect qualification process should be reverse-engineered from how prospects will make decisions:

a.    Should I buy this?

b.    Can I buy this?

c.    Is it worth it?

d.    Am I convinced?

Knowing your prospects’ answers to these questions is essential before you begin investing time and resources in a sales cycle. If your prospect is not qualified, let that one and find someone who is.

Remember, your competitors have the same difficulties that you do. Stay calm, stay focused, and look for their vulnerabilities in the marketplace. You should be playing both defence and offense with your current customers to defend your position. By staying focused on the customer, you won’t be outsold, and you can win the customer’s business and loyalty.

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Driving the conversation: The fine art of questioning

As sales professionals, you probably know a lot about the capabilities of the products and services you represent. However, being a “solution expert” alone is not enough to differentiate you from your competition. If you are perceived as a trusted advisor AND a solutions expert, you are in much better position to win their loyalty and business. And gaining that trust means demonstrating that you can listen and intelligently reflect back what you learn.

We like to compare good salespeople to good physicians: Before good physicians prescribe a solution, whether it’s medication or a treatment, they fully understand and diagnose the condition. As a matter of principle, they do not recommend treatments without knowing whether or not the patient actually has a need for them.

Asking the Right Questions Likewise, skilled sales professionals will diagnose a situation, and then demonstrate more value to their prospects through the questions they ask…not the answers they give.

How do you go about using questions to diagnose? You must integrate purposeful questions into your conversation, while not interrogating your prospects. You begin by asking the right types of questions at the right time. Understanding how and when to ask the right questions is critical.

Here are three types of questions you should ask at every phase of your prospect qualification process:

1. Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions are our vehicle to learn what the customer thinks about their business issues, problems and solutions. They tell you what value means to them, who makes decisions, and what words you should use when you repeat back what you’ve learned. Open-ended questions don’t have a yes, no, or right answer. They demonstrate that you are seeking to understand your prospect’s world and perspective. An ideal open-ended question triggers an expansive response that, ideally, is wide-ranging and may cover many areas.

Sample open-ended questions:

  • “Can you explain why…?”
  • “Would you tell me more about…?”
  • “How would you describe the problems related to…?”

2. Probing questions

Probing questions allow you to dig deeper into details and uncover more specific information, based on the information you learned by asking open-ended questions. For example, if your goal is to learn more about the issues that could put your prospect’s profitability at risk, you would begin by probing for the typical ways they lose profit.

Probing questions also establish your credibility by offering you a chance to demonstrate your knowledge of their company, industry, and likely problems. Probing with purpose can help you uncover specific areas — recognized or unrecognized by your prospect — which can showcase your ability as a problem-solving expert.

Sample probing questions:

  • “Is it because…?”
  • “Do you find…?”
  • “What if you could…?”
  • “Have you ever experienced difficulty with…?

3. Confirming questions

Confirming questions simply confirm that we understand what our prospects just told us. They demonstrate that we understand our prospect’s issues. They help to uncover what might have changed as we check in with our clients throughout the sales life cycle.

The art of asking excellent confirming questions is by using reflective listening techniques: Reflecting back the actual words our customer uses and offering  them the opportunity to elaborate. Don’t assume you understand their meaning. Always ask for understanding.

Sample confirming questions:

  • “So, what you’re saying is…?”
  • “Is it correct to say that…?”
  • “Did I hear that…?”

The most successful salespeople I know are also the most curious. They are able to influence the conversation and demonstrate their credibility and knowledge by asking good questions. The better you are at asking the right questions, the better you become at uncovering needs that your products and services can address, and the better you’ll be at integrating your solution(s) into the context of your prospects’ businesses.

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How to warm up your prospect’s cold feet

You’ve labored for months with a prospect who seemed interested in your services. She returned calls and replied promptly to emails. Everything was moving right along and then … nothing. Nada. Radio silence. No more returned calls. No more email exchanges. And no explanations.

