Sales Leaders, Ditch Your Outdated Ideas about Hiring

Image via FreeDigitalPhotos.netA lot of sales leaders let old myths about hiring get in the way of finding superstar candidates.

The myths I’m talking about are based on the idea that certain characteristics or qualities can magically help you identify your next top performer among a pool of potential hires. For example, how many times have you heard people endorse job candidates by saying things like:

“He’s a hunter.”
“She’s a great networker.”
“He’s an ‘activity’ guy.”
“She’s a road warrior.”
“She used to be an athlete.”
“He’s a cold calling animal.”

These things are all well and good, but something about the language reminds me of the book Moneyball, in which baseball scouts would make decisions about players based on assessments like, “He passes the eye candy test. He’s got the looks, he’s great at playing the part.” Again, I’m not saying these things are negative. But can you really tell how good a player someone will be from the fact that he somehow looks the part?

As a sales leader, do you really want to make a hiring decision based on the fact that someone has been described as an “activity guy” or has a background in sports? It’s awesome if a candidate used to be an athlete (I used to be one, myself). He or she is probably very competitive and has thick skin. These are two traits that help a lot in sales – but those aren’t the only traits you need to be successful in a sales position, and they’re no guarantee that a former athlete will succeed in your particular selling environment.

Sales managers tend to get hung up on these myths because they have no real idea about what makes their top performers tick. As Moneyball showed, however, a methodology can help you assess new hires more accurately and change the game. In my organization, for example, we identified the Top Performer personality traits of our most successful reps as:

  • Listens well, but can also engage in two-way dialogue.
  • Offers a unique perspective and is intellectually curious.
  • Is comfortable discussing money and can push the customer.
  • Understands the customer’s business and can identify economic drivers.

I put this to the test by giving the Top Performer personality survey to my entire organization. No surprise that our top reps matched the personality traits of the Top Performer. Now I have a real way to identify and measure top reps – and I can hire an army of them.

As a sales leader, you have to watch out for descriptions of potential hires that are just empty words. Hunter. Networker. What do these words really mean? Dig a little deeper so you can identify whether or not a candidate has the specific traits that track to success in your organization. When you use methodology instead of myth, you’ll be able to spot the true gems.

Mike Nelson
Mike Nelson is Vice President of Sales at ON24, a cloud-based Virtual Communication software provider. He has more than 15 years of sales and business development experience in the SaaS, Cloud Software industry, with a focus on Enterprise as well as Channel. He was recently a featured expert during a Webinar on sales enablement strategies.

Managing Sales Team Talent: How to Help Reps at Any Level Sell More

By Nancy Martini

One of the most difficult challenges any manager faces is helping an employee improve performance. Creating a high performance sales team is even more complex. A typical sales team includes a number of top producers (10-20% of the team); these are the folks who crank out the numbers month after month — either with incredible skills, sheer effort, or a combination of brains and brawn. The middle group (60-80%); often includes reps who are adequate but not yet reaching their potential — various reasons get in the way, from confidence, to commitment, to limited skills or motivation. Finally, there is the small group (10-20%) of those struggling with the position and trying to figure it all out — they may or may not make it. Ultimately it’s up to the sales manager to drive the performance of the entire team, fortunately (as I discuss in my new book) science can help determine the exact scenario and who needs what.

scientific selling resized 600

As a manager it’s important to look first at the relationship between the reps’ sales skills and their actual sales results. There are four science-based scenarios that occur to help diagnose and guide you for accurate coaching.

The “Muscle” Scenario: High sales results, Low sales skills.
These are top producers who get the job done, but likely in their own way. Their success may come from years of experience, superb product knowledge, or they’re simply extremely hard workers. The good news is, they get superior results. The bad news is how they do it. A rep with high sales and low skills tends to be highly reliant on a single muscle (for example closing skills, presentation skills or questioning skills). They are most likely working inefficiently. By building other muscles, they could potentially increase their performance and efficiency substantially. Most top producers are all over increasing skills that can help create more sales; managers tend to shy away with a fear of messing with success. Gather the sales skills assessment data and dive in; this effort is well worth the return.

