Cross-selling Effectively into the Crosswinds of Financial Services It is said that oak trees grow strong in contrary winds. In the crosswinds of deregulation and re-regulation, financial institutions have gotten bigger, more complex, and more attuned to risk. As they turn up the pressure to drive revenue, cross-selling effectively takes on new levels of urgency and complexity. So, how does a client-facing professional stay grounded in these crosswinds while still advocating for his or her clients? Let’s start with the issues.   As financial institutions continue to grow their fee-based businesses, they have pushed into an increasing number of product lines, and leaders are seeking cross-sell production across these product lines. This makes it more difficult for the client-facing financial professional to stay current on a wider scope of client needs, keep pace with a broader range of capabilities, and to build trust, skill, and alignment with a new and changing group of partners. What’s changed with clients and internal partners? Attractive clients are exercising their buying power and are increasing demand for customized services and pricing. At the same time, there is growing pressure to standardize as financial institutions seek to reduce risk and increase profit margins. Historically, client-facing professionals felt the advantage in these discussions, always able to invoke "the client" to push through an unusual structure or fee arrangement. However the balance of power has shifted, as influence has grown among risk, legal, compliance, and finance professionals. This has created unusually high tension with what used to be considered "support" groups, and makes it increasingly difficult to deliver on client demands. As a leader, have you noticed the rising intensity of these competing pressures as you get pulled into heated client and internal discussions? Five Best Practices for Cross-selling Effectiveness So with all these crosswinds swirling around you and your team, how can you, your team, and your business get stronger? Here are five best practices that we see among leaders of winning teams to hit cross-selling targets in the midst of all the competing pressures mentioned above: Team preparation: As your team increasingly works alongside partners from business units with whom they have little or no track record, this increases the importance of sharpening your team’s ability to lead or contribute to an effective pre-call meeting. This can include: Modeling, and reinforcing among your team, the importance of creating rapport with new partners; Checking in before significant client meetings or pitches to be sure that client knowledge is being effectively transferred among team members, that the team is setting clear and unified meeting objectives, and that roles and responsibilities for the meeting are being clearly carved out; and Requiring, and playing a role in, team practice sessions. Team execution: Conducting an effective one-on-one sales meeting is challenge enough; adding teammates, especially unfamiliar ones, makes it far tougher. Without effective team preparation, it is extremely tough for a selling or account team to convey or gain alignment during a meeting. Leaders at effective cross-selling organizations ensure their account or pitch teams have sorted and practiced the following: How the team’s leader will set the stage Sequencing and delivery of introductions Key questioning areas and who on the team will take the lead into each Flow of capabilities or solution discussion Who will close and what it sounds like Team follow-up: We find that crisp and thorough follow-up is more the exception than the rule. Team follow-through tends to be more disjointed among teams unfamiliar with one other. There can be such a wide range of perceptions and expectations — on both your team’s side of the table and the client’s. So, it is essential for teams to debrief as soon as possible after the client, prospect, or center of influence meeting to compare notes and agree on accountabilities. Leaders play a key role in insisting on and participating in formal post-mortems. Realign with internal partners: There has always been a healthy tension between revenue-producing and non-revenue groups. Today, many would use an adjective other than "healthy" to describe this tension. To facilitate more productive interactions with those whose charge it is to mitigate risk, consider asking your team to apply the same rigor to discussions with internal partners as they do with clients, employing best practices in engagement processes and skills. Helpful reminders include: Taking time to create and build authentic rapport with internal partners; Approaching significant discussions - such as those where an unusual structure, provision or a client requirement for non-standard reporting is being presented - by setting a clear objective and agenda; Practicing with others and testing, for feedback, key parts of the discussion; Doing less talking — and more questioning and listening — facilitates partnership, collaboration and agreement; Following through on agreements and next steps builds productive relationships among colleagues. Sharpen your value prop: Increasingly, there can be a gap between what the client is demanding and what your organization is willing or able to deliver. If this gap is large, well understood, and real, this opportunity may not be qualified. We find that there are many situations in which teams react to what gets voiced by the client as a demand, with less than a full understanding of the client’s interests. In these cases, there is a coaching opportunity for you and a chance for the team to do more discovery. This can result in a win when the team is able to persuasively link capabilities to the client’s needs in such a way that makes the solution feel custom-made for this client. Use your team meetings, one-on-ones, and down time between joint calls to leverage these five best practices. This will position you and your team to get stronger — like the oak tree in the face of contrary winds — and to boost cross-selling effectiveness with partners and clients. ——————————————— To learn more about Richardson specialized sales training for Financial Services companies, please click here. Download our newest E-book,  A Financial Services Leader Guide for Sales Success.        The post Cross-selling Effectively into the Crosswinds of Financial Services appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Building Healthy SaaS Revenue: 4 Keys for Landing New Logos  Cloud computing, and the evolution of software as a service (SaaS), has transformed the technology industry. According to IBM, 85% of all new software is now being built for the cloud, and by 2016, one quarter of all applications being used around the world will be available in the cloud. At the same time, SaaS solutions have transformed how businesses select, buy, and use software. At least half the time, if not more, SaaS vendors will sell directly to functional or business-unit stakeholders rather than just to IT people. The sales emphasis is now on a SaaS solution’s value to the business — not on the underlying technology. The nature of the sales dialogue between SaaS vendors and customers looks and sounds very different than it did in the days of on-premises applications. Traditionally, software licensing models were also based on one-time, upfront licensing fees, along with the inevitable (and expensive and painful) installation services and support packages. Such purchases committed organizations to their decisions, often for years at a time. It’s a very different world for SaaS vendors. Pay-as-you-go pricing and very low installation costs make it essential to deliver lasting value, keep customers engaged and satisfied, and generate stable long-term revenue streams. This transformation poses major challenges for many sales organizations. New buyers, changing business models, and shifting expectations require innovative new tactics to win deals, build strong relationships, and deliver the long-term value that SaaS customers demand. These tactics also provide a vital competitive advantage in a SaaS market where firms are under constant pressure to stay ahead of the competition. Phase One, in a manner of speaking, is landing the customer. We believe that two key activities and two key dialogues are essential for success. Key Activity 1: Understanding today’s SaaS buyers. According to a December 2013 study by Gartner Group, nearly half of all IT buying decisions are made or influenced by business-unit stakeholders. We believe an even higher percentage of these business users are involved in SaaS buying decisions given the ease with which these users can evaluate, select, and implement SaaS solutions. Most IT organizations still play at least an advisory role in SaaS buying decisions. Nevertheless, it’s important that your sales team develop the processes necessary to identify today’s SaaS buyers, to reach them with effective messaging, and to establish the value of your solution in terms that make sense to them. Key Activity 2: Establishing a repeatable sales process. Successful SaaS organizations are able to absorb and apply lessons learned from every customer contact function. Sales, marketing, customer service and support, and product development must treat organizational learning as a formal discipline. As customers use the product and achieve business value, the SaaS vendor uses these insights to improve its products and processes to add even more value. The SaaS sales team is a vital part of this organizational learning curve. The sales team must align with marketing and product design, understand how customers buy and use the product, document and validate its sales processes against that knowledge, and finally scale what it has learned for use by the whole company sales force. Organizations that establish a repeatable sales process are better prepared to position their SaaS offerings in the marketplace and to make the best use of sales resources. Key Dialogue 1: Learning to speak the buyer’s language. We already know that miscommunication between sales teams and buyers can be costly. According to Forrester Research, just 1 in 10 executives say they get value from meetings with salespeople. This problem is quite a handicap to overcome, especially in the SaaS market, where sales teams may be accustomed to speaking the language of IT buyers — not the business-unit buyers they increasingly encounter. Effective communication isn’t just a matter of speaking "business language" or avoiding technology jargon. The shift to SaaS and the cloud also requires the ability to address decentralized departmental buying centers. Salespeople have to frame the conversation in terms of operating budgets rather than CapEx. They have to focus on productivity, flexibility, usability, and other business-related impacts. Key Dialogue 2: Communicating value without overpromising. For better or for worse, over-promising on traditional on-premises applications was a low-risk proposition. Once a customer committed to a solution, they typically had little choice but to forge ahead. SaaS applications, by comparison, give customers the opportunity to continually hold vendors accountable for their product claims. If customers are disappointed, they’re less likely to renew their subscriptions. Successful SaaS sales teams know how to engage buyers in open, honest, and transparent conversations about a solution’s capabilities and benefits. A well-trained sales team will understand how to explain and demonstrate a solution’s business value without resorting to exaggeration or unsustainable claims. They also understand how to begin a dialogue with customers that is based on trust, honesty, and a shared vision of success. The key thing for SaaS salespeople to remember is once their sale is made, the selling process is not over. ——————————— COMPLIMENTARY BRIEF Click here to down load our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Building Healthy SaaS Revenue: 4 Keys for Landing New Logos appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Decision-making Needs Room for Big Data and Emotions Few people need convincing that big data is not a phenomenon or fad. The ability to collect, track, measure, and analyze vast amounts of information to know more about your business, including sales, customer habits and trends, internal business processes, and supply chains, is too much to pass up. In fact, it’s often more than most businesses can handle. It’s not industry- or function-specific either — a quick scan of headlines across trade publications reveals that taking advantage of big data is on everyone’s mind. Recent research shows just how much importance business leaders place on leveraging big data. According to KPMG’s Global Consumer Executive Top of Mind Survey 2014, "consumer company executives were clearly affected by the transformative impact that data and data-related issues are having on their companies and the industry. Data analytics and digital strategy were rated as the two most important areas of strategic focus (rated as having ‘very’ or ‘critical’ importance) in the coming year … Further, 40 percent of executives said the importance of data overall was at a critical level." Fifty-six percent of respondents ranked data analytics as most critical to their strategy ahead of other areas, such as human resources, growth and international expansion, and consumer health and wellness. Sales leaders must then realize that their clients and prospects might also be using big data as an input for their selection and purchase decisions. How does that impact your sales reps’ efforts to connect with their buyers? It’s Not Just About the Data Before bowing blindly at the altar of big data, though, another study provides a compelling counterpoint. The new report entitled "Only Human: The Emotional Logic of Business Decisions" from Fortune Knowledge Group and gyro Research reveals the undervalued role of emotion in business decisions. Among the key findings about the role of emotions in decision-making: Human factors are the deciding factors: Nearly two-thirds (65%) of executives say subjective factors that can’t be quantified (including company culture and corporate values) increasingly make a difference when evaluating competing proposals. Only 16% disagree. Executives "trust their gut:" A majority (62%) of executives say it is often necessary to rely on gut feelings and soft factors. Strong reputations and