Archive for category: Sales Skills

Your boss just promoted you to sales manager after years of working hard as a sales representative for your company. Now what?

Many think sales managers have it easy because they are devoid of having a sales number on their head. However the role is far from that. Instead of an individual quota, they have a whole team’s. Instead of being measured by their own performance, they’re held accountable for how each of their sales reps perform. Below, we’ll look at how to become a successful sales manager in your company by discussing these three key functions: support through coaching, prioritizing recruitment, and having good communication.   

Support Through Coaching

Coaching a sales team is one of the most important tasks a sales manager has. Coaching puts your leadership skills to the test by motivating and helping your sales reps refine and improve their selling techniques to elevate their results. Small Biz Trends explains how people with big egos may not make the best sales managers, because the role entails putting sales reps first. Successful sales managers want to see their team continuously improve and provide them with the right skills, mindset, and support.

Often, it helps to set individual meetings with sales reps once a week. These sessions should talk about how to put a sales plan in action, how to improve on weak areas, as well as how to bounce back when a sale doesn’t push through. It’s important that these coaching sessions also include feedback for the manager about how the rep feels the coaching is going and how the manager can better help them. Moreover, coaching sessions should also positively recognize the sales reps of their existing efforts.

Prioritize Recruitment

Being a manager means taking charge of the hiring and firing of staff. One thing sales managers overlook is the importance of allocating time for recruitment. It’s vital to make time for finding the right person for your team, and being familiar with the different types of recruitment strategies you can use. More often than not companies work with recruiters on either a contingency or retained basis. The Undercover Recruiter defines contingency recruitment as a set up where recruiters are only charged a fee when their candidate takes on a position within the company. This means recruiters are quick to refer candidates, sometimes at the expense of quality recommendations. 

Retained recruiters on the other hand charge an upfront fee to conduct a search, but take their time in thoroughly looking for the right candidate for the company. This type of dedicated search is common in all industries, whether it is business or law, in order to find the best fit. Special Counsel details how retained search engagement saves time and resources for a company, while still hiring the very best. Another reason retained recruiters are effective is because they will also have inside knowledge on the industry and where to find the best talent. Investing in quality recruitment ensures that you hire the right people who can achieve the results you need, and when your team succeeds, the whole company succeeds.

Have Good Communication Skills

During the sales process, teams spend a lot of time gathering necessary information about a client. Once a sale has been made and the clients are passed on to another department, these valuable pieces of information aren’t always turned over properly. Michael Ferguson reminds us that inter-office communication is important and can lead a company to having a successful relationship with a client. All Business states that integrating with other departments also helps facilitate a smooth integration for sales reps in their first few months at a company.

Ultimately, the task of chief communicator primarily falls on the laps of sales managers. They need to be able to articulate their teams’ needs to other departments and to the executive level. For example if there are times when the quotas being set are unrealistic, it’s their role to articulate this to upper management to resolve the situation. Not only does proper communication help you as a sales manager, it helps companies move forward as a cohesive workforce.

How you sell is one of the biggest differentiators between you and your competitors. By using methods like the PIMAT discussed here in Terry’s video, you can overcome common sales speed bumps and maximize your potential to land larger deals.

Speed bumps in closing large deals:

Long sales cycles

Figure out a way to shrink the sales cycle. Decrease the amount of time between when you meet a prospect and make the sale. Sometimes this can drag on for months or years.

Tough sales objectives

If you can’t overcome the prospects concerts about your product the likelihood of you selling them on large deals is weakened.

Stiff competition

Getting into price battles with our competitors. Differentiate yourself from them with your value and not just your price.

Low value deals

Try not to focus on the smaller low value deals and instead on bigger deals that can move the needle. An example would be for a printer to take an order for a $50 business card order vs $5,000 for a catalogue order.

PIMAT – 5 important topics that we need to talk about with a prospect during the “Needs Analysis” stage of the sales cycle.

1. Introduction

2. Needs analysis

→ [P.I.M.A.T]

3. Sales presentation

4. Close the sale

P: Problem – When you start your needs analysis conversation, ask about the goals they want to accomplish and where they are currently. The gap between where they are and where they want to be is the “problem.”

I: Impact –  What damage are the problems causing to the company. This could be a financial oriented problem, time oriented problem, or employee moral/personal oriented problem.

M: Money – Figure out a budgetary range that you can use to create solutions for the prospect. GIve them different price ranges to solve the variety of problems that you have uncovered.

A: Authority – The “who” factor. Who is the decision maker and who else should be involved in the decision to approve a deal. Also ask what factors they are going to consider, if there is a timing perspective to the decision, and what process they go through when making the decision.

T: Technical – The nitty gritty details. If you are building a car, its asking what’s the make, model, color, and interior elements. You have to determine how you will customize what you are selling to suit their needs and create a win-win for both of you.

As you go through the PIMAT process you can eliminate any and all objections that the prospect has upfront and prevent any objections from coming up at the end of the sale.

Alli wants to help sales teams be better at three things: Develop a compelling narrative, present with better visuals, and use presentations to make sales more effectively.

Often times every rep on a sales team has a slightly different “franken-deck” that they present from, and most of the good marketing content goes unused. Instead, every rep should tell the same story using the same assets all while can customizing it in their own way to walk the prospect through their specific needs.