The Execution Scenario: Low sales results, High sales skills
These are the folks who know what to do but have trouble executing on that knowledge. They’ve attended the sales training, they even get it, but they just have a block getting it done. We all know the old adage “the knowing-doing gap” and this the classic issue in this scenario. It may be from lack of confidence, lack of drive, or simply lack of coaching but this rep needs help with the “doing.” In this scenario, a focus one-on-one coaching is ideal. The rep gets to see how his or her judgment and knowledge plays out live with feedback from a skilled coach. When a person has the sales skills assessment needed for the role, it’s also helpful to examine their behavioral assessment to uncover the drive behind their selling.

The Knowledge Scenario: Low sales results, Low sales skills
Your sales reps who score low on the sales skills assessment and have low sales results need one thing — training.  You can hire the best reps in the world, with all the drive necessary to succeed, but if they don’t have core sales skills, they become a rocket without a direction. This one is fairly easy to adjust: start with solid sales training and reinforce with focused skill builders. By increasing a rep’s core sales skills, you are giving them the tools necessary for the role. These reps tend to be sponges and the sales skills training is absorbed and used.

The Leverage Scenario: High sales results, High sales skills
This one is the most complex of all. A terrific rep who emulates all the sales skills you want and creates outstanding sales results. Good as it is, you have two risks to stay on top of: 1) the rep may plateau because of time constraints; and/or, even worse: 2) he/she gets bored when “been there, done that” kicks in. In either case, your top producers need to be kept engaged, challenged, and leveraged. The leverage approach suggests that you examine all aspects of the person’s role to remove obstacles and increase support to give them as much selling time as possible. It may be additional technology or it may be a part time assistant but ultimately your goal is to leverage this talent with more time to sell.

In each of the four scenarios sales analytics help remove the guesswork and provide you with laser sharp focus of what’s needed. Pay attention to the sales skills assessment scores, the behavioral assessment profile, and the reps’ actual sales results — those three data points provide the accurate insight needed to impact the sales performance of every member of your team.

Nancy Martini
Nancy Martini is President & CEO of PI Worldwide, publishers of the Predictive Index (PI) and Selling Skills Assessment Tool (SSAT). She is the author of the newly released Scientific Selling. In October she will present Sales Coaching 2.0: How Using Scientific Data Leads to Better Sales Performance as a keynote  speaker at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Timeless Sales Messaging Tips to Win Today’s Customers

What is the number one problem that stands between your sales reps and prospects? Chances are that their sales messages fizzle in the marketplace. Prospects don’t know you, your company or your product; they don’t understand your message; and they don’t care about your story or your unique selling propositions.

Back in 1888, very few people had heard of George Eastman and his little black box that he called the detective camera. Only a few people understood photography, and even fewer knew his company. He started a sales revolution with the simple and compelling message: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Eastman’s sales message was as innovative as his camera.

Since 1888, advances in technology have created a landslide of products and an avalanche of information. Today customers are bombarded with sales messages that they have learned to tune out faster than ever.

Ask marketers and they’ll tell you that every year response rates decline. Today, more than 99 percent of all promotional emails are ignored or deleted. Why? The subject lines are boring, boilerplate messages. Ask sales managers and they’ll tell you that 90 percent of all prospects ignore a salesperson’s attempt to close the sale. Why? Because most salespeople talk about how great the product is, but they have little understanding of how their product can enhance their prospect’s business.

Why do most sales messages fizzle? When companies think of innovation, they think of innovative products, processes and technologies, but not messaging. What makes effective customer messages sizzle? The first author to write about selling with sizzle was Elmer Wheeler.

Wheeler’s bestselling book Tested Sentences That Sell was published in 1937, it revealed his experiments with sales messages and their impact on prospects. Wheeler spoke about meaty words that prospects could sink their teeth into and watery words that had little impact.

The world has changed since 1937, the advances in technology have been remarkable and business has become a lot more complex, yet human nature stays the same. For example, Wheeler found that if a waiter asked, “Would you care to order a red or white wine with your dinner?” it would double the sales of wine. Compare that with the unproductive questions that most waiters ask today: “What would you like to drink with your dinner?” Wheeler taught his students: “Don’t ask if, ask which!”