cultures win: When choosing a company to do business with, 70% of respondents cite reputation as the most influential factor. Company culture was also a top driver according to 53% of executives surveyed. Analytical insight requires emotional insight: A majority (61%) of executives agree that when making decisions, human insights must precede hard analytics. Positive gains outweigh negative risks: Most executives (68%) say that the ambition, admiration, and potential rewards outweigh fear of failure and being blamed for making a bad call. Long-term partnerships are the goal: The long-term gains are worth the short-term financial risks according to 71% of respondents. The Best Choice Incorporates Both Data and Emotions into Decision-making Clearly, there are pros and cons for placing absolute faith in either approach. Here are just a few considerations for each: Decisions Based on Emotions Pro — Based on past experience and knowledge of the subject/issues at hand Pro — Benefits from intuition Pro — Can see the difference between common practice (as represented by big data) and unique circumstances for specific clients or buyers Con — Might fail to recognize important but not obvious trends borne out of big data analytics Con — Might make knee-jerk decisions without patience and supporting research Decisions Based on Big Data Pro/Con — Removes human emotions Pro — Can process vast amounts of information Pro — Once data are collected and analyzed, decisions can be made swiftly Con — If the data aren’t complete or unbiased, basis for decision could be misleading Con — Could include old data that is no longer relevant or which has changed Big data should be a component of decision-making but not the sole factor. The absence of human emotions and instinct in decision-making puts us that much closer to a Terminator-like experience where machines are choosing for us. Few decisions in life are ever purely black and white, and that requires the careful assessment of multiple inputs — including data, experience, and instinct — in order to make the best choices. Make informed decisions that include all relevant data analyses, but also weigh human emotion, experience, and instinct before making the final call. Don’t ignore the data, but don’t be a robot either. Implications for Sales Reps and Teams With this in mind, realize that your prospects are making decisions in this same manner whether consciously or not. Therefore, encourage your sales reps to learn to sell not just on data or emotion, but to incorporate both elements into their sales pitches. You need data to substantiate the problem, your solution and experience, and the benefits buyers can derive from choosing you. But, you also need to be able to describe what’s in it for them in a qualitative way, not just quantitatively. Perhaps the data reveal that a product or solution will be the most effective, but if people don’t like or feel good about the experience, then it will likely fail. ——————————— COMPLIMENTARY BRIEF Click here to down load our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Decision-making Needs Room for Big Data and Emotions appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Selling SaaS: Essential Activities and Key Dialogues to Expand After You Land  Closing deals is important. However, closing alone is not sufficient for SaaS company success. Driving to profitable growth requires generating renewals, maintaining cash flow, and minimizing customer churn. This quest for lifetime customer value depends on two key activities and two key dialogues: Key Activity 1: Mastering the art and science of Customer Success Management. In the SaaS market, a "closed" deal never truly closes. Every conversation and point of contact contributes to a customer’s lifetime value from your system — to making what you sell a real solution. The sales, marketing, customer service, and product development teams must work together and demonstrate ongoing value to buyers — keeping buyers engaged, satisfied, and successful. This is the essence of Customer Success Management, and it’s a life-or-death issue for any SaaS provider. This ongoing quest for lifetime value begins with setting up the customer’s system, but it’s far more than simply an implementation issue. The solution provider must serve as a trusted advisor, anticipating buyers’ needs, helping them to see around corners, and enabling them to leverage the platform’s full capabilities. Key Activity 2: Measuring and reporting on customer business impacts. Success Management also involves knowing whether your customers are getting the value they expect from a SaaS platform. Clear and open communication is important here, but so is the ability to use a SaaS platform’s analytical capabilities — not just to do things, but to record results and enable the data to be analyzed. The use and engagement metrics your customers generate are very useful indicators — if you know how to identify the metrics that matter. Sales teams play a key role in this activity when they help buyers identify and articulate their goals and standards for success. These insights, in turn, support a SaaS vendor’s ability to measure the platform’s business impact and to report back on possible problems. Armed with this knowledge, the vendor can help customers proactively address issues and ensure that they are getting value from their investments. Key Dialogues (1): Resolving service issues promptly. Customer service in the SaaS world isn’t just about answering support calls. It’s about maintaining the right relationships with key customer stakeholders, engaging in conversations with these stakeholders, and uncovering potential service issues even before they become sources of customer concern. The sales team’s responsibility for maintaining and nurturing these relationships extends far beyond the sale. It is worth repeating that successful SaaS vendors know that there’s no such thing as a truly closed deal — only ongoing relationships. Key Dialogues (2): Uncovering and addressing the buyer’s evolving needs. There’s another important aspect to the customer conversation. Vendors must recognize that the capabilities that make a customer satisfied and successful today may not do so in the future. Instead, a SaaS provider’s sales team and other stakeholders must always think ahead on the buyer’s behalf — providing insights and positioning value-creating ideas that continue to generate business value. This is a challenging process. This may require an intimate understanding of the customer’s business environment, growth opportunities, organizational culture, and other factors. The payoff, however, is the ability to move the customer to higher-value SaaS products, to ensure that the customer realizes long-term value from these upgrades, and to continue to make a compelling case for keeping the customer engaged with your platform. The bottom line is that the sales and service process for the cloud is as least as customer-centric, if not more, as effective sales. A SaaS provider has to continue to prove relevance to customer needs. The good news is that the SaaS provider has continuing opportunities to prove that their product is relevant to what a customer needs. ——————————————————— COMPLIMENTARY RICHARDSON TECHNOLOGY BRIEF Click here to down load our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Selling SaaS: Essential Activities and Key Dialogues to Expand After You Land appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Are Your Salespeople Poised to Sell to Today’s Buyers? Few people need convincing that considerable power and influence has shifted to customers and prospective buyers. Much of this has been driven by technology and access to information. The challenge isn’t necessarily to recognize this change in the buying and selling environment, but to know what to do about it. Sales organizations or individual reps mired in the old ways of selling are destined to fall short of their target and find themselves in trouble or replaced by those that "get it." Are your sales reps poised to sell to today’s buyers? Are they confident doing so, is it a stretch, or is it far beyond their comfort zone? A recent Bain Brief underscored what’s at stake: "As customers seize the balance of power and more aspects of the sales process migrate online, leading B2B sales organizations find they must radically restructure their approach." According to the article, those companies that succeed in making those radical changes "are realizing EBITDA growth of 20% to 25%" by following what they refer to as six imperatives, which are listed below. Six Imperatives for the New Reality of Sales 1) Stay on target. Develop a sales system that matches the right offer at the right time to the target segment and delights customers based on a deep understanding of their priorities. You must be keenly aware of your targets’ (both prospects and current customers) wants and desires as well as challenges and opportunities. This must be done in real time - not monthly or quarterly - to be of service before a competitor beats you to it. 2) Know customer value and values. Enable your front line to understand a customer’s value to the firm’s growth and profitability, as well as the customer’s decision dynamics. This is more than knowing an industry or individual, but rather each target’s specific corporate culture, operating environment, and preferences. Each selling opportunity must be treated as unique and specific, not generalized or based on assumptions. 3) Re-imagine the channel mix. Invest in low- and high-touch channels to match sales capacity with opportunity and customer preference, then double down on self-service digital channels to help customers help themselves, earning loyalty and a high ROI. Don’t put all of your marketing and sales eggs in one basket - either traditional channels or purely social media. Balance the old and new and (re)deploy your resources accordingly where they can be of best use and value to your buyers. 4) Align resources across marketing and sales. Seamlessly integrate marketing priorities with sales channel mix and capacity. Rethink where marketing ends and sales begins, as buying processes begin earlier than ever. Force your team to think from the outside-in to see what your buyers are exposed to from both push and pull perspectives. Does it jibe, or is it disjointed and confusing? Get your act together to tell a consistent story and present a cohesive story to your buyers. Also consider how much information you’re sharing with targets and at what stage of the sales process. You have to be willing to give buyers something to keep them interested. If it’s not enough, they’ll likely keep searching until they find what they’re looking for (from your competitors). 5) Raise the bar on talent. To build the next generation of sellers, elevate expectations and strengthen capabilities. Recruit people with relevant expertise, and train sellers to make the most of their time with customers. What competencies are required of your sales roles for success? How can you help them master those competencies and skills? Adjust your training programs accordingly and be prepared to make tough decisions about those who can’t make the transition to support your new approach to selling. 6) Get the wiring right to unlock sales capacity. To reinforce new behaviors and track effectiveness, invest in data and analytics, system linkages, compensation and tools. Once you’ve mastered the first five items, the last thing you want to do is torpedo your efforts by maintaining old habits, tools, or administrative tasks that are out of sync with your new approach. Take a step back to ensure that all touchpoints from marketing to IT, HR, and Accounting and beyond are supporting your new reality and not dragging your sales team back to the past. This research by Bain and the findings they put forth in their paper are enlightening. The world of buying and selling is moving into new territory, to which sales organizations need to adapt in order to remain relevant and competitive. Such strategic changes need to be implemented through your people, which is easier said than done. How will you move your organization from where you are to where you need to be? Few companies or leaders can get there on their own. Helping to set the right course to train your people and change their behaviors to align with your new selling strategy and priorities is our specialty. COMPLIMENTARY RICHARDSON TECHNOLOGY BRIEF Click here to down load our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Are Your Salespeople Poised to Sell to Today’s Buyers? