Need to turbo-charge your sales? Check out our free new video series. 76% of leaders at small and medium sized businesses cited sales growth as their greatest challenge in 2011. Having been through the process of founding RAIN Group with my business partner, John Doerr, I know just how difficult it can be for a young, growing business to get off the ground. You’ve got a great idea that people have told you will succeed, outstanding value to offer, and the people in place to make it all come together. Problem is, when it comes time to launch, you’re just not generating the business you thought you would. More often than not, this is a direct result of the fact that many entrepreneurs simply have not been taught how to sell. And even experienced salespeople struggle to sell in an entrepreneurial environment where there are unique challenges to selling new ideas or selling against big, well-branded competitors. As good as your business idea might be, it’s not going anywhere if you can’t sell.      

Before you begin any sales training initiative, isn't it important you're training the right people for the right roles? I have been truly obsessed with baseball the last three weeks. My beloved Red Sox are folding faster than the deck chairs on the Titanic. I find myself cheering for the hated Yankees (so the Rays don’t edge out the Sox). And the talk shows are full of Danny from Quincy and Al from Everett suggesting ways to bolster the pitching by having relievers start games, starters come in to relieve, and closers (generally relegated to the ninth inning) pitch from the seventh on. What a way to end a (potentially) great season! Moving pitchers around from role to role without acknowledging skills, commitment, and past experience is much like hiring and training salespeople as if they were completely interchangeable parts. I hear things like: "Bill has been a great salesperson in his territory for eighteen years. He grows those accounts like no one ever has. Let’s move him to Santa Fe to open up our new office (middle reliever to starter)." Will anyone be surprised when Bill comes home a defeated man? He has proven to be a great manager of his territory and his accounts, but he has not had to prospect in a new market for years. What a way to end a great sales career.      

Part 2 of our How to Turbo-Charge Your Sales video series teaches you how to communicate your value to prospects. Don't miss it. Last week I announced the launch of our new sales training video series geared specifically to help entrepreneurs and sellers at growing companies build their businesses. It’s called How to Turbo-Charge Your Sales.   Since we launched the first video last Thursday, we’ve had a ton of positive responses, so I thought people might be interested in hearing a bit about the topic we’re covering in the second video, which launched today. This video is all about communicating an effective value proposition. In short, it’s all about how to respond to the question: "What do you do?" It seems like a simple question, but many entrepreneurs and salespeople get tripped up when trying to answer it, making it almost impossible for them to succeed in a sales conversation. After all, you can’t sell what you can’t describe.      

Part 3 of our How to Turbo-Charge Your Sales video series teaches you how to lead masterful sales conversations. Today I've released the third free video in the series How to Turbo-Charge Your Sales, and this is a big one. We’re talking all about how to hold masterful sales conversations so that your business can make millions of dollars. It’s can't-miss stuff for entrepreneurs, growing businesses, and anyone else who wants to see their sales go through the roof. You can check it out here: www.entselling.com/turbo-charge.html.  As you’ll learn in the video, the launching point of any good sales conversation is the ability to build rapport with your prospect. If you build rapport, you're well on your way to generating the kind of trust that will eventually lead to outstanding business relationships and more sales.      

Achieving your goals isn't a slam dunk. Can you do what it takes to meet them? I recently started going to a personal trainer. At the beginning of our very first session, she asked, "So, what are you trying to accomplish?" "To get in better shape?", I hesitantly answered. "Well, without a clear goal, you will not be able to see your progress, you will lose momentum, and we won’t be able to see if the training is paying off." "In that case, to fit in my suits from last year and to grab rebounds in my basketball games without getting pushed around." "Now, we are talking." Over the years I’ve seen many salespeople (and sales managers and companies) get goal planning, action planning, and commitment right, and I’ve seen many fall short. Without a clear goal they don’t know where they’re headed, so any path will get them there. In my experience, only two things set apart those who live by goals and those who don’t. Salespeople who live by goals: Know where they’re headed Commit to a goals routine      