Today, winning customers has less to do with the right choice of products than with the right choice of words. Every market has its own jargon, acronyms and buzzwords that salespeople need to know. Each prospect lives in a different world that is governed by different preoccupations, perceptions and preferences. While a CEO’s perception focuses on the future, strategy and efficiency, the CFO’s preoccupations revolve around cash flow and ROI. For a sales message to gain access to the prospect’s mind it must reflect the language of the market, the preoccupations of the prospect and the challenges of the company. If salespeople want to get a seat at the table, they need to initiate the right conversation and speak the customer’s language.

Today’s successful companies take a more strategic approach to creating and distributing effective sales messages. The new process is called sales enablement which is designed to give each salesperson direct access to the collective intelligence that already exists in a sales organization. Why should salespeople reinvent the wheel every time they need to create a proposal or prepare for a call? Why should salespeople quiz each other for customer testimonials or to find the best practice for negotiating a deal? Why should salespeople create their own laboratory for tested selling sentences?

As regular host of Sales 2.0 Events, I am continually amazed by the sophistication of sales enablement solutions that can help teams collect their best “message assets” (such as talking points, white papers, conversation maps, persuasive stories, presentation videos, proposal templates, market overviews, research data, ROI analysis, customer testimonials and more) and make them instantly available to the entire sales team.

I am sure that Elmer Wheeler would come up with a clever way to describe such innovation in one sentence: “Sales Enablement is the crunch in the cracker, the whiff in the coffee, the pucker in the pickle and the commission in the close.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the Founder & CEO of Selling Power. This post appeared originally on his blog. Gschwandtner will host the Sales Management 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia on March 5, 2o12 and the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on April 2-3, 2012. 

Transitioning from Sales to Management

The Harvard Business Review article, “Selling is Not About Relationships,” (the title is misleading) categorizes sales people into 5 buckets:

  • Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
  • Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
  • Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
  • Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
  • Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

In their analysis, they state that Challengers far outperform others, with Relationship Builders coming in dead last. Not that relationships are unimportant, their point is that the type of relationship is what is important. Challengers push the relationship, to make it better while Relationship Builders focus only on reducing tension.

This made me stop and think: How does this apply to management/leadership? I have often debated the merits of sales people transitioning from sales to management – where they can leverage their relationship skills. What this made me realize is that it is more than that, the ability to build relationships is important but success will hinge on what type of a person they are. Consider the same definitions applied to management/leadership with a few key words edited (i.e. customer changed to organization):

  • Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet everyone’s needs, and work hard to resolve tensions in the internal relationships. (Add: Infrequently progress from manager to leader as they are the keeper of the status quo).
  • Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team. (Add: It is naïve to think that you do not have to work hard to be successful. You do. But the person who thinks that hard work is enough stay managers. They are great ‘do-ers’.)
  • Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the organization who do things their way or not at all. (Add: Often burn bridges and have difficulty moving from manager to leader as they are not a team player. After all, people follow those they trust)
  • Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the organization’s standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on follow-up, ensuring that issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly. (Add: Great reporting to a leader)
  • Challengers use their deep understanding of the business to push their thinking and take control of the conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — within the organization. (Add: Can build, communicate and execute a vision … in other words, can lead).

As with the sales profiles, I would suggest that the Challenger will outpace the others as they are willing to paint a vision of the future, push boundaries, take risks, face big issues and execute – with relationships, problem solving and hard working contributing to that success.

Ken Powell
Michael Weening is VP Business Wireless, Radio & Paging at Bell Mobility. This post appeared originally on his blog. Weening will be a speaker at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on April 2-3, 2012. 

How to Succeed as a Sales Manager

As a sales manager and leader, are you measuring the right metrics for sales success?

At Vantage Point Performance, we recently wrote a book based on a groundbreaking research study we conducted about the metrics that leading sales forces are using to measure and manage their sellers. Interestingly, we discovered that thousands of sales metrics fall into one of three categories:

  1. Business results (such as revenue and market share).
  2. Sales objectives (such as acquiring new customers and selling certain products).
  3. Sales activities (day-to-day tasks like planning and conducting sales calls).