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Why Successful Team Selling Is Like a Game of Jenga There are several reasons that can prompt you to sell in teams to land new business or retain existing accounts. How you assemble and manage those teams can have a tremendous impact on their success. It is important to recognize when individual sales reps may no longer have the necessary skills or expertise. Many industries have experienced growth, evolution, and specialization, which makes it more challenging for generalist sales reps to keep up and maintain their expertise. It is common for sales reps selling within an industry to have worked in that sector earlier in their career. But while the basics remain the same, the longer they’re on the outside looking in, they risk losing touch and expertise with the nuances that have emerged. Rather than putting these sales reps out to pasture, partner them with appropriate subject matter experts. But perhaps a more common theme is that sales situations have become more complex, which often requires more resources, perspective, and attention than one sales rep can reasonably provide. Selling to financial services and institutions is certainly one example in which changes to the business, as well as external regulatory demands, require more expertise than ever before. Depending on what’s being sold and to whom, you can find examples of similarly more complex sales in just about any other industry. One of the concerns we’ve observed from our clients is that teamwork is often misaligned. Perhaps you’re already selling in teams and have done so for some time. Well, what if the client’s business has changed? Or, the way they’re organized internally has shifted, yet you’ve failed to adapt to a model or team structure that matches. Clients and prospects are likely to feel more comfortable with a seller that understands them and their business. If your configuration (or lack of) is markedly different from how they are organized, they might be wary of your ability to "get" their challenges and concerns and to provide an effective solution that supports and aligns with their business and doesn’t require them to bend over backwards to make it work. The Solution: Developing Effective and Efficient Team Selling As my colleague Michael Dalis noted in a recent post, leaders of winning sales teams are changing how their sales reps prepare for, execute, and follow through on client or partner interactions to address these challenges. They are also careful to realign with internal partners and sharpen their value propositions to take full advantage of their team-based approach to selling. Building the right team is akin to a successful game of Jenga: You need a strong sales rep to lead the team and provide a good foundation. Add the right pieces to grow the sales team, but ensure balance along the way. If you add too many pieces, that top-heavy structure will give way and come crashing down. (Too many people is inefficient and a distraction.) Likewise, a structure with holes or gaps will also topple. The successful end result appears to the beholder (the buyer) to be a complete structure with a stable foundation with no gaps or excess. You want to avoid your buyer thinking that your sales team is: Too big — Why is that guy here? He has contributed nothing to this process from what I can see. If this is how they operate, I don’t want to pay for bloated sales or service teams. Too small — That’s it?! Where’s the rest of the team? My business and needs are too complex for this paltry group. I expected their team to include more specialists who understand the nuances of my business. They obviously haven’t taken me or my business very seriously. When building teams that match your buyers’ needs and expectations, be sure to adhere to some basic tenets, such as identifying a team leader, selecting complementary and not combative personalities, and ensuring that team members have met and hopefully worked out a rapport with each other in advance of meeting the clients. Have you ever watched one of those ensemble cast TV shows in which the team of detectives, lawyers, doctors, etc., are so close that they finish each other’s sentences and naturally pick up where the other left off without missing a beat? That’s what you want for your sales teams, not ones who have obviously never worked together or who have vastly differing opinions, styles, and goals. Ask yourself whether it is more important for your buyers to adapt to how you are organized and sell or for your sales teams to adapt to your buyers. The answer should be a no brainer. Regardless of the team’s composition and size, it should be aligned to the needs of the selling situation and the buyer. ———————————————- To learn more about Richardson specialized sales training for Financial Services companies, please click here. Download our newest E-book, A Financial Services Leader Guide for Sales Success.   The post Why Successful Team Selling Is Like a Game of Jenga appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Sales: Do This, Not That!  Today’s post is written by Emma Snider from HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing and sales platform.  I have an astonishing appetite for candy, and it probably would have done me in long ago if not for the "Eat This, Not That!" series. Thanks to the book, I can still eat a sizable amount of candy without having as disastrous an impact on my waistline. ETNT prompted me to make the switch from Butterfingers to fun-sized York Peppermint Patties. After the first few days of no longer indulging in my favorite treat, the initial shock was gone, and with Yorks in hand, my mood stabilized (I am now a confirmed junkie). My sweet tooth was still getting fed, just with not quite as many calories. While none of today’s sales practices are "junk food" per se, there are some areas that can be similarly tweaked for better results. And like my experience, the hardest part can be making the jump; once the changes are normalized, the result is often a healthier sales organization. With my candy experiment in mind, I present to you, "Do This, Not That: Sales edition." Do This: Research prospects before your first encounter Not That: Go into a cold call completely cold As Linda Richardson wrote in her latest book Changing the Sales Conversation, "Today, clients will respond to straight discovery questions and product talk with impatience." Salespeople should aim to learn as much as they can about prospects before they pick up the phone, send an e-mail, or swing by the office. With so much competing for potential buyers’ attention, salespeople who diligently do their research will stand a much better chance of being met with interest rather than brushed off with annoyance. Do This: Seek referrals Not That: Wait for them to trickle in Customer referrals are a remarkably effective channel to grow sales pipelines and revenue. Yet, salespeople are often hesitant to ask for referrals because they feel awkward or because they’re loath to spend time cultivating customer relationships when a new month’s quota is on the line. But, according to sales coach Rick Roberge, salespeople should proactively seek referrals (albeit gently). And it’s not as awkward if you work in the expectation from the start — Rick advises salespeople to bring up the topic of referrals even before a contract is signed. Do This: Optimize social accounts for social selling Not That: Use them as online resumes Social selling isn’t just learning how to spot a lead on Twitter or LinkedIn and following up in record time — it’s also about using these channels as a way to gain and demonstrate knowledge of your prospects’ industries and pressing issues. Therefore, social profiles and activities should be optimized for buyers, not for sales recruiters. Social selling expert Jill Rowley recommends that salespeople engage with buyers, thought leaders, and other industry influencers by commenting on, liking, and sharing their social posts, in addition to writing vivid profile headlines and summaries that are more than just mini-resumes. Do This: Read every day Not That: Stop learning when training ends Since buyers are much more informed about products and services today thanks to the abundance of online information, salespeople need to add value in other ways. Linda Richardson espouses the importance of insights — information that disrupts a prospect’s status quo by revealing a problem they might not be aware exists. Delivering insights sets the stage for trust and, potentially, a sale. Google can’t serve up insights — only a human can do that. Salespeople should keep up with their buyers’ industries by reading trade publications and following relevant influencers. Strive to set aside some time for reading every day. Do This: Conform your sales process to your prospect’s buying process Not That: Force buyers to fit your sales process Just like researching individual prospects and companies before you reach out, you should also learn as much as you can about your target audience’s buying process. This enables you to provide relevant information or assistance at just the right time and increases your chances of being treated as signal rather than noise. Do This: Recognize that sales hinge on you Not that: Rely on your product or service to make the sale In today’s sales environment, differentiation is no longer the realm of a product or service — it comes from the salespeople themselves. As Jill Konrath wrote in her book Agile Selling, "You know what buyers pick as the differentiator in their decisions? The sales experience — what it’s like working with you." So, how can you become a differentiator? With your knowledge. Buyers are looking for more than a canned sales pitch and a demo; they want people to work collaboratively with their team to solve business problems. If you develop the know-how to recognize and fix problems specific to an industry or type of company (here’s where reading comes in), buyers will take what you have to say — and sell — seriously. ——————————————————- COMPLIMENTARY RICHARDSON SALES TRAINING TECHNOLOGY BRIEF Click here to download our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Sales: Do This, Not That! appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Value Strategy: The Foundation of Collaborative Account Development Sales people must fully understand a client’s industry and business in order to bring real value to the client. This brings something into play called the value strategy, the way to gain this understanding. Value strategy is a plan of action designed to identify, generate, communicate and deliver the value that your company brings to the client. Why do you need such a strategy? If you cannot identify, generate, deliver, and communicate value, you cannot attain the status of a trusted advisor, one who is "at the table" not just when purchases are made but when decisions are being made. A good sales person is one who helps the client identify solutions to problems. A trusted advisor proactively helps the client identify problems and potential solutions. Communicating the value created is the key part of the value strategy process. Many salespeople believe that if they win opportunities in the sales process and their account teams implement the solution for the client flawlessly, the client will automatically recognize that value has been created. This is a mistake. Value not communicated is value not perceived by the client. Four factors make up a value strategy. Identify the business environment and business needs: There are trends in the clients’ industry affecting their business. In addition, the client has company goals, objectives, and challenging issues. Out of these trends and challenging issues arise opportunities to work together in order to improve the client’s performance. This includes identifying, and formulating, how the client defines value. Generate new ideas: One of the key behaviors of trusted advisors is that they bring new insights and ideas to their clients. These insights and ideas seek to change the status quo at the client in order to help the client keep up in a fast-paced and challenging business environment. Communicate the value to the client: How can your company deliver value to the client? Be sure the client also is told, and understands, how you can deliver value to the client’s stakeholder, including the client’s customers. Deliver: After you have worked hard to identify and generate new opportunities, your account team needs to deliver the solutions that deliver value to the client. This part of the value strategy is largely out of your control as company specialists take the lead in implementing the solution. Remember, though, that high-performing salespeople stay in regular contact with their clients to monitor client satisfaction and correct any problems that might arise. Client stakeholders want you to: know them, know their business, and come to them proactively with insights to improve the business. This is the way to increase your business from the particular client and to develop methods viable and appropriate from your other clients. Your client will see you as providing value to the business when you: Help the plan proactively for change, threats, and opportunities in the business environment. Understand the industry in which the client works. Have a deep understanding of what the client’s business needs to perform better. Build a persuasive business case that gets senior company leaders’ attention Advocate strongly for client interests within the vendor company. Assemble an expert account team that works well with client teams Make client feel you have the authority to make decisions, or at least strongly influence decision making. Make client feel you are "one of them." Improve client experience with your company. Help client be more effective and efficient in their business. Create a strong sense of urgency to seize opportunities in client market or markets. Provide an objective, strategic view of client business that is both accurate and informative. Have a compelling vision for how client and the sales person’s company should collaborate to co-create value. Solve problems and issues promptly and fairly. Meet and exceed agreed- upon performance requirements on a regular basis. Navigate company organizational politics in a way that gets things done. Act as a catalyst to create consensus among multiple stakeholders ———————————————————————————- Complimentary eBook Richardson is excited to announce the launch of our new eBook, A Leader’s Guide to Successfully Sell with Insights. The eBook highlights helpful tips that sales teams can use to deliver insights that provide more value to customers and win more deals. Download it now and help your sales team improve your sales conversations with insights and dialogue. Click here to download: The post Value Strategy: The Foundation of Collaborative Account Development appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Why a Collaborative Approach to Account Development Creates Better Outcomes Ask most people, "What word stands out to you in the phrase ‘Collaborative Account Development?’" Most point to the word "collaborative" — working together. In the case of sales, this is working together, with a client, to meet client needs. However, a tendency of companies is to try and sell by telling the clients what they can do for them rather than by working together as partners to build solutions. Why should you consider adopting a more collaborative approach to working with large clients? Being collaborative allows you to differentiate your personal brand and create mutual gain for your client’s organization and for your company. As a result, you become known to your client, and within your own company, as a person who can bring real value to both organizations. Because the business environment in which your clients operate has become more challenging, you need to increase your proficiency in identifying and meeting needs in order to have credibility as a trusted advisor, one who helps the client decide how to buy and doesn’t just sell. In the current business environment, strong external forces are shaping how companies act and react. Globalization has changed who companies sell to, who they buy from, and where they locate operations. Fewer resources have intensified the search for value at a specific price point. People are less certain