Continued From Part One:

I then turned my attention to Skills: I discovered that to begin with, the one off programme was supplying a short term motivational buzz and provided my team with a number of thought provoking ideas. However, in reality, once they were back at the “front-line” the day to day pressures of hitting quota etc took over again and the reactive mindset returned.

Then and it is probably still true today, most - I would estimate at least 80% - training organisations, were making the assumption that all delegates were at the same level in terms of experience, expertise and had the same “commercial bandwidth”. This was of course, totally unrealistic.

Whilst it is never possible to equate age and experience with success, the reality is that although some professional salespeople do have ten years experience, most have one year’s experience ten times!

The very best salespeople – the ones that consistently exceed expectation - have usually received ongoing skills development from the “emerging” stage all the way through “advanced” right up to “consultative” level if appropriate, but the keyword is “ongoing”

Finally, and this is the most significant and blatant error of judgment most Sales Directors make, I know I did, is that every member of the team receives the same training, i.e. they are all dispatched off to the same course regardless of whether or not they already have those skills or if indeed they need to have them in their current role.

The point here is that there is far too little planning, assessing and objective setting; as I said earlier, it is much easier to delegate that responsibility to the training company. The downside to this approach is of course, so much money is wasted.

I quickly realised that the first step for any company deciding to make a change in their sales approach was to accept that training must be based on what the salespeople need and should be tailored to address diagnosed performance gaps. Using a diagnostic approach – a formal sales team skills audit, saves an organisation money and time because there is nothing to be gained from teaching people something that they are already doing well or, conversely, that they don’t need to do in the first place.

So what did I do? I wrote my own programmes and they eventually became the basis of the Vanguard Suite, but more significantly I designed an attitude/skills/process audit tool which has now evolved into the ASP Profile and is being used by organisations all around the world to regularly benchmark both the development needs and ongoing performance levels of their sales teams. And the most common feedback I receive? “I cannot believe how much money you are saving us”!

Process:

In his book “Fundamentals of Selling”, Charles Futrell identifies careful use of selling time as perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of the successful salesperson. Frequently there are two main pitfalls that even experienced salespeople can fall into in terms of activities. First, they simply aren’t doing enough. What’s enough? Enough telephone calls to make appointments, enough face-to-face calls, enough calls that involve or influence the decision-makers. In general, the more focused sales activity salespeople generate, the greater the number of sales opportunities they can create.

Second, but equally important, salespeople often aren’t clear about how to identify the prospects most likely to have a genuine need for their product or service. Without an objective way to prioritise which prospects to contact first and/or an efficient strategy for contacting them, salespeople are doomed to waste a large percentage of their time. Another huge dilemma for many salespeople is how to divide their time between servicing existing clients and generating new business from new prospects. A common approach among salespeople can be summarised in the saying “If you throw enough mud against the wall, some of it is bound to stick”. This approach is exhausting, demoralising, extremely unproductive and very expensive in the long term.

In the book Emerson’s Essays, there is a section on “Law of Compensation”, which can be summarised simply as “give more, get more” This is what most salespeople try to do, so they end up working harder when they should be working smarter. This begs the question, are your sales activities deciding your strategy or is your strategy deciding your sales activities?

From the Sales Director’s perspective, developing a consultative sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do. This is just as appropriate for internal and totally reactive sales teams as it is for external pro-active ones. This outline includes the activity and calls they must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the documentation they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

It’s only when such an outline is in place that sales management can be in a position to:

• Monitor the sales force’s activity, progress and results,

• Assess issues as they arise and take appropriate action,

• Redirect individual sales representatives’ efforts efficiently.

Although many organisations appreciate the importance of being customer-focused and talk in vague terms about their “consultative sales process”, surprisingly few sales leaders invest the time and energy required to develop a formal sales process – a process that is at once detailed and resilient enough to guide their salespeople and permit effective management of their efforts.

But I was determined to design a process tool kit which addressed every need my team had from opportunity analysis to personal organisation, from pipeline development to revenue forecasting etc. I developed innovative strategies that enabled me to achieve the Holy Grail: Sustained sales growth achieved efficiently, reliably and by design.

Part Three:The Four Essential Component Parts Of Successful Selling -And Finally, Knowledge follows.