A key insight from the research is that only sales activities can truly be managed. Numbers related to sales objectives and business results are important to everyone, but these numbers cannot be directly controlled by sales management.

In fact, sales objectives and business results are trailing indicators of a sales force’s performance – they only show what you’ve accomplished in the past. Measuring sales activities, on the other hand, (which provide insights into current behaviors) are leading indicators that foretell whether those objectives and results will be attained in the future.

Amazingly, only 17% of the metrics in our study were focused on sales activities. Or, stated differently: more than 80% of the things sales forces are measuring are things that they cannot actually control.

You can’t control revenue – you can only control the things that your sellers are doing day-to-day. For example,

  • which types of prospects your reps are calling this week;
  • what types of conversations they’ll have;
  • whether they’re completing their call plans; and
  • whether they’re proactively managing their opportunities.

Clearly, many sales managers are only looking at metrics that tell them how successful they’ve been in the past. But as our research shows, a far more effective approach is to start measuring and managing sales activities instead. These are the critical inputs to success.

It’s important to remember that CRM is just a tool, and it only does what we tell it to do. Information goes in, and information comes out. Which information we request and what we do with that data is up to us as sales managers. Once we start using CRM to measure the right metrics, we’ll begin to predictably influence the future and manage sales teams that fulfill their highest potential.

To discover the best practices and frameworks you can use to influence the future, register to download a free chapter from Cracking the Sales Management Code, including a forward by Neil Rackham, best-selling author of SPIN Selling.

Jason Jordan
Jason Jordan is a partner of Vantage Point Performance and coauthor of Cracking the Sales Management Code.

Why Sales Success Starts with Credibility

There are four very basic sales management questions that a great front line or senior sales leader should be able to answer “yes” to:

1) Do your people trust you?

2) Do they have clarity on overall strategy?

3) Do you make yourself available to them?

4) Do you exist to unleash their potential?

These questions might be basic, but the execution is always complicated. In a world where the speed of sales increases year-over-year, it’s easy to forget that when you peel back all the technology & innovation that have helped increase rep productivity, sales is basically about making connections. Connections with partners, with customers, and—most important—with your team.

Connections create credibility, and credibility drives sales success. But how do you become credible as a sales leader? Start with these evaluation questions:

Is it important for a sales leader to have first worked in sales?

Would you get in a plane with a pilot who has never flown? Of course not. Sales is the same. It’s essential that sales leaders and sales managers have a background in sales. Steven Covey says trust is built through competence and character, and both are only achievable after you’ve walked the walk. That’s why I only hire high-potential, top-performing sales leaders as part of our leadership development academy. With a sales force of 6,500 associates at ADP, it’s critical that we train the best with the best.

Do all great salespeople make great leaders?

No way! The question to ask yourself is, “Do you get more excited by closing the big deal, or seeing someone you coached close the big deal?” The traits that put the best salespeople on top are the same traits that make them terrible sales managers. They tend to overachieve because they’re selfish with their time and accountable to themselves. On the other hand, the great sales leader can channel that overachieving spirit and create one collective unit focused on team results. Being able to identify salespeople who have leadership potential is an art and a science. Fortunately, there are a number of selection tools that can help you identify sales leadership traits.

What should you consider as you move into a leadership position?

Your time is not yours. You exist to drive the performance of others. The great sales leaders who build trust, set a vision, and inspire their teams are the first to arrive at the office in the morning and last to leave at the end of the day. They have a servant’s heart and the clock never turns off.

What do you think it takes to succeed during a transition from a sales role to a leadership role?

I refer to this as “relationship reengineering.” Others need to see you in a new light. Focus on redefining sales success, setting time-bound, realistic goals, seeking feedback, gathering insight, and building a new sense of trust. Most important, new sales leaders that try to lead with the idea that “This is how I did it” generally fail. Be humble, observe others’ strengths, and lead each salesperson with an individual style.

Ken Powell
Ken Powell is Vice President of Worldwide Sales Enablement at ADP

3 Sales Management Challenges & How to Solve Them with Science

Are great salespeople born, or made? With today’s advanced scientific sales analytics and measurement tools, sales managers can actually find out.

