How to sell anything

18 Thought-Provoking Sales Tips from a Salesforce Sales Leader

By Amanda Nelson

One of the driving forces behind Salesforce’s incredible growth is the innovative work of the Revenue Ops department led by EVP Meredith Schmidt. Meredith has spent the last 15 years famously disrupting the SaaS, finance, and consulting sectors, while earning a reputation as a dynamic and visionary leader. The Revenue Ops team currently operates at 75% no-touch from quote to compensation — on an annual volume that exceeds 1 million orders. That’s serious volume.

In the brand new ebook, Revenue Ops: The Salesforce Way, Meredith shares universal tips that can be easily tailored to supercharge your own quote-to-compensation process. Grab your copy here, and read on to get a sampling of Meredith’s motivational words of advice.

Tips on making positive change

1. Just because things have always been done a certain way doesn’t mean that’s the best way.
2. A solution that only solves today’s immediate problem might not be the best solution.
3. Innovate, ask questions, and challenge the status quo.

Tips on sales automation

4. Any time you can automate a task, it frees up people to do their most valuable work.
5. Once a customer signs, nobody should have to touch it. It should automatically be provisioned, billed, closed, etc.
6. By giving employees the ability to test and share ideas, you’re able to use technology across teams, find patterns, and successfully automate processes.

Tips on your sales focus

7. Always remember who your target audience is. This is why you do what you do.
8. The end user — individual account executives (AEs), in this case — should always be the center of attention.
9. While developing and implementing any process, always be laser-focused on making the end user’s job easier and faster.

Tips on scaling and growing

10. Solutions that increase productivity aren’t just about increasing revenue right now; they’re also about keeping up with growing demand in the future.
11. Forward-thinking is the best way to ensure that your company is ready for sudden opportunities when they arise.
12. Ask growth-related hypotheticals to make sure you’re prepared for anything that comes your way.

Tips on sales leadership

13. Empower individuals by giving them a voice.
14. There is tremendous value inside each member of your team. Be sure to unleash it.
15. Make it easy for employees to provide feedback, report issues, and share ideas.

Tips for choosing sales technology

16. Choose technology that draws from a single data source, has the same, familiar UI, and is 100% mobile optimized.
17. Integrate your sales technology with other systems to unite back-office and front-office data.
18. Complete sales automation comes from an advanced, customized CPQ (configure, price, quote) app, which allows reps to configure quotes and streamline even the most complex approvals process.

Check out some of the sales apps Meredith’s team utilizes on AppExchange, and get acopy of the ebook here.

Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose

Selling Is Not About Relationships

Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?

To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.

We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights:

1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.

Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers:

• Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
• Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
• Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
• Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
• Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.

When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.

What makes the Challenger approach different?

The data tell us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:

Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn’t realized even existed.

Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.

Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.

We’ll discuss each of these capabilities in more depth in our upcoming posts, but just as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it’s almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.

Why is this? It’s certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales–that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tell us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matter. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer’s every demand. Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likable and generous with their time. The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.

This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.

Here’s how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: “You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it’s been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we’re in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can’t sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why.”

3. Challengers dominate the world of complex “solution-selling”

Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the down-economy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggest that this is wishful thinking.

When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers. At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments.

Put differently, Challengers win because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy. Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren’t just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.

From The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson (Nov 10, 2011)

Why Your Sales Reps Can’t Close

Think your team has a “closing” problem? Think again.

How often have you heard leaders say, “My salespeople can’t close”? If you’re a sales manager, you’ve probably even said it. But failing to close is never the real problem. Never. That’s just the symptom. The problem is that sales reps neglect important activities during early stages of the sales process.

Unless you address the broken links in your prospecting system, your sales reps will continue to struggle. It’s like back pain. You can stretch and put heat on an aching back, but unless you treat the source of the pain—a pulled muscle or degenerating disc—your back will continue to hurt.

