Selling Power

By Sundance Brennan

In a crazy world of quotas, deadlines, pipelines, and paperwork it’s easy for a sales leader to get distracted by the urgent fires that constantly come up. It’s easy to look busily at a computer screen for 8-12 hours a day. Those emails never, ever, ever stop.

I have had those days that go by in a flash and I have no idea what my teams actually did. What was their focus? What interactions did they have? What help did they need? Maybe you have had six hours of meetings, interviews, and issues to tackle and know what I mean. Who was watching your team then?

A quick and easy way to keep the team motivated and focused while you are away is to set them on auto-pilot with a crazy incentive.

These five crazy incentives can be used in pinch and can be rolled out with very little preparation. I’ve been accused of being “gimmicky” over the years and leaning on these techniques too much, but the only people who ever said that were other managers or salespeople from other teams. My team was too busy giving high fives, learning to work together, and heading out to dinner after hitting goals. These fun activities will build a fence around your team and encourage the team dynamics that lead to long-term success.

1. Desk Swap – Many sales agents work in a sea of cubicles. Offer to allow top performers to swap seats or designate an open office for the top performer. Better yet, stack rank the team and let the top guys choose first. Your bottom performers will end up sitting near the bathroom. This is easy to start, fun to execute, and it’s really obvious where your weak links are.

2. Cigar Czar – Offer a top performer your cigar of the month. Go to www.cigarmonthclub.com and buy yourself an annual subscription. If you are near a cigar bar, you can offer to take a few winners to the actual cigar bar with a boss. I don’t smoke cigars myself – and my teams often include non-smokers – but the prestige of winning is worth it.

3. Maid to Order – Offer a local maid service for a month as a prize. This frees up personal time and eases some stress! The single people on your team love this. The married people on your team love this more. The married people with kids love this the most! Give them a break; give their spouse a break. This is something your average salespeople don’t buy themselves.

4. Boss Humiliation – If a certain goal is reached, the boss has to shave his/her head, get some tattoo, or wear a crazy outfit. I’ve had to shave my head twice. I’ve had to ride to work on a Vespa dressed up like Elvis. I’ve almost had to get a giant tattoo of Texas on my back. I make the goal a stretch but within the realm of possibility. I smiled all the way to work as I rode that Vespa – because my sales team had hit its goal and everyone had gotten paid.

5. Sing Me a Song – Match up two teams and the losing team has to serenade the winner with a song sure to inspire laughter. Either the entire team has to sing, or perhaps just the leaders of the team. I tend to pick songs that are over-the-top repetitive like “Gangnam Style” or “What Does the Fox Say?”

I’d encourage you to try various forms of these incentives to see what works best for your team. Group buy-in is the scenario where your salespeople care not just for their own goals and success, but also about the team goals, reputation, pride, and overall success.

Take responsibility for motivating, cheerleading, painting the target, and getting your team to where they want to be. The hard work is all worth it if you throw in a little fun now and then. Your people need you to plan out and coordinate a workplace that will keep them engaged and moving toward their goals.

Sundance Brennan is the author of The Art of SalesFu, a sales professional and coach with more than 20 years of experience in consumer direct sales. You can read his blog posts, which usually consist of sales rants and book reviews, at www.thesalesnerds.com. Tweet him @salesfumaster or join the conversation at www.facebook.com/groups/SalesFu/.

By Russell Sachs

The sales industry is in the midst of a transformation due to the surge in sales enablement technology aimed at making sales reps more successful. In fact, venture capitalists have invested approximately $10 billion into the B2B sales enablement space since 2013, and this year we witnessed Salesforce and Microsoft raise the stakes with artificial intelligence (AI) technology for sales reps, debuting Einstein and Dynamics 365, respectively.

Sales technology is already changing the way we sell – from delivering social selling capabilities to automated follow-up reminders and predictive analytics – but it’s still in its relative infancy. That said, sales organizations are already exploring the best approaches to incorporate these tools into their larger selling process to impact their results.

The relationship between sales technologies and the sales organizations that use them will continue to evolve in the coming year as companies look to strike the right balance between tech and process. Here are three trends I believe will continue to emerge in 2017.

