Selling Power

By Gerhard Gschwandtner

What does the future hold for B2B sellers and marketers? In this Q&A, Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of Selling Power magazine, and Tiffani Bova, global, customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, discuss how technology is affecting sales and marketing organizations.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (GG): What is the biggest challenge for sales teams today?

Tiffani Bova (Bova): A sales team’s success today depends on the investment a company is willing to make in individual customer relationships. Companies need to provide salespeople with valuable data points that enable more intelligent outreach and facilitate connections with prospects at the right time and with the right content.

That means sales representatives need immediate access to rich data and artificial intelligence (AI). The most frustrating aspect of the selling process is technological limitations – and that’s preventable. Sales and marketing leaders need to be laser focused on ensuring that speed and access to data never present a roadblock.

Fortunately, as machine learning and natural language processing become more integral to CRM, sales representatives are offered more opportunities to leverage these tools for selling power. The growth of your team is based on its selling know-how and the technology it uses to assist them in identifying buying habits and surfacing customer preferences. Teams need to  access, consume, analyze, and update customer information from any place at any time; this can mean the difference between closing a deal and losing it.

GG: What does the future of sales look like from Salesforce’s perspective and how will sales strategies evolve?

Bova: At Dreamforce, we announced Salesforce Einstein, a layer of AI across the Salesforce platform that delivers intelligence to our sales, service, marketing platforms, and more.

With Einstein, companies of all sizes can drive more intelligent conversations with customers thanks to features such as Predictive Lead Scoring (helping sales reps stay focused on their most promising leads) and Opportunity Insights (providing reps with alerts when a deal is trending). The future of sales is evolving into a personalized experience for the customer. And it’s lending itself to faster processes for sales teams as each bit of data gleaned from a customer interaction helps Einstein become smarter.

GG: How will the implementation of AI change the selling landscape and how will it enhance the role of salespeople?

Bova: It would be impressive if every sales representative had a clairvoyant gift that permitted him or her to identify customer and prospects’ interests with perfect accuracy. While we’re not quite there yet, AI is showing remarkable promise. Sales teams can now look at a prospect and predict deal closure probability given geography, seniority level, and other key factors. Using analytics and intelligence has created a better selling process that translates all the way down the line to a seamless customer experience and, ultimately, higher customer retention.

As AI becomes more widely adopted, sales teams will become even smarter and better informed – spending more time targeting prospects with the highest selling potential.

GG: As we move from Sales 2.0 to Sales 3.0 and new technologies become more prevalent, how do you encourage buy-in from the entire team?

Bova: Despite the promise of AI, as with many new technologies, sales leadership may be faced with initial reluctance from their teams. This reluctance will quickly give way to acceptance as salespeople understand how AI helps them do their jobs better and provides more time to focus on establishing improved relationships with prospects.

Sales leaders are under constant pressure to reach monthly sales numbers and keep the company aligned on the end goal – increasing revenue. The process starts at the top. Sales leaders should set an example for the company by embracing new technologies to promote the shift to Sales 3.0. Training is an obvious, yet critical, aspect of gaining internal traction, and wide adoption starts with sales reps developing an understanding of the problem before they move to solve it. Additionally, designating a sales rep on your team as the point person for a new tool will ensure challenging questions and obstacles are quickly and efficiently resolved on the ground level. Plan for the future of your sales operations by strategically  planning for an implementation strategy and understanding the short-term and long-term outlook of technology in your company.

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, where she is focused on enhancing the overall customer experience. Prior to Salesforce, she spent 10 years at Gartner as a vice president, distinguished analyst and research fellow, covering sales transformation and indirect channel innovation.

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the Founder and CEO of Selling Power and the publisher of Selling Power magazine. He is the regular host of the Sales 2.0 Conference. Follow him on Twitter @gerhard20.

By Julie Thomas

One of the challenges managers wrestle with is how to drive higher performance consistently throughout their sales organization. How do you successfully coach your team to stay on top of its game when, the reality is, coaching takes a great deal of time?

More importantly, why spend the time to coach? The answer to that is simple: because it works. Working with thousands of sales managers and sales leaders over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the measurable difference good coaching makes. According to Brainshark, companies that support coaching development improve sales objectives by as much as 19 percent.

If you had to drive sales results all by yourself, you’d run out of steam, quickly. You can’t play every position in the field for every game. Instead, you’ve been given the players – and sales coaching is the best mechanism to get your team up and running and scale the organization.

The topic of coaching is wide and deep. So, for now, here are three quick and easy tips to immediately improve your coaching approach.