Put Your Finger on the Real Problem

When you start analyzing what really went wrong with missed sales opportunities, you’ll typically discover that your sales reps didn’t make time to prepare for their meetings. They didn’t plan agendas, do their research, tailor their pitches, or even check the clients’ LinkedIn profiles to identify shared interests, connections, and similarities.

Other common prospecting problems:

• The initial prospects were unqualified. They had no idea why they were meeting with the salesperson or why they should be interested.
• The salesperson didn’t ask enough discovery questions.
• The salesperson left without getting agreement on next steps or scheduling the next call.
• Follow-up consisted of a series of emails that promoted products, didn’t address the client’s unique concerns, and had no calls to action.
• The salesperson was clueless as to why his emails were greeted with radio silence.

This is not how you wow prospects, build relationships with them, and convert them into clients.

One of my clients was on the way to a high-profile meeting. If his team wowed the client, they had an opportunity to close a million-dollar deal. I asked my client how the sales reps prepared. His answer: “Oh, we talk about it in the car on the way to the meeting.” Was their sales manager clueless, or what?

Start at the Source

If your team has trouble closing, go back to the beginning—qualifying prospects—and examine your entire sales process for missing links and broken tactics.

Ask these pointed questions:

• How are sales reps getting leads?
• How are these leads qualified?
• Are salespeople asking the right questions to identify prospects’ problems and propose thoughtful solutions?
• Do sales reps demonstrate product features, or do they talk ROI?
• What is the marketing plan for following up?

Don’t even think about training your sales team on closing techniques. Save your money. Instead, give them a sales process that works.

The ROI of Referrals

More often than not, the problem is with a team’s prospecting methods. If your reps are chasing cold leads, they’re pretty much set up to fail. There’s only one kind of lead that should be in your pipeline. Only one kind of lead with a 50-percent conversion rate. Only one kind of lead that sales managers should care about.

That’s hot leads—the kind you source through referrals from trusted allies.

Every sales professional agrees that referral selling is, hands down, their most effective prospecting strategy. When you prospect through referrals:

• You bypass the gatekeeper and score meetings with decision-makers every time.
• Your prospects are pre-sold on your ability to deliver results.
• You’ve already earned trust and credibility with your prospects.
• You convert prospects into clients at least 50 percent of the time (usually more than 70 percent).
• You land clients who become ideal referral sources for new business.
• You score more new clients from fewer leads (because all of your leads are qualified).
• You get the inside track on your prospects and ace out your competition.

Ditch the Canned Pitch—Ask the Right Questions

If your team is getting in front of the right prospects and still can’t seal the deal, they’re not engaging in insightful discussion or asking compelling questions.

Thoughtful and provocative questioning has a huge impact on close rates and sales revenues. When sales reps ask smart, probing questions to understand what their clients really need—not just what the clients think they need—the scale of projects increases, creating win/wins for everyone. Your company gets bigger deals. Clients get solutions that actually solve their problems and create measurable business results. And they are happy to offer referrals to their networks.

Bravo! You’ve addressed the problem, not the symptom. Your client looks good, your team is prepared, and deals are yours to win. You are now a true sales manager.

http://www.nomorecoldcalling.com/note-to-the-sales-manager-why-your-sales-reps-cant-close/

How Well Do You Know Your Customer?

Dave Brock

My friend, Tim Ohai, has a brilliant bet he makes with sales people.  He puts a $100 bill on the table, saying, “If you can talk about your customer, their problems, opportunities, and challenges for 20 minutes, without ever mentioning your products, the $100 is yours.”

The tragic part of this story, is that Tim has never had to pay the $100!

The unfortunate imbalance is, any sales person can talk for hours on end about their products, pausing occasionally to take a breath or a sip of water.  They can fill whiteboard after whiteboard with facts, figures, feeds and speeds.  When they run out, they can pull out decks of Powerpoint pitches, endless product brochures, and case studies.

But that’s not what the customer cares about.  That’s not the help they need.  They can get all the same stuff on the web, downloading brochures, sitting on webinars, talking to others.

