For many of your customers, sales reps are the face of your company. Making sure that they put the right foot forward is not only a reflection of your company, it can also make or break a sale. This week we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 bad habits of sales reps and how sales enablement can help fix them.
1. Focusing on Selling
One of the biggest mistakes that a sales rep makes is focusing too much on selling and not enough time on building relationships. Product-centric communications are a major turn-off for prospects. Buyers want to feel like they’re making their own decisions, not being given a sales pitch or being directly sold to (Source: BDC, 2015). In fact, “43% say that creating deeper customer relationships is one of their top 3 priorities” (Source: Sales Force Research, 2015).
The more that you understand a buyer and help them succeed, the more likely it is that you’ll be successful in securing prospects (Source: Gallup, 2013). Buyers want to feel that salespeople understand their pain points and unfortunately, “40% of salespeople can’t understand customer pain” (Source: Marketing Tech Blog, 2015). If buyers don’t think that your sales reps understand them, it is likely they will not see how your product(s) will help them achieve their strategic priorities. Sales reps must start thinking about sales conversations as a means of identifying buyer problems and suggesting solutions (Source: BDC, 2015).
These are just some of the many problems we’ve identified in today’s sales training model. Download our FREE eBook below for a deep analysis on the future of sales training protocol, actionable ways to increase motivational capacity, and scientifically grounded strategies for more persuasive sales presentations.
At Skura we like to think of the sales rep as a trusted concierge, and the sale is simply the outcome of solid problem solving and relationship building, rather than an objective of the interaction.
Today’s buyer’s are more empowered and are disrupting the traditional sales process. Find out how in our infographic, “Today’s Buyer’s are More Empowered”.
Sales Reps Must Show More Empathy
When preparing for meetings, sales reps need to take a new approach. Instead of preparing product collateral, they should be taking the time to really understand the prospect. Researching your prospect’s company and industry allows sales reps to better understand the types of challenges that they may be facing and how your product can benefit them (Source: BDC, 2015). During the sales call, salespeople must center their questions and conversation on the prospect's business goals and obstacles that stand in their way to achieving desired success (Source: Gallup, 2013).
Building a relationship with prospects and buyers means showing empathy. This concept is polar opposite to traditional practices (Source: Dun & Bradstreet, 2015). Instead of pushing products at prospects, salespeoplemust listen to them. Greater empathy in the relationship building process leads to more complex problem solving and needs evaluation.
We believe that chance favours the prepared mind (in the words of Louis Pasteur), and the more that you can prepare your mind with customer details, the more likely it will be that you touch on real pain points and strategic priorities when offering solutions.
Understanding your prospects will be even harder if your sales reps don’t understand how the empowered buyer is changing the way we sell. Understand your prospects better by reading our post, “How and Empowered Buyer Impacts the Sales Process”.
Get Ahead of your Competition with Predictive Selling
By looking at trend data, sales and marketing can have a better handle on customer pain points. In turn , this will help sales reps to be more empathetic to buyer situations (Source: Dun & Bradstreet, 2015). By integrating sales enablement with marketing automation and CRM, sales reps get a comprehensive view of customer profiles before meeting with prospects face to face. Sales enablement gives them insight into what customers are looking for, the information that they have been looking at, and who they may have already spoken to. This is called predictive selling, or knowing what the buyer wants and being there with solutions ahead of time.
Sales enablement tools equip your salespeople to optimize micro-decisions, which helps them to close deals faster (Source: Dun & Bradstreet, 2015). By moving away from the classic sales pitch and towards predictive insights, sales reps can focus less on directly selling to prospects with traditional information searches, and more on building relationships with sincere interactions. Predictive selling helps your salespeople to be more mindful of customer concerns in advance.
Are you new to Sales Enablement? We discuss everything you need to know about this in our post. “What is Sales Enablement? A Sales Enablement Definition for 2015”.
2. Measuring the Wrong Things
The second most common mistake for many sales reps and sales departments is the way that they measure their sales efforts. Sales teams should be measuring the behavior of your sales reps and the behavior of your buyers at each stage in their decision journey (Source: Braintrust, 2015). Measuring sales numbers alone won’t give you the information you need to determine your best practices for success. Instead, you should be using data on buyer behavior to drive your selling strategy (Source: My Customer, 2015).
Using data correctly will not only help your sales reps engage in meaningful conversations, it will also help your marketing team develop stronger content. By using data correctly, you’re enabling sales reps to become more competitive, more service-orientated, and more relationship focused with communications (Source: My Customer, 2015).
Measuring KPI’s
Help your sales reps measure the right data by defining and outlining your own KPI’s. Be careful, as setting KPI’s that are too vague are just as bad as not setting them at all (Source: My Customer, 2015). You will be much more likely to achieve results with clearer and more direct decisions on KPI measurement (Source: My Customer, 2015).
