Learning and Development Leaders: Welcome to Your New Job in Sales Sales?  Learning and development professionals… in Sales?  Perhaps frightening to some, but there’s some truth to it. While it’s tempting to defer to the hyperbole that "we’re all in sales," meaning that we all represent our companies and are responsible for growing them, that’s not what I mean.  I’m also not just referring to those in sales training roles. I’m talking about the "Dan Pink" version of "we’re all in sales," from his book "To Sell is Human," meaning, that we’re constantly selling ideas and influencing, persuading, and convincing others (especially our colleagues and organizational leaders), to do what we think is best. (We diverge from Pink’s opinion somewhat, because unless you’re a sales professional with a quota, a pipeline, and likely a good portion of your income at risk based on your performance, it is NOT the same, but Pink is certainly correct that many of the dialogue, communication, and influence skills are the same.) That said, I don’t need to tell you that improving organizational results isn’t easy.  I’m sure you’re also painfully aware that training alone rarely gets that job done.  For years now, thought leaders, performance advocates, and organizations like ASTD and ISPI have been guiding our profession away from a "butts in seats" and "smile sheet" mentality, toward a true human performance improvement orientation.  And I think it’s fair to note that since not everyone has taken that journey with us, yet, that some selling and influence skills could be valuable. A Gap Analysis… on Us If we conducted a Force Field Analysis on this transition from training to performance, I believe we would find two primary restraining forces, holding us back. A remaining gap of awareness and skills among those in our profession, to execute true performance interventions. The difficult job of convincing organizational leaders to do the right thing, or the actions that we know will produce the best results… front-end or gap analysis, clear problem-definition and problem-solving, solution analysis and selection, and initiative execution with change leadership and management.  "Training" people is so much easier. We could debate why the first is still an issue and perhaps that’s fodder for a future post. But today, let’s focus on the second. Are you selling your ideas as effectively as possible? Are you effectively influencing your organization leaders and peers? Or do you need to improve your skills? In the remainder of this series, I’ll offer some things to consider, from a few of our sales training programs, that will help you in selling your ideas. Are You a Training Order-taker or a Training Sales Pro? Let’s start with considering Consultative Selling Skills. The Framework:  The concepts of opening a call or meeting, questioning to understand needs, presenting solutions that will meet the needs, and gaining agreement on next steps is alive and well. People will often have concerns or objections to our ideas, and you will have more success if you can identify potential obstacles, objections or concerns, avoid them if possible, or at least have a plan to address and resolve concerns, if you can’t avoid them. These concepts apply whether you are selling enterprise software, insurance, or ideas. Dialogue and Diagnosis:  Non-sales pros often think selling occurs during the presentation of solutions. While there is some truth in that, because there is an element of influence or persuasion involved in selling (choose MY solution, rather than THAT one), the real influence begins with a deeper understanding of the situation (and with the other person’s realization that you really want to understand and help them). The situation includes background information, challenges faced, possible opportunities, the potential impacts of not taking action or maintaining the status quo, risks of taking the wrong action, or possible gains from taking the right action. These result in the core needs and wants or the desired outcomes.  Usually there is a deeper need, and you can get to it by using The Five Whys or having an authentic dialogue about why addressing an issue in really important. Real differentiation often occurs in understanding the situation better than anyone else (especially root causes), because this leads to better solutions that will most effectively address the issue.  So, you achieve real differentiation through real understanding, which you can only reach through authentic and transparent dialogue, investigation and analysis. Don’t Just React - Test Reality:  Think about the number of times you’ve been asked by well-meaning internal clients to create training, when additional training really isn’t the solution to the problem. It’s an interesting conundrum in our profession that people come to us with a solution in mind and say "do this" or "we have a training issue."  If you want to address the real issues, rather than spin wheels, you need to get people to step back with you and have a dialogue and investigate and define the real problem, to determine the best solution. Build Dialogue Muscle:  In additional to the standard selling framework above, this also involves the finesse of the Six Critical Skills.  These communication skills support your ability to connect with others and lead an effective dialogue. -       Positioning:  Positioning is presenting information persuasively throughout the sales call.  Positioning helps to differentiate products and services by using words to shape a client’s perceptions and encouraging clients to listen and remember. -       Listening:  Listening is the ability to concentrate on meaning.  There are three levels of listening: zoned out (not involved at all), efficient (engaged but thinking about other things), and effective (fully engaged).  Listening at the highest level fosters effective client dialogue. -       Questioning:  Salespeople who really understand their client needs have a competitive edge.  How well they question determines how strong the competitive edge is.  When questions are well structured they are powerful. Questions give the data to position products and services to meet the client’s needs.  When good questions are asked, salespeople demonstrate commitment to meeting the client’s needs. Salespeople who can ask questions in a way that encourages a client to open up have a competitive edge.  Knowing how to get clients to talk about their needs in-depth is critical in sales.  Prefacing is a skill that can help you do that. -       Relating:  Relating is the manner in which sales professionals interact with a client to make personal and business connections.  Although most salespeople feel that they are already strong at relating, it is one of the toughest skills to truly master, and strong relating skills can help differentiate someone from competitors. -       Presence:  Strong presence is essential because it can give credibility to or undermine any message a sales person wants to convey.  In many ways, it may be the most important skill because if there is a disconnect between what the sales person’s presence conveys and what he or she says, credibility is lost. -       Checking:  Checking is asking open-ended questions to elicit feedback from the client on what the sales person has just said.  By checking for client agreement and understanding key times, sales professionals can keep the dialogue on track and interactive. Try It, You’ll Like It! We’ll continue this post in the near future, when we’ll share more concepts from our training programs (in this multiple part series, we’ll cover Consultative Negotiations, Trusted Advisor, and Selling with Insights®), which all learning and development leaders can use to further develop your skills to influence others and sell your ideas. Until then, evaluate yourself realistically against the concepts shared here, to see if something might help.  I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts either now or in the future - especially whether any of the ideas helped improve your influence skills.   The post Learning and Development Leaders: Welcome to Your New Job in Sales - Part 1 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Landing New Logos: Small Improvements to Make a Big Difference in 2014 How many new logo accounts do you need to land in 2014, how much will you to invest to achieve your objectives, and what can you do to get more bang for your buck? Landing new logo accounts is essential to the health of any business. As hard as we try to maximize the potential of existing accounts, there will be some natural attrition over time as personnel and priorities change. New logos help build your base of accounts to expand, and landing new logos is an indicator of your relevance in the market and your ability to compete. However, landing new logos is expensive, slow and time consuming. It typically cost three to five times more to land a new logo than to grow an existing account, and the sales cycle for a new logo is typically several months. This eats into profitability and productivity. New logo acquisition is difficult and uncomfortable, and without focus and accountability, many sales reps push new business development to the bottom of their priority list. You need a game plan for new logo acquisition to get the right level of focus, activity and accountability in your organization. Need some help thinking this through? Start by downloading our New Logo Revenue Planner, and follow the simple instructions to model the number of new logos you need and the investment required to land them. The planner also helps you set goals, model variables, and understand the dynamics that impact new logo acquisition. Below, I offer some advice for improving the variables that impact new logo acquisition most significantly. Expected Contribution from Existing Accounts Finding the right mix of revenue from new vs. existing accounts is an important first step in developing your plan. Start by looking back historically at how much of your revenue comes from new vs. existing accounts. Then, ask yourself if you need that mix to change. As I mentioned earlier, selling into new accounts is typically more expensive and slower than selling into existing accounts, so your mix will impact the cost of sales and profitability. However, maybe you’ve fully penetrated your account base and growth requires getting more accounts. Or, maybe you have too much business concentrated in too few accounts, and the risk of losing an account could put your entire business in jeopardy. The optimal mix is really dependent on your specific strategy, but your decision should be informed by what is realistic and achievable given where you are and where you need to go. Average New Logo Deal Size Increasing the average deal size for a new logo sale will reduce the number of new logos you need to acquire and the investment required to achieve your new logo revenue goals. However, increasing the average deal size comes with its risks, as you are asking someone who doesn’t know you or maybe even trust you to make a larger commitment to you. This can be done through a few ways, such as premium pricing, upselling, bundling, and offering incentives for longer-term commitments. Trying to increase the average deal size might also increase the perception with your customer that you’re expensive. You don’t want them to succumb to "sticker shock" and get frightened off. You need to understand what’s important to your customer and offer them something of value that helps them achieve their objectives. You also need to understand what they expect to pay and just how much they’re willing to invest to achieve their objectives. They may have some real budgetary constraints, and you don’t want to price yourself out of the market. New Logo Opportunity Close Rate Close rates, especially in the context of new logos, are significantly impacted by your ability to qualify the opportunity and your pursuit strategy and process. However, if you can win a greater percentage of new logo opportunities, in theory, you will need fewer new logo opportunities to make your number. Pursuing business in a new account can be like shooting in the dark. When you’re on the outside looking in, there’s so much that you don’t know and can’t see. You don’t really know the nuances of their business, you don’t know the buying influences or the political dynamics, and you may not know the competition. Many sales reps get "happy ears" and spend too much time, energy, and resources on a deal that has a low chance of closing. You need to recognize the signals that indicate if the deal is a good fit for you and lose fast if it’s not. There’s no shame in losing if the deal isn’t the right fit for you to realistically win. Improving the close rate is best achieved by learning what has worked well for you in the past for similar opportunities and having the discipline to replicate the process. When you have a process, you can make better investment decisions, and you can more effectively coach to the process. New Logo Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate Here’s where sales and marketing really need to be on the same page. There is value in building brand, and marketers often build brand through campaigns that have broad appeal and drive as many responders to a campaign as possible. Publish a great report and everyone will want to download it — more responders means that a campaign was successful, right? Well, not necessarily. You can run a great awareness-building campaign that doesn’t drive a nickel’s worth of opportunity. Marketers need to create content and offers that are an indicator of a prospect’s willingness or need to buy what you sell. It’s the difference between Top of the Funnel (TOFU) content and offers and Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) content and offers. TOFU is great for awareness and brand building, and MOFU is great to separate the lookers from the buyers. A TOFU offer might be an awesome research study with some tips and tricks to improve individual performance. A MOFU offer might be a buyer’s guide that someone wouldn’t want unless they are really serious about buying. MOFU offers will drive a much higher lead-to-opportunity conversion rate than TOFU offers. If a MOFU offer meets a pre-determined "Ideal Customer Profile" and is acted on quickly, it will drive a better lead-to-opportunity conversion rate. Research by MIT indicates that lead follow-up diminishes significantly after two hours. Sales and marketing need a service-level agreement that specifies the time frame that a TOFU offer that meets the ICP criteria will be followed up by sales. In addition to timeliness, you need to consider quality and effort. Better preparation and more rigor will lead to better conversions. Conversion rates should be tracked for every sales rep. The quality of the conversation your sales rep has with a prospect matters and will make an impact. Cost Per New Logo Lead This really falls under the responsibility of marketers, especially if you invest in driving traffic to your website through search engine optimization and paid search programs, such as Google AdWords. Better targeting and messaging to prospects that meet your ideal customer profile will result in fewer "wasted" leads. Better calls to action, landing pages, and web forms will improve the conversion of traffic to leads. All of this drives down costs and drives up efficiency and productivity. There has been an explosion in the number of channels available for marketers to generate leads and opportunities. Depending on your target market, some of these channels might be better options than your current marketing mix. It is difficult to know for sure until you test it. One caveat here: it is very important to evaluate channels for quality as well as quantity. You can drive down cost per lead, but you can also drive down quality in the process. This will surface as a higher cost per opportunity. It is also very helpful to track cost per new logo opportunity as a check against cost per lead. Keep this in mind as you test and evaluate these different investment options. Download our free New Logo Revenue Planner As you can see, there are many factors to consider. All this said, get started by downloading our free New Logo Revenue Planner, and follow the simple instructions to model the number of new logos you need and the investment required to land them. You will see that making even small improvements across a few of these variables can make a big difference.   