1. Focus on teaching. Managing is about delivering results. Coaching is about developing people. When you’re a sales manager, you’ve got to do both. To become a better coach, focus on teaching and giving instruction so your team members can further their skill set.

   If you expect it, you’ve got to inspect it. All the data and dashboards in the world won’t replace what you see and hear firsthand. You can’t coach a team if you don’t know what your people are doing in the game. So, observe them in the field and on the sales floor.

   If you inspect it, you’ve got to be able to role model all the skills you’re asking your reps to employ – day in and day out.

2. Give ongoing feedback. In managing, we typically recognize only the results. In coaching, we recognize what happens to get to the results.

   Recognize the small wins that will lead to the big wins. Take note of the effort and a rep’s ability to be uncomfortable, as well as the results.

   The feedback needs to be instant, truthful, and specific. Discuss the impact of the behavior rather than just the results. Give two times as many positive comments for every negative constructive comment.

   Think of this feedback as a continual, two-way conversation rather than just quarterly or during annual review.

3. Go for excellence. Great coaches want the team to be the best it can. They know how to tap into what motivates each team member and get them to do their personal best. This philosophy of rigor and positive attitude is what fuels their coaching.

   Be clear in your communications. It’s not about dominating the conversation; it’s about asking your reps good questions and listening to their responses. How did it go? What worked? What is your action plan?

   A great coach is also introspective. What are you doing to improve your coaching? Think about the uniqueness of your people. How’s your coaching relationship with each of them? What’s your coaching process? Take action and challenge yourself to be better.

To become a better coach, it doesn’t matter where you start. It only matters that you start.

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.

By Jim Szafranski

On most sales teams there are top performers and those who see only moderate success, but three standout strategies can help turn everyone into an A player.

Implementing these sales management practices can seem intimidating – especially when you’re trying to deliver results – but you can accomplish a little at a time, in pockets of your team, to produce the step-by-step improvements we all seek when we are trying to deliver sustainable results.

1. Master Remote Collaboration

Collaboration in the context of a sales team simply means focusing on being your prospect’s ally and partner rather than treating them as a short-term goal for your benefit. Anyone can be told directly what they need and how to get it, but, by working together and using dialogue to come to these conclusions, a salesperson is able to build trust and rapport that is central to identifying a winning solution. This is becoming especially important as prospects do more research – often developing opinions about you, your company, and your product even before the first meeting takes place.

Since the majority of today’s software selling happens over the phone, taking extra care to ensure collaboration feels personal is important. At my previous company, Fiberlink, I encouraged my team to carry one simple objective into every meeting: learn about your customer. If you go into a call hoping to learn about your prospect rather than pitch them, it won’t matter that you can’t see each other – the organic conversations that come out of that can build a profitable foundation.

2. Find the Plus 1

By the second time your sales reps interact with a prospect, they should have a customized plan for how they’re going to help. After analyzing the top performers at Fiberlink, I noticed they consistently identified three product features that influenced a prospect to move forward with our solution. While two of these primary issues were relatively universal and easy for a sales rep to execute, it was the third one – the thing that completed the solution and often was something the prospect couldn’t simply articulate upfront – that resulted in a sale.

This wildcard feature that closed the deal? It differs from prospect to prospect. Identifying it through education, discovery, and communicating its necessity became our focus, and we called it our “2 + 1” sales process. To aid our sales reps and simplify scaling, we packaged this education and discovery process in a single graphic of a solution map, which then acted as a conversational tool to help the entire team excel.  

By creating a process around this 2 + 1 strategy and sharing it with the rest of the department, Fiberlink was able to go from single-digit to double-digit lead-to-close rates across all sales executives before we were ultimately acquired by IBM. That remote sales success and process, I believe, was core information IBM wanted to learn from Fiberlink.

3. Activate Customer-led Conversations

Neither truly collaborating with prospects nor finding the Plus 1 would be possible if sales reps were forced to stick to a script. More and more companies today are discovering what our sales management team  learned at Fiberlink – that pitches are at their best and most effective when there’s room for exploration and discovery based on the prospect’s needs and pace, not the rep’s.

When you ditch the script and let the prospect lead the conversation, it turns finding the solution into a puzzle. Solving it together is not only the fun part, but an approach that makes getting to the sale an authentic and smooth experience.

Encourage your sales team to let the prospect take the reins. If they’re nervous about leaving their memorized lines behind, take the time to coach them in one-on-one sessions. Use a solution map or live product demo as your conversation script. There’s no shortcut around ditching the script; learning how to listen and talk with, not at, prospects is and will continue to remain crucial for sales success.

