Struggling with your sales team? - Call for a sales trainer - OR MAYBE NOT

There has been an interesting debate on LinkedIn about the value of sales trainers. It started with a simple question "Have you seen anything genuinely new from a sales trainer recently or is training now simply a commodity differentiated purely on price and service level?" Of itself the question seemed fair enough, but the debate that followed provided a fascinating insight into the world of sales trainers.

Who entered the debate?
I think it would be fair to say that 80% of the respondents (including Fred & I) were from the "industry", with the remaining 20% being, as they said themselves, "successful sales people". Unfortunately there was limited involvement from sales managers or directors.

What did they say?
There were clearly two camps:

1. I am a great sales trainer, I have a fantastic sales methodology, I can make you a better sales person.
2. Selling is about understanding customer needs, a refresh doesn't hurt, but the sales team and sales managers need to take greater responsibility for "selling well".

Now for those of you who regularly read the postings in this blog you will know that Fred and I fall into the second camp. In fact what concerned us most was the number of people who claimed that they had a unique approach to enhancing the sales process. This of course begged the question "if it was that good how come they are still doing sales training themselves?"

Interestingly the majority of sales people who participated in the discussion fell into the second camp. They were commenting on their belief that their success was due to doing the simple things well and then focussing on activity and good performance.

Why am I highlighting this discussion?

As we start to move out of recession focus will be slowly returning to the effectiveness of the sales team, and the internal discussion will start about how much sales training to purchase. Organisations need to ask the fundamental. "what are we trying to achieve?", "what does an effective sales organisation look like for us? and what is the best way to create it?"

To put it another way can I suggest you answer the following questions:

1. Does your sales team need training or better focus on doing the "right" activity regularly
2. Does your sales management process involve regularly working on a 1:1 basis with each sales person asking them how they can improve, checking if they need help, working with them to qualify out opportunities you have no chance of winning, supporting them in "being better sales people"
3. Do you need training or improvements in managing and leading?
4. Do your sales processes enable your people to be at their best most of the time?
5. Is it training you need or something else? For example Marketing and Sales working together on identifying winning propositions as we come out of recession

Remember - whether it is a recession or a boom time, selling is selling. It involves dedicated sales people working with their customers on understanding their needs and providing solutions to those needs

So let's go back to the question "Have you seen anything genuinely new from a sales trainer recently or is training now simply a commodity differentiated purely on price and service level?" Before you answer - think about whether you need training in sales techniques or whether you need to review your own performance and processes before spending anything on more training courses (unless of course you have new people to train or new products to sell)

Is there a right answer?
We are not saying don't train, that would be naive. We can always learn new things, and refresh on the basics. But training of itself is not the answer, the application of learning is the answer. The learning can be provided by sales trainers, internal coaches or even books. The application of that knowledge can only be driven by your sales managers. And remember that continuous use of a new behaviour ultimately becomes a habit, and effective sales teams are consistently shown to be made up of people with good sales habits.

Do you want to know more about what we do?

Either read our "Helping business drive sales" document or contact mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com and Mark can give you more detail.

We need your feedback - moving to sound and pictures from words

This is not our usual post, although we are giving you some information we really do need your feedback.

We have a range of content on all aspects of selling and coaching and we are considering making it available as 5-10 minute podcasts. Our issue is we do not know if this will interest people.

So we have decided to test the concept. Below is a video (we are not claiming that it is the best possible quality as we used our own camera and recording capabilities) please watch it and give us your feedback.

The topic is "Success is planned it does not just happen! and take just over 8 minutes. It will explain the concept of Urgent versus Important in a way that relates to sales people and will help you understand why you must take greater control of your sales activities.

We need your feedback

1. Is the duration, too long, too short, about right
2. Is the approach usable
3. Is the size and quality acceptable
4. Is there any valuable in the filmed components or could we do it all as a voice over

Please send your comments to mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

As a sign of appreciation we will make you an offer
We will randomly draw the name of one of you who has provided us with feedback and provide our assessment tool to you free for 90 days, along with our coaching content.

Do you want to know more about what we do?

Either read our "Helping business drive sales" document or contact mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com and mark can take you through more detail.

I know you want to engage at CxO level, but who do you really engage with?