First, behavioral assessments give sales managers insight into a salesperson’s nature and psychological makeup (“born”), while skills assessments provide concrete data on sales knowledge and skills learned via experience, lessons, observations, etc. (“made”).

This combination of information gives sales leaders new ways to tackle three perennial sales-management challenges:

Sales Management Challenge #1: Hiring
Sales teams are only as good as the salespeople themselves. Sales managers need individuals who can work within the culture of the organization, leverage their unique strengths, and find satisfaction in getting great results. This is simply about job fit.

To find the right people for your team, you have to know what kind of salespeople you’re looking for. Hiring the right salesperson starts by defining the role. Sales managers need to take the time to complete a job analysis that defines the behavioral needs of the position. You can imagine the different needs of various sales positions—including B2B, B2C, outside sales, inside sales, and call centers. By defining the job, you have a “target” to measure candidates against. The next step is to administer a behavioral assessment on solid candidates, review and compare it with other critical data about experience, education, and past successes. You’re now using science and multiple data points to find a good fit.

Sales Management Challenge #2: Motivation
Sales is the one job inside every company where you cannot hide from results. Sales professionals are measured every day; and if one hits a slump, has a bad week or month, not only does that individual feel it, the results are also highly visible. While the visibility can help motivate some people, it can also create a “pressure cooker” environment where morale is difficult to maintain.

In addition to pressure to produce, external factors like these can also impact a rep’s motivation levels:

  • tough economy,
  • increased competition
  • shift in the individual’s role
  • change in the company’s direction or vision.

For example, an inside sales team that goes from 95% inbound calls to 95% outbound calls might experience a drop-off in production, which would create a significant challenge for the sales manager to keep the team focused, motivated, and productive. Behavioral assessments provide essential insights to how an individual is motivated. Armed with data on motivation, the sales manager can stay ready to accurately guide his or her team through change of any kind.

Sales Management Challenge #3: Retention
Hiring the right people will always be a concern, but retention will be an even greater challenge over the next decade. Top producers always have and always will have choices of about where to work. As drivers of revenue, they are a huge asset to any company and remain in high demand. In addition, top sales professionals expect great leadership and a high level of job satisfaction. Most organizations find that there are not enough candidates to fill critical roles; this problem is likely to get more serious now and in the future.

How can science help? For one thing, people stay in jobs when they’re engaged, learning, challenged, and believe they can succeed in the environment. Science provides two key aspects to combine nature and nurture and help keep producers actively engaged and reduce sales personnel turnover.

While behavioral assessments provide insight into what makes each rep tick, sales skills assessments provide data on their strengths and areas of growth. With the combined data from a behavioral assessment and a skills assessment, sales managers can take the mystery out of retention and figure out ways to keep their top performers happy and engaged.

Ultimately, leveraging science to drive sales performance enables organizations to increase efficiency, manage effectively, and produce outstanding sales results. The result is predictable, sustainable, and repeatable success.

Nancy Martini
Today’s post was contributed by Nancy Martini, President and CEO of PI Worldwide, publisher of science-based sales analytics including the Predictive Index (PI) and the Selling Skills Assessment Tool (SSAT). Contact her at nmartini@piworldwide.com.

Are Sales Reps Just Complaining, or Is Lead Quality Really Down?

One of the first complaints a sales leader will hear from an underperforming salesperson is that the leads from marketing are not up to par. “It’s not me — it’s the leads. They’re terrible.” The next thing you know, all your other salespeople are also convinced that the leads are terrible, and suddenly you’ve got an entire sales team demotivated to perform.

For a long time, there was no way for sales leaders to assess the accuracy of complaints about sales leads. Are the leads truly low quality? Or has the rep not been trained properly on how to deal with this particular kind of lead?

This is a sales leadership issue that has bothered me for years. But at HubSpot, we’ve been as proactive as possible in taking the subjectivity out of the issue of lead quality by using data and metrics.

