C-Level, Relationship Selling Blog

Advanced Sales Training Tips 1 - Leaders Make Decisions but You’re Stuck with the Subordinates

Advanced sales training teaches that leaders decide whether there will be any purchases or investments. They decide what level of spending they will make depending on the magnitude of the problem/s it solves or the expected revenue reward it yields.  They don’t decide based on price.

 

They also decide who the supplier will be.  They base their decision on whose product or service will do the most, with the least risk for them professionally and personally.

 

They delegate their subordinates to do all the investigations, bidding, and jawboning, but the leader makes the final call.

 

Executives listen to each other for suggestions and concurrence. Subordinates can be and are often dismissed.

 

Read more - What to do about this situation and the problems it causes at Advanced Sales Training Tips 1.

Accurate Sales Forecasting

Forecasting can be simple and accurate.  Try this forecasting method on some outstanding business.  Try it also on some opportunities you closed and others you lost.

The simple system involves three components; (1) Will there be a deal for some vendor; (2) The match to your ideal customer profile, and; (3) the quality of the sales person.

Will There Be a Deal?  Is there an approved budget that is authorized to be spent?  Is there a deadline or else something traumatic will happen.  Most forecast are inaccurate because many believe investments will be made that never happen.

Match to Your Ideal Customer Profile means how well does this opportunity and customer match to the kinds of customers and sales you’ve been successful closing in the past.  The closer the opportunity fits the better your chances of success.

Quality of the Sales Person says a mouthful.  Good sales people can smell a buyer and they have a process that works to close the deal.  The less successful struggle with this to an increasing degree.

Determining the Probability of Success

·        Deal or No Deal …………….  0% or 30%; No or Yes

·        Match to Profile ……………… 0% - 30%; depends on the degree of the match. 

·        Quality of Sales Person …… Top 10%=25%, Top 25%=10%, Top 50%=0%, Top 75%=-5%, Bottom 25%=-10%

·        Add it Up!!

Refining the Probablity

If you have a sales process you can tighten this up tremendously because there are a series of element in any good sales process.  The degree to which you can address these will determine your range of accuracy.

Now go forth and predict.

And now I invite you to learn more.  See the full article with details and examples: Accurate Sales Forecasting

Why Sales People Fail to Get Higher Prices - The Curse of Marketing

Seth Goden, the marketing guruwho I respect very much, wrote in a recent blog; To get higher prices if you’re not the low bidder, sell the intangibles that you or your company can provides to customers.  He then went on to list a bunch or examples.

 

Spoken like a true marketer. Do this and you’ll go broke. 

Here’s why.  You can provide a basket full of services / intangibles to a prospect and they are worthless unless the prospect values them.  So which ones and how many do you put together.  And while you’re stocking up your basketful of services / intangibles, it costing you money to produce or provide them.  Even if you canvass your marketplace and determine these are the intangibles most prospects like, when you’re selling an individual you don’t know if this person fits the model. 

 

That’s the difference between marketing and selling.  Marketing is appealing to or exciting the masses.  Selling is closing the individual.  The individual in front of you may fall outside the masses.

 

When you want a higher price for your tangibles, you have to show the prospect (1) how your offering will do his or her task or project (2) better than any other alternative. 

 

First you have to know exactly does this person want to accomplish and how does he want to do it.  Exactly means his way, not what you think it should be.  To do this you will have to interview the person and drill down to completely understand his concept, risk tolerance, political environment and motivation.  Then you’ll have to know how to add, delete or modify it in a way that’s of interest to the individual.

 

Second to show your offering can do the prospects’ vision solution better than any other, you’ll need to know how to differentiate. Now anything can be differentiated.  I show people how to do it with the most commodity type products all the time.  Like interviewing it’s another skill.  But it has to be differentiated in the areas that the customer is sensitive about, which takes us back to the interview - determining the specific mindset of the individual.

 

Prospects are willing to pay extra or higher prices, but you’ve got to know for what and how come.  So ask them.  “What are you willing to pay extra for?”  Knowing this let’s you build your offering for the specific application and not waste all your resource building intangibles.  I wish all my competitors would build a basket full of intangibles.  They’d go broke and out of business.

 

Click this link for a detailed CD Seminar on Interviewing and Presenting

Successful Selling's Critical Ingredient - Confidence

Confidence is a salesperson’s biggest asset.  Confident people exude confidence and others pick-up on it.  It opens doors because confident people are believable. 