We regularly hear Sales and Marketing Directors proudly telling us that their sales strategy is "to engage at CxO level with business led messages". However, the reality rarely matches the strategy.

How can you spot who sales actually engage with?
It's very simple, ask the sales people who they met with in the last month. Look at the account plan and see who their contacts are. Review what is being sold in terms of value add beyond the standard product.

In an ideal world you should be able to ask sales managers for the contact strategy for their team's key accounts. It would be nice to know who are their sponsors, supporters, enemies, stoppers. It would be even more useful to see how senior the sponsors and supporters are - how close they are to the decision makers and decision making process.

What drives the engagement level?
The engagement level, and by extension the "comfort zone" of the sales team is driven by a number of external factors.

• Commission structure - Can a sales person achieve target by selling "product" and therefore not engaging at a business level?
• The offer - Is it applicable for a C-level engagement? There are many very successful companies who quite happily sell product that meets a specific "technical" need that is bought by people solely interested in the "technical" need
• The message - Is marketing producing a meesage that resonates at a technical level or the business level?
• Sales Management - do sales managers believe they are selling a commodity, a technical solution or a business solution?

To be successful a good campaign needs to be aligned to the real behaviours of the sales teams

A successful sales engagement campaign in support of a marketing campaign, requires pragmatism from both. A marketing campaign alone will not alter sales behaviours, no matter how appealing the offer to the client. It's aim is to entice customers to buy - to enable sales to sell more you have to do something else. You need to ensure that your sales engagement strategy is achievable by:

1. Understanding your contact database - ensure that the people you are targeting are aligned to your existing contact levels
2. Align your message to the targets - to be clear if your sales team are currently operating at a "technical level" give them technical messages
3. If you want a multi-level contact strategy tell sales exactly how to approach it - sales people always take the path of least resistance, you need to tell them exactly what you want to them to do and measure against it
4. Make it easy - provide sales with the messages, processes and target objectives for them to use and deliver against.

Are you telling me campaigns cannot be used to change the contact strategy of sales teams?

Based on our experience, this is the case. A marketing led campaign to drive the contact base into C-level individuals looks good on paper, but rarely works. Sales have to change their behaviours first.

We have successfully moved a sales team up towards C-level engagement, but it takes time and has to be achieved by getting the sales team to want to engage at that level and then habitually engage at that level.

Marketing campaigns follow the contact strategy of sales teams; they very rarely lead.

Don't despair though because you can achieve your desired C-level contact strategy.

Your campaign engagement process can provide the background to engaging at C-level, but it needs to be a step-by-step process, and used as part of a behavioural change programme for sales.

You told me you would provide a sales engagement process?

The sales engagement process we use does not change by contact level, it is a very straightforward approach. Here is a standard approach we use to help organisations acquire new customers:

1. Create a message that contains a trigger that will cause the recipient to have the emotional response of "ah, so there is a potential alternative to my existing supplier"
2. Follow up that message with a call to encourage the contact to have a meeting. The objective of the meeting is to "understand your challenges, priorities and focus, and see whether we can provide you a better solution than your current supplier"
3. Have a face-to-face meeting that is 80% prospect speaking and 20% sales rep speaking. The prospect will provide you with all the triggers you need if you ask the right questions. The outcome of the meeting is typically to identify 2 focus areas and come back with a potential solution
4. Measure and track all activity, plus capture the information gathered in the face-to-face meeting as this becomes your landscaping information for future campaigns.

Were you expecting something more complicated?

Remember our philosophy of selling being a simple process only made complicated by people who want to appear experts.

We have helped many organisation create targeted campaigns that sales can deliver against, and we have seen results, ask us and we can give you references. They have been used for both operational level engagement as well as C-level engagement. The process does not change; just the message and, of course, the ability and approach of the sales-person running the meeting.

C-level contacts are no different to any other level contacts. They want their problems solved, they want potential suppliers' sales people to listen to them and to provide potential solutions to their emotional and business needs.

Do you want to know more?

Either read our "Helping business drive sales" document or contact mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com and mark can take you through more detail.

A message to sales management - if you do not believe then neither will your team

Last week I explained how important I believe it is for the messages to the market to be appropriate; the next step is to ensure the sales team understand them and can deliver them to their clients.

Don't just rely on training
The standard response to "how do I ensure my sales team will deliver the message?" is for marketing to arrange a training programme and then send everyone to it.