The post Landing New Logos: Small Improvements to Make a Big Difference in 2014 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Liar Liar - Take care when you hire! Many of our clients are in the final stages of wrapping-up their strategic planning for 2014 and setting their sights on execution. For most organizations, hitting growth targets will require hiring more sales people and replacing underperformers with those with the potential to hit the number. Hiring sales reps is time consuming and risky. According to Manpower’s Talent Shortage Survey, Sales Reps are the second hardest jobs to fill. This difficultly, and a sense of urgency to cover an open territory, might tempt your hiring managers to work around your process to expedite hiring. However, research published last year from Accu-Screen, Inc., ADP, and The Society of Human Resource Managers reveals some shocking statistics: 53% of resumes and job applications that contain falsifications; 46 % of employment, education and/or credential reference checks conducted revealed discrepancies between what the applicant provided and what the source reported; 78% of resumes are misleading 21% of resumes state fraudulent degrees 29% of resumes show altered employment dates 40% of applications have inflated salary claims 33% of resumes have inaccurate job descriptions Consulting firm Marquet International compiled this list of the top 10 lies. Stretching dates of employment. Inflating past accomplishments and skills. Enhancing titles and responsibilities. Exaggerating education and fabricating degrees. Unexplained gaps and periods of "self-employment." Omitting past employment. Faking credentials. Falsifying reasons for leaving prior employment. Providing fraudulent references. Misrepresenting a military record. How to make better hiring decisions Hiring is an important process, and with so much riding on your need and ability to make good hires, it is a process that should be optimized, trained to and followed. Your process should start by clarifying the different sales jobs you need to fill, and updating job descriptions and competencies to reflect the objectives you need people in the role to achieve. The hiring process should specify how you will go about advertising the position; recruit, screen and interview candidates; make your conditional offer of employment; conduct pre-employment your due diligence such as background and reference checks, as well as any other checks such as drug testing references; and ultimately, onboard successful candidates. Establishing a fair hiring process and following process should also protect you from hiring-related lawsuits. We encourage the use of valid, reliable and predictive pre-hire assessments to support your screening and decision making process. When used correctly, these assessments can reveal more and better information about a candidate than most hiring managers could uncover during the interview process. For example, pre-hire assessments can tell you the type of job a candidate is best suited and how they are best motivated.  This insight gives a hiring manager more focus and direction to dig deeper in an interview. For example, our TalentGauge™ assessment generates an interview guide to really help a hiring manager cover their bases. We can’t overstress the importance of using a reputable assessment that is both valid and reliable. Reliability determines how consistently a measurement of skill or knowledge yields similar results under varying conditions. If a measure has high reliability, it yields consistent results. Validity or face validity is defined as the degree to which the instrument measures what it’s supposed to measure. If an instrument is not reliable over time, it cannot be valid, as results can vary depending upon when it is administered. An instrument can be neither reliable nor valid, reliable and not valid or both reliable and valid. However, an instrument must be reliable in order to be valid. That’s a mouthful, but the bottom line is that creating your own assessment in SurveyMonkey or using an assessment, such as Meyers-Briggs, that cannot be validated for hiring can get you into a lot of trouble. There’s a very comprehensive guide to pre-hire assessments published by the US Department of Labor http://www.onetcenter.org/dl_files/empTestAsse.pdf. While a good hiring process and valid, reliable pre-hire assessments help make better hires, none of this happens without the involvement of people. While there is no set formula, the assessment results should be take into account with a candidate’s relevant experience and what you learn in the interview process. Interviewing is a skill that takes some training and a lot of practice to do well. CareerBuilder published a nice guide http://www.careerbuildercommunications.com/pdf/interviewing_ebook.pdf to give you an idea of what interview skills you need. A good hiring process with the right tools and skills will help you hire faster and with less risk. ——————————————————————————————————————   The post Liar Liar - Take care when you hire! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Learning by Doing: the Magic Behind the Richardson Experience Salespeople and managers who go through a Richardson program often comment that it is different from any other training that they have ever experienced.  We pride ourselves in being experts in adult learning, in addition to being technical experts in sales process and dialogue.  For participants, it is a transformational experience in their careers.  Together we roll up our sleeves, work incredibly hard, get broken down (a bit) and put back together, and leave with a very different mindset and skill set than when they entered. Two key aspects of our success are the degree to which the program materials are customized to our client’s business and the incredible skill and expertise of our facilitators.  During training, our facilitators help participants build on, develop, and polish their current selling skills and strategies.  Because adults most effectively learn skills "by doing," we have structured the seminar with a learning by doing methodology; therefore, the training is interactive. We use role play and a special coaching process, which we call redirect, to provide "on-the-spot" feedback to participants.  Our training philosophy is based on the premise that the participants are not blank slates.  Participants come to the seminar with various levels of knowledge and experience in communications and selling.  Our goals are to build on that base and help them reach their next level of sales excellence. Our seminars are highly interactive for maximum impact.  The learning process is influenced by the Socratic approach of questioning and building on what people think and know.  It also models the consultative approach, as our facilitators use the very skills they teaching, such as questioning and checking. Our facilitators guide the dialogue and build the concepts by leveraging what the participants contribute.  Facilitators get input from the group and frame the learning by teaching the frameworks, models, skills, and key learning points. The seminar gives participants an environment in which they can gain insight into their current sales and communication approach through practice and feedback from facilitators and their peers and learn new skills and strategies. Role Plays, Redirect, and Feedback Skills Role plays are one of the most important elements in the seminar because they provide participants with an opportunity to practice applying the frameworks and skills and receive feedback on how they apply the skills and strategies. All of our role plays are fully customized as we know a one size fits all approach to sales training will not drive true behavior change. It is through the role plays that participants are learning by doing, translating concepts into action, and beginning to change behavior.  Because sales training cannot be held during actual sales situations, and because real clients usually cannot and should not be brought into the training, we simulate the sales experience through role play in the seminar room.  This is very much like the thinking behind scrimmaging for football teams, which provides a real-life practice session with coaching. A role play is the acting out of a sales situation.  It provides the participants the opportunity to: Practice Receive coaching from leaders Get feedback from peers Learn by observing colleagues in their role plays Full sales call role plays are based on cases, which go from the Opening to the Close. Focus role plays are based on exercises and zero in on one part of the framework or a critical skill.  For example, a focus role play can be centered around resolving an objection.  The focus role plays are much shorter and give participants an opportunity to work on a skill that they feel is important to them.  Strategy sessions are not conducted before focus role plays. Kinds of Role Plays We typically use two kinds of role plays: In Fishbowl role plays, the role play is observed by the full group.  The Salesperson and the Client role play the situation in front of the group, and the facilitator redirects and coaches.  At the end of the role play, the Observers give feedback to the Salesperson.  When the Salesperson and Client role play in front of the room, everyone benefits from the coaching, but most importantly, redirect coaching given by the facilitator during the role play enriches the learning significantly.  This is a very powerful training methodology. In Peer role plays, the participants form teams of three and fill the following roles:  Salesperson, Client, and Observer coach.  All teams role play simultaneously.  After each role play, the participants rotate and switch roles so that each person plays the sales role. Cases and exercises are based on scenarios that have been fully customized to the client’s business and reflect their strategies, priorities, solutions, and issues. We also use drills ( customized as well).  Drills are a list of challenging issues which the facilitator presents to the group using a round robin process in order of seating. After each role play, our facilitators ask for volunteers to give feedback to the person in the Salesperson role based on notes they have taken on critique forms.  There is one critique form for the full sales cases, and there are special critique forms for each exercise. In the critique/feedback for the role play, to save time and to not overload the "Salesperson," we limit the feedback to about five participant observers, who will give feedback to the person in the role of the Salesperson by giving one strength and one area for improvement. All feedback is specific and based on an incident or particular example.  Our facilitators, as the coach, are the last observers to give feedback.  At the end of all feedback, the participant who played the role of Salesperson can comment on all the feedback he/she has gotten, i.e., what he/she agrees or disagrees with. Feedback is a "sacred" time, and we don’t permit participants to open up discussions while the role play participant is waiting for his/her feedback.  Each observer should simply give his/her own view without discussion or debate until after feedback is over.  Then, if there is a question, address it. Learning Points At the end of each role play feedback session or other activity, we summarize key learning/teaching points at the flip chart based on the teaching segments and other examples/issues from the role play itself.  We also address any elements from the framework or the critical skills relevant to the role play.  We wrap up each learning point by asking the question, "What can we take forward from this role play to increase our sales effectiveness?"  Our role is to check for and then summarize key learning points. Questioning as a Learning Technique As we ask questions, our goal is to stimulate discussion and thinking and then drive key learning points.  When we ask a question, we are not looking for the "right" answer, but we are doing three things: Getting participants to think so we can build on what they know Assessing the knowledge of the group Reinforcing, redirecting, introducing, or teaching the concepts of the program As we ask questions, often we will ask each question several times (two to three) to stimulate discussion.  If a participant’s response is truly on the mark, we reinforce it strongly; if participants all have bits and pieces of the answer, we tie it together; and if a participant is off the mark, we neutrally acknowledge.  Our role as facilitators is to use their input as the basis to build upon as we make key learning points. For example: Facilitator:  What do we mean by a Consultative approach to selling? Participant #1:  "Tailoring" what you say. Facilitator:  Great, tailoring what you say.  What else do you think of? Participant #2:  Understanding what the client needs. Facilitator:  Yes.  Being client-need focused. Facilitator:  Our experience shows that while it is very logical and common sense in sales to focus on needs, it is not common practice.  It can be challenging to focus on the client vs. the product in the heat of the sales moment.  (Then, the facilitator would transition to module on Sales Styles.) The facilitator’s role is not only to repeat what the group says but to shape the information and take it to the next level.  This Socratic method of teaching helps get buy-in, and it also fosters accelerated learning, lets us assess where the participants are, and helps us take participants to the next level.  A great teacher once said about reaching students:  "You go in their door and take them out yours."  That is the basis for interactive learning.     The post Learning by Doing: the Magic Behind the Richardson Experience appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Richardson Sales Excellence Review Nominated for Top Sales Blog Richardson is honored to announce that we have been nominated for two Top Sales World Awards… and we need your vote!  The annual Top Sales & Marketing Awards contest recognizes "the heroes" of the sales and marketing space; to laud those companies and individuals who have gone that extra mile; who have been unafraid to challenge paradigms; who have had the courage to pioneer, when others remained wedded to the status quo.  This year Richardson was recognized in the following categories.  We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a few seconds to vote for us by clicking on the links below. Top Sales and Marketing Blog - Richardson’s Sales Excellence Review - Click here to vote Top Sales and Marketing Thought Leader -  Linda Richardson - Click here to vote Complimentary Webinar - Gamification and Mobile Reinforcement: Making Sales Training Sticky  Richardson and Qstream are offering a complimentary webinar to  introduce our groundbreaking technology from Harvard Medical School that helps sales reps remember complex processes and facts. This technology  leverages mobile and social gaming to drive adoption and motivation, and extends learning from weeks to years while maximizing your return on investment. Join us on Tuesday, December 10, 2013 at 1:00 PM EST for the latest webinar in Richardson’s eCoffeebreak series: Gamification and Mobile Reinforcement: Making Sales Training Sticky. Richardson and SAVO Partner to help Maximize Sales Training Investment Richardson has formed a partnership with SAVO Group, the market leader in sales enablement. The two companies are developing a Richardson configured edition of Sales Process Pro, a CRM-enabled tool that will maximize sales training investment and deal quality with a focus on continuous reinforcement and coaching at every stage of the sales cycle. SAVO Sales Process Pro Richardson Edition gives companies an edge by systematically reinforcing Richardson’s methodology and training, enabling a seller and holding them accountable for verifiable outcomes at each stage of an opportunity. Through integration with CRM and robust analytics, Sales Process Pro Richardson Edition also provides sales leaders with better forecast accuracy and real-time visibility into seller behavior and deal quality.  