Social Selling Will Force Sales to Evolve Its Outbounding Efforts

The proliferation of social selling in 2016 caused many to reconsider traditional methods of sales – namely phone- and email-based selling. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn proves that social selling is here to stay, as the company looks to enhance its Dynamics CRM solution with LinkedIn Sales Navigator (LinkedIn’s social prospecting tool) “to transform the sales cycle with actionable insights.”

While social selling does have a seat at the table, sales reps need to be cautious of how they utilize it. The reliance on social selling as a primary mode of selling – rather than as a useful tool in their overall tool chest – is overwhelming, leading to information overload and causing many buyers to “tune out” the white noise of multiple emails, LinkedIn messages, direct tweets, and other social solicitations. As a result, sales development reps will need to be more consultative and thoughtful in their approach when prospecting. The key when using social selling tools is to be relevant, respectful, direct and transparent.  Buyers are becoming desensitized to the overused social methods and tactics – and those who fail to adjust their methodologies will suffer from decreased hit rates.

Customization Is the Key to Revenue Growth

In 2017, sales organizations will continue to place greater importance on defined and specialized roles. In particular, targeted and coordinated efforts between marketing, the SDR, and account executive (commonly referred to as account-based selling) will continue to develop and grow in importance as organizations move away from a “one size fits all” sales methodology.

To achieve success here, sales organizations will need to employ a customized approach that demonstrates the value being delivered to each individual client, rather than rattling off a standard value prop with the bells and whistles of a product in hopes that it catches the eyes of prospective buyers in an active sales cycle. As the buyer continues to mature and grow weary of the noise and perceived overlap between products, sales professionals will be forced to focus on solving a customer’s unique problem or addressing a specific need of the client. The qualify, demo, and ask-for-order method only goes so far, and revenue will likely be stunted by those who stick to this approach.

In addition, as part of this trend, customer success and account management will continue to emerge and grow in prominence as companies look to improve retention rates and overall customer experience. Those who place a heavy investment and emphasis on customer success by aligning their efforts to their customers and strategic initiatives and focusing on delivering value will be handsomely rewarded by more loyalty, higher retention rates, and more revenue out of their existing customer base.

Sales Technology Will Continue Its Maturation Process

If 2016 was the year of sales tech innovation, then 2017 will be the year of sales tech refinement – especially around AI. As more customer data becomes available, we will continue to see the evolution and maturation of technologies that provide critical insights into buyer behavior. For example, products that uncover or clarify buyer propensity will make dramatic improvements in the coming year. We will also see an improvement in technologies that allow organizations to use data to enhance and improve forecasting and uncover which deals are most likely to close, which allows sales leaders to drive greater accuracy into the state of their pipelines and make specific recommendations on what needs to be done to close the gap and hit their revenue targets.

While it is exciting to see how predictive capabilities will drive efficiency into a sales rep’s day – such as allowing them to spend more time prospecting the right leads with the highest propensity to close – enthusiasm should be tempered as this simply will not replace the need for human interaction and interpretation of data. While it won’t teach sales reps how to sell, my hope and expectation is that it will keep them from squandering their most important asset: time.

We’re at an exciting time in the sales industry, and the right convergence of state-of-the-art sales technology and a customer-centric approach means unlimited potential for sales leaders and their teams. I, for one, am looking forward to the opportunities the New Year will bring. How do you see sales changing in 2017?

Russell Sachs is chief revenue officer at BetterCloud. He a veteran sales leader with more than 15 years of experience building winning sales teams and driving dramatic revenue growth for SaaS and enterprise software companies. Prior to joining BetterCloud, Sachs served as executive vice president of Sales at Work Market, where he grew top-line revenue tenfold in just three years. Sachs also previously held the position of sales director for Large Enterprise Services at Dell, Inc. Find him on Twitter at @RussellSachs. 

By Adrian Davis

Everywhere sales leaders are grappling with unprecedented, constant change when it comes to industries, customers, and competitors. As a result, sales leaders have to rethink their go-to-market strategies.

Often, they reach out to consultants to help them rethink their sales objectives, strategies, and processes. Getting external help when facing transformative change is not only a good idea – it’s often the foundation for fresh and innovative approaches.

One thing that can’t be overlooked, however, is that new strategies and new processes have no value unless they are actually implemented. Execution is the only thing that matters.

A Lesson from NASCAR

When it comes to winning, we can learn a lot from NASCAR. Not unlike NASCAR, we are in a race. Ours is a race for value, which requires us to make pit stops from time to time.

