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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you seen The Martian? In this film, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, an astronaut who is left behind on Mars who must learn how to survive on a planet that is barren and he is utterly and completely alone. The thing that struck me most was how his character has to overcome so much adversity to survive that it seems like most of us would give up.
As salespeople, part of our job is to quickly learn exactly what a prospect’s role is within their organization and to ascertain their true motivations for engaging with us. By doing this, we are in a position of power that enables us to address their needs quickly and efficiently, ideally getting us to a strong sales opportunity.
As sales professionals, we spend a lot of time focusing on the early and late stages of the pipeline. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
In the early stages of a deal, things are exciting and optimistic. As sales people, we are the most fervent of optimists, aren’t we? You reached out to a target prospect, managed to get to the CxO and now you have a meeting scheduled.
