Sales Management Flashcards
What is the key differentiator and competitive advantage.
Culture.
It also clearly dictated the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of the sales organization: We are elite. We strive to dominate the competition. We keep score and constantly look at and talk about the scoreboard – in the hallways, in our team meetings, and when we meet 1:1.
How to transform sales culture?
A formal scheduled meeting (either by phone or face to face) with each salesperson specifically to review their results and their pipeline of future sales opportunities
Sales Management Accountability Progression
Result, Pipeline, Activity
Goal of team sales meetings
Every salesperson to leave the team meeting better equipped and more energized to do their jobs.”
Sales meeting agenda topics
Personal Updates
Review Sales Results and Highlight Outstanding Performance
Success Stories
Product Training
Best Practice Sharing
Deal Strategy Brainstorming Session
Executive or Other Department Guest Presentation
Book or Blog Review
Sales Skill Coaching/Training
Business Plan Presentation (or Review)
Brief, Controlled Bitch Session
Non-Sales Related Inspiration
Takeaways
Manage your talent (4Rs)
Right people in the right roles: Specialize your team into dedicated hunters, farmers (account managers), and sales managers
Retain top producers: training, tools, and recognition
Remediate or replace underperformers
Recruit by spending dedicated time on referrals and asking for specific during interviews, including (i) details of a successful past deal & (ii) how they plan to approach the job
Coach and mentor salespeople by:
Conducting regular, results-focused 1:1 meetings by examining (IN ORDER!)
Results relative to quota
Pipeline (movement of existing opportunities; new opportunities added)
Spending time in the field (or in side-by-sides for inside sales) covering:
Pre-call planning (names, personalities, & meeting expectations of prospects; call flow; expected challenges; primary meeting goal)
Post-call review, letting the salesperson share her impression first
Selfishly productive
They maximize their time on high-value, high-payoff activities.
Five aspects of opportunity creation
The Right Attitude
Intentional Calendar Management
Strategic Targeting
Compelling Messaging
Commitment to Prospecting
The Right Attitude
When your motivation is to deliver the best possible outcome and help the customer win, and you believe with certainty that your proactive efforts to contact prospects will be effective, good things follow.
Intentional Calendar Management
Maximizing selling time, which requires minimizing their involvement in everything else.
Strategic Targeting
Seek input. Talk to others in and outside your company. If you are a salesperson, schedule time with your manager, and possibly even others in your company, who can offer wisdom, experience, and perspective
A Compelling Message
A solid, usable case study has three very simple components:
The customer’s situation when we found them or became engaged
What we did
The outcome
Commitment to Prospecting
Salespeople who struggle with proactive calling tend to make prospecting into something bigger, scarier, and more difficult than it actually is.
An Inferior Product Is Not the Excuse
When you live by the product, you die by the product.
Accountability
What they produced (results)
What they are working on to produce results in the future (pipeline), and
Where they focused (activity) to advance opportunities is transformative.
Two Iron Laws For Recruitment
First, recruit ahead of the need.
Second, never hire a candidate who is not better than the average person on your team.
Stop rushing to demo your product/software or conduct a presentation.
There is no way to be perceived as a true professional problem solver, consultant, or value-creator when you show up in pitch mode before doing solid discovery work.
Motivation for prospecting
You (and/or your company) are experts, problem-solvers, solution-providers, and value-creators for the customers/markets you serve.
Time blocking
Time blocking is the discipline of making appointments with yourself to work on your highest-value, highest-payoff activities.
Top producers prioritize the top of the sales funnel because they know that doing so ensures a healthy, balanced pipeline.
The top of the sales funnel because they know that doing so ensures a healthy, balanced pipeline
Engage customers early on
How to adapt products and services to provide better solutions.
Although buyers claim that price is the most important buying factor,
when we observe how supplier ratings affect share of wallet we find that service and sales experience are the most important buying criteria.”
Advocating your product prematurely always leads to a price discussion later on
Starting with what the customer needs givesthe sales rep an opportunity to learn directly from the customers about their pain points and what they value in a solution, before putting on the table the products and services the company has to offer.
Application marketers
developed integrated value propositions by combining hardware, software, and services modules from across divisions.
Needs and benefits database
Updated after each offer. This gave account managers access to a library of value propositions that could then be tailored easily to new customer situations.
established a sales process around cross-functional workshops
involved account management, marketing, and engineers.
let sales reps sell, releasing reps’ time from non-selling activity,
and let support staff support.
“A smoother and faster sales process can boost loyalty,
even if it may require some adaptations to customers’ own operations.”
Kknowledge-sharing system
Where salespeople can easily access best practices, insights based on win-loss reviews, and competitive-positioning analysis.
6 Why’s of Buying
- Why Change
- Why Now
- Why this industry
- Why your company
- Why your company solutions
- Why spend money
Answer why change
- What problem
- Scope of problem, what if we don’t change
- Make problem hurt
Answer why now
- Change now is better than change late
- Give them a choice
Answer why your industry solutions
- the problem of choosing other people industry
- what problem can our solutions solve while other can not
Answer Why your company
- Expertise
- Communicate confidence
Answer Why your company solutions
- what matter to the buyers
- why you are better than your competitor
3.
Answer Why spend money
- Desire for gain
- Fear for lose