One of these “pit stops” is the annual sales conference – often when sales leaders introduce change to the sales team. This is not, however, where change happens. Change happens when talented salespeople are in front of qualified prospects and they implement the new strategies and processes.

When reflecting on a recent win, one best-in-class NASCAR pit crewmember said this:

“Victories aren’t always determined behind the wheel. With the cars these days, you can’t really pass that well. Most races now are won in the pit.”

The relevance of this quote to sales teams undergoing change is significant. NASCAR has reduced the time in the pit to 8.5 seconds. That’s 8.5 seconds to change tires, refuel, and do any other necessary maintenance. Because of parity on the track, it is the team that can get its car in and out of the pit the fastest that now wins the race.

In the same way, every sales force must change or die. The adoption and use of CRM is no longer a “nice to have.” The ability to engage all stakeholders in meaningful and strategic relationships has become compulsory. And the ability to understand and contribute to the client’s total economic equation has become the only way to create real value.

These are just a few examples of the many changes through which sales leaders must guide their teams. With these seismic shifts in the marketplace, sales leaders are forced to pull their teams off the road and educate them on their new strategies and processes. The sooner the sales teams can fully grasp and implement the proposed changes, the more quickly they can get back into the race for value. With the unrelenting changes and intense competition these days, this is where the race is won.

Coping with the Shock of Change

Unfortunately, implementing change in a sales team is far more difficult than it sounds. The type of unprecedented change sales organizations are undergoing leaves many salespeople in a state of shock and bewilderment. They find comfort in doing things the way they’ve always done them. Rather than see the new vision and associated opportunities, all they see is something being taken away from them and they react accordingly. Often, they drag down the morale of the whole team and ensure your change efforts are stalled (at best) or abandoned altogether (at worst).

Six Steps to Success

Understanding the states people go through when facing dramatic change can help you coach your people to success and get them out of the pit and back on the track. The following stages are loosely based on the Kübler-Ross model of coping with loss.

Stage of Sales Team	What Management Should Focus On
1. Denial – They do not accept that the proposed change is real. They believe it’s just the flavor of the month and all they have to do is wait it out and it’ll go away.	Use this time to strengthen relationships with team members on a one-on-one basis and avoid confrontation. Break the change down into small bite-size steps and get the team to focus on fully implementing the first step.
2. Anger – They begin to realize the change is here to stay and the old way of doing things will no longer be acceptable. They begin to act out in anger in an effort to regain control.	Do not take these attacks personally; instead, legitimize the anger and acknowledge that it is appropriate to feel anger when you do not feel in control of the changes you are undergoing.
3. Bargaining – They try to negotiate elements of your change effort in order to minimize the impact of the change on them personally.	Be careful not to negotiate on the major elements of your change effort. If you do, you are redefining the change effort – generating a whole new wave of negative responses to any future change efforts.
4. Depression – They acknowledge that they have “lost” the battle to defend the old ways and they experience a deep sense of loss and intense frustration.	Continue to provide support and let the team know about resources that are available to help them. Encourage them to take responsibility for their career and to reframe the change in order to regain a sense of control. As an example, rather than say, “No one told me and there’s nothing I can do,” encourage them to say, “I didn’t ask for the information I need,” and, “Let me begin to explore my options.” This reframing will give them greater psychological strength and help them preserve and build their self worth.
5. Testing – They are willing to experiment with the new methods.	Acknowledge the team’s progress and help it build confidence. Openly praise the progress individuals are making.
6. Acceptance – They begin to realize that the change is positive.	Reward and acknowledge the progress; also, identify what has been learned that can be used in the next change effort.

Hiring external consultants to provide thought leadership with respect to sales transformation is critical. Bringing in a powerful keynote speaker to galvanize the sales team at your next sales conference will help win over hearts and minds and kick off your change effort in a position for optimal success (please reach out to me if I can help you here).

However, the most critical step in change is using a strategy for adoption to prepare management to coach and validate your people through the change. This is where the real transformation takes place. In the end, it’s not systems or processes that change, it’s people. The sooner they change, the faster you can get out of the pit stop and back into the race for value. In a world of constant change, the speed in and out of the pit stop is where the race for value is won!

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and Dupont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

By Mike Kunkle

As 2016 draws to a close, sales organizations are assessing what worked – and where improvement is needed – to drive even better results in 2017. With one in five companies offering their sales managers no training at all (CSO Insights), there’s ample room for improvement in sales manager enablement.