and more anxious about their jobs and financial security of both their firms and themselves. There is more regulatory oversight and consumer scrutiny of firm’s actions. Four major challenges are emerging for most businesses: Renewed Emphasis on Price — Price has always been important in business. In today’s environment, there is much more reluctance to spend (or invest money), and thus funding is carefully scrutinized. Clients feel like they have to look longer and harder in order to justify why they are buying a particular solution at a specific price. As pricing pressures increase, more and more firms find clients trying to "commoditize" the solutions that vendors provide. Greater Complexity — The business environment has become increasingly complex. An IBM study of more than 1,500 CEOs cited increasing complexity as a major challenge to the managerial and leadership ranks of most companies. A majority of the CEOs in the study did not feel confident that their organizations had the ability to successfully adapt and respond to this complexity. Higher Levels of Ambiguity — Ironically, as access to information has proliferated, the level of ambiguity in the business environment has increased. This uncertainty makes it hard to determine what long-term strategies and short-term tactics will be most effective in reaching business goals and even whether those goals are still relevant. High levels of ambiguity create a tendency to preserve the status quo, although this is rarely an effective means of increasing revenue, saving on cost, or proactively managing risk. Decreasing Client Loyalty — The last decade has seen a divergence between client satisfaction and client loyalty. It used to be that when you checked with a client and the client said they were satisfied, this meant they would pick you over your competitors. Now, a client may say that they are satisfied or even very satisfied and still switch to a competitor. Long-term client loyalty is eroding. What is the result of these forces on how you sell to your large clients? Clients take time to really weigh value vs. price, which puts an emphasis on being able to quantify the value that you bring to the relationship. Clients are struggling with complexity, so trusted business advisors are needed to help them organize that complexity and, whenever possible, simplify rather than add to it. Higher levels of ambiguity means that most buying decisions are now made by consensus. This involves many more stakeholders than before, and salespeople need to develop coalitions in favor of changing the status quo. The decrease in client loyalty means that salespeople need to be continuously bringing new insights and ideas about how to help stakeholders improve their business performance and gain recognition from those stakeholders for the value created. Collaborative account development helps you look at your client’s needs from the point of view of the client while bringing in an outside objectivity. You will be able to elevate the level of your relationships with specific clients in order to have a "seat at the table" as their trusted business advisor. Clients don’t care about your latest product or your industry-leading service if it is not relevant to their goals, objectives, and business challenges. What your clients want from you are ways to better manage their businesses, which is what a trusted business advisor does. By consistently following this process of understanding your client’s business intimately, aligning your account team with the client, and engaging stakeholders to validate and modify opportunities to work collaboratively together, you create value for that client and earn a place in their decision-making process. —————————————————- Learn More About Richardson’s Collaborative Account Development Sales Training Programs Richardson’s Collaborative Account Development solution ensures your team has a consistent and repeatable account development process combined with superior dialogue skills. To learn more about this program and to download a complimentary brochure, please click here The post Why a Collaborative Approach to Account Development Creates Better Outcomes appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Insight Selling - How to Move Beyond an Inward Focus and a Product-based Message The Problem - Ultra Informed Buyers Today’s buyers are savvier than ever, which makes selling to them a greater challenge for sales reps and teams. Whether they’re interested in a one-off transaction for a particular product or service, or a long-term strategic partnership, customers from companies of any size and industry can research just about anything they desire online, which puts them in a position of strength over sellers. If your salespeople are selling the same old products the same old way, then you could very well be deep in a rut. Have you backed yourself into a corner as a commoditized order fulfillment broker rather than someone who can truly add value? As an example of what’s going on in the Financial Services sector, all buyers from individuals and wealthy families to investment committees, chief investment officers, and corporate treasurers are shielding themselves from sales pitches - using RFPs, consultants, procurement officers, and other gatekeepers. They are instead looking for insights and solutions relevant to their goals and challenges. This most obviously changes the game for the new business development officer who is finding it increasingly difficult to break through the clutter and get an appointment. However, this impacts every member of a client-retention or new-business pitch team, including senior leaders and subject matter experts, and their ability to communicate with clients in a way that causes them to engage rather than withdraw. Who can blame them? "Why should I buy (let alone listen to) what you’re selling? If I’m interested, I’ll research it myself and will contact you if I think you can help me." We’ve been so conditioned to Google everything and to keep those purse strings tight for so long that it’s now Pavlovian. (I’d also add that Caller ID has also further conditioned us to avoid picking up calls from unknown senders, which further confounds sellers, but that’s another topic.) With these barriers, how can sales reps regain some control and influence in the selling process? The Solution - Engaging and Selling with Value-Based Insights Many sales teams are anchored by experienced client-facing professionals who over time have developed a set way of talking about industry issues, your organization’s capabilities, and their own qualifications and experience. Even if they’re credible and brilliant, too often these ideas sound generic and frequently fall short of compelling clients, prospects, referral sources, and colleagues to act. It is easy to become complacent and inwardly focused. Unless you’re in a fast-changing business and have a lock on what the market needs, your salespeople need to find a way to move away from an inward, product-based focus and find a more enticing scenario to sell. Developing and delivering insights and solutions that resonate with clients, prospects, gatekeepers, and centers of influence is a remedy to overcome the same old approach. But as with many dialogue skills, execution is a trickier matter. Effective insights and solutions require preparation, deep and current industry and client knowledge, and a communication framework and skills that connect an issue that is relevant to your client with your organization’s ability to help. This should include examples of how this work has impacted others. Finally, value-based insights and solutions require practice to ensure that your people are at their most confident in delivery and, with the help of feedback, that the language they choose is easy to follow and relevant. Properly prepared and practiced value-based insights have wide application in building your business, enabling: Business developers to gain initial meetings; relationship managers to expand perceptions about your organization’s capabilities in a new area; you and other senior managers to differentiate your organization in a client or sales meeting; and subject matter experts to distinguish their ideas as being not just smart, but relevant to the client. Winning leaders engage their teams in this area by modeling and coaching on the preparation and delivery of relevant insights and solutions. Instead of allowing your sales team to go out and sell more widgets or widget-based services, teach them how to sell the value and need of those widgets through insights. "Here’s what’s happening in your industry. Maybe this is a surprise to you, or perhaps you knew about it, but didn’t realize the scope of the issue. We’ve helped other clients to overcome this problem (or take advantage of this unique opportunity), and here was the impact. We believe can help you, too. Would you be interested in learning more?" —————————————————————————- Help your Sales Team Sell More Effectively by Selling with Insights  Click the following to learn more about Richardson’s Selling With Insights sales training program.     The post Insight Selling - How to Move Beyond an Inward Focus and a Product-based Message appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How to Transition Your People from Taking Orders to Developing Key Accounts Strategically Without process and metrics, it is difficult to determine if your account managers are taking orders or managing key accounts strategically. It is tempting for salespeople to enjoy the easy money of fulfilling orders and avoid "rocking the boat" to push the customer to do more with you. However, that complacent behavior can backfire quickly if a key contact in an account leaves or changes positions. Forget about growth — your business in the account could evaporate instantly. You can’t take that risk. You need better insight into the account and activity. Protecting and growing key accounts is essential to the well-being of any organization and is too important to be managed reactively. Account managers are part of a business and need to have both short-term and long-term plans for that business. An account development process provides this type of short-term and long-term planning for your large accounts. Good account plans provide checkpoints; measurable objectives that allow you to see if progress is being made. Equally important are checkpoints that let you spot and correct small problems before they become major issues. Plans often change, but they can provide a place to start. Some organizations have specialized account managers, and others expect their salespeople to play the role of both hunter and farmer. However, planning is not typically a salesperson’s favorite part of his or her job. Planning takes time and does not provide immediate gratification. It is an investment of effort up front for an uncertain return later. We see this challenge over and over in organizations with these hybrid roles. The key is finding the right balance, setting the right expectations, and reinforcing the expected behavior through management feedback and rewards. When you don’t plan and are focused on the short-term with large accounts, you are typically taking orders as they arise; you are not focused on the client’s long-term business objectives or the bigger picture for your company. You are seen as a commodity rather than a Trusted Advisor, and when you’re a commodity, your customers are usually very price sensitive and not loyal. Planning links your company’s products/services to your customers’ important long-term goals, making them real solutions. You get more visibility with the business and with key stakeholders throughout the company and become more integrated into the client’s organization. This makes it harder for competitors to unseat your position and creates more sustainability when budgets get tight. So, how do you ensure that key accounts are receiving the right focus? Good planning includes verifiable outcomes. These are checkpoints — signposts that forecast the health of the company‘s relationship with a large account. Verifiable outcomes are leading indicators based on the client’s actions (not the salesperson’s actions) that demonstrate the company’s level of alignment with the client. Have you ever had a client that you thought your company had a great relationship with and then lost that client a few months later to a competitor? This happens to every salesperson at some point in their career. Wouldn’t it have helped you to have an early warning system or indicator that would have allowed you to take action to prevent the loss of the client? Verifiable outcomes are leading indicators embedded throughout the account development process. They enable you to understand how well-aligned the client and company are at any time. There are three characteristics of verifiable outcomes: They involve client feedback or action. The outcome requires some reaction from the client. It is OK if the reaction is not wholly positive. The reaction has occurred and you collected feedback, which is more important. They are observable. The salesperson should be able to produce some evidence (e-mail, document, etc.) that the outcome has been achieved or be able to answer some specific questions about his or her interaction with the client that would lead the sales manager to conclude that the interaction with the client has been sufficient. They increase the confidence of the salesperson that the client and company are well-aligned. The Completion of the outcome should give the salesperson greater confidence that the relationship is healthy. Verifiable outcomes allow us to objectively determine the status of the relationship. Wishful thinking and anecdotal evidence are reduced, which makes your assessment more accurate. Losing a relationship with a large account or being forced from a Trusted Advisor or technical expert position down to a product provider will have a direct and dramatic impact on your book of business. Verifiable outcomes help you to identify risks to the relationship and take corrective action before it is too late. When you set the right expectations; provide the processes, tools, and skills; and then reinforce the desired behaviors through inspection and rewards, you stand a much better chance of protecting your downside and enhancing your upside in key accounts. —————————————————- Learn More About Richardson’s Collaborative Account Development Sales Training Programs Richardson’s Collaborative