Sales Mastery or Sales Enablement?
I've worked with thousands of sales people in many different
industries. Professional selling is changing rapidly with technology-driven
automation and commoditization resulting in more than one-third of sellers
losing their jobs in the coming years.
Sales
people need to fund themselves from the value they create rather than from the
margins that the product or service delivers.
For any sales person to prosper in
their career they need to move beyond being good at building relationships to
also embrace the holy trinity of sales mastery:
·
Lead with insight as a domain expert
·
Create tangible business value for clients
·
Leverage technology to be effective and efficient
Make no mistake, relationships
alone are not enough. Buyers today are busy and stressed. They are not looking
for new friends. They instead want greater value from fewer relationships. They
care about how you can help them achieve their goals and manage their risks.
Lead with
insight: Don't wait
for your employer to hand you mythical silver bullets... you instead need to
self-educate by researching and writing about the disruptive and transformative
trends in your customer's world.
If you can't write then you
can't sell.
There are four reasons to create
and publish content:
1. Educate
yourself and develop domain knowledge and expertise
2. Connect
with industry leaders to build your sphere of influence
3. Attract
clients and an audience to support your business goals
4. Build
your personal brand evidencing credibility, value and insight
In an
online world we are known by who we associate with (connections) and what we
publish (insights). According to IDC research, 75% of buyers research the
seller before engaging. What do they see when they view your profile? Do they
see a credible domain expert worthy of trust and an investment of their time or
do they see a mere salesperson? We must create own own narrative that sets us
apart and earns engagement at the most senior levels. It is vitally important
to publish thoughtful posts in
your LinkedIn profile.
Creating
business value: Move away
from talking about who you are, what you do and how you do it to instead lead
with why a conversation matters. What business outcomes can you deliver for
them and what risks can you manage?
The
language of business is numbers not words
Lead with why it is important and
what it can do for them at a business level. Have evidence to support your
claims. Know your best customers and why they decided to implement change
within their organization. Understand their business case and the challenges
they faced in change management. Bring this wisdom to new prospective clients
and set an agenda that sets you apart from the competition.
Leverage
technology: The best
sales people combine proven old world practices with modern ways of executing.
Building relationships and evidencing credentials and value can be done online.
Buyers expect the sellers to arrive having done their research. Don't waste the
customer's time asking them to educate you about publicly available
information. Embrace a social selling framework to modernize the way you sell.
Social Selling Definition: The
strategy and process of building quality networks online that attract clients
and accelerates the speed of business and efficiency of selling, as achieved
with personal human engagement through social listening, social publishing,
social research, social engagement, and social collaboration.
Also use your company's CRM system
better than anyone else. Work with marketing for lead nurturing with automation
tools that keep prospects in your orbit without you annoying them or them
wasting your time.
While
sales individuals need to focus on 'sales mastery', the sales organization
needs to focus on 'sales enablement'.
Sales
Enablement
Most businesses do a good job in
segmenting their markets, customers and products but what is often missed is
the insidious impact of commoditization. Every product or service becomes a
commodity over time as features that once differentiated drift back to parity
as competitors catch up. According to Corporate Executive Board research, 86%
of the time that sellers pitch their ‘compelling value,’ buyers perceive it as
neither unique or compelling but merely features also offered by other suppliers.
Every business needs to look at itself from the outside – how do customers
really view us comparatively? If you sell a commodity, then face the awful
truth rather than cling to expensive sales models where customers are unwilling
to pay for the low value and high costs associated with a field sales force.
There is
no such thing as a high margin commodity and the value they offer must stem
from insight and wisdom rather than mere information and service. The first law
of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust. They then seek
best value and lowest risk. The key for every seller is to understand that‘value’ and ‘risk’ are all
defined by the customer. In selling, we are delegated down to people
we sound like and this
means that salespeople need to learn the language of leadership if they want to engage at senior levels.
They need to be equipped to discuss the business case, delivering outcomes and
managing risk.
What are the critical elements of
sales enablement and how do you create a framework for effective sales
execution? There are three essential ingredients plus the catalyst of sales
management leadership. The three ingredients are sales methodology, sales
process and technology platform.
Few people can articulate the
difference between methodologies and process yet these elements are distinctly
different in complex B2B selling.
Methodology is the framework for formulating strategy and
tactics to win; it’s also how you create your competitive deal strategy,
identify risks, cover the political power base within the relationship map, and
identify the best way to create compelling value for the buyer. But which
methodology should you use? There are a number of well-proven methodologies
including TAS, Miller Heiman, RSVPselling, and others. Success with methodology
does not depend on which one you select but simply on how well you use it for
opportunity coaching with the team.