Salespeople know what they sell, and they sell what they know. When it comes to salesperson knowledge, people know too little about their particular industry, their customers’ needs, and their company’s products and services to be able to sell the full suite of solutions. Without this knowledge they can’t: Ask the right questions to uncover the complete set of customer needs Match the right products and services to those needs Position the value of their company as superior to other options available to the customer Indeed, they can’t and don’t hold masterful sales conversations with customers. The result: Lost sales and missed cross-selling opportunities. Some of you may be saying to yourself, "Wait. We provide knowledge training. We even hold a retreat each year and classes focused on knowledge topics."     Perhaps you’re the exception, but most often even if product knowledge training happens, it doesn’t get the job done. If there is some kind of test for knowledge gained, it’s usually only for accuracy.      

It's that time of year again when all of the "Best of 2011" blog posts, newsletters, and magazine articles are coming out - from the best new business books to the best restaurants in every city. This year we are thrilled that RAIN Group and our online publication RainToday.com have been nominated for an unprecedented total of 7 Top Sales and Marketing Awards. But the voting ends tomorrow! With stiff competition in each category, we need all the voting help we can get. If you find that we're deserving and you would be willing to vote for us, we're up for:      

The votes have been counted and the results of the 2011 Top Sales Awards are in. We are thrilled that RAIN Group brought home 6 awards in total including the gold in 4 categories: Top Thought Leader: Mike Schultz and John Doerr Top Sales Book: Rainmaking Conversations Top Sales Resource Site: RainToday.com (taking home the gold for a second year in a row)      

What does sales training failure look like? Hear any of the following comments after asking, "How was the sales training?" and you're closing in on it. Failure is popular these days. Seriously. I’ve been reading (and recommend) The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. In The Lean Startup, Ries covers a number of concepts to help entrepreneurs and their new ventures to succeed. One such concept is ‘Validated Learning’. Essentially, Validated Learning is a process by which you try a lot of things that you think make sense, measure the results, find that you made a lot of mistakes and hit on some successes, and keep on keeping on by avoiding the mistakes and testing new things.   I like it. For a business.  For sales training, not so much. I’m a fan of failure when...      

According to ES Research between 85% and 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days. At the same time, companies are spending billions of dollars on sales training each year. That’s billions of dollars being wasted on limited sales performance impact and only short-term boosts in sales at best. Training can be a disappointment right away when it just doesn’t go well, or it can be a disappointment months later when results don’t materialize. Regardless, sales training strikes out a lot. When it does, it’s usually because of common and predictable reasons. But if you can avoid these mistakes, you can set yourself up for a successful training initiative that leads to increased sales performance and long-term revenue growth. Here are 7 reasons why your sales training might be failing...      

There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. A hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.  - Harry Belafonte Here at RAIN Group, our advice to organizations looking to create a culture of sustained, serious selling: Make sure the bucket doesn't have any holes or it won't hold water. Time and again we see organizations doing a certain percent of what they need to do to help their teams achieve more sales success and increase sales performance (our favorite, "Can you come in and give a 90-minute speech that will charge up the team for the next 12 months?"), but rarely do they put forth 100% effort. If you're only doing 70% of what you need to do to increase sales performance, you don't get 70% results; you get much less. Like patching a leak in the bottom of a boat, if you don't patch it 100%, it still takes on water. So if your charge is to create a team of rainmakers, those people responsible for selling who are bringing in three, five, or seven times more revenue than everyone else, make sure you...      

In our last post about building a rainmaking sales culture, we discussed the three areas of organizationally-controlled influences you need to address in order to create the best sales environment in which your sales team can thrive and succeed: Organizational Influences:    1. Expectations and Feedback    2. Tools and Resources    3. Consequences and Incentives In this post we will discuss how to make certain you have the best rainmakers and potential rainmakers working in that culture. We’ll look at the three factors that are a part of who is on your team, who can sell, and, just as importantly, who will sell. These 3 factors are...      

