The last few weeks have been pretty unique – I know I have never experienced anything like what is happening right now in my entire career. Sure, there were the downturns in 2000, 2008, 2011, but those were nothing like what 2020 is bringing us right now. That said, one thing is certain – just like previous downturns, this will end and we will recover.
The world has changed drastically over the past few weeks in many ways. While things are moving slower than usual, it’s a great time to reconnect with customers (virtually, of course), educate yourself, and sharpen the skills you’ll be able to use when the freeze starts to thaw.
“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” - Sheryl Sandberg
The ability to deliver the above is one, if not the, distinguishing characteristic of a great leader. Upon reading it, I began to think of what Sandberg’s definition of leadership meant for sales leaders.
During sales management training, I often tell sales managers they need to approach sales pipeline reviews with their sales reps like prosecutors in the courtroom. What exactly do I mean? To start, I’m not advocating that you look to “convict” your sales reps. Instead, I’m suggesting sales managers take an evidence-based approach to sales pipeline inspection. Doing so will remove the biases from conversations with sales reps, and make sales pipelines more accurate and data driven.
So, where do you find this evidence?
Sales Gauge, a leader in the sales training industry, today announced it has launched a new application for sales executives using Salesforce.com (SFDC). The app, which provides real-time insight into high value deals, is available at no charge on the SFDC AppExchange. In addition to full transparency into their sales pipelines, the new Sales Gauge High Value Trade Table app provides salespeople and managers a common language to discuss sales pipelines and forecasts.
The overwhelming chaos that is our new normal in sales is paralyzing many salespeople from doing the business development they need to do. In these times, we have to go back to basics and think about how we can use our time management skills with our storytelling to get our message out there. The filters we all have in our minds about how we approach customers in the “old world” are obsolete - we need to think about the “new world” we are in right now.
The last few weeks have been pretty unique – I know I have never experienced anything like what is happening right now in my entire career. Sure, there were the downturns in 2000, 2008, 2011, but those were nothing like what 2020 is bringing us right now. That said, one thing is certain – just like previous downturns, this will end and we will recover.
“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” - Sheryl Sandberg
The ability to deliver the above is one, if not the, distinguishing characteristic of a great leader. Upon reading it, I began to think of what Sandberg’s definition of leadership meant for sales leaders.
During sales management training, I often tell sales managers they need to approach sales pipeline reviews with their sales reps like prosecutors in the courtroom. What exactly do I mean? To start, I’m not advocating that you look to “convict” your sales reps. Instead, I’m suggesting sales managers take an evidence-based approach to sales pipeline inspection. Doing so will remove the biases from conversations with sales reps, and make sales pipelines more accurate and data driven.
So, where do you find this evidence?
Sales Gauge, a leader in the sales training industry, today announced it has launched a new application for sales executives using Salesforce.com (SFDC). The app, which provides real-time insight into high value deals, is available at no charge on the SFDC AppExchange. In addition to full transparency into their sales pipelines, the new Sales Gauge High Value Trade Table app provides salespeople and managers a common language to discuss sales pipelines and forecasts.
We have been talking a lot about using the High Value Trade Table (HVT) to close deals. Sales professionals taking our eLearning have found the deal simulator that provides them insight on how to read the score of their deals eye-opening. That said, each organization is unique and requires an in-depth look at the best structure for the HVT. Keep in mind that the HVT spreadsheet we provide in the resource tab gets you started but each company will have unique trades to identify and call out in order to advance their sales along.
Do you understand how your solution fits your customer’s product lifecycle? Salespeople must recognize that the landscape is truly shifting under our feet. Neil Rackham from Spin Selling discusses the polarizing landscape that will take the low-end transactional business and move it downstream to inexperienced sales reps or through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to process these orders.
Does this mean that sales professionals will no longer be needed? The answer depends on whether you can transform yourself to meet the needs of the current buying process and build strong relationships with your customers. According to Rackham, we must become consultative with our prospects and customers; while most of us seem to understand this, many still struggle with how to actually make it happen.
The traditional sales model from which we have recognized up to 80% of our business is moving to the transactional sale and the higher end business is going to demand a consultative sales approach. This approach is going to shed light on the skills – or lack thereof – of today’s sales professionals. So it’s time to ask yourself: Do you have the skills to connect with executives in order to gain access to their team?
The title of this post leads you to believe that we are going to talk about time to close a deal or to make a deal. In this case I want you to think about time as a precious commodity that is fleeting and beats us every year: your finite amount of time to make quota. As the year begins with kickoff and planning, Q1 is over before we know it and Q2 is upon us. We quickly need to make up for the Q1 shortfall, which means we must double down on prospecting and get appointments that lead to follow-on investment by the customer.
While I recognize that baseball is not a sport that everyone follows, I wanted to share some insights from Billy Beane whose character was the main focus of the 2011 film, Moneyball. Billy was the keynote speaker at the 2017 Splunk Conference where he made a statement that is so applicable to the sales world that I have to share it with you...
How many times do we struggle to convince management and ourselves we have a good deal in the pipeline? Throughout our sales careers, we tend to get overly optimistic, convinced that we have this really great deal in the pipeline. We take our customers’ word as perfectly true each time and are surprised when we lose the deal, especially to no decision. In this post, we will introduce you to the process of building a scorecard and the High Value Trades (HVT) needed to effectively negotiate opportunities in the pipeline.
According to Wikipedia, a cyborg is an organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology. A Cyborg Seller, therefore, may be described as the ultimate selling machine that will combine sales acumen and content together with social media to build a defensible position in your accounts. Sounds great, right? But how do we become Cyborg Sellers?
Many of the clients that Sales Gauge works with have formal sales onboarding and training programs. One such client put together a comprehensive launch program for their sales people that began with the basic skills that a sales person needs to have prior to going out into the field.
But while this company had an aggressive 5-day boot camp for people that covered product and soft skills, they discovered a lot of people (25%) would wash out of sales within 6 months. As you can imagine, coming to this realization meant that they were hiring the wrong people. The company recognized that they needed to make some drastic changes to ensure that they were not only hiring the right candidates but that these new hires have the skills required to successfully sell on behalf of the company.
Recently, we were meeting with a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to discuss training for their team in the science and art of prospecting. To kick things off, I asked the CRO about the current prospecting process and the plan to hold the sales people accountable. His answer?
“They aggressively sit at their desks waiting for the phone to ring.”
While we found the answer amusing, his response underlined the reality that their sales people had become order takers and not sales professionals.
In a previous blog post we discussed the book The Customer Service Revolution by John R. DiJulius and how companies and individuals have a tendency to approach clients with preconceived notions. We have this negative belief that our customers are always trying to put one over on us. It’s the 2% of customers trying to pull a fast one who prompt us to put up our defenses and drive us to believe every customer wants to screw us. But the reality is that most customers want us to be successful and profitable, in turn passing on fair pricing on our products and services. In this way, everyone benefits.
Sales and Operations leaders are given an annual budget to spend on sales effectiveness programs. Most often these programs revolve around sales training and other sales enablement programs, yet fail to realize the expected revenue growth from these investments.
What is the root cause of failed ROI? Is it the market? Do we have a talent issue? Certainly, it can’t be the training program we invested in?