Process is how you build a sales funnel and execute
the sale; it’s how you qualify opportunities and progress through the deal
stages with discovery, proposal, demonstration, closing, contracting,
on-boarding and then doing win/loss reviews and case studies. Process steps
need to be supported by the right tools such as a call planner, qualification
tool, discovery questionnaire, proposal templates, win/loss review forms, and
territory and account plan templates.
Platform is the technology you use to enable and
automate your sales methodology and sales process. It is where you have a
single source of truth about customers and opportunities. It must also be your
coaching platform where there is transparency concerning pipeline depth and
opportunity quality. Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) software is
the ideal platform but CRM needs to be a strategy, not just a technology and
reporting tool. To be implemented successfully, it must go beyond the mere
functions of accounts, opportunities, pipeline and forecasting; it must instead
enable the mapping of relationships and force discipline in deal stage
progression with qualification scoring and action tracking. It must also include
close plans with customer validation of critical dates. Finally, CRM needs to
incorporate tight integration with both marketing, social (such as LinkedIn)
and after sales support to provide a single view of the entire customer
lifecycle from targeting, marketing, lead nurturing and selling through to
account management, support, service, satisfaction and upselling.
This approach uses CRM to place
customers at the heart of everything you do and provides the platform for being
truly customer-centric. It also delivers transparency with deal quality and
revenue predictability. It’s where sales people manage their opportunities and
the tool that sales managers use to coach their people. This approach is
designed to serve the sales people in improving their efficiency and
effectiveness. Because it provides them with value and enables their manager to
coach for improved win rates, they actually populate the systems with accurate
and useful information.
When CRM
is implemented with customers and sales people as the priority, and when it’s
the platform for deal coaching and the enabler for sales process; then system
success is assured. The synergistic outcome for management is accurate
reporting and revenue predictability. The corollary of this is that CRM failure comes
from implementing it as a reporting tool with poor alignment to sales
methodology and sales processes. Many CRM implementation fail and it has
nothing to do with the technology provider; here are the critical success
factors for successful CRM:
·
Obsessively focus on the system serving
sales and customer support staff
·
Integrate with social platforms such as
LinkedIn and InsideView (for easy sales research and insight into Trigger
Events)
·
Integrate with marketing for lead
nurturing (to build sales pipeline)
·
Create a single view of customers and
prospects (to be informed)
·
Embed methodology and process coaching
(qualify, call plan, close plan, etc.)
·
Simplify reports and KPIs which can
actually be managed (activities)
·
Support customer lifecycle post sale
(cases, complaints, renewals, etc.)
With
accurate data in a CRM the next issue to decide is what metrics provide
meaningful reporting. A common mistake made by management at all levels is to
seek to manage by results. Jason Jordan writes insightfully on this topic in
his book, Cracking The Sales Management Code, highlighting that only 17% of the
300+ possible sales metrics measured are actually manageable. As an example,you cannot manage revenue,
but you can manage the activities that create it. Rather than command sales people
to bring in more revenue, they need to be guided in which activities are most
likely to create the type of revenue you are seeking. Managing activities is
the key to delivering the right results and this leads us to the catalyst that
brings methodology, process and platform technology together for successful
sales enablement – the sales manager.
Sales management is without doubt
the most important link in the revenue chain for any organization. The right
sales manager creates emotional commitment and belief within their team, they
coach and mentor for sales success, they develop the right strategies to focus
effort where the team can competitively win and they drive the right
conversations with the right roles within the right targeted prospects. They
also create organizational alignment with upstream marketing and downstream
delivery, support and service to build a business with quality customers.
Sales
management leadership is the catalyst that brings it all together: people, process
and technology within the right strategy and a culture of excellence in execution. The type of person
capable of delivering all this is an engineer rather than a warrior, they have
empathy yet hold people to account. But the best sales manager in the world
cannot be successful if their boss has them endlessly in internal meetings and
reporting up. The sales manager needs to be a coach rather than an
administrator. She needs to spend more time in the field than in the office,
and more time strategizing and reviewing opportunities with sales people than
managing reports. A great coach does not jump in and take over, nor do they do
the sales person’s job for them. They don’t feel the need to rescue people and
instead understand that people are best motivated by reasons they
themselves discover. They focus on planning and debriefing to create
constant improvement.
The Holy
Grail of sales enablement is the seamless integration of the right methodology,
efficient sales process, all enabled by Social Selling and CRM technology used to
coach sales people by an effective sales leader focused on strategy, execution
and building a positive team culture.
The very best sales operations
bring people, process and technology together to be obsessively
customer-centric.
My regards
Tamer El-Sagheer
SkillInside
SkillInside
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