To Learn more, please contact Jim Brodo at Jim.Brodo@richardson.com ——————————————————————————————————————- Register Today for our upcoming Webinar! The post Update from Richardson appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Leading with Questions or Insights In Sales Calls: What’s the Right Strategy? Leveraging insights in sales calls is a very popular strategy in this age of the empowered customer. Our clients often ask us when in the sales conversation their sellers should lead with insight versus lead with questions. The simple answer to this question is, "It depends." I’ll provide some further guidance in this post, but I suggest you start by downloading our Sales Insight Call Strategy Checklist and share it with your sales reps. If you are up-skilling your sales team to sell with insight, there are a few important points to remember. First, sharing insight is only one aspect of a sales conversation. Even if you have the most profound, mind-blowing insight, you will still need to prepare for the call, open the call, ask needs-related and solution-related questions, resolve objections, secure commitment, and then follow up. Insight sharing is an important skill, but it is not the only skill you will need for a successful call. Second, understand the risk of sharing insight without careful thought and planning. The phrase "show up and throw up" used to apply to product pitching but has taken on a new life as sales reps try to jam in meaningless, irrelevant, self-serving grabbers. Nobody wants to be "that guy" who shows up, blows through his numbers play, and then gets shut down because his insight is superficial or irrelevant to the buyer. Preparation must also take into account what to do or what to say when a buyer pushes back on your insight. Resistance to new ideas is normal, and your sales reps need to be skilled to stay composed and work with the buyer to resolve the resistance. Finally, keep in mind that your sales reps will typically be planning a single call and that not every call will result in a closed sale. You need to know where you are in your sales process and the buyer’s buying process. Then, you need to set reasonable objectives for your call based on where you are today and how far you think you can go, and you need a strategy for how you’re going to get from point A to point B. Insights and questions usually both play a role in achieving your call objectives. All this said … Lead with questions when: You don’t have a sufficient understanding of your buyer’s business, You require further understanding about their situation or attitude, or You seek their confirmation (checking) before moving forward in the conversation. This includes: Drilling deeper when the buyer has self-diagnosed a need Understanding the buyer’s current thinking or point of view on an issue Developing ideas together with the buyer Checking that an issue leading to an insight is relevant Gaining the buyer’s perspective on an important aspect of the sale Developing opportunities resulting from insight sharing Lead with insight when: You have a high level of familiarity with the buyer, You want to seed new ideas, or You want to influence his or her thinking. This includes: Triggering new ideas Shaping the buyer’s current thinking Differentiating yourself from your competition Creating a sense of urgency Building your credibility Piquing your buyer’s curiosity Disrupting your buyer’s current mindset Overcoming bias or misconception Jim Ninivaggi of Sirius Decisions sums it up well: "B2B selling still comes down to a series of conversations. Early in the sales process, your sales reps need to be provocative; in the middle, your reps need to build and prove differentiated value; and late in the process, they often have to elevate their conversation to the senior-most executive levels." Better prepared and more informed buyers means your people need new skills to bring more value to a customer conversation. Our complimentary Sales Insight Call Strategy Checklist will help them better understand when to lead with insight versus lead with questions and make the maximum impact on buying influences. —————————————————————————————— The post Leading with Questions or Insights In Sales Calls: What’s the Right Strategy? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Mind the Gap! Five Gaps That Impact Sales Effectiveness and How to Fix Them (Part 1 of 2) This post is based on the white paper "The Five Failure Points of Today’s Selling System" by the SAVO Group. There’s not just one big gap that impacts your sales effectiveness. In fact, there are several gaps (or chasms, depending on the severity) that get in the way of achieving peak sales performance: How a buyer buys and how your sellers sell (often the biggest gap) Your marketers’ outputs and your salesforce’s needs How your organization trains and how much your sales reps retain and practice what they learn Revenue forecasts and how your salesforce actually delivers Failing to close these gaps prevents salesforces from achieving their optimal success. The most forward-thinking organizations address this situation by establishing a sales enablement strategy — a dynamic and long‐term initiative that provides the thinking and the tools to engage sales reps, sway buyers, and inform marketers. It’s all about smarter selling that transforms sales execution into a repeatable, results‐oriented process that ultimately creates optimal alignment between your salesforce and your customers’ buying processes. A good place to start closing the gaps and embark on the path to smarter selling is to examine the critical components of the selling system that are most prone to failure. We’ll start by looking at the first two in this post and will save the rest for Part 2. 1. The Lead Failure: Nurtured leads poorly handed off create low conversion rates Most Leads Languish: How many of your marketing-generated leads actually become sales? According to MarketingSherpa, 79% of leads aren’t nurtured through the sales handoff. If that’s true, then consider this related statement: only one in five leads are developed properly when handed off. Savvy Buyers: Consumers are "self-educating" on their perceived needs, wants, and solutions before they ever talk to you. The ease with which anyone can spend a few minutes to research a problem and possible providers (Lack of) Time: Sellers are spending nearly 20% of their time researching and generating leads. The Fix: Making it faster and easier for your salesforce to act The top-line fix is to create (and sustain) better alignment between sales and marketing. They need to work together to develop campaigns, including target buyers, key messages, timing, processes, and follow-ups, in order to prevent a misfire. It never looks good when a great marketing campaign completely fizzles because sales was out of the loop or when a sales rep hears about a campaign for the first time from a prospect. Sales reps need to think like their buyers and consider how someone might research their problem or need, solution, and potential vendors. This not only ensures that reps can anticipate questions and concerns from buyers, but also helps to identify information and promotion gaps to be filled by marketing. This requires an open channel of dialogue and feedback with marketing so that timely adjustments can be made. Of course, higher-quality leads always trump large volumes of duds. No one has time to waste nurturing a non-lead. Marketing should refine its processes to be able to parse out browsers from serious buyers. 2. The Process The Failure: Buyers and sellers are misaligned; lack of management visibility, team focus According to SAVO’s Maturity Benchmark, fewer than 10% of companies report that they’ve mapped their sales process to their customers’ buying cycles. That pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach to sales all but guarantees wasted time, effort, resources, and especially difficulty in closing the sale. Companies that fail to recognize the importance of getting in stride with their customers’ habits and timing are guilty of thinking (and acting) inside-out as opposed to outside-in. A common way that that scenario rears its ugly head is the disconnect between marketing materials and customer needs. In fact, the SAVO Maturity Benchmark has shown that 33% of new business losses could have been wins if the seller had been better informed. Sales reps shouldn’t have to bear the burden of trying to fit marketing’s square peg into the buyer’s round hole — that comes from leading with capabilities and strengths without specific regard to clients’ challenges and needs. The Fix: Better alignment to buyer’s cycle, capturing prescriptives for success The obvious fix would be to analyze your customers’ buying cycles and align to them. You are there to serve them, not the other way around. Both B2B and B2C consumers are aware of the vast amounts of data and information that are available about their individual and corporate preferences and buying habits. The quid pro quo is that companies will use that information to make every sale and opportunity appear as if it was tailor-made for each buyer. Otherwise, you appear inattentive, lazy, and out of touch, while a savvier sales rep can easily swoop in and look like a hero. Along with being more in tune with buying cycles, sales can give marketing better information regarding why clients are buying so that those insights can be used to drive future campaigns. Don’t assume that "you know better" or "we know what our customers want to hear" and instead take a fresh approach that is more about them than you. Alignment of Sales and Marketing Can Resolve Gaps The common thread among these gaps and fixes is the need for sales and marketing to be better aligned. When they’re combative or just out of sync, no one wins. When they collaborate, they can create a formidable team that will make both teams more effective and able to respond to client needs more confidently and at the right times. The next post on this topic will cover the remaining three critical components of the selling system that are most prone to failure: the meeting, the proposal, and the analysis. What’s your take? Has your sales organization experienced these gaps? How have you overcome them to make your teams more effective? Let us know in the comments below. To Download SAVO’s  full white paper, please click here The post Mind the Gap! Five Gaps That Impact Sales Effectiveness and How to Fix Them appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Leadership Do’s and Don’ts for Maximizing Sales Training ROI: Where do you Stand? In the movie "Father of the Bride," there is a memorable scene in which the father (George Banks), unsure where to stand during the bouquet throw, misses important moments at his daughter’s wedding. Similarly, many sales leaders confidently invest in sales training (the wedding) yet are uncertain about the role they should play (or where they should stand).  The purpose of this post is to share my perspective, as a facilitator and former sales leader, on three common mistakes to avoid and five best practices to leverage as a sales manager in supporting a successful workshop that will drive sales training ROI. THE DON’TS:  THREE COMMON MISTAKES Leaders who maximize sales training ROI don’t: I.          Hand off early:  once the training is scheduled, don’t move on to the next project, and don’t pass the ball to your colleagues in Learning & Development (L&D) to implement and to participants to learn and apply in the field.  II.          Limit your participation to opening comments:  After your opening comments, don’t leave the group for the day and assume your team will feel more comfortable without "the boss" looking over their shoulders. III.          Attend the workshop distracted:  Don’t attend the workshop without a defined role or you will be quickly consumed by other responsibilities, including calls and e-mails. While there is logic to each of the don’ts, they represent George Banks-like missed moments.  Even limiting our view to perceptions, consider the contrast between you, if absent or distracted, and your team — having committed time away from their markets and personal life and being asked to focus and move outside their comfort zone.  How does this contrast align with your intent and the importance of this training? THE DO’S:  FIVE BEST PRACTICES Beyond perceptions, what are the substantive ways that you can contribute to and maximize your impact on the sales training ROI — before, during, and after a class?  Here are five best practices that I see as a facilitator; I encourage you to consider how to employ some or all of them to drive excellent outcomes.  Do: Stay connected to the program design process:  Even the most capable and earnest L&D people have, at best, a second-hand understanding of the marketplace challenges your team faces daily.  Do check in throughout the development process.  You will ensure that the program and materials nail your business objectives and must-haves for your team to hit the goals you envision. Attend the workshop as an (active) observer:  Do take advantage of the opportunity to assess skill levels across your team, to emphasize or address key points that are raised in classroom discussions, and to share feedback.  In the process, you will also be able to model behaviors, such as staying present and avoiding distractions. Attend the program as a participant:  Yes, with your team!  This might sound frightening, even risky, but do consider going through this experience with them.  After the workshop, this will give you both the credibility and ability to model and coach to the principles covered in the workshop.  Besides, who among us has no room to sharpen his or her skills? Schedule and participate in a managers-only session (alternative to #3):  Do take the time to enable you and your peers or first-line managers to understand, model, and coach to the things your team will be learning in the program.  This will reduce any concerns you or your managers may have about going through the program side-by-side with your team. Plan for reinforcement:  Your people will come out of the workshop fired up to apply their new or refined skills.  Research shows that a habit takes an average of 66 days to form.  Do lock in workshop outcomes through planned and steady reinforcement in the weeks and months that follow.  Among your options, do consider some of the ways that Richardson supports teams after a workshop: Adoption and Sustainment (http://www.richardson.com/What-We-Do/Enablement-Adoption/) Continuous Learning (http://www.richardson.com/What-We-Do/Continuous-Learning/) So, the next time you decide to schedule training for your team, skillfully sidestep the three common mistakes, and leverage the five best practices above.  Be clear in your intent about the role you will play before, during, and after the workshop to maximize sales training ROI.  The actions you choose to take as a leader will send a powerful message and create a classroom culture that extends far beyond the dates and walls of a workshop. The post Leadership Do’s and Don’ts for Maximizing Sales Training ROI: Where do you Stand? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Sales Coaching: Why do Companies Continue to "Not Coach"? Today’s organizations have finally realized the importance and value of sales coaching, but that doesn’t guarantee that it is always happening. The sales coaching process starts at the top of an organization with managers, whom are responsible for coaching down. If managers are unable to grasp the learned skill of coaching, it will affect the rest of the organization as well. In this video blog, Richardson’s Andrea Grodnitzky, Senior Vice President, Global Performance Solutions, discusses what is preventing organizations from fully adopting coaching as a universal skill. If you cannot view this video blog, please click here ————————————————————————————- Richardson provides customized Sales Coaching training, in the classroom and on the Web. Our highly interactive and learn-by-doing approach helps to quickly deliver the process and skills that sales managers can immediately implement to coach their salespeople to their next level of sales excellence.  Whether managers have 1 minute or 30 minutes, we can help them develop an effective, practical process to empower their people to stretch beyond their comfort zone and learn new ways to accelerate performance and improve productivity. To learn more, please contact us at Click Here   The post Video Blog - Sales Coaching: Why do Companies Continue to "Not Coach"? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Consultative Negotiations: What Roles can a Senior Play in Negotiations? Negotiations tend to be high-stress and emotional situations for sales reps who are heavily invested in closing the deal. A senior leader plays an important role in the process, acting as an objective player who can help the client to further understand the value of the deal and can acknowledge their needs from an alternate perspective. Join David DiStefano, President and CEO of Richardson, as he shares some of his best executive practices for participating in and improving the environment of negotiations. If you are unable to view this video blog, please click here.   