Buoyed by the strong results it generates, sales manager enablement will, I predict, continue to blossom and become more mainstream next year. Am I right? Only time will tell, but maybe we can give it a collective nudge.

Sales Manager Enablement Momentum

Some thought-leaders are already championing the cause. Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights has been at the forefront, citing the need for and impact of sales manager enablement. Consultant Mike Weinberg speaks frankly about the folly of how we get in the way of sales success. And thought-leader Dave Brock recently published a book that could be the foundation for an entire sales manager enablement program. These are just three great examples.

A True Story about Sales Manager Enablement: The Request

Personally, I often quip that, if I had a dollar to spend on sales training, I’d spend 75 cents on managers. There’s a reason for this, and I’d like to share a quick story and takeaways to help you take bold steps toward better enabling managers to transform sales results.

Back when I was consulting, a senior sales leader at a mid-market technology firm approached me, concerned that his frontline sales managers weren’t coaching. When I asked how he knew that, he cited a recent survey with lackluster feedback from reps on how they were (or mostly weren’t) being coached.

The Analysis: Too Many Meetings, Too Much Reporting, Too Much Bureaucracy

The leader wanted me to train his managers to be effective coaches. However, I’ve never been much of an order-taker without validating the performance need, so I first reviewed the survey results and set up conference calls with the frontline managers and their sales leaders.

What I heard from managers was that they were swamped with too many meetings, too much reporting, bureaucratic “C.Y.A.” activities, and more that prevented them from coaching in the first place. To validate that, we did a focus group, laying out all the things managers were being asked to do and documenting estimates for how long each should take.

As it turned out, managers were being asked to fit 110 hours of work in a week (which leaders deemed a conservative estimate). Obviously, not everything could get done, and managers prioritized based on what headquarters or executives were reviewing – none of which centered on coaching or performance management.

The Solution

Senior executives and sales leaders had an “aha” moment, took ownership, and made changes, including

• Offloading many of managers’ administrative tasks
• Reducing meeting requests
• Redefining sales manager roles, with a primary focus on hiring, field training and coaching, pipeline management, forecast management, customer/prospect issue resolution, strategic account development guidance, and team leadership and performance management
• Defining sales manager competencies and assessing frontline managers against them, with individual development plans
• Developing a manager training curriculum and implementing an effective learning system to ensure managers’ knowledge sustainment, skills transfer, and mastery – culminating in a sales manager certification
• Establishing a cadence or management operating rhythm and holding managers accountable for executing on it

Takeaways to Make 2017 the Year of Sales Manager Enablement

The investment and discipline paid off. Manager training was completed in late Q1, and, by year-end, the company had a top-line revenue lift of more than 34 percent, finishing the year over quota. The company subsequently reported a decrease in rep turnover, along with faster ramp-up times for new sales hires.

The strategies implemented represent best practices other organizations can incorporate. Additional tips and takeaways to make 2017 the year of sales manager enablement include:

• Make the commitment. There’s a lot of boardroom head-nodding about the importance of frontline sales managers, but taking aligned action with top-down support is what produces results.
• Get the role expectations and competencies right. Train to those competencies.
• Provide the right tools to help managers work more efficiently and enable them to increase their time with reps and focus on what really matters.
• Hire (or rent) someone to coach your coaches. Just as with reps, managers need knowledge sustainment, transfer support, and coaching too, so training sticks.
• Measure the behaviors and outcomes you expect, and report on them transparently.
• Capture the output of sales coaching sessions. Regardless of where you do so (be it your CRM, LMS, or HRIS/performance management system), capture them somewhere so analytics can be run pre- and post-coaching to see the impact, and so sessions and action plans can be viewed and reviewed by others.

When you enable your frontline sales managers in these ways, you’ll get far better results from your sales force and have the best chance of meeting or exceeding your sales plan. Good luck in 2017!

Mike Kunkle is a renowned strategist, practitioner, speaker, and writer in the field of sales. Mike has more than two decades of experience leading sales training, productivity, and performance initiatives. He is senior director of sales readiness consulting at Brainshark, a leading provider of sales readiness software. Prior to Brainshark, Mike spent 21 years as a corporate leader and consultant, helping companies drive dramatic sales results through best-in-class learning strategies and sales performance methodologies. You can follow Mike on Twitter at @Mike_Kunkle.