A conversational approach to content is highly beneficial at all points in the sales process. Trust is built, dialogue is genuine, and participants are able to arrive at a solution quickly and naturally. The ability to get to the crux of a customer’s interests each and every time you communicate with them creates a consistently relevant and engaging experience. And those are the types of experiences that lead to both purchases and consistently happy customers.

At my current company, Prezi, our sales management team calls this approach “conversational presenting.” We’re learning that it can benefit any department, but the sales- and marketing-specific rewards are extraordinary. Our new platform, Prezi Business, was built around this approach, and aims to make delivering the right information and the right amount of information in a conversational manner as easy as it should be.

Jim is in charge of overall customer and business operations at Prezi. Since earning his engineering and management degrees from MIT and Stanford, he’s built his career around helping users and communities adopt new Internet and mobile technologies. He’s passionate about making new technology fun by creating innovative user experiences and business models. Prior to Prezi, he was SVP of product management, customer acquisition, and success at Fiberlink (acquired by IBM) where he helped build the company’s industry-leading mobile enterprise cloud platform. When he’s not pursuing Prezi’s mission to help millions of people communicate better, you’re likely to find him in his backyard with his children and his home-improvement list.

By Jonathan Whistman

I think it’s a universal truth: Nobody likes a micro-manager. Not even the one doing the “managing” likes to be called a micro-manager. You’ll typically hear the term used derisively to describe a manager who gets so involved in the little details that it gets in the way of people actually doing their jobs.  

In sales management you might find the sales manager obsessing over the CRM data; constantly monitoring the number of calls, meetings, and emails; or incessantly phoning the salesperson to get an update on what’s happening in the field (even when it’s in the CRM.) Sales managers knows that, ultimately, they are responsible for the sales results – and this pressure causes them to want to constantly check the pulse of what is going on with the team. Sometimes this creates the possibility of micro-managing.

How can you get peak sales performance without micro-managing? Here are a few power tips.

1. Automate as Much as Possible

Jarrod McCarrol, the CEO of Weber Slicers Inc., has found that creating a calling schedule inside his team’s sales CRM that tracks who and when the team member should be calling on their customers and prospects allows the team to stay in a good cadence of calling – and he doesn’t need to be the one to follow up and ask about this important activity. He calls it the “easy button.”

Each day, the team’s dashboard keeps the team focused. The CRM also is set to automatically remind the team members when they don’t enter the data needed in the CRM or when they are falling behind. Since these reminders are automated and come from the system, the team doesn’t attach the label of “micro-managing” to the manager. The result, however, is the same: the team gets the job done correctly.

Think through all the items that can simply be automated – that you might normally handle personally – without losing quality and you’ll see great results. For instance, you might use a service like Mindmarker.com to deliver short follow-ups on training to make sure the team is using new information they’ve learned. Or you might use the CRM data to visually post a dashboard somewhere to remind the team to focus on key sales indicators.  

2. Run Sales Meetings Consistently

Another form of automation is simply structuring how you start sales meetings – starting them in a way that creates some group peer pressure and keeps the focus on the right selling behaviors. Eric Levy, vice president of sales at Weather Metrics, found that having a structured check-in to start the meeting was effective. When his team huddled up for a sales meeting, each salesperson would check in without prompting by using a script such as: “My sales quota is X dollars and, this week, I sold X – bringing my total to X. That’s ahead/behind. I have X meetings scheduled this week and my focus is _____. I would like help with _______. I’d like to give kudos to so-and-so for X.”

Imagine if you had just joined this team and heard each salesperson do this scripted check-in. As it came around to you, what would you be thinking? For sure, you’d know right away that, on this team, knowing your sales number is important. Also, if you were struggling or had a tough week, you’d likely work even harder the following week to get your number up closer to the rest of your teammates. This is a powerful method of keeping the group’s focus. It has the added benefit of becoming a habit and nobody will feel the manager is micro-managing when it happens.

3. Stick to the Routine

Finally, use routine activities as much as possible. For instance, if you have role-play sessions as a matter of habit rather than just when you think someone is struggling, then the team will simply accept it as the way things are done. Nobody gets labeled a micro-manager.

The key to peak sales performance without micro-managing is simply to be creative in the way you organize, interact with, and coach your team. Build as much routine and automation into the system as possible and be consistent. I call that “Sacred Rhythms.” Sacred Rhythms just become accepted as “the way things are around here” and have a powerful impact on individual and team sales performance. Use that fact to your advantage when leading your team.

Jonathan Whistman is author of The Sales Boss: The Real Secret to Hiring Training and Managing a Sales Team. He is a senior partner at Elevate Human Potential, a sales consulting agency.