Richardson’s Consultative Negotiations sales training programs provides participants with a consistent process to achieve win-win negotiations that preserve profit while building effective, long-term relationships. The program covers every facet of a negotiation, from preparation, to controlling the opening and counter-opening, converting demands to needs, justifying value, trading concessions, and effectively closing. To learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Negotiations program, please click here. The post Consultative Negotiations: What Roles can a Senior Play in Negotiations? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How can sales reps prepare for resistance from a client? Clients are likely to challenge a sales rep in order to test their credibility and knowledge of the subject matter. In anticipation of resistance, sales reps should be thinking about the prospect or client and trying to turn a piece of data into a relevant insight. Without that connection, the information provides no value to the customer. In this video, David DiStefano, President and CEO of Richardson, discusses which resources sales reps should be leveraging to successfully navigate resistance from a client and offers advice to reps about when to seek additional help. If you are having issues viewing this video, please click here —————————————————————————————— The post How can sales reps prepare for resistance from a client? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Improve Sales Results in 2014 with Your Sales Performance Value Chain In 2014, how will you better enable and support your sales force? Do you plan to tackle a major sales force transformation, or … Do you aim to fine-tune the processes, systems, and tools that you have in place? In either case, but certainly the latter, it makes sense to consider your Sales Performance Value Chain. The Sales Performance What? What’s a Sales Performance Value Chain, you ask?  Why, it’s a phrase I just strung together (read:  made up) to refer to the series of places where we uncover and deliver value to our clients.  If we can improve performance in these areas by better supporting the sales force, we’re likely to win more deals and effectively grow current accounts. If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know I’m a fan of what I call the Sales Performance Ecosystem.  Some find the ecosystem daunting.  Aligning all of the parts of the ecosystem is certainly a major sales transformation effort.  No one (worth listening to) is going to make recommendations for your specific organization without conducting an analysis first, and neither should you, but I will at least attempt to offer a relatively simple way to approach pieces of the ecosystem that have the potential to make a big impact quickly. To do that, let’s look first at the approach we’ll take in each of the links of the value chain that we want to strengthen and support. People | Process | Methodology | Technology (PPMT) In the immortal words of Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters:  "We have the tools, and we have the talent!" In slightly different words, we often hear the phrase, "people, process, and technology" bantered as a framework for improving organizational performance.  Because there are key differences between process and methodology, and because sales methodology is a big piece of sales performance, let’s expand this phrase to "People, Process, Methodology, and Technology" (PPMT): People Do you have the right people in the right roles? Process What steps do they follow to accomplish objectives? Methodology What do they do in each step to move forward in the process? Technology What tools can they use to support the process or methodology? This is over-simplified for a short blog post, of course, but it is "directionally correct."  For process and methodology especially, you can drill a lot deeper through the 5 Ws and 1 H (who, what, why, when, where, and how), but hopefully, this is clear as a starting point. Sales Performance Value Chain Now, consider these select elements or "links" of the Sales Performance Ecosystem.  I call this subset of the ecosystem the Sales Performance Value Chain because it’s through our people (our talent) and these three activities (aka support opportunities) that we deliver our value to clients. Sales Talent Management Support How you select, onboard, train, and develop your sales professionals, including both frontline sales reps and their managers/coaches Lead Acquisition/ Management Support How you generate, nurture, qualify, and pursue leads to create opportunities Account Development Support How you review, analyze, strategize, plan, and execute with current accounts to grow them and pursue possibilities to create opportunities Opportunity Management Support How you manage both the above new and growth opportunities through their buying process and your pipeline to acquire new accounts or grow current ones. PPMT Meets the Value Chain For each of these four links in the chain, you can use the PPMT framework to identify what’s working, what’s not, what top producers do more effectively, where gaps exists, and what you can do in each area to close them. If you have the same staff doing the work across all these tasks (perhaps in a smaller organization where the work may not be segmented by functions like Marketing, Inside Sales, Field Sales, Account Managers, Sales Operations, etc.), you may need to separate out the People/Talent piece of the equation because you’ll only be asking it once in the Talent Management section, versus asking it across the other three links.  For the most part, however, you should be able to consider PPMT in each of the above chains beyond the Sales team to ensure the right people are in the right roles in all functions that support Sales. As an example, in Lead Acquisition/Management, you can now ask questions about each piece of PPMT: People:  Do we have the right people in place in each of the roles that support lead acquisition and lead management?  How do we know?  What can we learn from studying the top performers?  Can we coach and develop others to do similar things (close a knowledge or skill gap), or are gaps more related to things like culture fit, job/role fit, motivational fit, and occupational interests?  How can we ensure we have the right people in the right places to get the best results? Process:  What steps do they follow to accomplish objectives?  Are these steps effective if followed well?  Do they consider the buyer’s perspective?  Is there flexibility when needed?  What do the top performers do similarly and differently than average performers?  How can the process be fine-tuned to be more effective? Methodology:  What do the players do in each step to move forward in the process?  Add all the 5 Ws and 1 H, and also, compare top to mid producers.  Build training around top-producer practices or known-effective practices, and develop Continue | Start | Stop lists, highlighting differences between what top producers do versus others. Technology:  What tools are performers using to support the process or methodology?  How well are these tools working?  Are they being used as intended and to maximum effectiveness?  What can we learn from top performers? Lather, Rinse, Repeat This is just one example.  You can ask similar questions using the PPMT framework as you move through the other links of the value chain (or almost anywhere in the larger Sales Performance Ecosystem).  By doing this each time, you can begin to identify areas for improvement and create plans to close gaps. Make sense?  I hope so.  Either way, please drop a comment and let me know.  As always, I’d be pleased to answer questions, bounce ideas, or refer you to someone who can help if you’d like to take a deeper dive.  Whether it’s tackling some low-hanging fruit early in 2014 to improve your chance of making the numbers this year or preparing for a large-scale sales transformation effort, there are few things more important than enabling and supporting your sales force to the best of your ability. And, just in case … if you haven’t officially documented our purposefully designed your sales processes and selected effective methodologies to support them, make 2014 the year you do it.  If you need support, we can help. The post Improve Sales Results in 2014 with Your Sales Performance Value Chain appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Mind the Gap!  Five Gaps That Impact Sales Effectiveness and How to Fix Them (Part 2 of 2) This post is based on the white paper "The Five Failure Points of Today’s Selling System" by Savo Group. We began writing about this topic in a recent post.  To review, there are critical gaps in your business that prevent sales effectiveness.  If these go unresolved, you’ll continue to struggle to hit your numbers.  You might be thinking "I’m not struggling to hit my numbers!"  If that’s true and yet you still have any of these gaps, then you’re selling yourself short (yes, pun intended) and underachieving against your potential.  And that would be a waste. The first two areas where gaps are commonly found are The Lead and The Process.  You can read about those problems and recommended fixes here.  In both of those instances, the alignment (or lack of alignment) between sales and marketing was often at issue.  Let’s finish the list of gaps and see if that persists. 3. The Meeting Failure:  Prospects are unengaged; sellers aren’t equipped to deliver or are often off‐message The primary challenge affecting sales reps’ productivity is the amount of time it takes them to become competent with delivering your company’s messaging. -       According to research from Forrester, only 14% of prospects say that they receive relevant messages from sellers in sales meetings. -       From the same research, only 7% of sales reps manage to get called back to a second meeting. It appears that there’s a significant disconnect between buyers’ interests and what sellers are bringing to the meeting.  They aren’t listening to the buyers’ true needs, aren’t armed with the right messages, or aren’t savvy enough to connect or convey those pieces effectively. Fix:  Bring the right solutions at the right value to the deal The meeting is your opportunity to shine.  Your company has been vetted for consideration, but there are still many obstacles to be avoided.  Obvious ones include your personality, how well you interact with your colleagues on the sales team (are you meeting for the first time on this gig or have you built a rapport over many years?), and how well you engage the buyer and influencers. Other key obstacles are materials and messaging.  The buyers have researched your company, and you’ve likely sent them additional materials that support your work.  Your job is to identify with their needs and connect what you can do to resolve them, demonstrating that you have the experience and ability to add value without question.  If you want to make it to the next round, your ability to make those connections with confidence could be the deciding factor. When the discussion gets very narrow and specific, be knowledgeable about (and better yet, able to access) cases and examples of similar client situations that represent your awareness of the issues and mastery of the solution.  This takes time, discipline, and close interaction with colleagues in marketing to generate this valuable content.  Consider leveraging your content management system and linking it to your sales automation system for the best results. 4. The Proposal Failure:  They’re non‐productive time‐drains The task of preparing proposals often falls to sales reps, who spend up to 60 hours a month cranking these out.  Too much of your sales reps’ time is wasted searching for information and formatting documents, for example, the results of which could be off‐brand and non‐compliant.  Does this extra time and effort lead to closing more sales?  Not often enough. Fix:  Validate and automate, monitor There are ways to automate this process and relieve sales reps of the burdensome proposal writing to which they can’t add value.  Work with marketing (see the pattern?) to lock down the branding and produce standard content for typical sections.  Then, let your sales reps focus their energy to customize the proposal for the buyer and their specific needs and goals. But don’t stop there.  Once you have the basic proposal elements in place, collect and leverage information about each individual selling situation throughout the stages of the selling cycle to take automation to a new level.  This information can be used to automatically assemble the right proposal team and develop a first draft of the proposal at the push of a button. Companies using a sales automation system with proposal capabilities can track a deal’s progress from the presentation phase to the prospect’s validation and verbal commitment to you.  Dashboards are automatically updated in real time for sales management monitoring as the deal moves through negotiation and close.  The end result is far greater forecasting accuracy that increases sales effectiveness — both operationally (the staffing and delivery of the solution) and for revenue growth. 5. The Analysis Failure:  Inaccurate information damages forecasting accuracy Many businesses cite information breakdowns when it comes to tracking and gaining intelligence from their sales process.  Over half those reporting to the SAVO Maturity Benchmark said that their CRM system is not configured to do the job, and two‐thirds lack basic KPIs and dashboards.  A separate study by IDC found that nearly half of sales forecasts are less than 70% accurate three months prior to close. Failure to collect and analyze critical pieces of data about the sales process is a huge gap for many sales organizations.  What don’t you know that you should be tracking?  How, where, and when is information collected and stored?  Are you connecting all of the dots?  Who owns and is responsible for the data?  An incomplete or inaccurate data collection and analysis process will sabotage your ability to forecast and will most certainly hinder your sales organization. Fix:  Capture Success Indicators to Correct Course, Replicate Best Practices You need to know what’s working (and what’s not) and from that determine what needs to be done to correct or improve the situation.  That requires timely, accurate, and relevant data and analysis. Marrying more sophisticated tracking and analytics with the ability to capture behavioral intelligence allows marketing, sales, and operations to gain insights that have never before been available.  Here are a few examples of what should you be looking for in your analysis of sales automation data: Sales managers can track what actions their top sellers take and try to replicate those patterns for lesser-performing sellers.  The tracking capabilities allow sales management to use data and executive insights to better align resources.  These capabilities also shed light on where and why prospects are being lost in the sales process so that sales and marketing can better collaborate to fix the failure point. Product managers can get leading indicators of the success of new product launches and other initiatives in order to learn and adjust future initiatives. Marketers can receive direct feedback from field personnel — which is unfortunately still a rarity.  Coupled with analytics on what’s working and what’s not, marketers will be better able to determine how to allocate future resources. Summary:  The Path to Smarter Selling Making sales more effective is a critical imperative among businesses today.  It starts by taking a keen look at the points of failure in your selling system and identifying the fixes — both in terms of the thinking and advanced technological tools — that will close those gaps and enable your sales organization for long‐term success. Let us know in the Comments section below whether you’ve experienced and conquered the gaps described here and which ones we missed that should be mentioned.  We look forward to hearing from you. The post Five Gaps That Impact Sales Effectiveness and How to Fix Them: Part 2 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Maintaining the Sales Machine In their November 2013 Harvard Business Review article Dismantling the Sales Machine Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) assert that "Leaders must abandon their fixation on (sales) process compliance."  In place of "disciplined sales process" they favor a flexible approach to sales in which salespeople rely on their own insight and judgment.  That they find sales process  discipline and a sales force capable of insight and judgment incompatible seems untenable.  The CEB has long brought much to the sales space with its research.  They have been at the forefront of recognizing the new sales environment and helping define the new buyer.  