What customers really need and value is someone who can talk about their customers, competitors, markets, industries, and their own companies.  Customers struggle to get through the day to day, so they need help learning about opportunities they may be missing, things they could improve, ideas for growing, or simply reducing the stress and problems they face daily.

In virtually every survey asking customers about the biggest problems they have with sales, the following issue is always in the top 5:  “They don’t understand me, my company, our markets, or our business!”

Going back to Tim’s story, he reports, on average, sales people can only go on a little more than 3 minutes before they are forced to start talking about the product.

Stated differently, sales people can only speak for about 3 minutes on the things most important to the customer!

It’s no wonder we have problems engaging our customers!  It’s no wonder why customers don’t want to talk to us until they are 57-70% through their buying process.  We are irrelevant to them until that point.  We create no value on the things that are most critical to them.

There are two levels to this problem.

The first is organizational.  Billions are spent on training every year.  The bulk of that investment is training on products and services.  Some of that training is on sales skills/techniques.  Some, in fact, may be on how to deliver insight, but not about the insight itself.  If you sell to financial services companies, when was the last time your company took you through comprehensive training on the financial services industry?  What is the structure of the industry (it’s hugely diverse with lots of business models)?  What are the key drivers, trends, issues?  Who are their customers?  Who are the competitors?  What are the strategies of the key players?  How are the companies organized/structured, how do they work, how are they measured?  What are their biggest problems/challenges/opportunities?  What are the problems we help them solve?  What are the things they are talking about, what should they be talking abut?

Name an industry or segment, to be relevant to our customers, being conversant in these issues is table stakes.  If you are a sales or corporate executive, it’s critical to provide this foundation to your sales people.  They have to understand how businesses work, what drives the decision makers we work with in those businesses.

The second element of this problem is at a sales person level, and their preparation to meet with customers.  Who are they meeting with?  What’s their background?  What’s their role?  What are their concerns (or what are they likely to be)?  What’s happening with the company?  How are they performing?  Have there been any big changes?  And the list goes on.  Unless we research and prepare, we aren’t equipped to talk about the things the customer most cares about.

Sales managers, try this in your next team meeting:  Take a tip from Tim, put $100 (or the equivalent in your currency) on the table.  Ask your sales people to talk for 20 minutes about the customer, their strategies, challenges, opportunities, performance, markets.  They have to do this without mentioning your products or services.  It’s a bet you want to lose!

10 Sales Skills Everyone Should Master To Be Successful

BY BO NARDIN

What comes into your mind when hearing words ‘sales skills’? Some people connect these words with manipulation, chasing people on the streets and being able to talk like a machine gun. These images are just the opposite of what good sales skills are all about.

The fact is that mastering sales skills is an essential part of being successful in any area of your life: as an artist or as a computer programmer, at your office when you present a new idea to your colleagues, as a business owner or even when planning a new holiday destination with your family. If you look at sales skills from the right angle, your success is on the way!

To start with: we all have practiced some good sales skills (and not even thinking about them!) at one time in our life. Remember when you were a kid. How many ways have you invented to persuade your parents to buy you ice-cream? Or in your teens, you met a girl or a boy of your dreams. What have you done? You tried to convince her or him that your love is a true one and that you are the best choice for her or him. And (hopefully) you meant it from all your heart.

So, we are all born with some good sales skills! To help you out to be even more successful in any area of your life, here are 10 sales skills which can improve your daily life.

1. Be a good listener

Contrary to popular opinion people with good sales skills listen very carefully. They know that we have two ears and only one mouth, so that there is a good reason to listen more than talk.

When listening, be an active listener, be interested in what people have to say. When you propose an idea at your job or in your family, listen carefully what objectives people around you have. Only then, you will be able to find the right answers for them and be successful in promoting your idea.

2. Find a way to connect

Successful salespeople are masters in connecting with other people.

The next time you talk to a person observe the way he or she talks. If the person speaks slowly, you should slow down your speech, too. Why? Because similarities connect people.