Let me clarify what I mean, I am not saying you shouldn't be training your sales team on your products and propositions - of course you should and we will look at how to maximise the effectiveness of this training next week. However, there is a fundamental issue to address before you start sending people on a training course; what "behaviours" are you expecting from the sales people and how will you ensure that they will regularly and habitually exhibit those behaviours?

How do you want the sales people to engage with the client?
One of the major issues we come across is that nobody has really thought through the client engagement strategy associated with the campaign. Let me illustrate what I mean with some examples:

• Expecting the sales teams to follow up a generic "brochure" in the last month of the year - to marketing's surprise sales would rather focus on closing deals.
• A campaign that uses an incentive to customers to turn up to a meeting, but does not tell sales what the outcome of the meeting should be - Sales give the incentive away to meet with their favourite customers, "think of it as a reward for your great business"
• A comprehensive campaign to promote key messages to "C-level" contacts - to everyone's surprise few meetings are arranged to deliver the message, instead everything remains business as usual

In all these cases there are two main issues:

1. There is no clarity as to the sales objective of the campaign and by extension no definition of the activities required from the sales teams
2. Sales management has not bought into the campaign, so they have not taken ownership of the effective execution of the sales part of the campaign

How do we define the activities sales should complete in support of the campaign?

The start point is a very simple one, stop thinking about a marketing campaign and start thinking about the desired outcomes of the campaign (why are we doing it?) and work backwards.

Let me give you an example of one we are currently working on.

Campaign objective: To acquire new corporate accounts.

Campaign approach: To promote a new product (which is unique in the market) to act as a door opener

Marketing deliverable: An expensive Direct Mail piece, supported by an incentive to get the customer to have a meeting.

So we worked backwards from the objective.

1. What outcome do we want from the meeting? To understand what the "prospect" sees as their issues, confirm we can address them and identify an opportunity to prove ourselves.
2. How do we know we have achieved this? Ensure you have a simple data capture document that enables the sales rep to capture all of the appropriate information
3. How will we help the sales rep capture the information? Provide them with a proposed structure and agenda for the meeting
4. How will we ensure the "prospect" gives us the information? Tell them the objective of the meeting and ensure they are happy with it
5. How will we ensure the "prospect" knows about the objective of the meeting? Provide a structure for the telephone conversation selling the meeting.
6. How will we ensure that calls are made? Create full visibility of who the Direct Mailer was sent to, and when they were called
7. How will we ensure the right people are invited? Manage the data that is used to build the mailing list.

So all you have to do is support sales through every step and the campaign will work

Unfortunately it is not that straightforward. Not only must you have a good plan you must be able to execute it. Key to execution is sales management, if they do not drive execution it will never happen.

There is an old adage "a fish rots from the head" and it is very true about sales. If management does not believe in something, not only will they not drive it, but they will undermine it. We have all experienced a sales manager, or sales director, who has made a virtue of knowing better than anyone else. Do you recognise these examples?

"Ignore them, we will do it my way", or "What do marketing know, selling is a numbers game, the more calls, the more meetings, the more sales"

How do we get sales management on-side?

There are two steps (and they are both about selling!)

1. Involve them from the outset, they have to own the campaign alongside marketing
2. Make the campaign measurable and make sales management own the metrics.
1. Measure the number of meetings
2. The outcomes of the meetings (opportunity pipeline)
3. Ensure the client landscaping data is accurate and up to date and helps sales qualify opportunities - do we know enough about the key potential prospects in the target market?

Our experience is that it is only when you tie marketing and sales management to a common goal that you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

Keep following this blog, it will help you

It is our aim to continue to provide pragmatic and practical advice and solutions to the issues facing sales teams. We will always ensure that whatever we say you can use with your teams confident in the knowledge that we have already used the solutions in real life. We will continue to provide free tools and if you want access to more tools then you can always visit our website www.sales-accredit.com.

We need your input

We base all of our examples on the issues we are identifying in our clients, but we would like you to help us. Send us the issues you are facing and we will endeavour to address them in our future blogs.

And Finally

In the last blog of 2009 we discussed the personal business plan. We now have a worked examples, so if anyone would like a copy please drop me a line mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

The next blog will look at how we design the sales engagement process.