Frantically, you mentally retrace your steps and re-read email threads to find clues behind this maddening silence. Finally, she calls…but only to explain that she’s had second thoughts, looked into alternatives, and is now leaning toward a competitor.

Sound heart-breakingly familiar?

While it’s not uncommon for a prospect to second-guess a big decision, it’s also relatively common for top-notch sales professionals to persuade the prospect to revisit their initial interest and seal the deal. The key is to help your prospect come to their own conclusion AND stick with you.

A ValueSelling Framework® core principle is that “people need a reason to change.” Change is difficult for many people because of the risk and uncertainty that is attached to it. In order to find the source of apprehension, have a conversation that includes well-placed anxiety questions. Anxiety questions, asked correctly, will lead a client or customer to understand the unique value of your offerings.

Consider one or more of the following anxiety question tactics. Ask questions that:

  • Develop a reason to change from the prospect’s perspective by uncovering their key business issues
  • Help cast doubt in the prospect’s mind about the value of a competitor’s products or services
  • Create a sense of urgency

For example, “How do your company’s products stack up against the competition in terms of reliability?” or “Does your company’s service record trump others?” Ask your prospect if they have considered the consequences if a machine is out of service. Make sure you phrase it so that they momentarily experience the anxiety they would feel if their system shut down. This way, you’re challenging their current thinking without insulting their intelligence or damaging the connection you’ve established.

As a salesperson, you can’t force a customer to change. But you can help people fully understand their business issues and realize, on their own, the need to change direction. If you can lead conversations to uncover conditions and reveal consequences the prospect may not have considered, you create opportunities to steer them back around to your solution.

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When it comes to selling, you’re as good as your word(s)

EmoticonToday’s slangy emoji text culture may have you thinking that formally written communications are a lost art. Don’t believe it. When it comes to professional communications, poised and precise prose rules over the casually misspelled messages passing between colleagues.

This is especially true for sales professionals, since selling is fundamentally a communication process. No one wants the strides made during sales calls to be undermined by weak writing skills.  Properly crafted follow-up emails and formal proposals provide a planned opportunity to recap and confirm discussions, establish mutual plans, and remain connected between talks with the underlying benefit of staying at the top your prospect’s radar.

Yet, there’s not a single formula that works for each sale; your choice of words and how to present them will depend on who you are addressing.  Here are some writing tips to support – and not sabotage – your sales efforts:

Keep the customer in mind. Words help build relationships, so choose them carefully. Use words and concepts familiar to your prospect or client. It’s important that as you draft the correspondence, you are capturing your client’s point of view.  Use less “I hope…” and “I believe…” and more “you will realize…” and “your benefits will be…”

Be concise. Sometimes more isn’t better. After you create a draft, edit it down to the essentials. The clearer your message, the higher probability your customer will remember it.

Make it attractive. People appreciate copy that is attractive to the eye – that is, shorter paragraphs instead of long, rambling ones.  Busy people often scan longer documents, so bullet points are an effective way to break up copy into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.

Don’t trust spell check. Programs to double-check spelling and grammar are great, but they are far from perfect. For instance, homonyms such as they’re, their, and there will pass the spell check but still be used in the wrong context. And we’ve all read hilarious, embarrassing autocorrects. Don’t let the joke be on you: Carefully read what you write before you hit “Send”.

Don’t be an illusionist: The single biggest problem in communication is that “we listen to reply and not to understand” , so its all the more important to be extremely clear in what we want to communicate.

Remember, carefully written messaging is a continuous effort that deserves proper attention. After all, if your written communications aren’t working for you, they could be working against you and impact your ability to advance your sale. Make sure your choice of words speak highly of you.

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Is negotiation a strategy or a skill?

When it comes to a successful negotiation, which is more important: strategy or skill?

The definition of the verb, negotiate, is to “deal or bargain with others, as in the preparation of a treaty or contract or in preliminaries to a business deal.” In a sales context, the key definition is to “bargain in order to create, or culminate, a business deal.”

