2019 is just a few weeks away and chances are you’re planning some sort of sales and recruiting effectiveness initiative. Perhaps you’re thinking of overhauling your existing new-hire onboarding program, or maybe you have training designed for your sales reps to accelerate the customer interview and hiring process, or candidate negotiation training for your recruiters. Whatever it is, let’s assume for a second that you did the hard work and created a world class training strategy, built engaging training content, and you secured buy-in from the field. Let’s also assume you delivered a compelling learning experience for your employees in which employee feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
The most important job for the sales leader is coaching and developing their people. Coaching and continuous learning is the one thing that connects high performing sales teams because sales requires constant practice for one to stay on top of their game. While you may have some individuals who are keen on learning and trying new things and always researching the latest and greatest ideas and best practices, the majority of your salespeople are not going to be this proactive. The majority of your people will need direction and guidance from their sales leader.
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In case you haven't heard, buyer behavior has dramatically changed. Buyers are empowered and more sophisticated and, thanks to the internet, flooded with information and research overload. At the same time your buyers are searching—often in vain— for new ways to innovate, compete, and improve their success. But when salespeople bring valuable insights and ideas to their buyers, they strengthen their relationships, differentiate from their competition, and win more sales. While it may be a new concept to you, insight selling is the heart and soul for how top performing sales professionals sell. It's why they crush their sales quota year after year after year. Rather than talking about insight selling I thought I would share this great video illustrating insight selling.
Charisma and being an extrovert can be advantageous in sales. In fact, many people attribute sales success to personality traits rather than to skills that can be coached or taught. Despite that, corporate America alone spends more than $20 billion annually to train salespeople on products, services, sales skills and behaviors, all of which demonstrates the widespread belief that you can develop great salespeople and great sales teams.
Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales (and recruiting) organization with the technology, tools, processes, methodologies, training, coaching, playbooks and analytics that help salespeople sell more effectively. The intention of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with what they need in order to consistently engage customers and candidates in productive sales conversations at each stage of the sales process. But regardless of how effective your sales enablement program is, there is one element that FAR OUTWEIGHS all others and determines success or failure, and that is the sales manager.
The ability to stimulate the interest of prospective hiring managers and corporate buyers is the lifeblood of selling. Those who fail to master this skill will always struggle to fill and maintain the top of their sales funnel. This is by far one of the most challenging tasks for sales professionals regardless or product, service or industry. A survey conducted by Equation Research polled sales professionals about the most pressing challenges they face and over 50% of respondents indicated that “prospecting for new opportunities” was their top barrier to success. Another survey conducted by Chief Sales Officer Insights revealed that nearly two-thirds (64%) of sales teams need improvement in generating new leads.
Market leaders, whether it be the staffing industry, manufacturing, software, financial services or any other industry all share one thing in common; their sales teams are a well oiled machine, operating in unison and consistently executing across the entire team. Their sales leader(s) consistently hire the same type (DNA profile) of successful salespeople who they consistently train and onboard to adopt the same skills, behaviors and knowledge and follow the same sales process and sales methodology and adopt common messaging and a call planning framework. There isn’t much deviation from rep to rep.
consultative selling | insight selling
In case you haven't heard, buyer behavior has dramatically changed. Buyers are empowered and more sophisticated and, thanks to the internet, are flooded with information and research overload. At the same time your buyers are searching—often in vain— for new ways to innovate, compete, and improve their success. When salespeople bring valuable insights and ideas to their buyers, they strengthen their relationships, differentiate from their competition, and win more sales.
While it may be a new concept to you and many in the staffing industry, insight selling has been around for years and has been deployed by sales professionals in other industries including enterprise software, financial services and systems integration. Perhaps you have heard the terms "selling with insights, "challenger sale," "provocative selling," and others. Either way, they all essentially imply the same thing which is sellers sharing relevant insights with with their prospects to position themselves as a thought leader in order to quickly establish trust and credibility and move deals forward in a way in which traditional sales techniques cannot. The act of executing Insight selling supports and aligns with a consultative sales approach.
consultative sales | consultative selling
Consultative selling represents a sales approach in which sellers disengage from pitching candidates and instead focus on sequencing strategic questions to engage in dialogue in which the customer reveals their goals and objectives and the challenges that lie in their way. Consultative selling also includes sales professionals sharing ideas, insights and best practices with the prospect on how to go about solving a problem or achieve a goal. By sharing ideas and insights the salesperson positions him or herself as an authoritative thought leader. With this approach sellers are able to challenge the customer's thinking, thought process, assumptions and beliefs and by doing so, effectively shape the solution. This is how consultative sellers create value and build trust with the customer.