In their article, they rightly point to many significant developments: The new sales environment favors creative and adaptive salespeople. Deals vary from one to the next. Performance trumps protocol. Salespeople must have latitude. Managers’ roles are to guide, support, and serve as coaches rather than enforcers. The new world of selling demands greater collaboration among team members. They also acknowledge that many average performers benefit from clear direction regarding their activities and being held accountable for specific milestones, which are primary goals of sales process. This is all true.  But contrary to the assumptions and conclusions the authors make, the sales machine/sales process discipline does not work against the above trends, but it enables them.  I believe far from dismantling the sales process, sales organizations need to embrace it and make it part of their sales DNA. The predominance of research I have seen from firms such as Salesforce, Aberdeen, and CSO Insights  shows that there is a high correlation between best-in-class sales performance and the discipline of sales process.  This correlation is supported by everything I know from my client work and specific feedback from the managers at my sales management program at Wharton.  Rather than most sales organizations operating as well-oiled sales machines, we learn from Aberdeen that too many organizations lack a defined sales process, and according to McKinsey, many of those that do have adoption problems. Having a defined sales process that spells out objectives, best practice activities, customer actions, sales tools, and models for each stage does not have to suppress creativity and flexibility.  Dashboards provide valuable information and don’t by nature dash creativity.  An effective sales process serves as a critical guidepost for salespeople to follow and managers to coach and track to.  The goal of a sales process is not only to be efficient but to be effective. A good process replicates the best practice performance of star performers.  This eliminates the need for each salesperson to reinvent the wheel or operate without the knowledge the wheel exists.  One salesperson in a team I am working with shared a "secret" (best practice) to reengage with prospects who have gone dark.  Using this best practice, team members increased their ability to reengage by 50%.  This shared best practice did not strip away the use of judgment by members of the sales team, some who at first resisted it and others who use the tactic judiciously. I have found over the past two years that when salespeople and sales managers are provided with a clear sales process that is linked with formal, but even more importantly informal, coaching, coaching conversations become easier and more productive.  I have gone so far as to align coaching questions to each phase of the sales process — not to confine but to support manager, peer, and self-coaching.  Having the right questions provokes judgment and creativity.  And while a lot of the coaching is around deal review, deal review is more than numbers and includes developing insights and judgment and the strategies and skills needed to execute.  Effective coaching is coaching by asking, not telling, and it is important not to conflate what to coach with how to coach:  one is knowledge and one is skill.  Both are needed for dialogue. Maybe we are just speaking different languages.  If a sales machine/sales process operates as the authors describe it, "inflexible governance that works through formal rules," meaning that salespeople are turned into robots, then the sales machine indeed is in destructive overdrive and should be turned off and repaired.  If this is the case, the problem is in the design.  But generalizing that the sales machine/all sales processes should be dismantled is a huge step backward for sales.  The key is to make sure that the sales process mirrors and influences today’s customer buying cycles and buying habits and is supported with a collaborative coaching methodology. Provocative titles grab attention.  Just as the customer need dialogue (solution selling) is not dead, neither is sales process.  Both must evolve, and have but they should not be abandoned.  An effective sales process does not prevent a salesperson from exercising judgment and being creative in dealing with highly knowledgeable customers.  Indeed, an effective sales process is an indispensable tool for sales force development and productivity.  The world in which salespeople operate with judgment and creativity that the authors describe is a world I subscribe to, but with sales process in it. Today, in the sales space, we have the advantage of technology and data not available to us just a short time ago, and we also have research into the new buyer and what it takes for a salesperson to succeed in the new world of selling.  Judgment, creativity, and expertise are essential to selling today.  If I had to choose between a sales force run by data and cognitive patterns or what I will call for shorthand "human talent," the latter would win hands down.  But I don’t have to choose.  I can have both — and so can you. The post Maintaining the Sales Machine appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Achieve Stronger Sales Results Through Better Preparation "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." - Benjamin Franklin, Scientist, Inventor, Statesman It’s early January and many New Year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside. If there’s room for one more on your list, I encourage you to add this one: Preparation. Anyone who has painted a room knows the importance of properly preparing before painting. Proper preparation generally takes more time than painting itself and can be tedious, which is why many choose to skip or cut short this step in favor of "just getting on with it." A true professional might get away with less prep than the average person, but a sloppy job is a constant reminder that cutting corners rarely pays. Doing the job right from the start requires a good plan, patience, and discipline. The resulting satisfaction from a job well done likely includes the realization of how important those preparation steps were to the process. In sales, the need to prepare is no different. Even the greenest sales rookie knows to take time to prepare before a sales meeting or call. But what’s the proper way to prepare? What boxes should you check before proceeding? We take preparation very seriously and categorize it into three groups: strategic, client, and technical. Here are a few ways you should prepare when going after new targets: Strategic Planning Look at the big picture. Where are you in the sales cycle with this client? What do you hope to achieve as a result of the meeting? Envision how you want the meeting to end and then build from there. What are the possible curveballs that can be thrown your way and how can you avoid them? The devil is in the details, and knowing what challenges may arise and how to overcome them will greatly aid your level of preparedness. Client Planning This step includes multiple layers to be researched and explored before sitting down with your client. Company - What does the company do? How do they make money? Who are their customers and what do they want? What division are you targeting? Is the company growing, stagnant, or struggling to compete? Has their leadership changed recently? What does the company say about themselves, and what are others saying about them? Individual buyers - Hopefully you have an internal project champion to help guide you. Try to find out about your target buyer and influencers. How senior are they? What’s their position and role? Is their focus local, regional, national, or international? Do they have buying authority, or are they researching for their boss? Look them up on LinkedIn to find out what groups they belong to and whether or not you have any common contacts and to see what topics they are posting or commenting on to get a sense of their level of experience and sophistication. Competitors - Who are your target’s key competitors and what are they up to? How might that influence your sale? Is your target leading their industry or playing catch up? Past projects or history - Have your companies worked together in the past? Not doing your internal homework is a rookie mistake that can make you look really bad in front of the prospect. Even the smallest project in another business unit from 10 years ago counts as history. Know who did what, when, for how much, and with what results before talking to your buyer. Technical Planning Once you have answered the strategic and client questions, you need to align that information with your company’s products, services, and capabilities. Capabilities - What challenges do they face that you can help resolve? How do your products or services fill a void, fix a problem, or otherwise help them improve their business? What features and benefits of your services directly relate to their needs? Don’t drown them in every last detail about your business, but rather pick your specific capabilities that can help the client. Industry and market trends - What are the trends across the industry? Not only should you know what’s going on, but try to dig deeper to uncover an insight that would be of interest to your prospect. It could be something they already know but perhaps weren’t aware of the scope, or it might be something significant that presents a threat or opportunity. Show that you’ve done your homework, but be careful to be respectful and not insulting when presenting the insight. Objections - How would you respond if confronted with "We don’t need your help - we can do it ourselves. You’re only here because my boss wants a dog-and-pony show." What other objections might you face and how would you overcome them? Where should you look for answers to these questions? Search Google, LinkedIn, Twitter. Industry publication websites are also great sources of information. Simple keyword searches will usually yield helpful results beginning with basics such as "banking industry trends" or "top issues in banking 2014." Of course, using keywords that are specific to their business or issues will get you more granular results. Your New Year’s Resolution: Preparation We’ve all been guilty of Ready-Fire-Aim at some point. But when it becomes an everyday habit, your ability to be successful will likely be extremely compromised. Good preparation takes thought, time, and discipline to set yourself up for success (and avoid failure). Sales managers need to encourage action and monitor progress, but also to instill the importance of properly preparing for sales meetings and calls. As you look to the New Year ahead, resolve to make preparation a priority. What are your tips for preparing for client meetings? What pitfalls have you encountered along the way? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you would like to learn more about Richardson and we may be able to help your sales team with their preparation, please contact us at info.richardson.com or visit our web site at http://www.richardson.com     The post Achieve Better Sales Results Through Better Preparation appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Can you please shut up? I’m trying to share an insight! Over the past 18 months, we’ve had numerous conversations with sales leaders wanting to adopt an insight-led approach to selling. Through these conversations, it is very clear that there is confusion over how insights come to life in a sales situation. Some of the people with whom we’ve spoke have the impression that an insight is communicated through a presentation. We believe that there may be situations where that is the case, but the more likely case will be for an insight to be communicated in a sales conversation. This is important not only because a sales conversation requires a different skill set but also because it requires a different mindset. Let’s run through an example to see how all of this plays out. Say, for example, the wizards in your R&D group discover some breakthrough innovation that gives you this unbelievable capability to solve a difficult challenge for your customers far better than your competition. Excited by the potential, you have your marketing team produce a slick PowerPoint deck and take time to train your sales reps to deliver the commercial teaching pitch. Then, you issue a directive to line-up appointments with our customers to close some business. So far so good, right? The real challenge takes place face-to-face in front of the customer. You’ve prepared your sales reps to deliver a presentation — a silver bullet shot straight to the heart (or mind) of the customer. A presentation that is so insightful and compelling that once delivered, your customer will take out his or her pen, sign on the line that is dotted, and cut a check on the spot. Seriously? Does this ever happen? Probably not, unless you sell all-purpose steak knives at the mall that can hack through an old leather shoe and a beer can and then cut a tomato like a hot knife through butter! In reality, your buyer will have questions and possibly doubts about your point of view. As buyers, the notion of someone trying to "sell" to us puts us on the defensive. We live in an age of content marketing overload, and we’re skeptical from being carpet bombed with self-serving thought leadership. However, we also know the importance of staying well-informed in a competitive and rapidly changing market. Every decision is scrutinized. We have doubts, we have questions, and we have our own thoughts and opinions about issues related to our business. And, when we hear a thought-provoking idea, especially a novel one, we need time to process and internalize the concept before we buy in completely. This doesn’t mean that your sellers can’t trigger new thinking or ideas, build credibility, add value, and eventually sell something, but sellers must be sensitive to how buyers process information, manage through resistance, and keep the buyer tracking with their point of view. Shut up and listen, will ya? "Telling Isn’t Teaching" is a popular phrase in the world of learning and development that insight sellers should take to heart. When you train your sellers to deliver insight through a presentation-led approach, you risk putting them into a "telling" mindset. Being in that frame of mind exposes the seller to two significant risks. The first risk is that they are so focused on delivering their pitch that they miss signals that the buyer has questions or isn’t tracking with them. I’ve personally observed sales reps shut down a buyer in the critical early stages of their commercial teaching pitch, effectively asking them to shut up for 20 minutes until they finish talking. This is extremely annoying for the buyer and very detrimental for the seller who fails to keep the buyer tracking with their thinking. The second risk is that the insight isn’t very insightful for the buyer. Again, the seller is so focused on delivering the pitch that they assume that what they have to say will be of interest to the buyer. At no point does the seller check with the buyer for validity or support. It creates an awkward situation when the buyer shuts down the seller halfway through their teaching pitch because they have some experience or opinion that does not support the seller’s point of view. When you think "Insight," think Conversations, not Presentations. It is helpful to think of a customer sales conversation as a pendulum, and through the course of the conversation, the pendulum swings between asking questions, listening, and sharing insight. There are times in that conversation where you will want to lead with questions, such as when you need to sell understanding or seek confirmation. Then, there are times in the conversation where you lead with an insight, such as when you want to seed new ideas or influence thinking. And of course it is necessary to listen for both verbal and nonverbal cues. Sellers must draw on the right skills at the right time, depending on what you know (or don’t know) and how the buyer responds through the discussion. When the opportunity presents itself to position an insight, we believe that the seller should first start by floating the issue to the buyer and then checking with an open-ended question to test for support. For example, the seller could say something like, "Here’s a challenge that we’ve seen with clients similar to you. What have you considered so far to address this challenge?" Then, if the buyer responds favorably, the seller can dive deeper into their insight, continuing to check along the way to ensure that the buyer is tracking and addressing questions or concerns along the way. This conversational approach has many advantages over presenting a canned commercial teaching pitch. First, it gives the seller an early out if the concept won’t fly with the buyer. There are many reasons why a buyer might not even entertain your idea, so why waste valuable time trying to push that issue? Second, checking along the way helps the seller keep the buyer on track with new thinking. Finally, by asking questions, the seller gathers more and better information from the buyer. This enables the seller to tailor the delivery of the insight message for even more relevance as the conversation evolves. As buyers become better informed and better prepared, competition becomes more intense, and sellers need more skill than ever to succeed. Presentations have their place in the sales process, but insights are best shared through the sales conversation. The post Can you please shut up? I’m trying to share an insight! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Are Your Sales Reps Taking a "Show-up and Throw-up" Approach to Sharing Insights? Leverage our Insight Blueprint to Engineer Your Path to Success "The antithesis of selling with insight," as one of my colleagues so colorfully describes it, "is to show up and throw up." This negative metaphor illustrates the tendency to join a call or meeting with a prospect (or in trying to broaden an existing relationship) and overwhelm the listeners with information about your business and capabilities, which may or may not be of interest or even relevant to the purpose of the meeting. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Would you rather hire the firm that struts in like a peacock and essentially says "Gee whiz, look at us, we’re big and great and can do all of these things and you should hire us!" or the one that turns the focus on you and your needs and opportunities by saying, "This is what we’re seeing in the market from our clients and the impact it has on companies such as yours. This is the solution we recommend, and yes, we have the capabilities to help and would love the opportunity to talk in greater detail if you’re interested"? There is little choice over which approach would be better received, but you’d be amazed by how few sales reps actually take the time to craft and deliver such a message. It takes effort, time, and discipline to get it right. Yet, most salespeople are guilty of bringing too much to the party in an attempt to impress when it actually overwhelms and disappoints buyers. Engineering Your Path to Success At Richardson, we work with our clients to teach their sales reps how to develop and refine insights to be pitched to their clients and prospects. At the core of our Richardson’s Selling With Insights® training is our Insight Blueprint, which is a roadmap to follow as you learn to develop and share your insight with your client in an attempt to connect the client’s challenges or opportunities back to your capabilities and differentiators to trigger an Aha Moment. It is this moment wherein the client realizes the value of exploring the issue with you further. The insight is the catalyst that spurs the link between the client’s issue, your ability to help them with that issue, and the client’s desire to explore this possibility further. A blueprint conjures images of building plans, architects, permits, diagrams, detail, and the like. It can be exciting or daunting depending on your perspective. When working with blueprints, it is ever important to be mindful of scope and scale. Scope: A blueprint for a building is just that — it’s not meant to include an entire block or even adjacent structures. Therefore, be careful to maintain focus on that which is pertinent to this insight, and don’t overload the blueprint with erroneous or distracting information. Scale: Similar to scope, yet different. It’s easy to give in to the temptation to make the issue bigger than it needs to be, as if the topic or insight on its own doesn’t carry enough weight to convince your buyer. (If that’s true, then perhaps you haven’t zeroed in on the best insight or compelling research to help drive your point across.) Keep the scale in check by maintaining a laser-like focus on only things relevant to the insight and nothing more. Our Insight Blueprint ensures that you stay focused on that which is relevant to the insight for your client and avoids scope and scale creep. Barriers and the Bottom Line As you might imagine, building a credible insight takes time and effort. Sales reps (and their managers) who are anxious to dive in and "just get on with it" will have less success than those who apply these tactics (and managers that encourage, coach, and foster a culture of insight selling). We talked about the importance of patience and preparation in a recent post. This culture and mindset represents a gateway or barrier to how successful you’ll be in connecting with clients and moving on to the next phase of the sales cycle — and hopefully being hired. You need to be able to cut through the daily clutter, noise, and distractions to get an executive’s attention. Personalized insights are intended to create an Aha Moment, capture your client’s interest, and stimulate dialogue. The bottom line is to find the insight that will create the openness to explore more with you. That is what the Insight Blueprint represents: a tool to align your client’s challenges and opportunities with your capabilities and differentiators and deliver personalized, relevant, and compelling insights through various channels to spark an Aha Moment and gain their interest. Have you had success using insights? What do you do to prepare for a sales pitch and connect with your prospects? Let us know in the comments below. Are you interested in learning more about Richardson’s Selling With Insights® program? Learn more about our approach and how we can help your company. The post Are Your Sales Reps Taking a "Show-up and Throw-up" Approach to Sharing Insights? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Prospecting Procrastinators: How to Better Manage Your Prospecting Time, Activity, and Focus "Your timing is perfect!" are words we probably don’t hear often enough. In sales, particularly when trying to connect with prospects, those words sound wonderful because they imply that the prospect is interested in talking to you. Sales reps can’t survive on luck when trying to get prospects on the phone. You can’t just block out two hours of your day to make your cold or warm calls because it suits your schedule. If that’s your "strategy," then you’ll likely emerge from your office having left a series of voice mails and messages that have a slim chance of ever being returned. Prospecting with insight requires careful and thoughtful planning. You’ve done your homework to find a target organization that has a likely need for your products or services, researched further to identify the best contact in the company, and tailored your insights to create the perfect pitch to get them interested enough to have a deeper conversation or meeting. But all of that preparation won’t mean much if you can’t get the prospect on the phone. Set Aside Sacred Prospecting Time The time and effort you need to put into prospecting depends on the amount of new business you are expected to self-generate. You have to set your priorities. If prospecting is vital to your success and livelihood, then carve out discrete blocks of time that you need to dedicate to it and let other activities take a back seat. Literally block the time in your calendar for yourself so that others know the time is reserved. Schedule your telephone time to coincide with when your prospects are most able and receptive to talking to you. There will be times when your prospect is inaccessible or simply too busy to talk. For example, finance and sales leaders are typically very busy near the end of the quarter and the end of the year. In addition, research shows that executives are more likely to answer calls on Wednesday and Thursday over other days of the week. This is because people get slammed on Monday, dig out on Tuesday, and check out on Friday. Research also suggests that executives have a greater tendency to answer calls from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. This is because they are less likely to be in meetings during those blocks of time. Don’t fight nature! If you are really a hardcore hunter, consider working two- to five-hour shifts, and use time zones to your advantage: 6:30-8:00 a.m.: Call EST and CST 8:00-10:00 a.m.: Call CST and MST 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Call MST and PST 12:00-3:00 p.m.: Do non-call work; all prospects are eating or are in meetings 3:00-5:00 p.m.: Call EST and CST 5:00-7:00 p.m.: Call CST and MST 7:00-8:00 p.m.: Call MST and PST You would also be wise to schedule dedicated time on your calendar for researching target organizations and prospects. Consider how much time has elapsed between when you generated your target lists and conducted your research on them. If you compiled a list that will take several weeks or longer to get through before making your calls and pitches, be sure to do a quick search to see if anything new has happened that could help or play into your message. You want to be seen as current and forward-looking, not out of touch and irrelevant. When the Prospect Answers, Remain Calm and Professional This might sound like common sense, but it bears mentioning: consider your attitude, demeanor, and voice when your prospect actually answers the phone. Especially if you call early or late in the day, try to hide your shock, surprise, or relief that they picked up. Otherwise, you can come across as sounding: Desperate ("Thank God I got you!") Unprofessional ("I can’t believe you actually picked up this early!") Critical ("You’re a hard person to reach — do you ever answer your phone?") If they mention that you called at an unusual time, keep your response professional and straightforward. "I know that you have many demands on your time throughout the day, and I didn’t want to intrude on your busy schedule. I thought that calling you now might better accommodate your schedule." The right attitude and response can signify (even subconsciously) that you’ve thought about your prospect’s workload and schedule, that you know something about their business and how they work, and that you’re conscientious and willing to work hard (and possibly inconvenience yourself) in order to meet your clients’ needs. Prospecting is a very important activity, but few sales reps would say it’s their favorite thing to do. Like anything we don’t like (even if it is good for us), it is easy to come up with excuses to not do it. Successful prospecting requires discipline, persistence, resilience, practice, and coaching. The post Prospecting Procrastinators: How to Better Manage Your Prospecting Time, Activity, and Focus appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Why Selling is a Joke A young executive was leaving the office late one evening when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. "Listen," the CEO said, "this is a very sensitive and important document here, and my assistant has gone for the night.  Can you make this thing work for me?" "Certainly," said the young executive.   He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button. "Excellent, excellent!" said the CEO, as his paper disappeared inside the shredder.   "I just need one copy…" [Cue laugh track] Whoops! So, what made that funny?  You thought it was going in one direction, but at the last moment, it went another way, right?  There was a surprise; often called "a left turn."  There’s a reason they call it the "punch line"… it hits you right in the figurative funny bone.  This is one way that comedians make us laugh. It’s also one way that sales professionals can spark an Aha Moment, using insights. The Aha Moment According to Wikipedia, the "eureka effect," also known as the "aha! effect," refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.  Scientists actually study this.  We call it the Aha Moment and talk about it in our Selling with Insights® program.  In the course, we share these definitions of insight, which relate to the Aha Moment. The Cambridge Dictionaries Online defines insight as: "…a clear, deep, and sometimes sudden understanding of a complicated problem or situation, or the ability to have such an understanding."  Insight can come in the form of an idea (sometimes a surprise or "flash insight"), a data point from research, or knowledge gained from experience. In the context of selling, we define insight specifically as: "… information or an idea that is based on credible research, authoritative content, or relevant experiences, which, when personalized to your client’s likely or known challenges and opportunities and shared appropriately, opens your client’s mind to think about their situation in a new way and shows them a path toward solving a challenge or capitalizing on opportunity through your company’s capabilities and differentiators." Shake, Rattle and Roll If you’re selling, the goal is to bring value, create opportunity, solve problems, empower outcomes, influence decisions, and ultimately incite action.  We think of the "insight" as the data or information and the Aha Moment as the desired short-term outcome of sharing the insight and making some dot connection.  Whether it’s in the context of selling or not, the Aha Moment is the same… it sparks interest and results in seeing things in a new light or gaining a new understanding.  It’s not the only thing that matters, but it is one very important piece of selling with insights. You can think of an Aha Moment like an earthquake.  They vary in intensity, right?  Some topple buildings; others just rattle your China.  But both get your attention.  Remember this, to keep expectations realistic.  Not every Aha Moment will be earth-shattering.  The goal of sharing an insight isn’t an end in itself… it’s a means to continue and deepen the ensuing dialogue and explore new possibilities together with your client. Creating Surprise or Tension with Your Insight To get back to the main purpose (and title) of this post, if you want to create an Aha Moment or surprise left-turn with your insights, you can learn from what comedians do.  (This is just one method that we’re exploring today, but it works.)  To do this, you must find a way to juxtapose facts to make a quick "left turn."  In business situations, as opposed to comedy, this typically creates a "resolvable tension," which illuminates (or further illuminates) a challenge or opportunity, or leads to a path to resolve one. Here are two examples to consider. EXAMPLE 1 Here’s an example using some data from CSO Insights that you’ve likely heard or seen this year: If you say, "According to the 2013 research conducted by CSO Insights, 65% of top sales leaders say that new account acquisition is their primary objective for the coming year," that’s simply a statistic.  It’s interesting and it points toward something important, but it’s just a fact. If you add, in juxtaposition, "Yet, 67% of those same sales leaders, rate their sales team as ‘Needing Improvement’ in lead generation," suddenly, you’ve created some tension.  Hmm.  They want X, but Y could get in the way of achieving that. Presuming you offer a way to improve sales reps’ ability to generate leads and acquire customers, these facts could be helpful to share.  (Or, if you’re a learning and development or sales enablement leader, and you confirm these facts as true in your organization, you’ve certainly just found a way to link sales training initiatives to business strategy.) EXAMPLE 2 Let’s look at another example.  (Disclaimer: this is for illustrative purposes… some of this unverified data has been sourced from various websites, and some is fabricated for the teaching example.) Data from a 2011 federal crime report shows that, in the U.S.: A burglary happens once every 15 seconds We can expect one in every thirty-six homes in the United States to be burglarized this year Homeowners incur an average loss of $1,675 per break in In 38% of home invasion incidents where someone was home at the time, assault was reported (of injuries reported, 36% were minor and 9% were serious) Grim statistics, but just facts.  