One framework for lead intelligence data is demographic data (for example, company size and revenue) versus engagement data (for example, how many times the prospect visited your site and/or downloaded materials). We use this kind of information to develop our lead quality score. We can then have more quantitative discussions about lead quality. For example, as opposed to “the leads suck,” we can gather feedback such as: “The percentage of B2B companies with greater than $100 million in revenue has dropped by 24% in the past week. This trend is problematic, as these types of leads close to customers 37% more than the average sales qualified lead”.

The other aspect of lead quality we examine is salesperson performance on specific lead segments across a broader set of salespeople. When a segment of leads is under-performing, typically this result is either because the sales team is not adequately trained on how to handle these leads or the leads are in fact not a great fit for your offering. If you find that all your salespeople struggle with the lead segment, then the leads are probably not a great fit for your offering. But if, say, four salespeople performed well with the lead segment and 11 did not, then you have a sales training issue. Your next step would be to look at the four reps who are doing well, find out how they’re approaching those leads, and get the rest of the team trained on those techniques quickly.

A good example of this at HubSpot is our non-profit leads. Our reps used to avoid selling to this segment like the plague: “Don’t give me nonprofits – there’s too much red tape and they don’t spend a lot of money.” The data showed a different story. In fact, nonprofits did have a longer sales cycle, and it took a deeper qualification process to find out who the decision makers were. But when you got them to sign up, they became phenomenal customers, which made its way back into the salesperson commission plan.

It’s amazing how often the data differs from the gut feel of the salesperson. If you make that data known, reps stop complaining and instead start figuring out what they need to do to translate leads into deals.

Mark Roberge will share insights about lead quality and sales and marketing alignment on September 20, 2011 in a webinar sponsored by Selling Power. To register, click here.

Mark Roberge
Mark is responsible for the entire sales function at HubSpot, having grown the team from 1 to 80 employees in five years. Prior to HubSpot, Mark founded and/or held executive positions at start-ups in the social media and mobile sector. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter

Where Do Great Front-Line Sales Managers Come From?

Managing a sales team is one of the most important positions in a company. Great sales managers have a profound impact on the productivity of their sales teams and produce better sales results. Managing a sales team is also one of the most challenging positions in a company, and it requires a unique set of skills. Unfortunately, most front-line managers start their sales management careers ill-equipped to effectively manage a team of salespeople. So, where do great front-line sales managers come from?

Star-Athlete Syndrome
I hear about the “Star-Athlete Syndrome” frequently in sales organizations. A star sales person grows tired of the daily grind of being an individual contributor and aspires to something “greater,” such as sales management. Meanwhile, the vice president of sales is under time pressure to fill a vacant sales manager position. The vice president assumes that the star sales rep will know how to produce great sales results from a sales team.

The challenge is that salespeople are frequently unable to make the transition from being an individual contributor — achieving results through individual expertise, effort and determination — to being a manager, achieving results through the performance of others. This problem is not unique to sales. Think of all of the great athletes who never developed into great coaches.

Key Sales-Management Abilities
While a sales manager needs sales experience in order to have credibility with the sales team, the key driver of long-term success as a manager is mastery of specific sales-management skills. In order to produce exceptional sales results from the team, a sales manager must excel in the following critical sales-management abilities:

1) Managing sales performance by focusing on the underlying behaviors that drive sales results.

2) Sales coaching to help salespeople develop their full potential.

3) Building a team of great sales professionals with the requisite competencies to succeed.

4) Leading and motivating the team.

Return on Investment
Often some training is needed to develop these critical sales-management abilities. I find the return on investment training sales managers offers truly exciting. A sales manager can leverage improved management skills over the entire sales team. For example, if a sales manager manages 10 salespeople, improving that manager’s effectiveness represents a 10:1 return on investment opportunity.

Just think about all that untapped potential.

Norm Behar talks about developing highly effective sales managers with Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of Selling Power.

Norm Behar, sales management
Norm Behar is CEO of Sales Readiness Group. This post originally appeared here on his blog. Follow Sales Readiness Group on Twitter @SalesReadiness, or email Norm at nbehar@salesreadinessgroup.com.