By Sharon Gillenwater

Pity the poor chief information security officer (CISO). Once engaged in a role buried many layers down in an organization, the person in this position is  now a business leader, CSO from IDG wrote recently.

According to Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv, “The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology.” It’s a high-pressure job and, on top of that, they’re dealing with “vendor overload.”

A Glut of Vendors

CSO from IDG noted there are more than a thousand companies pitching security tools and solutions. A 2015 report by CB Insights found that, over the past five years, $7.3 billion was invested into 1,208 private cybersecurity startups. Yikes! Who has the time to evaluate each offering – and still do their job?

As a vendor for enterprises in any industry, the last thing you want is for your team to aggravate potential customers like these CISOs with irrelevant information. The customer is hand wringing over problem X, but your folks are eager to download product details that address problem Y – or, even worse, rat-a-tat-tat about all your products, hoping to score with something.

Why Customers Are Overwhelmed

The customer, who is likely being pitched by scads of other vendors besides you, is justifiably irritated on any number of levels. The problem isn’t being solved. It’s a selling exercise – not an effort to solve problems. And, of course, a waste of their limited time.

In a recent article in Channel Partners, CenturyLink chief security officer David Mahon said that a lot of people are being pitched “gold-plated security tools” to solve a range of problems –  some more pressing than others. He noted that, with so many vendors, enterprise customers are confused and he likens the situation to a construction project with too many subcontractors in the mix. “Something goes wrong, you have the plumber blaming the electrician, the electrician blaming the framer,” he said. “We need a consolidation, for a number of reasons.”

In the face of the ever-changing technology landscape, vendors overwhelm customers with irrelevant information when what is called for is precise targeting – especially if you are pitching to a busy executive.

Sure, the temptation is to tell them about everything in the hope of hitting on something they need. But a smarter approach is to do your homework and find out what the customer is focused on and then connect the dots between their needs and your products and services.

Five Tips to Stand Out from Your Competitors

With that in mind, here are five tips for targeting your pitch and cutting through the vendor “noise:”

• Do your research: The basics are key. Who are you going to be talking to? What are they focused on? What are the company’s goals and priorities, their setbacks and strategies, and their competitive position? What threats are they facing?

• Address market realities: You not only need to know their competition, you need to have a firm grasp of yours and how you are different. Your customer is facing a landscape in which the vendors and products – and the very technology itself – are constantly changing. Focus less on this “noise” and more on how your product or service alone can help them meet their business goals.

• Listen: If you go into a meeting anxious to download information, you’re going in to sell. But no one wants to be sold to. Instead, ask intelligent questions that reflect your knowledge of the customer’s business. Listen carefully to their answers and make real and clear connections between your offerings and their needs.

• Start with the basics: Instead of trying to be all things to the company, try to focus on their biggest priorities first. This will help you build credibility and earn the right to expand the business relationship.

• Be a collaborator and an advisor: Help your customer figure out what’s coming down the road by providing a steady drip of relevant, useful nuggets of information – anything that will help them plan for the future. Instead of wasting their time, you become a go-to advisor.

As technologies evolve and vendors grow in numbers by leaps and bounds, meeting customers where they live becomes essential. Instead of being the bore who annoys CXOs with too much that addresses too little, do your research and tap into their concerns and needs with just enough of the right details to pique their interest.

Sharon Gillenwater is the founder and editor-in-chief of Boardroom Insiders, which maintains an extensive database of the most in-depth executive profiles on the market, from Fortune 500 companies to independent non-profits, to help sales and marketing professionals build deeper relationships and close more deals with clients. Gillenwater is a long-time marketing consultant with expertise in marketing strategy, account-based marketing, and CXO engagement programs.

By Byron Matthews

Talent is one aspect of your sales and service organization that cannot be developed. I know that goes against everything we’ve ever been told, so let me explain.

Yes, of course, sales training and development are vital to any sales organization. In fact, organizations that have a robust sales enablement function – which includes a strong commitment to training and development – are 10.2 percent more likely to reach their revenue targets than all other organizations, according to research by CSO Insights. Just think about the year-over-year impact that can have on a business.

But talent is different. It is a part of any person that cannot be explained or accounted for by training or experience. Talent is made of recurring patterns of thought, feeling and behavior, and it’s something you have to act on to activate.

