For Sales Professionals

Sales SkillsSales Professionals:
Establish a trusted advisor/consultant relationship with customers leveraging proven best practices.

We have helped other Sales Professionals who were struggling with:

  • Missing Revenue Targets

We work with sales professional who struggle to meet their revenue or quota goals. The most common reasons we find are that many companies focus more on training the sales team on the features and functions of their products and services rather than teaching their salespeople HOW to engage with a decision maker on why they would want to buy their product or services. It is often left up to the salesperson to figure out what to say that would motivate that customer to buy. For a new salesperson, it can take up to six months to figure out the right approach, and for the more seasoned salesperson, they often don’t know what they don’t know. Traditional methods that were successful in the past don’t work as well and it is difficult to figure out why. As a result, the manager puts more pressure on, the salesperson makes less money and often it is not a happy ending.

We help sales professionals better align with their customers and connect with them in the places they are looking for information on which solution is the best fit for them.  When focusing more on the customer and their needs and less on features and functions of the product or services, sales professionals can close more business. 

  • Inability to access decision makers

Salespeople struggle to get access to decision makers. It is extremely difficult to get through gatekeepers and voicemail and actually connect with a decision maker for the products and services being sold. Over the years, a lot of creative ideas have been tried with minimal or inconsistent success. Executives are busy running companies and have no time to hear a pitch from a salesperson. So, how can a salesperson get the attention of an executive?
 
We work with sales professionals to help them understand the business issues that are “top of mind” with an executive. Once a sales professional understands those business issues, using a consultative process, the sales professional can tailor their conversations around ways their products and services can help the executive address their business issues.

  • Difficulty growing wallet share of existing customers

One of the biggest challenges when a contract has been signed, is to keep selling when the account goes into “fulfillment mode.” Very often, once the contracts are in place, the relationship is maintained by the company’s purchasing or fulfillment department making if difficult for the sales professional to get back in front of decision makers.

We work with sales professionals to help them position events and opportunities early on in the sales cycle where the decision maker agrees to meet with the sales person on an ongoing bases to have discussions around how things are working, growing the relationship with additional revenue, and how others within the organization might be benefit from the products and services sold.

  • Prospecting / Business Development Skills

Most sales professionals tell us that prospecting is one of the hardest things they do in their job and they don’t like it because of the high number of rejections or no responses they get. Marketing statistics reveal that a buyer will not respond to a seller until that seller has attempted to connect with them 7 to 11 times. This is a lot of effort and no promise of a sale! As a result, most salespeople will stop trying to connect after (3) attempts! If you are doing (4) or more, than you are doing better than most, however, your results may be the same as the salesperson who stops after three!

We work with sales professionals to better identify their buyer profile, understand how to get them to respond and where they typically begin their buying process. Once a salesperson understands how today’s buyer differs from the buyers of 5, 10 or 20 years ago, they can build a plan with tools that will increase the success rate of connecting with a buyer who needs their products and services.

  • Selling to buyers who typically buy on price

The Neanderthal behavior of prior generations of salespeople have created this perpetual issue that exists in most sales cycles. When a buyer asks for a discount, most salespeople feel compelled to honor the request. Buyers have been taught by salespeople to hold out until a seller says “UNCLE!”  Over the years, deep discounts and buyer-favored terms and conditions has cost sales professionals and companies millions of dollars in profits. One of the most common reasons for this is because the seller doesn’t understand where they buyer is in the buying process and why they are asking for the discount. If the seller gives the discount without any consequences for the buyer, they have validated that the seller is no different that their Neanderthal sales predecessor. Once the seller understands why the buyer is asking for the discount and where in their buying process they are asking for it, they can maintain control using strategies that can actually minimize or eliminate discounting all together.

  • Promised or agreed upon close dates slipping

The end of the month or quarter is fast approaching. The sales professional has calculated the number of deals in the pipeline with the close dates in play and make quota and a nice commission seem “in the bag!” With the end of the period nearing, panic sets in as the promised closed dates have passed and the buyer has become unresponsive. What has happened? Why didn’t the buyer close? One of the biggest reasons for the slippage of the close date centers around the ability to maintain control the process with the buyer. 

We work with sales professionals to help them build a list of next steps with the power sponsor/decision maker where there are checks and balances in place to ensure accountability and mutual agreement on dates and activities that identify potential delays and the consequences. When salespeople are actively managing a list of next steps, the completion of each step increases the chances of closing the business when mutually agreed to.

  • Poor win ratios on RFPs / RFIs

RFP/RFI’s can burn up a lot of resources and effort to complete, yet for most sales professionals, the win rate is exceptionally low. There are two things that will increase the win rate on an RFP: (1) you helped create it with the customer and have requirements your competitors can’t deliver on, and (2) you are the incumbent already doing business with the company. They are hard to ignore because it is easy to use convincing logic that they are going to buy from someone, so why not me? Unless a salesperson is the vendor of choice, or can change the requirements, the likeliness of winning is less than 5%. We often hear that a vendor has won on price, and that does happen, however, the decision had nothing to do with the salesperson’s selling ability. We work with salespeople to help them qualify and identify their win potential and then create a strategy to change the requirements and the positioning of the salesperson and their solution. This process helps the sales professional validate whether to invest the resources and effort in the RFP/RFI, or not.