Account Development solution ensures your team has a consistent and repeatable account development process combined with superior dialogue skills. To learn more about this program and to download a complimentary brochure, please click here. The post How to Transition Your People from Taking Orders to Developing Key Accounts Strategically appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Senior B2B Execs Use Social Selling Tools When Buying and Influencing — Are Your Sales Reps Part of the Conversation? Don’t be fooled by age or seniority. Old dogs, who happen to be seasoned, executive-level buyers and influencers, have not only adopted social media but are using it professionally as well as personally. A white paper from IDC ("Social Buying Meets Social Selling: How Trusted Networks Improve the Purchase Experience" by Kathleen Schaub, IDC, April 2014) provides some eye-opening statistics for skeptics regarding just how much senior executives are using social media in B2B buying and influencing. According to the paper: 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level/vice president (VP) executives surveyed use social media to make purchasing decisions. Online professional networks are the number-one information preference of buyers in the final stage of the purchase process. Social buying correlates with buying influence. The average B2B buyer who uses social media for buying support is more senior, has a bigger budget, makes more frequent purchases, and has a greater span of buying control than a buyer who does not use social media. B2B buyers find the greatest benefit of social media is gaining greater confidence in and comfort with their decisions. The paper provides a wealth of data that clearly demonstrates how important social selling tools are becoming to buying and influencing among B2B businesses. The question then becomes whether your company, and specifically your sales reps, are poised to leverage social selling efforts? Take Advantage of Social Buying and Influencing Your Own Social Habits Are your sales reps using LinkedIn and other social selling tools to build their own profile and history of knowledge and interest in topics related to your business and your customers’ needs? Are they sharing via LinkedIn and Twitter great headlines about your firm or concerns happening in your sector? Use your sales reps to extend the reach of your thought leadership efforts and promotional campaigns by encouraging them to develop and nurture their own networks and then share your content with them. Your Best Customers’ Social Habits Think about your best clients. Are they on social media, and if so, do you engage with them? Do you know what they’re saying about themselves, their needs, and their priorities? Does any of that concern the services you provide to them? Would you ask them to be an advocate for you and your business? These are prime people to become influencers through testimonials, retweets, favorable quotes, and reviews. Don’t overlook them, but also, be careful not to overstep boundaries or abuse the relationship. Where Are Your Prospects? This can be a fun exercise but requires thought and planning. Keywords — What do people search for when buying your products and services? Issues — What causes someone to want or need to buy your products or services? Trade industry groups — Who is already writing about these issues or services? How your products and services are used — Think about your range of customers and how your business fulfills their needs. Be sure to cover the obvious and not-so-obvious angles. Who typically buys from you — Think about job titles and roles, and try to find where they congregate online. Who might also influence those purchases — Who are your buyers’ bosses who may approve a purchase or colleagues that are needed to help implement (e.g., IT, HR, Accounting, etc.)? Answer questions, such as these, to engage your buyers and prospects online while developing your sales reps’ personal brands and expertise. Identify and Develop Visible Experts A word of advice: Especially if you have large sales teams covering the same ground and issues, don’t have them tripping over each other in the same forums. Leveraging social media to find influencers and buyers should be a positive thing but can easily turn into a turf war among your sales reps. Hopefully it won’t come to this, but if you must, be prepared to set boundaries and divide coverage of forums, and perhaps a hierarchy of experts, in order to manage and avoid internal conflicts.One way to prevent sales reps from tripping over each other is to identify and develop specific experts on various products, services, issues, industries, and the like. Over time, those experts will generate enough of an online social history to demonstrate their knowledge, wisdom, and interest. Look to your top sales reps and bona fide experts first, but if they’re too busy to engage online or unwilling to adapt, then look for a lieutenant to take the social reins. Adapt or Die! Well, not quite. But, you can’t ignore the impact and influence of social buying. And, you can pretty much guarantee that if there’s a void to be filled, if you’re not doing it, then your competitors will. Don’t be left out of the conversation — even if you’re a market leader. If you don’t have a formal process for monitoring and engaging in social buying and influencing, now’s the time. If you have such a policy, be sure to revisit it often to ensure that it remains current with ever-changing trends. Finally, this is a perfect opportunity for sales to get in sync with marketing colleagues to work in concert — and not against — each other. —————————————————— COMPLIMENTARY RICHARDSON SALES TRAINING TECHNOLOGY BRIEF Click here to download our new brief, Selling in the Cloud - 8 Keys to Successful "Land and Expand" Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers. The post Senior B2B Execs Use Social Selling Tools When Buying and Influencing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Richardson Clients Honored with Eleven Awards by Brandon Hall Group Seven of Richardson’s clients have been recognized with Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals by the Brandon Hall Group’s annual Excellence Awards for Learning, Talent Management, and Sales and Marketing Awards. The award-winning categories included: Gold, Best in Competencies and Skill Development — Cargill Gold, Best Program for Sales Training and Performance — Cargill Gold, Best Learning Program Supporting a Change Transformation — Cargill Silver, Best in Coaching & Mentoring Program — Bank of Montreal Silver, Best in Competencies and Skill Development — QTS Silver, Best Program for Sales Training and Performance — ITS Silver, Best Program for Sales Training and Performance — WellPoint Bronze, Best Leadership Development Program — Bank of Montreal Bronze, Best in Competencies and Skill Development — Chevron Bronze, Best in Competencies and Skill Development — SunTrust Bronze, Best Sales Leadership Development Program — ITS A full list of winners can be found by clicking here. The 2014 Brandon Hall Excellence Awards are presented by Brandon Hall Group, one of the leading research firms in training and development. The entries were evaluated by a panel of veteran, independent senior industry experts, Brandon Hall Group Sr. Analysts, and Executive Leadership based on the following criteria: fit the need, design of the program, functionality, innovation, and overall measurable benefits. "Our Richardson team congratulates our client teams for their exceptional accomplishments and recognition from Brandon Hall," said David DiStefano, President and CEO of Richardson. "We are privileged to be strategic partners with such forward-thinking companies and to help them strengthen their sales culture — and to build a competitive advantage. Today’s selling environment has never been more competitive, and we at Richardson are committed to helping our clients execute their sales strategies through a proven process of talent and organizational readiness, sales force development, and sustainment-of-change initiatives." "I’m honored to recognize this group of elite organizations with phenomenal programs across HCM functions," said Rachel Cooke, COO of Brandon Hall Group. "The winners truly exemplified excellence around the critical business dimensions across the award categories, including a high standard of performance in their organization and demonstrated clear, measurable business results through these innovative programs." "Our company is proud to receive submissions from organizations all over the world that have demonstrated major successes across their HCM business areas," said Mike Cooke, CEO of Brandon Hall Group. "The beauty of our new HCM Excellence Conference is that some of these elite executives will now be able to share lessons learned through panel discussions, Q&A discussions, executive roundtables, and peer-to-peer networking. We are delighted to be able to share the winners’ insights and case studies with a larger circle of colleagues." About Brandon Hall Group Brandon Hall Group is an HCM research and advisory services firm that provides insights around key performance areas, including Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, and Workforce Management. With more than 10,000 clients globally and 20 years of delivering world-class research and advisory services, Brandon Hall Group is focused on developing research that drives performance in emerging and large organizations and provides strategic insights for executives and practitioners responsible for growth and business results. (http://www.brandonhall.com) LEARN MORE! Click here to Learn More About Richardson’s Award Winning Sales Training Programs   The post Richardson Clients Honored with Eleven Awards by Brandon Hall Group appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Why You Must View the Customer as "Them" not "It"  A theme we keep returning to in this blog is the idea that the most effective sale professionals focus on creating value and building trust with customers. You don’t just put your product or service in front of the public and say, "This is good. Buy it." — however good your product or service may be. Other companies will also have good products. They will also be able to offer good services, possibly even as good as those offered by your company. We hear the term "solution" often today. It may even be overused, particularly as a fancier and quicker way of saying "product or service." The way to make a sale today is to convince the client that your "solution" actually is a solution — that it actually solves a problem your careful research has identified. You start with planning, creating what might best be called a flexible contextual relationship with the client. You work with the client collaboratively to create value for their organization and make them more successful. You become a valued partner, helping the client identify needs as well as just finding places — hopefully your company — where the client can meet the needs. All too often, sales professionals build account plans only in terms of what they can sell the customer instead of what the customer really needs. What customers really need is a strategic partner who can dig deep into their business to analyze the current situation, identify the possibilities, and pursue relevant opportunities. When you view a major account from your customer’s perspective, you find more ways to significantly enhance performance. When you can link your solutions, making them real solutions (that solve problems) to your customer’s goals, to your customer’s objectives, and to your customer’s challenging issues, you build your personal brand as a trusted advisor rather than just a product provider. You build your company’s reputation as a place where people solve problems. One complicating factor in dealing with customers is that a customer is not just a monolithic body where one approach and one focus will be sufficient. There is a good chance that your customer will have one decision maker who can say "yes." But even here, he or she will have other opinions to take into account. You must be able to consider the perspectives of many stakeholders within your customer’s organization. At a basic level, executives have similar goals: to make money, to save money, and to manage risk. But, the way they think about achieving these goals differs depending on their function. So, if you view each interaction through the lens of functional focus on what each stakeholder does, you gain greater credibility and relevance to these stakeholders. Take, for example, the goal of increasing organic growth by 8% over two years. A CEO might focus on enhancing the company’s profile with key constituencies. A CFO might raise capital to finance a special project with growth potential. An R&D leader might accelerate the development of new products. All have the goal of making more money, yet each has a different functional strategy to get there. You have to be able to speak their language and relate to their world to gain credibility and build trust. This will enable you to earn the right to demonstrate how you can bring value to the table. You need to view the situation through their functional lens and prepare for meetings and presentations accordingly, planning to be both relevant and meaningful. Understanding the different perspectives and what each executive cares about allows you to be more effective in tailoring your message to each stakeholder’s interests. Otherwise, with a more generic approach, your presentations will be less relevant and less useful to everyone. Businesses today are facing more volatility, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty than ever before. If you can demonstrate a keen understanding of your customers’ issues — and align yourself with their goals and strategies — you have a much better chance of helping them become more successful. This makes you more successful — today and into the future. ————————————- Complimentary eBook Richardson is excited to announce the launch of our new eBook, A Leader’s Guide to Successfully Sell with Insights. The eBook highlights helpful tips that sales teams can use to deliver insights that provide more value to customers and win more deals. Download it now and help your sales team improve your sales conversations with insights and dialogue. Click here to download: The post Why You Must View the Customer as "Them" not "It" appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Insight Selling: Essential Skills for Shaping and Creating Sales Opportunities Opportunities to grow your business with a major account come in three different modes: Respond, Shape, and Create. When you respond to an opportunity, the customer has already identified the issue, the solution, and the expected outcomes. Now, a provider is sought. This is the most reactive style of account development. The scope and budget are usually already set. Pressures on both price and competition are often high. By no means should you ignore such opportunities. Flexibility is a key element of business. You have to be able to respond as well as initiate. But, responding is not the best way to develop and grow a business relationship. High-performing sales professionals tend to focus more on shaping opportunities. This is where you help the customer in defining the issue, the most likely outcomes, and even possible unintended consequences. This is a much more proactive style of account management — one where you may be able to preempt the competition. And even though some opportunities might initially appear to be "respond" situations, if you have a different opinion or broader view, you might be able to shape a respond opportunity in new ways. The third selling mode is the most ambitious and creative. Here you create an opportunity. You bring forward insights to challenging issues that are not even on the customer’s radar but will likely have an impact sometime soon. This is the most proactive style of account development, and it is the most difficult because you are teaching the customer something new and are creating both the need and an opportunity. This allows you to become actively involved in defining the scope and budget. You may even be able to shut out the competition and forestall or lessen price pressure. So, how do you identify or create opportunities from insights? Tie the insight to a challenging issue. Where do you find those issues? Marketing should provide you with a list of issues that your client’s industry is facing — or, do the research yourself. Then, you select the challenging issues that will resonate the most with your client. When positioning the risk of the typical approach, choosing your success stories, or describing the impact that your company can have on the issue, use numbers to grab the client’s attention and enhance credibility. Asking questions to understand the client’s situation, goals, objectives, initiatives, success factors, and thoughts is important. However, when it comes to positioning insights, you need to communicate a point of view. Clients need and expect you to have a perspective. This is what elevates you to a Trusted Advisor position. Your point of view should be concise, easy to understand, and defensible. Presenting both sides of the issue shows that you’ve given thought on all aspects of the issue upon which you’ve based your point of view and conclusions. The risks you are highlighting are linked to a current approach, which the client may be taking. Don’t exaggerate these risks, and if possible, quantify the negative consequences. Word choice is so important, as the client may be feeling pain or resistance around a particular issue. Avoid directive language, such as, "You should …" and instead, make suggestions with phrases, such as, "Imagine if …" and "You have several options. For instance …" Clients do not usually just come up with great ideas all by themselves. They rely on others for ideas. Those that consistently provide good ideas establish credibility over time and become a part of their inner circle. They have the opportunity to develop into a Trusted Advisor. It is important to understand that an idea does not always need to be fully developed. Instead, providing an idea or point of view provides a starting point from which a discourse begins and a collaborative discussion can take place. It is through this collaborative process that clients can refine their thinking, establish their own point of view, and determine their course of action. When you don’t present a point of view, what are the risks to your personal brand? Proactively sharing a point of view is perceived as valuable by a client. The opposite is also true. When you consistently don’t present a point of view, you risk the perceived value of your brand being diminished. This limits your ability to elevate your relationship into being a Trusted Advisor, and over time, you risk becoming irrelevant to your client. This opens the door for competitors to fill the void, and if they are able to consistently provide insight and ideas, they will ultimately win the business, and you will be replaced. Selling modes are important because they affect where you enter the customer’s buying cycle. The earlier you enter the buying cycle, the better.  ———————————————————- Help your Sales Team Sell More Effectively by Selling with Insights  Click the following to learn more about Richardson’s Selling With Insights sales training program.     The post Insight Selling: Essential Skills for Shaping and Creating Sales Opportunities appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Successful Negotiations: Why it’s Critical Not to Lose Sight of the Big Picture "Are we negotiating?" "Always." That succinct bit of dialogue from the 1997 movie "The Devil’s Advocate" serves as a good reminder for sales professionals to heed when selling to prospects or existing accounts. Don’t take for granted that it is a mere formality or confined to the period leading up to inking an agreement. You are constantly negotiating and should not only realize this, but practice their approach. Negotiating is certainly about prices and fees, but also about so much more. What’s negotiable? Pretty much any aspect of a sale can be negotiated from delivery date, warranty, and payment or service terms to product features, account team, and the like. What’s important to realize is that each bit of dialogue and revelation throughout the sale process enlightens both seller and buyer alike with information that will influence this deal - or the next. It’s the tail end of the contract building process, but as the quote above suggests, negotiating really starts at the beginning of the relationship and continues long after the deal is done. Off-hand comments, questions, and observations made by your clients can cue what they’re thinking about when the time comes to re-up. How you approach them can either shore up or undermine the chances for future success. Ingredients of Successful Negotiations When negotiating, keep these points in mind to avoid derailing while strengthening your relationship: End-game. Have a clear image of the end. What do you want to achieve as a result of the sale? What does a successful agreement look like for you? For your buyer? Dialogue. Negotiating is an art that requires a delicate but effective touch. Realize that even when the deal’s done and the ink has dried that further negotiations are happening. The trick is to keep a checklist of variables and factors that could change or impact the deal, but don’t waive it in your client’s face at every opportunity. This gets old fast and makes you seem like you’re constantly keeping score and not focused on the big picture. Rather, focus on a fluid dialogue that recognizes variables and addresses them more naturally between contracts and more directly when negotiating an agreement. All dialogue should happen in a friendly, relationship-building manner. Flexibility. You don’t want your sales professionals to be pushovers, so you must train them where they need to stand fast and where they have wiggle room. Always maintain some area of flexibility and maneuverability. If you’re completely inflexible, then your buyer might assume that you’re not even making an effort to meet their needs or requests. What Not To Do: Successful Negotiations Do Not Look Like This There are several things that you should not do when negotiating in order to avoid torpedoing the deal and thus your relationship. Here are a few examples: Don’t be adversarial or combative or try to get one over on them. If you’re adversarial in negotiating, you risk blowing up the deal and relationship. That’s akin to winning the battle but losing the war. While you don’t want to be unfair to your clients, you also can’t go back to your boss and say that you’ve given away the store. Your company is in business to make a profit, which is not unreasonable. Don’t allow your desire to please your client undermine your ability to be effective. Don’t weigh deals down with goods or services that are unwanted or needed. This "bloatware" will go unused, will be unappreciated, and cause the buyer to feel like they overpaid for the value they received. If something is truly necessary, then make sure that the end users know what it is, why it is important, and how to leverage it. Otherwise, they’ll be skeptical and resent it making future sales or renegotiations difficult for you. The Ultimate Goal: Create Value and Build Trust Both parties in a negotiation have priorities: the buyer to receive something of value for a reasonable price, the seller to deliver services or goods for a reasonable profit. The key elements in this exchange are value and trust. If either is missing, called into question, or obviously deficient, then closing the deal becomes more difficult (and could cause the relationship to falter). Encourage your sales reps to structure deals in a manner that highlights the value that you will bring to your buyers and the trust you hope to instill in them by delivering as per the terms of the agreement. At the end of the day, your goal should be for the long-term success of the relationship you’ve developed and cultivated. If your mindset is focused on a transactional sale, then your goals and motives are one-sided and clearly not in the interest of your buyer. Sellers with a lock on the market might be able to get away with that for a time, but as soon as a viable alternative appears, what respect have you shown by taking advantage of them? Negotiate for the sake of the relationship, not the deal, and both parties will win. ——————————————————— LEARN MORE ABOUT RICHARDSON’S NEGOTIATING TRAINING To Learn more about how you can partner with Richardson’s to raise the quality of your team’s negotiations with your clients and prospects, please click here.   The post Successful Negotiations: Why it’s Critical Not to Lose Sight of the Big Picture appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Challenger Selling: "Courageous Questions" Differ from "Grenades" Many sales leaders are urging their salespeople to adopt a challenger selling methodology and ask "challenging" questions to have effective sales meetings with prospects and clients. The intent is to be more provocative, create differentiation in a crowded market, provide insight, and hopefully add more value to the conversation. This post is designed to share some mistakes I have been seeing with this approach and to offer suggestions for properly asking "courageous questions" in an effective sales meeting. First, what is a courageous question? Many questions can take courage, including ones that are: Direct Delicate Challenging to current thinking Seeking commitment Insightful Thought-provoking Courageous questions — relevant to the client and well asked — can take a relationship in a new and positive direction as part of an effective sales meeting. Yet, why are some received as "grenades?" The movie equivalent is Bruce Willis walking away from the villains’ hideout, pulling the pin on the grenade, tossing it over his shoulder … BOOM … causing a huge explosion in his wake. Throwing a grenade question on the table is not courageous, it’s a selling mistake. On this topic, I have been seeing different problems from two categories of sales professionals. The first group of salespeople — long on confidence, armed with industry marketing intelligence, and feeling empowered by their leaders — are more than willing to ask challenging questions in prospect and client meetings. Of course, challenging current thinking is likely to cause resistance. Instead of getting either mild resistance or the "wow" factor that they are expecting, they are met with significant blowback or stunned looks. Rather than marking an inflection point from which the relationship advances in a new and positive way, it now marks the fall-away point. The second group of sales professionals, not as long on confidence and without a process to challenge thought, avoid asking the courageous questions. And, while competitors start to make inroads in the relationship, these salespeople wonder why the client relationship has stalled. So, how do you ensure that your courageous question is received well and not as a grenade? Here are eight best practices for integrating courageous questions into an effective sales meeting: Know where you stand: If you are at all unsure that the foundation upon which your client relationship is built is solid, seek feedback, and know where you stand. No assumptions, as courageous questions are best delivered from a position of strength. Establish trust: Look for signs in your interactions that trust has been established. These can include kudos for positive past dealings, an open exchange of information, responsiveness to calls and meeting requests, and client-initiated calls. Establish credibility: This does not require you to be all-knowing on all subjects. It does mean that, because of your background, your work, and the organization behind you, the client sees value in engaging with you on this new topic. Prepare and practice: Preparing and then practicing with a colleague tends to ground the over-confident and build conviction in the should-be-more-confident. Both language and delivery matter, so prepare to receive feedback on both prior to the client meeting. Choose an appropriate setting: Challenging a client’s thinking can feel awkward to you and threatening to the client, especially in front of others. Choose a meeting location and time that puts folks at ease rather than on edge. And, think carefully about how your question impacts not just the intended recipient but also others who may be present. Set the context: Courageous questions are relevant to the recipient. A relevant question reflects your knowledge about the client, as well as his/her organization and the industry/market in which it operates. Structure the question skillfully: Combine a good preface, which expressly states why you are asking the question and/or why the customer should reply. Use an open-ended structure to invite discussion. Allow silence, and listen: It is not tough to tell when someone is genuinely interested in your thoughts. What is tough for many salespeople is taking a breath, engaging silence and listening, being attentive to language and cues, and being curious enough to continue the dialogue by asking deeper questions based on the client’s reaction. The same guidelines go for colleagues who may join you at this meeting. Inform them about this part of the meeting, and, if they have a tendency to "ease the tension" and fill the silence, practice with them both the delivery and the silence that follows. Remember the movie "Top Gun," starring Tom Cruise ("Maverick"), the classic 1980s film that glamorized navy pilots? In a practice drill, Maverick locks onto an enemy fighter, and his flight instructor coaxes him to "take the shot." Grenade questions ignore the best practices above, and taking the shot may result in a crash-and-burn, eroding trust and credibility. In cases where you’ve earned it, leverage the best practices above in an effective sales meeting, take the shot confidently, and enjoy the new dialogue stream — and opportunities — created by your courageous question. ——————————————- Complimentary eBook - click here, or on the image below to download our latest eBook, A Leader’s guide to Successfully Sell with Insights.  The post Challenger Selling: "Courageous Questions" Differ from "Grenades" appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