What if we added… While many home security systems adequately protect front doors, only 34% of home intrusions come through the front door, with 66% entering through windows and other less-secured points Most security companies hire contractors to install systems, but according to research commissioned by Crime Prevention Journal, trained law enforcement personnel offer the best advice on avoiding home intrusions and can more accurately identify the most vulnerable and likely entrance points Might this influence your thinking about the home security company and system that you choose? What if you then learned that Richardson Home Security offered the following? A complimentary home inspection to determine areas at greatest risk, especially windows, with inspection and installation crews comprised entirely of retired or off-duty law enforcement professionals A wide variety of window protection options, from installed bars, reinforced locking devices, electronic barrier deterrents, automated sliding covers, laser barriers, lighting, and biometric scanners. See what I did there? The first data set exposes the seriousness of the home invasion risk.  The second layers information and takes a slight left turn to point out a specific problem and create some tension.  The capabilities offered by our fake security company address those problems. This may be over-simplified or different compared to some of the complex B2B products you sell, but the concepts are the same and I hope the point is clear.  In both cases above, we took data that established a baseline and juxtaposed data against it to make a left-turn or create a resolvable tension. Our Own Aha Moment So what’s the take-away from this? Well, if you begin with your capabilities and get clear about what problems you can solve and the special value you can bring, it’s a great start. Then, conduct, commission, source, or buy research or codify your knowledge gained from experience to create a baseline of data about the challenge or opportunity that you can solve. Next, look for ways to juxtapose the data to further exacerbate the issue, highlight the importance of addressing it, or lead to the unique ways you can address it and add value. While this is a very simplified representation, this is exactly what we do with our Insight Blueprint™ (among other things). Coming full circle back to our earlier definition, then you can craft relevant, compelling, personalized Insight Messages to share: "… information or an idea that is based on credible research, authoritative content, or relevant experiences, which, when personalized to your client’s likely or known challenges and opportunities and shared appropriately, opens your client’s mind to think about their situation in a new way and shows them a path toward solving a challenge or capitalizing on opportunity through your company’s capabilities and differentiators." We’ll talk more about the Insight message, another day. Oh - and about that title - no, of course I don’t think selling is a joke.  But by using those same funny, left-turn principles used by comedians, you can surprise clients, capture interest, and perhaps enlighten them, if your message is delivered well.  If you’d like to talk about that or anything else about selling more effectively with insights and thoughtful dialogue, reach out and let me know. Good luck with those punch lines! Man:  "Did I ever tell you that my uncle Bob was a magician?" Woman:   "No, you didn’t!  Really? Man:   "Yup.  Every time he walks down the street, he turns into a bar." The post Why Selling is a Joke appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How to Stop the Spoon Feeding and Start Coaching Sales Reps to Remove Obstacles for Themselves What’s preventing your sales reps from being successful? Are sales coming slower than expected or being blocked altogether? What obstacles are standing in the way of your sales reps, and how can you help overcome them? Obstacles get in the way, slow you down, and force you to change direction, settle for less, or flat-out stop in your tracks. In short, they prevent you from achieving your goals. In business, these barriers to success can be physical, but they are more often process-oriented, procedural, or behavioral in nature. What obstacles are in the way of your sales team, and how can you help your sales reps to overcome them? How much revenue are you losing from obstacles due to slow, low, or no sales? There’s no app for this — Google Maps can’t help you reroute to circumvent the obstacle blocking the path. By their very nature, obstacles deter or impede progress, which in this context is selling. The key is to start coaching sales reps to resolve the issues for themselves in order to overcome them in the future. Coaching, Not Doing Sales managers can’t do it all. They can’t see every client, ride along with every sales rep, or make every decision to be made throughout the sales process. Here are five steps sales managers should take to help their sales reps to overcome obstacles to selling. Identify the obstacle. What behavior is getting in the way of the sales rep’s success? Try to understand the sales rep’s perspective. Every person is unique and possesses their own backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, while each client (even in the same industry and geography) is similarly distinct, meaning that an obstacle for one person may not hold someone else back. Embark on a questioning dialogue in a manner that leads the sales rep to identify the obstacle. You might have a theory, but they know more about the situation and variables than you do, so don’t assume. Besides, if you do it for them, then the outcome will seem like your idea and directives akin to an assignment as opposed to something they uncovered on their own (albeit with your help). Coach the sales rep to remove or circumvent the obstacle. Once you agree on the obstacle that’s in the way, the next step is to determine the best steps to take to overcome it. Again, this isn’t a time to be directive (even if you have something in mind). Take a page from the lawyer’s handbook and "lead the witness" if you must, but really try to get them to own the solution. Individual follow-up — ensure changed behavior avoids these obstacles. Their numbers should be an indicator, but don’t assume that no news is good news. Take a long-term interest in your sales reps’ development, and follow up with them in regular intervals to make sure they’ve truly moved on from their old habits. Look for patterns among your sales reps. When you see many sales reps struggling with the same issues, sound the alarm and get help for your team. Perhaps training is necessary to get them over the hump. Don’t ignore warning signs of larger problems. Rinse and repeat (watch for new obstacles). Just because you’ve helped sales reps overcome an obstacle doesn’t mean that’s all there is or ever will be. In the same way that problems and rewards get bigger as a child becomes an adult, so too do issues grow in significance as you sell bigger solutions to bigger companies higher up the food chain. There will always be some kind of obstacle that could get in the way. Help your sales reps — no matter how seasoned they may be — to recognize and avoid new blockades. Gone Fishing The critical factor here is to start coaching sales reps to help themselves. Yes, you might be able to do it for them or give them the answers they need in order to proceed, but that’s enabling them to repeat the same behavior that led them to this predicament. This ancient proverb sums it up best: "Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime." At the beginning stages of the coaching relationship, your role should be more extensive and directive. However, over time, your role as a coach should diminish as the sales rep learns to self-assess and then self-coach. Regardless of how much you direct, keep the responsibility for identifying and removing the obstacle with the sales rep. The objective is to coach in a way that makes the sales rep responsible. As the sales rep learns to figure out what the obstacle is and how to remove it, less direction will be needed. Your role is to add value, refine the solution as necessary, critique and modify, and offer guidance to help the sales rep successfully develop the best solution. You must leverage your time and abilities across all of your sales reps to get them to help themselves to overcome obstacles they face. It’s the only way they’ll grow as professionals, and it’s the best way to grow your revenues. The post How to Stop the Spoon Feeding and Start Coaching Sales Reps to Remove Obstacles for Themselves appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Quarter-end Contracts Slip-sliding Away? Check Your Sales Process! Negotiations went well. You made your case to your buyer, and you have their assurance that the deal will close by the end of the quarter. You update your forecasts and just sit back and enjoy. Nothing can go wrong. Or can it? There is a term you should know … slippage. Fast forward now to the second-to-last week of the quarter. Your buyer still hasn’t returned the signed contract, and you’re feeling the heat to get it signed. You call to get a status update, and you learn from the buyer that IT still needs to complete its security audit. You’re in the queue. A week goes by, and there is still no signed contract. Now, your buyer tells you that a purchase of this size will need to go through procurement, and the CFO will likely need to sign off personally. The problem is that the CFO is on vacation and doesn’t share your sense of urgency to sign the deal by the end of the quarter. Now, your deal and your forecast are in serious trouble. At this point, there is little you can do. You can pray that the slippage is just temporary, that the whole deal has not gone south, and that your forecasts are not just off but gone. Otherwise, it is just damage control. The best way to avoid the need for damage control is to avoid damage. There are several steps you can take to avoid slippage. Start with a sound sales process that is aligned with the customer’s buying process. Following a well-defined sales process will let you know what to expect and when to expect it. Keep in mind that you sell your products, services, and solutions all day every day, but your buyer might only make this purchase once in his or her career. You need to know what to expect. You need to anticipate challenges to a smooth buying process. You need to work with your buyer to anticipate problems before they arise and should then move through with little or no problem. The process should include buyer-centric "verifiable outcomes." This is a big word for clear activities your buyer has taken that verify where the buyer is in the buying process and where you are in your selling process. Start with knowing the key players and buying processes with the company. Valuable things to learn include: How familiar is the customer with your product, service, or solution? Have they bought something like it before? If not, educate them in how others buy. Who makes the final decision? Who signs the contract? What role, if any, will the CFO or the finance people play? Who are the other major players that influence the purchase? Every department affected by a purchase, particularly if they might have to change the way they currently work, could have some impact on the decision-making process. Find out sooner rather than later. Can your contact do more than just recommend you to the decision makers? Does his or her opinion carry real weight? You should learn decision maker priorities. They may need or want what you offer but may need something else more. You have to learn decision maker problems. You have to be able to convince the decision makers that your product or service will solve problems and meet needs — that what you offer will become a solution. Be especially aware when key personnel in a buying organization change. What if the supportive decision maker leaves the company? What if a higher up, even the CEO, is replaced? New "powers that be" at a company may come in with a new agenda. At the very least, they will want to review operations and get to know the company, or part of a company, they inherit. When this happens, it is not uncommon for major purchases to stall while the dust settles. If you smell smoke, there may be fire. Find out about regulatory and compliance issues that need to be satisfied. If you are selling something like machinery, you already know to ask about environmental issues. But what about IT? Security is a huge issue. No company wants IT problems. A company is going to want to be especially sure IT problems do not make the national news, like Target. Not good for the career of anyone who signed off on Target’s IT security buying decision. Finally, and this sounds simple but people forget the simple, look at a calendar. Are any holidays coming up that might delay contract signing? Foreign companies have different holidays than in the United States, so you will want to check. Check religious holidays. Vacations are also a factor, particularly if a decision maker has one planned. Times to be particularly careful are the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s when a lot of people may take time off. The latter two are international holidays. Design your sales process with the buyer in mind, and ensure that you are tracking with your buyer throughout the process. Anticipate the challenges to close the deal, and proactively take measures to avoid slippage. ———————————————————————— COMPLIMENTARY REPORT Organizations invest substantially in sales training and development. This complimentary report from Training Industry and Richardson summarizes data and provides recommended strategies for maximizing the impact of sales training over time. Click here or on the image below to download this report. The post Quarter-end Contracts Slip-sliding Away? Check Your Sales Process! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Opportunities and Challenges: Bersin’s Human Capital Predictions for 2014  We often come across research reports in the industry from thought leaders who we respect. If human capital management is of interest to you, we recommend "Predictions 2014" by Bersin by Deloitte, a human resource-focused consulting subsidiary of Deloitte. The subtitle gives a good idea of what this report is about: "Building A Strong Talent Pipeline for The Global Economic Recovery — Time for Innovative and Integrated Talent and HR Strategies." The link for the report can be found by clicking  here. Take a look. You will find it useful. Josh Bersin, the human resources expert who wrote this report, is guardedly optimistic about 2014, calling it a year of "global transition and recovery."  He sees the year as being both an opportunity and a challenge. He sees a new focus on company growth, and growth-oriented companies will have to compete for the right talent. They will have to invest in developing leaders and creating a progressive and dynamic place where people want to work. People must have a feeling that their work is appreciated and that they can rise as far as their skills, and desires, will take them. They have to have a supportive company culture. Unfortunately, there will a short supply of people with certain key skills. One key skill is experienced leadership. Companies seek leadership that can motivate employees, not just order them what to do. Education and training can help meet skill needs, but, as more and more baby boomers reach retirement age, companies are expressing concern as to whether this will be sufficient in the future. Bersin calls for "Integrated Capability Development," as opposed to just learning, for developing people with the needed skills. Throughout the report, he makes the point that people are a company’s major resource. Treating staff well is the way to get the most out of staff, but a company always has to be aware of what skills and capabilities it needs now and will need in the future. It has to develop the skills within the company. Companies have to develop a "supply chain" of skills to meet needs when they arise. They have to develop what sports teams call a "strong bench" to be sure they can meet expected capability needs. Bersin raises the interesting issue of software firms moving to different parts of the world to tap into foreign local talent to meet their needs. Not just "third world" centers, such as Bangalore, India, but also Silicon Alley in New York City and the home of the "Beltway Bandits" in suburban Washington, D.C. A company’s competitors will know these places. He suggests firms look for ways to develop local talent where they are, not just on the other side of the world. Staff development programs typically include well-known elements like performance management, but Bersin strongly advises that companies add programs such as career planning and development, basic coaching, training to refresh and update skills, formal and informal feedback, recognition, and other programs. Training and staff development programs also have to interface with other programs and with current and future company needs. This report stresses the need for data collection and use. A company has to know not only where it is going but also where it is now. Data analysis, and training for that matter, has to remember that a simple system used effectively is better than a complicated, even more comprehensive system not used effectively. We have only skimmed the surface of this interesting and valuable report. The value for those of you involved in sales is to provide a better idea of the environment in 2014 and the years after. In sales, your basic need may be to understand the environment and how your product or service fits into the environment and becomes a "solution" for a client company. At 60-plus pages, this report is long, but it is well-structured and easy to read. This report is worth your time. COMPLIMENTARY RESEARCH REPORT Organizations invest substantially in sales training and development. This complimentary report from Training Industry and Richardson summarizes data and provides recommended strategies for maximizing the impact of sales training over time. Click here or on the image below to download this report. The post Opportunities and Challenges: Bersin’s Human Capital Predictions for 2014 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Improve your Sales Effectiveness with Insight and Dialogue Selling with insight is all the rage now.  