Here’s an example: Courage. This admirable quality can be considered a talent – either you have it or you don’t. And, if you have courage, it doesn’t do any good to you or anyone else unless you use it. If you don’t use it, you may as well not even have it.

We all have a series of traits that can be considered talents, and each person’s talents are unique. These traits – or talents – lead to performance.

The winning formula for any sales organization is simple:

TALENT + developable SKILLS x the CULTURE you work in = PERFORMANCE

So, if you’re already committed to developing the skills of your sales team and creating an environment in which people can thrive, you just have to find the right talent and you will be on your way to performance.

Here are three tips to ensure you are hiring the right talent the first time:

1. Learn everything you can about your high performers and uncover the reasons they are successful. You need to have a deep understanding of what top talent looks like in your organization and what drives the very best performers to produce results.
2. Once you discover what top talent looks like, hire people with similar traits and characteristics. Plot a blueprint of your existing successful performers, then simply replicate the blueprint to fill your sales organization with high performers.
3. Once you’ve identified and hired more top talent, invest in your people. Encourage them to develop their skills and hone the talents that make them special. Make it a mandatory part of your onboarding and development processes.

Remember, you can teach skills and you can create a winning culture, but you can’t develop talent, because it comes naturally. The trick is to discover what it looks like and find more of it. When sales leaders can do that, results will follow.

To learn more about what drives high performance and read about the four insights all sales leaders must know to be successful, download the latest white paper from Miller Heiman Group.

Byron Matthews leads Miller Heiman Group’s commitment to championing customer-management excellence throughout the customer lifecycle and across the enterprise. His dedication to placing the customer at the core of everything gives Miller Heiman Group its expanded, holistic approach for developing, managing, and sustaining long-term customer relationships. Before joining the organization, he served as senior vice president of sales at Aflac, where he led more than 30,000 sales professionals across multiple channels. He also spent more than five years at Mercer as global sales performance business practice leader, where he grew revenue more than 40 percent.

By Mark Donnolo

Last year, I found myself on the phone, listening as an irate woman spelled out the reasons she would never consider using a particular technology company again. “It’s pretty damn expensive for a product that doesn’t work,” she yelled.

Though technically I was on the receiving end of her anger, she wasn’t actually mad at me. I was talking to customers – and former customers – of our client, a large telecommunications provider, and trying to understand why their customers were leaving in droves. This helpful lady had agreed to participate in these “voice of the customer” interviews. At the end of hundreds of such interviews, the technology company agreed it needed to make some substantial changes to its customer service, service bundles, and overall value proposition. They needed to revamp their sales strategy.

Customer Feedback Plays a Vital Role

Customer feedback – or voice of the customer – is a critical piece of a sales organization’s strategy. Together with other essential information, including the macro market environment and competitor performance, the voice of the customer shapes the following:

• Products and services to promote or retract
• Customer segmentation and targeting
• Value proposition
• Approach to market
• Sales channels
• Sales roles and structure
• Sales process
• Sales deployment
• Incentive compensation and quotas
• Recruiting and retention
• Training and development
• Tools and technology

Sales leaders must understand the needs and expectations of their customers and the sales organization’s performance relative to those expectations. That insight allows leaders to see any gaps and determine where they can improve, as in the case of the helpful, irate woman informing them their value proposition was out of whack.

How Customer Feedback Informs Sales Leadership

Once sales leadership understands what’s going well and what’s broken with its products or services, they can create an informed sales strategy, which is essentially just an action plan to achieve its goals. The sales strategy will drive decisions concerning product and service focus, concentration on certain markets, value propositions, and the resulting approach to market.

First and foremost to the strategy, it’s critical to define the core and strategic products and services the business provides. In many companies, these are developed based on the needs of certain customer segments. Too often, however, products or services are internally driven and may not align naturally with customer needs, requiring a significant change in the offer or value proposition. Customer feedback helps keep products and service decisions in line with customer preferences.

The organization determines how it will organize and prioritize customers and prospects through its segmentation and targeting. The most effective segmentation and targeting considers characteristics such as customer industry, sales potential, profitability, common needs, and overall fit with the sales organization’s business. It’s important that segmentation and targeting flow into a plan that’s actionable by the sales organization. Simply defining the segment at a high level is not going to answer the sales rep’s question, “Who do I go see on Monday morning?”