 There are three ways to get confident:  (1) Prepare yourself professionally,  (2) Prepare for the situation, and (3) Prepare yourself mentally. 

 

 Preparing Professionally

 

Learning the correct behaviors of selling and making them into habits is critical for our success and our confidence.  Learning requires studying, coaching, trying, assessing, more coaching, correcting and trying again.  The process continues forever.

 

 Preparing for the Situation

 

Just as Tiger walks the course or takes practice shots from various locations before a match, you too must prepare for the situation. Without preparation you will feel nervous and uneasy.  This is fear, and fear destroys confidence.

Before a meeting I will fill out my sales call plan.  Based on my pre-call work, I know what I have to learn. I’m prepared to present. I’m also prepared to ask for commitment and to deal with objections.  This preparation is extremely effective making me feel confident.  The people feel this confidence and it becomes easy to move forward.  This preparation also eliminates anxiety which destroys confidence.

 

Prepare Yourself Mentally

 

Confidence comes from within - getting over self-doubt. Since we know we are capable - we can talk to people and we have sold before - our feeling of self-worth needs to be bolstered by positive self talk about previous successes.  Go into meeting or approach selling situations with positive thoughts and this will keep you confident. If you go in with the thought that you have nothing to lose, you’ve already lost.  You have no confidence, only failure, and you create your destiny - the eventual failure.

Positive self worth, positive projection and getting pumped up will lead to confidence.  This has to come from within, and the best way to draw from your strengths is to prepare yourself professionally and mentally, and prepare for the situation. 

 For the complete article see Successful Selling's Critical Ingredient - Confidence

Advanced Sales Training

Everybody knows the basics of selling which are; to present, ask questions, and listen – not necessarily in that order.  Many people end up in sales because that was the only job available and/or because they noticed sales people made a lot of money, and seemed to have lots of freedom.  “How tough could it be.  I can do that.” we thought.  We figured we were smart, energetic and could handle people easily. 

Then we found out selling wasn’t that simple.  Prospects weren’t interested, competition was beating us and our company wasn’t giving us the support, technology, price, etc. to get us orders.  Nowhere along the way did we ever consider we weren’t that good at selling. 

Well the best sales people realized they weren’t good, before they got good and that’s how they got good.  People are not born “good sales people”. They may have waken up one morning and said, “I’m really angry I lost that deal and I don’t want that to happen again.” Or they just said, “I need to be better.”  So they took charge and may have asked or watched successful sales people closely to see how they sold.  They may have bought some books or CDs to self teach.  They may have signed up for a sales seminar.

The one magic pill these top producers all took was that once they started learning, they never stopped.  I’ve been teaching sales people and sales managers for 20 years and the top sales people are the most attentive and anxious to learn something that will give them an edge.  They will pay close attention to topics they’ve heard before. Show them a new spin to an old concept and they are all over it.  Give them tips about the subtleties of change and they want to know what they have to modify to keep their lead.

I was in management for 15 years before I was the only sales person in the company I started.  A friend gave me some Tom Hopkins’ tapes, which I listened to again and again.  They worked and I became successful. Years later I got involved with Steve Heiman, founder of a sales training company, and I learned so much from him that my selling success, which was already good, skyrocketed.  His comments about me to others were that I listen and implemented his coaching.

What I see in the hundreds of seminar I run is that the sales people with average to poor numbers are the least involved.  They must feel they are ok because they resent having to go and they ignore implementing what was taught.  They rationalize the training as not applying to them rather than figuring out how to fit it to their go to market strategies.  This is when management must step up and insist these people follow a proven selling process or get out. 

Unfortunately, most sales management has never been trained to coach, mentor, educate, or manage a selling process.  When I initially insist to senior management that the only way for their sales people to get better is for the sales managers to get better first, I usually lose the sale. They believe they have their best people in the top manager spots and they do.  However, their best people are not being trained, mentored and coached to be good managers.  They were good sales people and got promoted. 

Today the US economy is very slow, yet there are some sales happening.  To compete for a prospect’s attention and/or limited resources or to compete against other vendors, sale people need advanced selling skills and sales management needs to know how to manage a selling process and hold people accountable to working it. 

So to help you, the next postings will be a series about moving from basics to advanced selling.  Sign the RSS feed for automatic notification of the postings and pass them along to your associates, bosses and subordinates.  Everyone is a sales person in life. Those with better selling skills will out sell those with the basics most of the time.

If you want a head start see my advanced sales training website.  Review the articles, think about having a workshop at your company, or buy some books and CDs for self learning.