How to build your presentation:

There are several elements to building an effective presentation. First, Alli explains, is that you need to start your presentation off by showing how your product improves things compared to the “old way,” whatever that may be for your business. Next, discuss the value of your product and what they will gain by using it, followed by some type of proof like a reputable case study or testimonial. Throughout the presentation, there should be a compelling storyline to keep the audience engaged and interested.

Start your story with “Change” – Show the old way of doing things and the problems associated with it compared to the new, better way of doing things (and how your product plays into that). Focus on the pain of point A to show why getting to point B is valuable.

Talk about what is gained from your product – Discuss the gains from the perspective of the customer, not from your perspective or your product’s perspective. You want them to leave with a clear understanding of the outcome they can achieve with your product and the value associated with your service.

Show proof – It’s not just about volume (showing a ton of logos on a slide). Instead, say “everyone like you is using this” and provide relevant examples.

Add a storyline – Narrative matters, and pitches that include a compelling story have a higher success rate of bringing the discussion to the next stage.

How to deliver your presentation:

How you deliver your presentation is one of the most important pieces to the equation. This is where you get the attention of your audience and have the opportunity to take them on a carefully constructed journey using a clean slide layout, simple graphics, and a discussion that comes off as free-flowing.

Slide layout – When you have text-first slides, your audience is reading, not listening to you. When you have visual-first slides, your audience will look at the slide while listening to you talk about it.

Dont present directly from the proposal – Use slides with less text to help guide the conversation, as opposed to slides with a lot of descriptive text which can be sent to those who weren’t there for the meeting.

Simplify your visuals – Use easy to follow, simple graphics. Graphic overload can confuse the audience and lead to them being disengaged.

Keep it brief – Try to keep your presentation to under 9 minutes. If you go over 9 minutes, try to use that 9 minute point to switch to a demo or an interactive part of the conversation.

Following Up

By going through these steps you can show your audience that you’re conscious of their specific needs and not just going through the motions of a cookie-cutter presentation.

Follow up with a message laying out the audience’s situation today. Address their roles, teams, processes, tools, timing, and goals. Next, take the three biggest concepts/pain points that were discussed and show how specific benefits from your product will solve each of the three problems. This follow-up template can then be turned into their buying guide.

By taking Alli’s advice on building better presentations you can take your sales pitches to the next level, make an instant connection with those you present to, and land more deals.

In this video course, Krish Ramineni explains that effective sales comes down to two things: your ability to be a great salesperson, and your drive to reach a large number of leads.

His theory is that the more people you reach out to and follow up with, the more chances you will have to be a great salesperson and close deals. To save you time and energy you can implement several easy sales automation tools and processes to manage and personalize your outreach messaging.

Sales automation has three main pillars:

The three pillars below are the main elements that will be in play when setting up any type of sales automation process, and each is equally important to make sure your strategy is successful:

• Process: Your playbook, what you and your manager are figuring out to help you send out the right type communication to the right person.

• Data: Your CRM needs to be updated, your leads list needs to be accurate

• Tools: Leverage tools ot take advantage of the process and data that you have in place. Take 1 to 1 communication and turn it into 1 to 100.

Three key parts of Process:

Within the element of “Process” there are three factors: Outreach, Follow-ups, and Data Entry.

• Outreach: Number of people you are reaching out to, number of emails you’re sending, “top of the funnel.”

• Follow-ups: You need to follow up consistently, sometime up to 7-8 times, before finally getting a response.

• Data Entry: Keep CRM and other systems updated so you know what your next steps after each outreach/followup.

Three key parts of Data:

Within the element of “Data” there are three factors: Conversations, Activities, and CRM.

• Conversations: Qualitative information, asking questions, and insight into if a deal with close or not.

• Activities: Actual actions you are performing. Number of calls you’re making, number of emails you’re sending, how busy you are

• CRM: The CRM fields that tell you what stage a deal is, how big a company is, how many employees there are, what domain they are in, what job titles you are reaching out to, etc. This helps you understand and organize your information.

Three key parts of Tools:

Within the element of “Tools” there are three factors: Email Sequences, Dialers, and Scheduling.

• Email sequences: Email outreach tools that allow you to create templates, craft personalized messages, schedule follow up emails, and track results.

• Dialers: Power dialers that help you call outbound dialing lists and notify you when someone picks up.

• Scheduling: Tools like calendly that help you schedule meetings with people without needing to email or communicate back and forth trying to pick a date.

Data tools:

Krish provided a list of data tool examples, including Clearbit, Fireflies, and Zapier.

• Clearbit: Allows you to upload information from LinkedIn into CRM and do lead scoring.

• Fireflies: Enters information from meetings into CRM by recording and transcribing the conversation.

• Zapier: Allows you to take all the information that is collected from your apps and load it into your CRM.

How to be more effective at sales:

• Outreach is important, but the other part of it is personalized and unique messaging. One way is to manually personalize the initial message, and automate the follow ups.

• Leveraging new channels: Don’t just email and phone call, look at other channels that you can reach leads through. Examples can be through Facebook groups, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

• Product Triggers: Reach people when they are visiting your website, or using your product. You can then send personalized messages related to their recent interaction with your product.

Sales automation helps you manage, optimize, and personalize customers journey. Even though it gives you the power to reach tons of new leads, it comes at the risk of becoming “spammy” so you must keep a balance of what is seen as friendly, personal outreach and generic and overly persistent messaging.