How to Create a Sales Training Budget to Support Sales Skill Development According to a July 2014 report from Bersin by Deloitte, year-over-year change in training spending has not only recovered since the downturn, it more than doubled between 2006 and 2013 (up 7% and 15%, respectively). With that level of investment, the exercise and process of setting next year’s budget in support of sales training and skill development presents an opportunity that should not be squandered. Don’t just take last year’s budget and add 5% or 10%. Unless you’re perfect in every way, doing more of the same will get you the same results. Take a strategic approach to creating your sales training budget. Depending on your needs, it could be dramatically more (or less!) than last year’s. Here are a few suggestions to maximize your sales skill development budget and training efforts. Organizational Strategy and Goals Start by thinking about the big picture: What is your business trying to accomplish? How has that changed in the last year? A SWOT analysis can help you start to narrow your focus on what you need to do differently. Now, based on organizational goals, what sales training is necessary to support these objectives? Your training should help you build on strengths, fortify weaknesses, capitalize on opportunities, and mitigate threats. For example, a common threat is changing buyer behavior. Functional buyers now have more authority over technical buyers, which requires a different sales conversation than your sales reps have had in the past. Another scenario is the introduction of new products or solutions, which requires sales reps to understand not just features, but also to know how to position the product with buyers. At this high a level of analysis, it’s about tradeoffs: you likely have numerous strategies and goals, but you must prioritize them and address the most important ones. If you can’t do everything, what will have the greatest impact toward aligning your training strategy with your organization’s goals? Individual Competencies and Capabilities Now, take your focus down from the organizational to the individual level. What do your sales leaders, sales managers, and sales reps need to do differently to achieve your objectives and goals? How significant of a change is that? The degree of change will dictate the intensity and direction of your developmental efforts. Before you know what training to tackle, you need to know their capabilities. Assess your sales reps’ strengths and weaknesses against your selling needs, and then, look for training opportunities to build skills and bridge knowledge gaps. Determine Needs and Sales Training Budget There are a number of factors and details to include when preparing your formal budgetary request: Scope — Consider all of areas that you will address through training. It could be some aspect of customer dialogue skills, opportunity or account management, presentation skills, and negotiation skills to name but a few. Typically, the broader the scope, the more you will need to budget. Scale — Consider the number of people you’ll train, noting the level and breadth across the sales organization. In addition to sales reps, consider training for sales managers and leaders to help drive the change. Clearly, the more people that will require training, the more you will need to budget. Pre-, mid-, and post-training assessments — To get where you’re going, you need to know where you are. Assess your team’s current capabilities before, during, and after the training to ensure that it has had the desired effect. Measurement — Just as you need to assess individuals, look for organizational benchmarks to monitor before and after the training. It could include the number of sales calls, meetings held, sales funnel status, length of sale, size of sale, win/loss, and others. Communication program — Let your sales reps know why you’re doing things differently this year and what you expect them to get out of it. Reinforce the mindset, behaviors, and approach that they should be taking when prospecting and selling as a result of the skills you want them to learn. Carry on communicating long after the training, and connect it to the big picture. Hard costs — These are the quantifiable costs of training, including travel and meals, conference rooms or centers, outside facilitators, training materials, equipment rental, and related expenses. Justify the Value of the Training After going through such a rigorous planning exercise, it would not be surprising that your budget request to fulfill next year’s sales skills development training needs could be markedly different than in previous years. This will likely raise a flag with not only your higher-ups but also leaders in HR and Finance. Be prepared to outline why the approach and investment make sense given the potential benefit. "If we continue to do ABC, the results will be predictably like last year’s. But, if we do XYZ, the outcome will more closely align our selling activities to support the goals of the business." Be transparent and realistic so that your credibility isn’t questioned, and don’t overlook the need to "sell" the new training approach to the sales reps who will go through it, as well as your superiors who need to approve it. ———— Complimentary eBook - click here, or on the image below to download our latest eBook, A Leader’s guide to Successfully Sell with Insights.  The post How to Create a Sales Training Budget to Support Sales Skill Development appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Quick Tips to Better Align Sales and Marketing Obvious fact: If you align sales and marketing teams, you will drive better leads, close more business, and reduce internal conflicts that may stand in the way of meeting objectives. Survey Reveals Breakdown: The annual CSO Insights survey reports that major issues still exist between these two essential teams. Findings include the following: 63% cited the need for improvement in marketing-generated lead quality and quantity Only 43% said they had a formal process for qualifying a lead 45% said supporting materials needed improvement What can be done to improve these numbers and better align sales and marketing? Create a Mutual Service Level Agreement (SLA) — With an effective SLA, both teams agree on priorities and accountabilities for deliverables. They commit to collaborating on programs and to discuss challenges openly. Quick Tip: SLAs should include joint goal creation, meeting cadence, sales responsibilities, and marketing responsibilities. KPI Alignment — Key performance indicators for both teams must be in sync, with marketing supporting sales and vice versa. Lead Criteria — Sales and marketing need to agree on the definition of a good lead vs. a bad lead. Quick Tip: Define the elements of a qualified lead, allow marketing to do the initial follow-up and qualification if it is a marketing-generated lead, sales must close out wins and losses with relevant information, and make sure contacts are added and updated in the CRM. Leverage Content Effectively — Sales and marketing both play a critical role in content-based marketing, using and sharing the insights and content created within the organization. Quick Tip: Embrace and share social selling tools, including mentions and links of company articles on LinkedIn, tweeting or re-tweeting ideas or company tweets, creating circles and sharing information on Google+, and reaching out to prospects and clients to share relevant articles with an "I thought you might find this interesting" note. Sales Enablement — Marketing needs a clear view into how they can support sales at each stage of the sales cycle so that they can deliver the appropriate tools and materials to drive prospects through the pipeline. Quick Tip: This generic sales process can offer a starting point for what marketing can help support. It also may help to define triggers that signal when to really move a lead into the sales cycle. Qualification: E-mail templates, product playbooks, brochures, case studies, fact sheets Discovery: Industry information, white papers, validation letters Proposal: Updated proposal templates, RFP resources, solution outlines Presentation: PowerPoint template, demos Close: Contracts, master service agreements, implementation plans Now more than ever, sales and marketing teams must work together to achieve a common goal. No longer can either succeed in a silo. True alignment will take time, commitment, and strong leadership to ensure that changes occur. When they do, and both teams are aligned and working toward the same goals, the whole organization will benefit. Do you have more tips? What have been some of your challenges with aligning marketing and sales? Let us know! ———————————- Complimentary Industry Brief Download our newest Sales Training Industry Brief - 5 Keys to Insurance Sales Success The post Quick Tips to Better Align Sales and Marketing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

2015 Sales Challenges Richardson is conducting a research project on the 2015 Sales Challenges that you feel you may be facing in the upcoming year. Please click on the link below to participate in this short survey. Your input is critical to the success of the study and we appreciate your time and honesty in responding to the questions. Click the following to complete the Survey (http://bit.ly/1yRT3lk) If you are not currently a sales representative or sales manager, we would appreciate if you could forward this e-mail to your sales team to complete. For submitting the survey, you will receive a free copy of the final report and become eligible to win a new Nike Fuel Band. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Jim Brodo   The post 2015 Sales Challenges appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Strategic Use of Assessments to Identify Sales Talent and Build Sales Dialogue Skills Often in sales, it is the intangible qualities that separate a high-performing salesperson from an average one. These intangible qualities include some combination of a high-performer’s natural sales talent and the sales dialogue skills they actually demonstrate when interacting with clients and stakeholders. How do you accurately identify this mix of sales talent and selling skills to ensure that you know the "secret sauce" that makes someone a high-performing salesperson in your organization? Begin with Your Strategy It has to begin with your go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy that is based on bringing in net new clients with a large national or global footprint by offering truly innovative solutions is different than a go-to-market strategy that is focused on harvesting a broad array of new opportunities through deep customer intimacy. Both strategies are equally valid ways to achieve your revenue target but the sales talent and selling skills needed to execute them successfully will be different. This is crucial to get right - the mix of sales talent and selling skills that makes someone a high-performer within the context of the first go-to-market strategy will probably make them only an average performer or even mediocre in executing the second go-to-market strategy. If your sales organization is pursuing a hybrid go-to-market strategy, make sure you know which of the mixed strategies you are trying to enable at a specific time. Figure Out Your Team’s Natural Strengths Sales is about playing to the strengths of your salespeople in order to win in a competitive marketplace. If your go-to-market strategy is changing or you are a new sales executive coming into lead a sales organization, you need to understand your team’s natural strengths. Over time, sales organizations tend to hire sales talent similar to the talent that already exists in the organization simply because people like to hire people that are similar to themselves. As a result, the salespeople in many organizations tend to be highly concentrated in a specific part of the sales talent spectrum and this can be limiting. If you are changing your go-to-market strategy or you are a new sales executive, you need to know what your team is inherently good at even if you do not spend time and effort to train them - the team’s raw sales talent. Conducting a sales talent audit using a highly valid and reliable assessment will enable you to make this raw sales talent visible and quantifiable. You can then determine if there is a misalignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s natural strengths. If there is good alignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s natural strengths, invest in training to super-charge those strengths. If there is misalignment between your go-to-market strategy and your team’s strengths, you have to make some hard talent management decisions about how to get alignment. Identify Key Interactions Sales is not B2B, it is people to people. That means most of your sales team’s wins and losses are going