Sales professionals are often negotiating with both prospects and clients. We bargain with prospects for access to key decision makers or in our own organizations for additional resources. We make tradeoffs with ourselves in an effort to improve productivity and improve time management. And we negotiate the final terms and conditions of new contracts in order to close business.

At ValueSelling Associates, we are often asked to help our clients negotiate more effectively. We have observed that there are consistent, common traps that torpedo negotiations.

1. Timing: When companies offer incentives to their customers in order to create urgency and persuade prospects to expedite signed contracts. These incentives may be pre-announced price increases, introductory offers, or embellished deliverables. Whatever the incentive, how and when it is communicated becomes critical.

We advise sales professionals NOT to negotiate before the prospect is a fully qualified opportunity. In our Framework®, the qualification process is multidimensional. There are four questions a sales executives should have the prospect answer to determine if they are a qualified opportunity:

  • Should they buy this?
  • Is this worth it?
  • Can they buy this?
  • Are they convinced?

Offering incentives to a prospect before the qualification process is confirmed will diminish your credibility as a sales professional and potentially devalue your offerings in the prospect’s mind.

2. Authority: As a sales professional, are you aware of your negotiating parameters?  Every organization draws a line in the sand for what is considered negotiable. To be a successful negotiator, it is critical that you understand what your organization allows to be included in negotiations with your prospects.

Negotiation Components:

  • Deliverables
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Price

While many prospects attempt to focus the negotiating conversation solely on price, a smart sales professional only talks about price after they’ve exhausted deliverables and/or terms and conditions.

  • Do you know what authority your organization has given you to negotiate?
  • Do you know how you can include your sales manager, and their greater authority, in an upcoming negotiation?

You should know the answer to both questions before attempting a negotiation.

We’ve seen sales professionals make over-commitments to prospects, only to have to go back when they could not honor what they promised, then try to re-negotiate. It can be very embarrassing! When you understand what you can authorize, your negotiations have a better chance of succeeding.

Is negotiating a strategy or a skill? It’s both. Successful negotiators have a plan, use the authority they have, and are very purposeful in their negotiations with prospects.

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Are we selling too tactically? – Best Practices to Optimize Sales Performance

Between January 2013 – March 2013, we at ValueSelling – India surveyed 130 end-user organizations, about their sales effectiveness practices and challenges, that the sales leaders face today and what the best do. We all know that buying has changed significantly in the last few years. Customers are flooded with information, today the customer has access to 20 times more data about you and your peers than what they had 5 years ago.

Top Challenges for reps and sales leaders: Survey Results (total respondents 130)

In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment. Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft which has been custom-made by the founding partners. But once you achieve the initial product- market fit suddenly you are faced with some new kind of challenges: How to scale up the sales efforts? How do I build a repeatable, scalable and measurable sales process that is like an industrial machine and not like a craft hobby project.

Some might say that sales teams will have less relevance because customers are buying more online. If you notice the scene behind the curtains of online firms themselves, you will find traditional face-to-face sales organizations as the prime revenue generation engine. In 2012 over 50% employees at Google were in sales; and at Facebook the sales force’s ability to translate “likes” into advertising revenue will make or break that company’s fortune in the times ahead

What is true is that online strategies are realigning and re-designing sales skills and priorities.

Selling skills are now even more important. The options available to customers put greater pressure on the rep’s ability to add value. The role of a sales person has moved up from being the “value communicator” to “value creator”.

According to the recent study 40% of all sales people can’t understand customer pain and only 46% reps feel their pipeline is accurate. When a customer problem arises , it’s tempting to jump and offer up the first solution that comes to mind. This can lead to disaster when your answer ends-up addressing a problem that only touches 5% of the customer issues. It’s best to stay in the problem box as long as possible and ask many “Open”, “Probe” and “Confirm” questions to make sure that you have a good grip on the key business issues and challenges before you start talking about a solution for good life.page1image22456

Ultimately, companies don’t execute strategy; people do. Your job as a leader would be to empower and enable them.