If your firm is like most, you’ve been using CRM software for years now. Name after name, title after title, data point upon data point, you’ve likely stockpiled a huge amount of prospecting information through various lead generation activities. You’ve created countless records and guided each one through your sales pipeline. What do you do with those records once you can no longer push them forward? Again, if your firm is like most, you probably leave them languishing in your database, perhaps with a sad "lost - chose competitor" or "dead - no budget" tag attached. But these are more than just dead data...      

Is your account team playing all the right roles? Ask leaders at companies how much more they believe they could be selling to their strategic accounts and you don’t hear 5%, 10%, or 20%. It’s usually more like, "We should be selling 2 times…3 times…even more." Ask what’s in their way, you’ll often get this answer, "Our strategic account managers just aren’t doing what they need to do to penetrate the account, cross-sell, and keep the competition out so we can truly grow our accounts to their potential." The reasons vary why this is the case. But when it comes to the strategic account management team, eight of the reasons are predictable. There are eight distinct roles that must be played for strategic account management initiatives to deliver at peak potential. Few companies define the roles and play all eight well. The first step to changing this is to know what these roles are. So here you go.      

Rule #1: Play to Win-Win. (This post is the first in a series of blog posts on the new rules of selling.) Win-win is a common negotiating philosophy. The idea is to find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties, and maximize value on both sides. Since repeat business and referrals are so important in complex sales, employing win-win as part of your selling technique and philosophy should be a foregone conclusion. However, in the name of "win-win" many salespeople get so tied up in the name of "providing value" during the sales process that they:      

Ask the question, "What needs to happen at your company to maximize your success with your strategic accounts?" and you’re likely to get answers like this: The leaders at the account need to know about the value we can bring them besides what we’re doing for them right now. We need to penetrate different divisions of the accounts. Our relationships need to be deeper if we want to keep competitors out. We need to work directly with decision makers at the enterprise level. Nice list, but not unique to strategic account management. Indeed, the answers tend to be the same as those to the question, "What would you like your salespeople to do more of?" Company leaders often ask the question, look at this list, and decide, "Okay - looks like we need sales training. Let’s put something on the agenda." This is a mistake. While on their face, many of the outcomes of strategic account management and sales are the same (e.g. higher revenue, higher margins, longer contracts, deeper penetration, more mindshare, stronger relationships) and some of the concepts are the same, the paths to get there can be quite different. Here are 5 areas where these differences stand out...      

You're at an industry event mulling over which cheese will go best with which crackers at the buffet. The person next to you introduces himself. You introduce yourself. Then he says: "So tell me, what do you do?" The challenge is to communicate the key elements of your value. When we work with our clients to teach them how to sell, we tend to focus on helping them learn the right things to do, such as you’ll find in our article 6 Building Blocks for Communicating Your Value Proposition. Knowing the right thing to do will help you get on the right track. However, even those on the right track can get derailed by common mistakes. It’s often just as helpful to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. Here, then, are the most common mistakes we see people making when trying to answer the question, "What do you do?" and ideas for how to avoid them...      

In our white paper Why Strategic Account Management Fails, we noted that high performers in strategic account management were significantly less likely to face 16 of 19 common challenges in strategic account management. We didn’t, however, have space to go into much detail in this specific area. Since publishing the white paper, we’ve been asked quite a bit for more detail on the specific challenges faced by companies that engage in formal strategic account management, and the differences between high performers and average / below-average performers. Though access to the full Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management is reserved for one-on-one interactions and for our work with clients, we are happy to share this more in-depth look at some of the challenges that stood out to us...      