to occur in their sales dialogues with clients. As a sales executive, you are going to focus on the quality of these sales dialogues like a laser. This is often where you will want to invest time and resources to refine and develop specific skills such as: resolving objections, exploring needs, and positioning insights. But in any sales organization there are going to be more "skill gaps" than you have time and resources to develop in a single training program. So you will need to prioritize which "skill gaps" are having the greatest negative impact on your results and address those first. In order to not degenerate into factional fighting about what is and is not emphasized in the training, conduct a skill assessment that benchmarks your sales team’s dialogue skills again a robust database. Not only will you see how your team compares to other sales teams’ dialogue skills, you will be able to identify those "skill gaps" that fall significantly below the benchmark and invest heavily in training on those specific skills in your first training program. As a bonus, the skill assessment can measure the results of training by comparing pre-training scores on specific skills with post-training scores on those skills. Measuring behavior change is critical in order to know that your investment in training is paying off. Where to Start Sales talent and selling skills are two sides of the same coin. Inherent strengths that naturally exist and dialogue skills that can be developed both "co-habitat" in the same salesperson. They are different and require different assessments. However, sales talent and selling skills are also both necessary to sales performance. If you are changing your go-to-market strategy or have inherited a sales organization that you do not know well, the first best move is to check the alignment between the sales team’s talent and the go-to-market strategy so that you can make wise talent management decisions. If your go-to-market strategy is stable or you have been leading your sales organization for a while, assessing your team’s dialogue skills should be sufficient to wisely invest in their skill development. Most sales organizations need to clearly understand both the talent and skills that are in front of clients every day. By properly sequencing both talent and skill assessments over the course of multiple years, a sales executive gets a complete picture. The strategic decision is to know where you want to start. Learn More about how Richardson’s TalentGauge and SkillGauge can help you improve sales performance.  The post Strategic Use of Assessments to Identify Sales Talent and Build Sales Dialogue Skills appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Closing: Winning Sales Tips for Closing Effectively in 2015 As 2014 rapidly comes to a close, this is a great transition point to reflect on past, present, and future. Among the things that deserve some focus is closing. Whether the close is a client call, meeting, contract renewal or extension, or a new partnership or business agreement, each is an important transition point from the end of something to the start of something else. Done well, closing positions you for success, reinforces client confidence, and sets you up to execute on client expectations. In my coaching and classroom work this year, I continued to see confusion and struggles around the topic of closing. To help you or your team close sales meetings more effectively in 2015, let’s look at: A readiness to close checklist Winning practices A process for closing any meeting effectively READINESS Closing a meeting or deal often gets fumbled due to several common missteps. See how many of the following questions you can check off with a "Yes." Have you: - Defined the close or the commitment(s) you will be seeking at this meeting? - Shared and validated the close with your team? - Decided who will close? - Overcome self-limiting obstacles, such as: Concerns about coming across as pushy, confrontational, or icky (sure, that’s a word)? Believing that clients close themselves? Using a presumptive close? Rushing to close based more on self-confidence than on client-based facts and feedback? - A full appreciation for the importance of closing well — for you, your organization, and (often forgotten) for the client? BEST PRACTICES If we can agree that business relationships are advanced when every client or prospect interaction is ended professionally and completely, here are some reminders on best practices that lay the groundwork for an effective close that you, your team, and your client can feel good about: Prepare: Define the team’s goal for this meeting — i.e., ask for the business, a referral, or a next meeting, etc. Be specific, put timing around it, and don’t keep it to yourself. Winning teams arrive at key sales meetings fully informed and aligned on the mission. Assign lead responsibility for this part of the meeting or pitch. Once accepted, be willing as a team to role play this a few times and share feedback. Even if the person making the ask is your CEO? Especially in the case of a senior, many of whom don’t receive the honest feedback they need to accomplish the team’s mission. Mindset: Clients not only expect you to close the meeting you requested, they need it so that your execution meets their expectations. Avoid the presumed close. Example: "We are ready to get started. Can we send you an agreement?" Client agreed that you could do some (free) work in producing documents that they may or may not choose to sign. This skips the close with no commitment conveyed.  Feedback: Seeking client feedback throughout the process and conversation ensures that you stay aligned. It also ensures that the client is as confident in your team as you are in asking for an important commitment. PROCESS: THE NEW "A-B-C" When prompted to close, many of us immediately remember a young Alec Baldwin in David Mamet’s "Glengarry Glen Ross," coaxing a group of weathered salesmen to "A=Always, B=Be, C=Closing." A good close is not heroic or chest-thumping — it is a natural step in a conversation, is polished, and gains clarity on commitments and next steps. The new A-B-C of closing that is fully in line with today’s market dynamics is: A=Ask, B=Be Clear, C=Chronicle: 1) A=Ask about remaining issues, concerns, or needs. Asking an open-ended question, such as, "What issues are still on your mind?" can surface both new opportunities and doubts, both of which are best addressed in person. 2) B=Be clear on what commitments are being made. Ask a closed-ended question. Modifying one from above: "We are ready to get started. Are you ready to begin working with us?" This enables the team to leave that meeting with a better sense of clarity on what, if any, commitments were made. If this feels too direct, consider prefacing the ask. Example: "So that we can properly plan next steps, are you ready to hire us for this work?" 3) C=Chronicle next steps. Inventory the follow-up plan, including who is going to do what by when. A crisp and complete recap reinforces the client’s commitment to you. Open-ended questions here can convey client empowerment. For example, "How would you like the kickoff meeting to be structured with your team?" In summary, approach your close methodically — with preparation, a positive mindset, and client feedback. And, follow the new A-B-C to close that next dialogue confidently and completely — and with clarity! ——- Learn More about how you can close more with Richardson’s Consultative Selling sales training solutions. Click here. The post Closing: Winning Sales Tips for Closing Effectively in 2015 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales  - Part I Content marketing — it’s all the rage. A reported 93% of B2B marketing teams in North America are using a content marketing approach, according to B2B Content Marketing 2014 research. While that’s an impressive number, only 9% of survey respondents felt it was "very effective," while 33% said "effective." That tells me people are jumping on the bandwagon without clear strategies, tactics, or implementation. So that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with defining what we mean by content marketing. Or, more appropriately, how Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which publishes the annual B2B survey, defines it: "Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action." This content can take any number of forms: blog posts, videos, white papers, printed or electronic books, infographics, case studies, emails, newsletters, articles, and so on. Even though it plays a valuable and critical role in today’s marketing mix, content marketing is often misunderstood by those in sales. I would be rich if I had a nickel for every time a sales rep has said: "That’s just a download; what am I supposed to do with it?" Given all the investment and focus being spent on content marketing, the only way to make an impact — to drive profitable customer action — is for marketing and sales to be in sync and supporting each other. Here are a few tips to better align marketing and sales to optimize a content-based marketing approach. Marketing should: Survey the sales team to get input on what support materials they would like to see from marketing and to glean insights from their daily experience with clients, prospects, the market, and even competitors in the field. Not only will you get more buy-in and alleviate a "throw-it-over-the-wall" approach, but the marketing team also will benefit from greater exposure to the overall business environment, enabling them to create more relevant content. Communicate the content strategy and publish an editorial calendar. Sharing your strategy is a critical step for successful alignment with sales. Give them a copy of the editorial calendar so they can plan related activities around the launch of specific content. Create relevant content. Make sure to feature content that is relevant to your company and products and services. Don’t make it hard for the sales team to relate the value of marketing content to their targets; even the best content can distract from the sale if it’s not relevant to what the company offers. Make sure sales can find the content. If the materials are just thrown into a folder on a network, no one will know where it is or what a specific piece is about. At Richardson, we use SAVO’s Sales Content Pro to house and manage all of our content. This is a great tool to tag and provide information about the content, which is linked to the appropriate stage in the selling process, which brings me to the next point… Have a strategy that creates content appropriate for each stage of the selling process. Content should be different for each stage of the sales process: qualification, discovery, proposal, presentation, and close. What’s relevant for prospecting is not the same when sales is presenting or expanding a relationship. Make sure marketing fully understands the buying and selling process to ensure the content will support the acquisition of new customers and growing value with existing ones. Stay tuned for "Content marketing: Part II; How the sales team should work with marketing."  The post Content Marketing: How the Marketing Team Should work with Sales - Part I appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Content marketing: How the Sales Team Should Work with Marketing In Part I of this series, we talked about the rising popularity of content-based marketing. A reported 93% of B2B marketing teams in North America are using a content-marketing approach, according to B2B Content Marketing 2014 research. While that’s an impressive number, only 9% of survey respondents felt it was "very effective," while 33% said "effective." That tells me people are jumping on the bandwagon without clear strategies, tactics, or implementation. I shared a definition used by Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which publishes the annual B2B survey: "Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action." While Part I focused on tips for how marketing could become better aligned with sales, now let’s turn to what sales can do to align with marketing in order to optimize a content-marketing approach. Sales should: Share content broadly. Salespeople who share good content add to their credibility and position themselves as trusted advisors or go-to resources. Such sharing takes the form of regularly posting content on LinkedIn, tweeting about it, emailing it, snail-mailing it, using it as a post-meeting take-away — whatever method works to get content in front of the client. Communicate with the content development team. Don’t wait for marketing surveys or the editorial calendar; take an active role in helping the marketing team deliver the content that sales reps need to engage prospects and clients. If one rep is thinking about a certain topic that would be helpful for a blog post or other marketing material, other reps are surely thinking the same thing. But, marketing will never know unless someone in sales tells them. Follow up, and then follow up some more. Effective follow-up and nurturing of a lead who has downloaded a piece of content is vital to the success of that particular marketing campaign. Even if the prospect doesn’t have an identified need or isn’t a hot lead, it’s likely there is some interest in the company’s products or services related to the download content. Use the content as a way to connect and build credibility. It may take time, but the only way anything will happen is if sales reps reach out, follow up, and nurture the lead. While it may be tempting to give up and move on to the next lead if there’s no immediate callback or response, slow and steady wins the race — especially with content-based marketing. Content marketing is here to stay. A projected 35% of every company’s marketing budget will be spent on content-based marketing development and campaigns. But marketing just can’t develop good pieces and send them out. And sales just can’t discount the longer-term effects of a good content-marketing strategy. Both must be aligned with the strategy and implementation. Together, marketing and sales can drive much higher returns on marketing investments and, ultimately, achieve business outcomes. ——— New For 2015 - Complimentary Research Paper Best Practices for the Design and Delivery of Sales Training - Click here to download The post Content Marketing: How the Sales Team Should Work with Marketing appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.