Not sure what KPI’s you should be measuring? You may find our post, “How to Choose the Right Metrics for Your Sales Process”, to be of interest.
Using Sales Analytic Software
Predictive sales analytics software imbedded in sales enablement provides sales and marketing teams an avenue to measure and analyze digital content consumption behavior. Traditional sales analytics answers the question: “how did we sell more products or services last month/quarter/year?” Reporting is retrospective. Whereas predictive analytics are forward-looking andanswers the question: “why?” Predictive analytics drill into a specific question until a premise has been established which can suggest actionable changes (Source: My Customer, 2015).
According to Salesforce, “high-performing sales teams are 3.5x more likely to use sales analytic software than underperforming teams” (Source: Salesforce Research, 2015). With the help of sales enablement, you too can give sales reps the tools they need to be a success out in the field. Using predictive sales analytic software, you and your salespeople have a comprehensive picture of your buyers across all channels according to their preferences, behaviors, and demographics.
Using this software also helps marketing to produce better marketing materials and sales reps to engage in more productive conversations with buyers. Using mobile sales applications, sales and marketing can analyze data collected out in the field and this option gives both teams better insight into where the buyer stands in their decision journey. Using the right data can help you to improve and optimize your campaigns and integrate metrics that span your sales pipeline.
Are you seeing a disconnect between sales and marketing leads acceptance? You’re not alone! Find out how sales enablement can help you in our post, “The Devil is in the Details: Sales Enablement KPI”.
(Image Source: Easy Earing Income, 2015)
3. Closing the Deal Early
Sales reps make the common mistake of trying to close before the buyer is ready. Being too eager to seal the deal actually leads to a loss in prospects or damages the sale. Skipping past important decision journey stages will result in an automatic loss for many buyers (Source: Hubspot, 2015). When sales reps skip these important stages they are not spending the time the buyer needs to understand and develop their need for your product or service (Source: Sales Force, 2013).
Why are sales reps skipping out on important parts of the complicated sales process? For some, it may be because they are eager to anticipate a sale. Arguably for most sales reps, it is simply because they are underprepared when it comes to understanding the buyer’s decision journey. When you misinterpret where a buyer stands along their journey, it is quite easy to assume they are farther along their journey than they actually are.
The decision journey should play a large role in your buyer awareness and overall communications planning. If you’re interested in learning more about the buyer’s decision journey, may I suggest our post, “The New Decision Journey and Appropriate Digital Content Strategies”.
Organize Content with Sales Playbooks
With help from sales enablement tools, organizing your content into playbooks allows sales reps to present digital content that is relevant to the buyer and where they stand in their decision journey. Sales playbooks provide guided selling assistance to various selling job roles (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015). Once organized around your buyer personas, sales reps can easily access the content they need in relation to where the prospect is along their decision journey. Using sales playbooks can help to bridge the gap between your content management tools and your sales process (Source: Sales Benchmark Index, 2014).
Are you new to sales playbooks? Or perhaps you just need a refresh, CLICK HERE to see our post entitled “What is a Sales Playbook and How Does it Benefit Digital Content Marketing”.
4. Not Enough Time Spent on Selling Activities
Not to be mistaken with #1 – doing too much selling and not enough relationship building – In this case sales reps often get into the bad habit of not spending enough time on actual selling activities.
On average, a sales rep only spends 1/3 of their day actually selling (Source: Hubspot, 2015). Sales reps must keep in mind that every hour they spend on tasks that don’t involve selling means that they have one less hour in their day to make their quota (Source: Hubspot, 2015). The two most common distractions that sales reps tend to prioritize include administrative tasks and content creation.
Administrative Tasks
One of the most common distractions for a sales rep is administrative work. According to Hubspot, 20% of their time is spent on reporting, administrative, and CRM related tasks (Source: Hubspot, 2015). On average, sales reps receive almost 600 emails a week (Source: KnowledgeTree, 2015). Many sales reps get caught up in trying to keep up with their inbox than actually selling.
While most sales reps need to learn how to better manage their time, they are not the only party at fault here. Management needs to also recognize that the company’s administrative processes are too time consuming and take away from your sales rep’s ability to sell (Source: Briantrust, 2015). Using a tool such as a sales enablement will help sales reps accomplish administrative tasks faster and more efficiently. The more time sales reps have to sell, the more likely you’ll be in meeting your sales goals (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
Sales enablement automates many administrative functions, especially CRM reporting for contact profile updates. These kinds of administrative detours can be replaced by a simply press of a button on a tablet, freeing sales reps to redouble their newly found time on relationship building and prospecting.
