Three Sales Skills Menemsha Group Drastically Improves

Improving sales skills is one of the reasons customers chose to work with Menemsha Group. Our sales methodology including all of our training content, playbooks and exercises is the vehicle that brings sales reps from initial cold call to closed deal, fast.  Our SaaS based technology platform is the gas that fuels the vehicle. Combined together, you have a best-in-breed sales onboarding and sales training solution. 

Here are three sales skills Menemsha Group drastically improves and how we do it.

Improved Call Planning and Call Structure

While many salespeople approach sales calls and sales meetings with the attitude of "I'll just show up and see where things go," top performers don't.  Top performers follow a consistent and methodical sales call planning process.  They do this because they know that succeeding in sales is not like improv comedy, but instead requires thoughtful planning like a world-class chess player.

Menemsha Group helps sellers (and recruiters) plan for and control their sales conversations leading to predictable outcomes.  In fact, Consultis enrolled a group of recent college graduates into our sales training program and within 90 days of completing training they had already outperformed ALL prior new hires INCLUDING EXPERIENCED IT STAFFING SALES REPS BY A LOT:

• New hires achieved 34% increase in new sales meetings over prior new hire groups
• New hires achieved 21% increase in MSA signed over prior new hire groups

You can read the full case study here.

Improved Sales Discovery, Face to Face Meetings

For most sales leaders, sales discovery and running face to face meetings is the one activity they want ALL of their reps to improve upon. This is because the sales discovery call or initial face to face sales meeting is the most important call a sales rep engages in. The sales discovery call sets the tone for the whole relationship and determines how fast or slow the buyer will move through their buying process.

Here are just a few ways in which Menemsha Group helps sales reps improve their sales discovery skills including how they run face to face meetings.

Leveraging video coaching and artificial intelligence (just two of the many benefits of online sales training), we can pinpoint and quantify how effective a sales rep is with applying key selling skills such as:

• How they open a sales meeting and set meeting expectations  
• How effectively they position themselves as an authoritative thought leader
• Their talking-to-listening-to-asking questions ratio
• Their ratio of asking open-ended vs. close-ended questions
• Their effectiveness in closing a meeting and establishing next steps

By reviewing their completed missions and bench marking their performance against a set of quantifiable criteria representing the relevant skills and best practices, our customers can answer questions like:

• What probing questions are my reps asking? Which are they not asking?
• What selling activities and sales skills are my reps not comfortable with (and need to improve upon)?
• How evenly do my reps balance probing questions and sharing insightful comments and fresh insights vs. just pitching our company, candidates and service offerings?
• Are my sales reps creating a healthy, two-way conversation or, are they interrogating their prospects?

Improved Objection Handling Skills, Answering FAQ's

Handling frequently asked questions (FAQ's) such as:

• "What do you?"
• "Tell me about your company"
• "What do you specialize in?"
• "How can you help me and my company?"

and overcoming common sales objections such as:

• "We have a vendors list"
• "You need to talk to HR"
• "I'm happy with current vendor"
• "How are you different?"

is another sales skill that all sales leaders want their reps to improve upon.  Handle these questions or objections the right way and the sales cycle moves forward.  Answer them incorrectly and you have stalled sales cycle.

With our sales enablement platform we are able to capture how top performers handle all of these common objections and frequently asked questions on video.  These videos are then shared with team members for them to watch and learn from.  We like to refer to this as social learning.  This is how staffing firms replicate top performing sales behaviors across their organization and "clone" their top performers.

For example, did you know that top performers do the following when overcoming objections:

• Before they even respond to an objection they actually express and demonstrate empathy. You might be wondering, how, what does that sound like? That is why we capture it on video, so other sales reps can physically see and hear how they demonstrate empathy
• After demonstrating empathy, they ask clarifying probing questions to understand the root cause concern and the customer's motivation behind the concern
• Only after gaining a complete understanding of the customers concern do they then offer a credible rebuttal. And their rebuttal is typically delivered in the form of a customer story-a story highlighting how they overcame the concern with another customer
• Finally, after sharing their credible rebuttal, top performers always ask their customers for feedback so that they can understand whether or not their rebuttal successfully addressed their concern to determine if the customer is ready, able and willing to move forward

Do you know how your sales reps are addressing frequently asked questions and common sales objections? Can you pinpoint exactly what skills and behaviors make your top performers, top performers? And, can you break it down into bite size skills and activities so that it is teachable and replicable for others to adopt?

That is the beauty of having an experiential training approach in which learners are focused on understanding and interacting with a skill, behavior and concept and followed up and reinforced with practical, hands-on role play scenarios that requires learners to apply and execute the skill, behavior or concept in a real world, everyday staffing scenario. Capturing what they say, do and show on video enables the skill and behavior to become repeatable.

How are you developing the skills and behaviors of your salesforce and making them replicable?  What are you doing to take advantage of online sales training?