All Entries in the "Sales Process" Category

Selling Sleuth? The Secrets of Gathering Intelligence

Gathering Intelligence – An Insightful Sales Competency

Business is an intelligent game and to win you have to gather intelligence about the marketplace. As a Sales Trainer, you will teach the sales team gathering intelligence as a sales competency. Your sales training program will present them how to define, analyze and learn about competitors, products, customers, distributors, industries, technologies and field research.

Sales Training Management Dilemmas

Sales Training Management Dilemmas

Do you really know your sales organization?

Most people don’t realize that the sales culture created in the organization is actually built upon bits and pieces of the sales profession. By that I mean, each person that has had a critical decision to make has uniquely crafted the sales organization…

Help Your Sales Team Succeed

Help Your Sales Team Understand the Buyer

Businesses seeking to increase revenue growth should shift specific focus to the buying environment within each potential customer. Great sales professionals recognize there are a distinct set of phases that a buyer engages to buy with the end result of this buying cycle being the purchase of the product or service, or not.

Unfortunately for all buyers, each selling organization and their individual sales professionals are unique and often require immense amounts of energy to build a relationship with. This keeps buyers guessing, which in turn keeps the sales organization guessing. It’s a constant game being played out across offices across the country.

To help both sides, it may be prudent to go back to root cause of these ambiguity. The only common denominator across all sales organizations and all buying organizations is the dollar sign. Surprise! Buyers and sellers are concerned about the same thing! The buying organization wants more revenue through decreased revenue; the selling organization wants more revenue through sales. The bottom line– we all want more revenue.

The item that keeps most C-level executives up at night is how to engage in the global marketplace to increase revenue or reduce costs-that’s it. All decisions being made today, whether it’s compliance to new laws, expansion into new markets, or whether to lay anyone off, can be traced back to these two sides of the dollar sign. The key for many companies is to focus on aligning marketing, sales, and customer service functions to that common dollar sign–but this is easier said than done. What many companies fail to do is to align these systems to the buying organization and their actual buying processes instead of forcing their process onto the buying organization.

This approach can be summarized as:

(1) Know your customer,

(2) Know your product,

(3) Be ready for the customer to buy, and

(4) Stay engaged with the customer after the sale.

Many organizations train their sales professionals, marketing departments, and customer service representatives on their product, but stop there. As a result, they have spent millions of dollars on training with little results. The problem with this approach is quite simple; they have not first asked “what is the process the buying organization uses in relation to these four phases?”

Believe it or not, the occupation that must understand this question absolutely and definitively is the sales profession. This is because the sales profession has the responsibility for converting market demand into revenue for the selling organization by understanding the desire to increase revenue in the selling organization. Sales professionals fill a critical position in any company by spanning boundaries from one organization to the other. The sales organization (sale professionals, and all supporting infrastructure) must build relationships, understand the customer, and articulate how bring value to the lives of their buyers. This in turn helps the subsequent customer. Sound confusing? Try doing it with a CFO of a telecom firm in the morning, a VP of Marketing in an IT software firm at lunch, and a CEO of a fortune 1000 at night!

The question is not “how do project our sales process onto the buyer?” The real question is “how do we facilitate the customer experience?”

As an example, how would your organization sell to the federal government? Would it be easy to do so if your organization had never done it before? The reason why it is difficult to sell to the federal government lies in difficulty of understanding how the federal government procures their goods and services. By understanding how the government buys obviously helps companies understand how to sell. This needs to happen in every industry, with every buying customer. Unfortunately, this crucial understanding is often overlooked, at the expense of driving lop-line growth.

Sales Operations

Your critical sales dashboard for aligning measurement and effectiveness…
Sales operations is an over overlooked area of the professional selling system.  Sales operations team members are responsible for a helping sales team members attain success by designing processes, tools, and controls to support the sales process. An effective sales operation function supports sales management decision-marking by helping to monitor current business processes and sales productivity tools for adequacy. Sales operations staff also develop and drive strategic infrastructure planning efforts by collaborating with business planners, functional leaders, and sales management team members.

Sales operations employees are also responsible for driving or supporting infrastructure change and alignment. Therefore, collaboration with sales and operational management is very important in order to develop change management strategies and programs.

Think about it:

When does the sales process begin?
When does it end?
Sales operations helps you align sales effort to performance and determine exactly what it takes to improve selling efforts.

Sales Marketing

When it comes to sales and marketing, there are skills needed in order to become extremely successful. Whether your sales team has 10, 20, or only 1 year of experience, you need to properly manage the right tools to help you increase your organization’s revenue.

There are many marketing strategies that must be aligned to achieve business goals. From database marketing to direct marketing, your sales marketing training should successfully help your sales team leverage the product knowledge, value proposition, and benefits identified.

While the marketing team has the same goal as the sales team, each has its own unique job to do. When an organization synchronizes marketing efforts to sales team execution, and couples that with improved training, revenue increases dramatically.

You Must Have The Right Plans!
Ensure your business stays ahead of the competition at every turn. In order to accomplish this goal, you must be implementing the right strategy for effective business publicity.

However, just having a perfect system and program to promote your business is not enough. You need to consistently come up with cutting-edge sales techniques for turning prospects and leads into successful sales.

It is more profitable when you convert these generated leads into repeat customers. The largest return on your investment is on the back end (from additional products and services) of your sales efforts.

Sales and Marketing are two key areas within a business and each require a high degree of sales competencies. However, not one single area is going to be successful without the other playing its role effectively. In other words, both areas are co-dependent with one another in terms of acquiring profits and keeping your business on its feet.

Sales and marketing focused training materials should be designed to help you train others to build your organization’s brand, find targeted prospects, close more sales, and drive revenue.