How We Use ‘The Pitch’ to Achieve Sales Success

elevator pitchI recently read a blog post by Gerhard Gschwandtner which posed the question: Is ‘the pitch’ dead?” Ya know, the good old-fashioned elevator sales pitch — is it still relevant?

It got me thinking about when I first came to Dyn two and a half years ago from WhippleHill (a software company for private schools) because Dyn had no ‘pitch.’ We had no singular message or way of talking about our brand identity in a way that people could relate to. We needed to craft a genuine story that people could get behind, believe in and yearn to be a part of.  I didn’t know a ton about the technology at Dyn (DNS – Domain Name System), so it was also a great way to get up to speed.

Before phones, radio and television, people looking to make a transaction and achieve sales success actually met in person to do a business deal. (Imagine that!) There was a straight-in-the-eye look, trust-building conversations, and a firm handshake that led to contracts getting signed.

Today, the same thing happens but the look, trust building and handshake doesn’t simply occur between two parties. It happens between employees, fans, prospects, customers, followers and friends. There is an abundant supply of online reviews, magic quadrants, hungry competition, analyst briefings, crazy analytics, community sites, Twitter, Facebook, customer references and more to sift through. You simply can’t slack off, because competition can pounce at a moments notice.

The function and business of sales itself always seems to carry a negative connotation. I know it did for me growing up. It’s no secret that there are plenty of sleazy sales jobs out there or overly corporate slick practices to convince people to buy whatever wares are being served up.  The amount of spin and BS being spit out has given sales — and more specifically ‘the pitch’ — a bad name. It’s up to sales leaders like us to reinvent ‘the pitch’ and ensure that its genuineness shines and that dialogue (not monologue) flourishes.

When we bring sales people aboard at Dyn, they must learn four key things before they’re truly unleashed to rep us. All four things are what end up making up our unique pitch one that continues to evolve with every customer win, technology advancement, industry shift or overall achievement of company milestones.

Here are the four key aspects of the Dyn Pitch:

1. The Dyn Story
Our roots: how we were founded, how we grew, how we were our very own first customer, how everything we’ve ever done has been because of customer demand and how we’re really just like those we want to do business with: dedicated.

2. The Dyn Difference
Our straightforward, transparent (we overshare), high road, direct, and impassioned approach. We love to talk about and show our commitment and loyalty to our customers, our strong relationships that go beyond the dollar value of an account, our obsessive account management and support, and our flexibility in contracting, pricing, and product enhancements. We keep it real in an industry that tends to be old school, slow and very corporate.

3. The Dyn Customer, Case Studies & Vertical Markets
We are just like our customers. We’re fighting tooth-and-nail to grow and experience great success in a unique way that we can be proud of. We focus on everyone who values his or her presence online. We’ve redefined what it means to be enterprise, how to practice a customer-centric and solution-selling approach, and drive ahead with our customers and vertical market focus in the spotlight.

4. The Dyn Technology
We are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for managed DNS and email delivery, but what is DNS? What is email delivery? Why outsource? How does our technology work? What problems does it solve? Smart customers want the keys to the car and want to test drive the services themselves. We let them, and expose them to experts from the word go. When technology stands on its own two feet, it’s easy to sell. The technology is the last thing we have people learn. (Again, imagine that!)

The two most important things I tell anyone coming into our sales organization are: 1) people buy from people they like, and 2) you know what you don’t know.

We explain that even if you don’t win a deal at the end of the day, do everything in your power to ensure that the prospect likes you so much that he or she feels terrible about letting you down. Sales success is about using all your resources to deliver for your prospect or customer.

Recently, the VP of Sales at a large public competitor, whom I respect very much, asked me how we were finding DNS sales reps in New Hampshire. I told him very pointedly that we’re not selling just DNS and we’re not just hiring sales reps. We are hiring honest, passionate and persistent people to round out our sales team and that they must possess two key characteristics: fit and hustle.

Once they learn ‘the pitch’ and how to share it, the sky is the limit for them and for Dyn.

Kyle York is the VP of Sales and Marketing of Dyn, an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) leader that features a full suite of DNS and email delivery services for enterprise, SMB and personal users. Follow on Twitter: @kyork20 and @DynInc.