Find out what the person likes, what hobbies they have. Does the person have a dog? If you have a dog, too then there is plenty to talk about and the connection just gets stronger.

3. Think of giving value first

If you want to empower your life with good sales skills don’t think of selling. Think of giving value first and the money or success will be a by-product. We all like people who bring value to our lives and dislike people who just want to sell.

Be resourceful, make suggestions for improving the workflow at your office or your business, try to find ways to improve other people’s lives and you will become successful.

4. Be passionate

Sales people or business owners who are passionate about their products or what they do don’t even think that much about their sales skills. They simply do it because they think it is right. When shareholders tried to press on Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO for greater profits, he simply replied:

”I don’t even care about ROI (Return On Investment). We, here at Apple do it in the way we do simply because we think it is right and good!”

Find your passion, find what you like to do, (think of what you would do even if you are not paid for it) and your passion will drive you through every obstacle on the way to your success.

5. Picture your end result

Successful salespeople always see their customers being fully satisfied with the service they offer. They see how grateful people are after buying their products. They see the end results even before they start selling. They always have these images in their minds.

Make a habit to picture the end result for everything you want in your life. Even when you don’t have the slightest idea how you are going to make it, visualize your end result. Picture yourself driving your new car, sipping a nice, tasty coffee on a balcony of your new apartment or signing a new contract in your office as a successful business owner. Having the image of your desired thing always in your mind will help you to find ways you can’t see right now.

6. Don’t take it personally

One of the hardest sales skills to learn is how to deal with rejections. Jean Paul DeJoria, the co-founder of Jean Mitchel Systems and founder of Patron Tequila said:

“When 100 doors are slammed in your face, go to the door number 101 and be just as enthusiastic as you were at the beginning.”

How to do that? Just don’t take a rejection personally and go on. If some people say “no” to your idea or proposal, they are maybe just not prepared for it, right now. But don’t allow this to doubt in yourself. Believe in yourself and find people who will support your ideas.

You have to remember that successful people do things unsuccessful people try to avoid in any possible way.

7. Find out what people really need

Even if you have exceptional sales skills, you would have hard times selling a bottle of water someone in the nice Alpine village. But offer this same bottle of water to a thirsty group of tourists lost in the middle of a Sahara desert, you really shouldn’t have any struggle.

Take time and find out what people need in your town or anywhere in the world (thanks to the Internet you can offer your solutions just anywhere). For example, if you are a yoga teacher, there are many people who have backache problems because they sit for long hours so try to think of how to offer your service in their offices, when they have a break. There are many people who want to learn marketing skills and you might already have these skills. So look around for the needs first and then figure out ways for solutions.

8. Keep eye contact

Keeping eye contact is one of those tiny, small but very important sales skills which show a prospect you really care about him or her. Successful people know that avoiding eye contact is a sign of insecurity or unappreciation.

The next time you speak with your boss or your customer look calmly in their eyes (just don’t stare at them like you are in trance) because with natural eye contact, even when you don’t talk you are silently telling: “I listen to you and I care for you.”

9. Do the best follow up

One of the most efficient sales skills for bringing referrals in is a great follow-up. How good would you feel if you enroll in a fitness program and the next day a fitness instructor calls you asking how you feel after your first workout day? People who do great follow-ups know they can win customers for life.

So, if you want to be successful make sure you take great care for people around you. If you helped someone at your office with a problem a week ago, ask him how he is doing now, what his progress is. If you own a business, pick up the phone today and ask your customers how they are doing with your product.

10. People buy you first

Even if you master all the selling skills in this planet if you don’t have a good, caring personality, nothing will really work. You have to remember that people buy you first and only then your products, which means that they have to trust and like you first.

Work regularly on yourself, read motivational books every day, watch videos on YouTube which motivate you. In this way, you will become a strong personality which is the great foundation for your success.

Mastering sales skills is basically the art of mastering relationships with people around you. To be successful in your life, work every day on slight improvements on every of these sales skills, and the compound effect of slight improvements will be shown in the better quality of your life very soon.