"It’s impossible to get serious face time with senior executives." "Even getting 15 minutes with a senior executive can take 15 months." I hear things like this all the time from professionals, sellers, and other business leaders who want to get more time with decision makers, but haven’t yet cracked the code. Let’s start by setting a few things straight: 1.    It’s not impossible to get serious face time with senior executives. 2.    Getting serious face time with senior executives doesn’t need to take forever. 3.    The code is crackable. It’s a common misconception that senior executives don’t have time. Based on extensive research in the area, I’m prepared to reveal a startling fact...      

What is the #1 challenge or issue you face when it comes to growing sales for your business? When I recently reached out to my network and asked that same question, 75% mentioned sales prospecting as their #1 challenge. The problem isn’t that people don’t know what to do; it’s that what they’ve always done no longer works. Want proof? Think about the last time you met an actual decision maker at a networking event, and that conversation led to a sale. How about from a cold call? Trade show? Advertisement? The simple truth is this: if you do what everybody else is doing, you’ll get the same results everybody else is getting. Which, in a world where prospects are increasingly turning off their phone and turning on their spam filters, isn’t much. So, if you want to stand out (and get more meetings), here are five sales prospecting techniques you’ve probably never tried (but should).      

All the strategies. All the meetings. All the planning. All the effort you put in to maximizing your sales to existing accounts will be for naught if you don’t first talk about, and then do something about, this hidden killer of account growth. Your people don’t trust each other. We don’t mean everyone thinks the guys down the hall are all lying, cheating, sniveling Salty Sams. It’s often more subtle: Your account leaders don’t know enough about the other areas of your business and how they operate to trust them with their most important relationships. Your account leaders don’t know enough about what the other areas can help clients achieve to believe that their clients will be thrilled if they buy it. Your account leaders have been burned in the past by bringing other people (or, perhaps, specific people) in, so, whether consciously or not, they avoid broadening the conversation. Then again, it could be Saltysamism. It could be they doubt each other’s competence. Or that the product they sell isn’t so great. It could be a host of issues.      

See an article about differentiation and it’s likely to be about marketing. Differentiation often starts with marketing, but it’s in the selling process that it truly comes alive. Here at RAIN Group, we recently analyzed just over 700 business-to-business sales made to buyers who represent $3.1 billion in annual purchases from industries with complex sales. The purpose of the research was to find out what sales winners do differently in the selling process compared to the sellers that didn’t win, but who came in second place. One area we studied was the buyers’ perceptions of what they believe led them to buy from the winners. Overall, we studied 42 factors, three of which focused on differentiation. They were: Overall value from the company was superior to other options. Company offers products and services that are superior to other options. Seller differentiated their products and services from the other available options. Not only did these differentiation factors score near the top of the list, they dominated it. In fact, these three factors were in the top four! Not only is differentiation in the selling process helpful, but it’s of the utmost importance if a seller wants to win.      

One of the greatest difficulties in professional services sales is helping potential clients understand what outcomes they will achieve when they work with you. Creating a picture of what outcomes are possible with the solution you present is imperative for two reasons. First, prospects need to be convinced of the outcome and that you can achieve it or they likely will not purchase. Second, if they do not fully understand what you are able to do for them, they cannot communicate it to the rest of the influencers in their organization and your sale may get stuck in endless internal discussions. Helping prospects to understand the value of the services you provide is an exercise in teaching and learning. Prospects need to understand what will be different for them and their company if they purchase your services versus if they don’t, or if they purchase services from a competitor. In the end, prospects are not interested in buying your services; they are interested in what your services will get them.      

Broad, open ended-sales questions are great for helping us to find out what’s going on in our prospects’ and clients’ worlds. They help us connect with buyers personally, understand their needs, understand what’s important to them, and help them create better futures for themselves. Following are 21 open-ended sales questions you can ask that will help you round out the picture of your clients' needs. These questions are broken down into four groupings within the RAIN SellingSM Framework: Rapport Aspirations and Afflictions Impact New Reality One thing to note about open-ended sales questions: they don’t need to be complex. Often the basics are all you need.