Your Value Proposition

The value proposition goes beyond what the sales organization communicates to customers and articulates the organization’s understanding of the customer’s business and issues, what the organization can accomplish for the customer, and how the organization differentiates itself from the competition. The highest level value proposition is usually communicated at a company level. To be effective for sales, however, the organization must convert its value proposition to sales messages that can be communicated at the segment level, customer level, and deal level to adapt to changing situations and customer needs. And, it has to be honest. As the lady in my customer interview pointed out, a product that’s expensive and doesn’t work won’t live up to promises of high quality.

When developing the approach to market, sales leaders should incorporate insight about product, service, target segments, value propositions, and potential sales resources – especially when the information comes directly from the customer – into a plan that can be executed by the sales organization.

Mark Donnolo is managing partner of SalesGlobe and author of The Innovative Sale: Unleash Your Creativity for Better Customer Solutions and Extraordinary Results and What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation.

By Julie Thomas

Some questions I hear constantly from clients are: “How do our sales reps gain access to the executives they need to call on?” and “How do they prepare for success when they get there?”

The reality is that executives want to talk to other business people. If your reps want to sell higher, they  must understand and speak the language of business – the language of finance. Help them learn to think like an executive and develop business acumen by encouraging them to go through these three steps:

Step 1: Investigate a buyer’s company, industry, finances, and people. Do a Google search and you’ll see how easy it is to get stuck in “analysis paralysis.” Give your team the tools to rapidly sift through mounds of information to uncover salient, relative nuggets that can be used in a communications strategy. What’s currently going on in the buyer’s business? Where’s the industry headed? What do the business financials tell you? Who are the key people on the purchase decision?

Remind your reps that, when researching, they need to avoid going down rabbit holes. Instead, they should search the most reliable publications; get information about the prospect’s company, industry, financials, and people; and notice the most recent changes in the executive’s business.

Step 2: Predict the most likely business issues and problems. Based on the information they discover, sales reps need to be able to quickly spot business issues and problems and assess the general health of a business. Is the business growing? Shrinking? Facing new opportunities? Within that context, the sales rep needs to connect your solution to what’s going on in the executive’s business.

To sell higher, your sales reps need to know enough about relevant business issues to be conversant, intelligent, and credible when talking with an executive. Encourage your team members to make educated guesses about important business issues and confirm them with the executive throughout the sales meeting.

Step 3: Prepare to gain access and plan for the upcoming business conversation. According to SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of sales leaders say their top challenge is that reps spend too much time not calling. Take a good hard look at what the individuals on your sales team are doing in lieu of making sales calls. Are they procrastinating because they lack confidence in gaining access to executives? Are they failing to prepare properly for the sales call? If they get in to see the right people, are they wasting precious meeting time focusing on the technical aspects of your products and services?

The highest performing reps are those who have more meetings, which results in more opportunities. But first, a sales rep must gain access. Give your team methods to get past gatekeepers with messages that are so compelling executives want to meet. Listen to their introductions and gauge whether they can immediately establish credibility.

Landing an important sales meeting with an executive who holds the power and authority to make the purchase is not about luck. It’s about knowing how to turn information into insight. It’s about developing stories and communications campaigns to gain access. And it’s about engaging executives through business conversations. All it takes is business acumen and effectively investigating, predicting, and preparing for the sales meeting.

To address this critical need, ValueSelling Associates created a blended learning program, Executive Speak™, which gives a basic primer on business and financial acumen, guidance on where and how to hone in on relevant facts about your buyers, and proven tactics to gain access to decision makers.

Streamlining the research process is so important that, as part of Executive Speak™, we developed the 360° Profile Builder™ – a tool that leads sales reps through answering 16 targeted questions about their buyer. The answers are then mapped to a ValuePrompter®, a tool that guides sales reps through a conversational questioning process. Our Executive Speak™ program develops business acumen, giving your sales reps the confidence and competence to sell higher, create more opportunities, and generate more revenue.

Julie Thomas, president and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, is a business consultant, coach, facilitator, speaker, and author of ValueSelling: Driving Up Sales One Conversation at a Time. She has led ValueSelling Associates to become an award-winning, competency- and process-based training provider that measurably improves sales performance in B2B sales organizations around the world. Visit valueselling.com.