According to Sales Force, “high-performing sales teams use nearly 3x more sales tech than underperforming teams, freeing them from process-heavy tasks and giving them more time to actively sell” (Source: Sales Force Research, 2015). Sales enablement offers sales and marketing teams the ability to keep all of their contact information, emails, and sales calls in one place. Having multiple devices and databases means that contacts can sometimes get lost or forgotten about. Using sales enablement software, sales reps can sync and upload all contacts in one easy-to-access place. This becomes especially important given that sales reps are always on the go.
The best sales enablement solutions also offer sales reps the ability to integrate their email, marketing automation, and CRM. Doing so makes it easier for the sharing of content, presentations, and other communications between sales teams and buyers. Through sales enablement, sales reps can also learn how to better manage their time as they have the ability to set up reminders of when to follow up and email buyers and prospects.
Creating Content
Sales reps can also get into the bad habit of spending too much time creating their own content. On average, they spend 30% of their day looking for, or creating content (Source: KnowledgeTree, 2015). This begs the question, ‘why isn’t marketing creating the content sales reps need?’ The truth is that 70% of marketing content never gets used by sales (Source: KnowledgeTree, 2015). This is because 67% of sales reps feel that content is too generic while 40% feel that content is not relevant enough to the buyer (Source: Lattice Engines, 2013).
In order to create productive content, sales teams need to be advised by marketing on what content to use and when to use it, as sellers cannot be responsible for committing entire content libraries to memory (Source: KnowledgeTree, 2015). One way to accomplish this is through sales and marketing alignment. Building stronger relationships between these two departments will allow for greater communication, and in turn, better quality content. If you’re struggling to align your sales and marketing teams, using digital tools such as sales enablement can be very beneficial.
Interested in learning more about why sales reps aren’t using content created by your marketing team? We discuss why in our post, “3 Reasons Sales Reps Aren’t Using Digital Content Created by Marketing”.
How Sales Enablement Gives Sales Reps Back Their Time
As mentioned above, integrated sales analytic software can provide very valuable insight to sales and marketing teams. Using data collected in the field, marketing teams can create more valuable content that is better directed at the customer, based on where they are in their decision journey. According to Forbes, 44% of top performers look to sales enablement to power their content strategies (Source: Forbes, 2015).
Sales reps often look to creating their own content because they cannot find content created by marketing, are using materials that are outdated, or find that it is too generic. Reportedly, 41% of top-performers use sales enablement to power their content strategies because it allows instant access to content in the field (Source: Forbes). Using mobile sales applications, sales reps can access content on any device, at any time, whether they are connected to the internet or not.
When it comes to customizing content, sales enablement can equip sales reps with the tools they need to be successful, as mobile sales apps also allow sales reps to use existing marketing collateral to create customized presentations on the go. This is beneficial as no two-decision journeys are the same, customers will differ in the types of content that they need at every stage.
Interested in investing in sales enablement tools but don’t know where to start? We discuss how to choose the right tools for your company in our post, “How to Determine the Right Sales Enablement Software”.
5. Not Engaging in Productive Conversations
As mentioned earlier, building relationships with prospects and current customers is a valuable aspect of the sales process. How do you begin to build those relationships? The answer is through meaningful conversations. According to a study produced by Gallup, only 20% of B2B customers are fully engaged (Source: Gallup, 2013). Keeping customers engaged with valuable content will not only help build trust, it will also build loyalty in the long run. The role of the sales rep is to change the mind of the buyer by showing them the difference between price and cost (Source: Sales Force, 2013).
Opportunities for a sale are not based on price alone; sales are made on the value that is created between sales reps and prospects (Source: Sales Force, 2013). Value is derived through the content being presented and the relationships that are being built. Shockingly, “70% of sales reps say they don’t have the knowledge and tools to add value to their sales conversations” (Source: Monster, 2015). Don’t just give sales reps the knowledge to do their jobs, give them the tools to do it. As mentioned above, sales enablement provides sales reps the opportunity to create customized presentations on the go. The more a prospect is able to relate to a presentation, the more engaging the sales conversation will be with your sales reps.
Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over average customers in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth (Source: Gallup, 2013). Therefore, the more engaged a prospect is, the greater the profitability will be over time. Through sales enablement software, sales reps can easily keep in touch with prospects and stay informed with up to date content.
No two sales reps are exactly the same, however if you’ve been in the business for some time, I’m sure you’ve noticed some behavioral trends amongst sales. We analyze and define our own sales rep stereotypes in our post, “Sales Enablement for Reps Who are Walking, Talking, Turnoffs”.
Breaking bad habits can be hard, especially if a sales rep has been in the industry for a while. Using sales enablement as a means to end bad habits can be extremely useful. The right tools can help break bad habits quicker and easier, and makes habit relapses less frequent.
Did you find this post interesting? Then you’ll love the report we put together on sales enablement best practices! Click the link below to learn all of the ways you can (and should) be optimizing your sales enablement strategy.