I get why.  As Brian Fetherstonhsugh of OgilyOne has alluded, selling needs to evolve because buyer behavior has fundamentally changed.  While the impact of this is felt differently and more deeply in some industries and verticals than others (context and nuance always matter), the need for most selling organizations to evolve is clear. We get it, too, and designed our Selling with Insights® program to help clients make this shift.  Unless you want to get caught at the end of the buying process in a fiercely competitive battle for the business, where buyers have pre-decided solution options (fraught with their own bias and possible misconceptions) and with Procurement doing their best to commoditize you into a price war, it’s time to do something differently. Another Oldest, New Killer Sales Skills Enter insight, a timely approach given the era of Big Data, right?  I won’t spoil the moment by reminding you that selling with insight is not new… it’s been done successfully in professional services for years, and used elsewhere and very successfully by top-performing reps (think the top 20% of the top 20%. Very similar to our 2013 post on dialogue being the oldest, new killer sales skill.)   What we’ve really done is create an insight methodology that is replicable and can be scaled across a sales organization, without requiring reps to become something they’re not or start challenging their prospects and clients. A View into Deja Vu At one of my past employers, the very top reps used their knowledge gained from experience and perspective gained through research to completely reframe how customers saw an issue, and offer an innovative solution to a common challenge. It was a stunningly-brilliant and customer-oriented approach that yielded great results. (For the fellow geeks in the house we showed a statistically significant difference in outcomes for those reps who used this approach.) Did these reps challenge their customers?  Did they go in swinging with their insights or bludgeon clients or try to shock them with their brilliance? Sorry to disappoint, perhaps, but not a chance.  They actually worked hard to AVOID shocking their clients and reduce the risk of walking into a surprise jab (avoiding what I like to call "black eye/bloody nose syndrome").  My friend Dave Brock has written about the dangers of selling with insight here.  I paraphrase one of his examples often, saying, "Pit a 25 year-old enterprise software sales rep against a 47-year old, battle-worn CIO, and have that rep ‘challenge’ the CIO about how he sees his business, and see how well that works out for the rep."  Greg Alexander of Sales Benchmark Index wrote about one of his unfortunate experiences shadowing a Challenger rep, here. It’s ugly.  I know these are extreme examples, but unfortunately, we frequently hear that companies struggle to operationalize an insight-led approach. In contrast, the reps I mentioned earlier used a very educational, respectful approach. There were times when they did share information and insights outright (and did it with confidence and presence, completely without arrogance), but there were just as many where they led their clients to a new realization through questions, leading an open dialogue. In the room, you could see the gears turning in their prospects’ heads… they’d lean forward, brows wrinkled, heads tilted, questions leaked out, and sometimes, a few objections or resistance. But you could literally see them thinking.  At the end, you could always see the proverbial light bulb go off over their heads.  It was a process that was always very respectful and engaged the client at every step. The reps led the client to a new understanding and new solution for an old problem, that provided bigger benefits at a similar or reduced price.  At the end of the dialogue, it was such a no-brainer for customers to buy that most did.  Did everyone "get it" and buy exactly what the rep recommended?   Of course not.  It was a pretty radical departure from what others were doing. It worked more often than not for these top producers and I didn’t see or hear about reps being tossed out for challenging customers either.  In the calls I observed personally, clients went out of their way to thank the reps for helping them see things differently. Yup.  It’s Still About Dialogue. It’s probably no surprise to those who have followed Richardson for a while that we believe selling is still all about having an effective dialogue.  Sure, there are times when you lead with insight, versus questions, because the changes in buyer behavior demand that you get it  in early or cut through the clutter, or build credibility and differentiate yourself.  At the end of the day, once you capture attention, gain interest, and hopefully orchestrate an Aha Moment… it’s the dialogue that takes it home from there (and honestly, even our insight-led models incorporate dialogue within the models). What Makes This Work? There is no single defining moment, but rather a series of steps and skills that when combined completely shift the approach and increase the effectiveness. Pick a capability you want to support with insight. The capability must address a significant challenge or enable a considerable opportunity for your clients. Find or gather your research, data, case studies, white papers, or experience gained from knowledge, which either increases the weight of the challenge/opportunity, or helps clarify the solution you offer as the best approach. (See this post for tips on creating an Aha Moment by juxtaposing two points to create a resolvable tension.)  Not every Aha Moment has to be Earth-shattering, but the more you can bring a surprise to the table or a perspective that could help someone see the issue or solution differently, the better. (You can see that some advance thinking or research may need to go into this step.) Develop an Insight Blueprint™ to codify and capture the thinking around the Challenge/Opportunity, the Insights, the Capabilities/Differentiators, and more. This is the source document where the information and logic path are contained. Use the information in the Blueprint source document combined with what you know about a prospect’s or client’s real situation to personalize an Insight Message (we have a model for this). In this stage, you need to think about how you can position the Insight to influence the client’s thinking or help them see things in a new way. Deliver your Insight Message in the context of a dialogue or sales conversation. All of this must be done well to improve sales performance and increase win rates, but it’s that last bullet where the magic happens.  We teach reps to identify what stage the decision maker is at in their Buying Process, to identify the appropriate Selling Mode (where you Create, Shape, or Respond to opportunities). Then, we teach dialogue models that will get the best results for each mode, and teach reps how to plug their Insight Message into the dialogue. This is where strong dialogue skills come into play, such as the Six Critical Skills and others taught in our foundational Consultative Selling Skills course. This is so much more than just "making a pitch" (that term still makes my skin crawl) or a presentation. This is an influential, ethical, respectful dialogue between business professionals. Is that easy?  No.  Is this different than what most reps typically do?  By far.  Can you just hold a training event and hope for change?  Hardly - you know better.  Done with mastery and sustained throughout the period of culture and behavior change, can it transform your company’s sales effectiveness?  Yes, it can.  This is what the very top reps in some industries have been doing for years.  Now, the changes in buying behavior are pushing many more of us in this direction. Are you feeling the push, in your industry, your company, with your sales force?  If so, we’re here to help. The post Improve your Sales Effectiveness with Insight and Dialogue appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Overcoming The Fear of Selling to the CFO Anyone know a good Chief Financial Officer (CFO) joke they’d like to share? Here’s one. Joe managed a large account that required him to interact periodically with that company’s CFO.  Joe dreaded these meetings, and would prepare meticulously with spreadsheets, slide shows, and any other supporting material imaginable. One day Joe gets a call from his day-to-day contact in the account informing him that a scheduled meeting would need to be postponed because the CFO had a heart attack. To which Joe replied, "You mean he has a heart?" Many professionals who sell high-value B2B solutions will share Joe’s feelings and frustrations, but there’s no easy way around this obstacle. Once the cost of a purchase starts bumping-up against a certain amount, or if contract terms start to drift outside of the normal, you can bet the CFO will become involved.  The CFO may become involved earlier, even just to have the finance department sign off on contracts. That is the CFO’s job. Getting through and effectively selling to the CFO is your job. Let’s use a medical analogy - a bit strange, perhaps, but bear with me. The pain is that sales people fear selling to the CFO, and become uncomfortable when the CFO gets involved. But the pain has to be cured, or you won’t be able to do your best work of selling the product or the service. Simply: You need to understand the CFO. You need to be able to view the world from the CFO’s perspective. You need to position your product or service as a solution, a compelling way to solve their problem and meet their needs. Start with learning your CFO’s priorities. CFO magazine, a specialized web journal, recently published a good summary of general company financial priorities for 2014. Some or all of these will affect your potential customer. Raising some of these issues with your contact at the company, or even directly with the CFO, will be very useful.  You can find the article at http://bit.ly/1drpcIC. Outlook 2014 starts with what might be called the "Big Two" of CFO concerns, the Affordable Care Act, better known as "Obamacare," and regulatory changes.  CFOs will have opinions on whether Obamacare and specific new regulations should exist. But in the real world they exist, and have to be taken into account. Your job is to find out how much of a handicap they pose for individual companies, or the companies think they pose, and what impact this will have on the money available to spend on your product or service. Technology is cited as a CFO interest, including "cloud" computing. Data security is a major factor. A company does not want to lose confidential information, or, even worse, make the news because it has lost this information. This is not good for business. CFOs will be interested in currency risk, particularly in the many companies involved in foreign trade.  If costs are locked in at the time of a contract, a volatile currency might greatly lower the value of a contract to a company. These are all realities for the company, for the CFO, and for you.  But the article provides a piece of good news for those selling to companies - curing the pain may be less challenging than you think.   Six out of ten CFOs of growth companies are setting higher growth targets for this year. Your job is not done. You need to find out more about the particular CFO and company.  Ask your contacts in the company. Simple, but it can be quite effective. They should even be pleased you are making the effort.  One excellent first question is to ask how big a contract has to be before the CFO becomes directly involved.  When does the CFO have to approve the contract? What role will the CFO play under different contract conditions? Are you selling a "budgeted purchase" — was it planned before hand with its need recognized. Is the purchase "unbudgeted," with the need suddenly apparent? In this case there might be less time for the purchase to be studied, and you may have a better chance of quick approval. The material you found on the web may be able to tell how well the client’s financial plan is being implemented. No plan ever works perfectly, but how well is this company keeping up with its current plan?  It won’t hurt to ask. You are going to want to do outside research to learn what you can about the company - at least some before your first meeting with the company.  Check the company web site. Public companies have to issue periodic reports. Their web sites should have these reports. You can find their Securities and Exchange Commission reports at http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm.  Private company information is harder to find, but the larger ones will have web sites.  Some places to start researching a private company, or a public company, are attached as the appendix to this column. Armed with information on the company and the CFO, you now have to relate your product or service to company needs.  You have to make a case that what you call your solution actually is a solution to helping the company meet its growth targets. Start with the core issue, money. What is the ROI, return on investment - in English, how much more money will they make by purchasing your solution?  Almost by definition, the ROI will have to be better than the alternatives. Products and services both have ROIs. What is the total ownership cost for products? Basically, what does the product cost above the initial cost? Is your solution something that would be "capitalized" (paid for all at once) or "expensed", paid for when the expenses actually occur? Capitalizing lowers profits at the start. Expensing lowers profits for each period the expense occurs, but by less each time. Can billing for your solution be adjusted to fit into the most convenient schedule for the client? If not, you will have to make a stronger case for what you are offering. Finally, how will the product or service help the CFO lower risk, which is one of his or her main jobs?  The CFO wants a product or service to help decrease any number of risks to the company. These risks fun from the relatively minor risk of more work, to major threats to the company. The role of the CFO in a company is a reality you have to discover and map to be effective at sales.  It is one part of the basic need to focus sales on what the customer needs and wants. Appendix: Research Sources Below are some databases to use in researching companies.  They are subscriptions services, and often not cheap.  But they may be worth the cost.  You might also be able to use some of the sources at a public library or university library. Bloomberg Finance Markets - http://www.bloomberg.com/ Business Source Premier  - http://www.ebscohost.com/academic/business-source-premie Capital IQ  - https://www.capitaliq.com/home.aspx Factiva  - http://www.dowjones.com/factiva/index.asp?link=factivacomURLdirect Hoover’s  - http://www.hoovers.com/ OneSource  - http://www.onesource.com/corporate/ Priv Co - www.privco.com —————————————————— Industry Specific Sales Training Interested in learning more about Richardson’s industry specific sales training solutions? Click here to take a look at our February featured industry, Financial Services.       The post Overcoming The Fear of Selling to the CFO appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.