In this 5th piece of our 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals.
In this section, we want to discuss the age-old debate about sales reps; are they born or are they made? You would think that the best sales reps are extroverts who are able to hold up a conversation with just about anyone. You might even go as far as to say that they show poise and confidence in any situation and become the focal point in any environment. However, are these the requisites for being able to successfully pitch to a client? Doesn’t being more concise, and saying less with more, ultimately win over lip-worship?
Top performing sales reps aren’t oftentimes born sellers. It is the ones that have learned how to properly listen and understand the prospects that in the end win out. Making each Sales Call count means coupling a quality pitch with clarity of mind and out-of-the-box thinking –the elements that really work to ramp up the chances of making that sale.
The First Sales Reps
It might help to start with a brief history lesson about the sales process. We can certainly agree that there are some sales presentation tactics that just don't quite cut it any longer, like canned sales or pressure selling.
The question about why they won't work is almost common sense.
Canned sales are exactly what they sound like - sales presentations that came out of a can. Giving everyone the same exact pitch with maybe some variety in flavour. Nobody in the world wants to hear this, they can just as easily read it on the website and not be encumbered by a sales rep.
Pressure selling is all about driving the pitch, established needs, known benefits, and likely some elements of fear, in an effort to pressure or intimidate the buyer into making a purchase decision. Any buyer who receives this attitude today will just hang up the phone.
So, why bring it up? There was once a time and place for both of these sales enablement solutions.
During the industrial revolution, intercity trade was realized as a facet of new-world economics, and sales was a respectable and viable employment frontier. The need of the day was information dissimination, and that's exactly what reps did. Canned presentations were memorized, delivered, and refined. Competition was low, and buyers just needed to know the ins and outs of the product or service. Remember, there was no internet.
Between both World Wars and The Great Depression, businesses were starved for income, and everybody was on the margins, if at all. High pressure sellers won the day for the entirety of those decades, and unfortunately, the nice-guy trusted sales rep, and certainly the canned seller, lost out.
Trust Based Relationship Sales
Today we know that none of that past nonesense works anymore. Buyers want a strategic consultant to help them reach their objectives. Sales reps spend time learning anything and everything about anyone, anything, and everything needed to add value to the sales presentation. Knowledge about the buyer enables a sales rep to think outside the box and create a total sales solution.
The sales rep of the 21st century is a strategic consultant, with a keen understanding of how to manupulate the offerings of their vendor for the sustained benefit of the buyer.
It's not about personality, it's about process
As you can see, even if the best pressure sellers of that day were charming, well-spoken, and influential, they would fail miserably in today's sales environment. Nobody in the right mind would allow themselves to be pressured by a seller when competition in most industries allows for several alternatives.
Today's effective sales reps know that the name of the game is maintaining relevancy to the buyer. Being a consultant, or someone trusted, is being someone who isn't interested in the sale for it's own sake, and who wants to maintain a long term post sale interaction. The growth of digital sales and mobile sales apps has resulted in more opportunity to communicate and remain relevant - knowing the buyer, and keeping lines of communication open.
Knowing Your Buyer
If canned selling involved knowing your product (or, your script), and pressure selling was all about fast talking and handling objections, trust based relationship sales is about knowing your buyer.
Trust is tricky business, and it invoves showing the other party that you have competence, commitement to their success, and aspects of integrity. Buyer's are certainly getting more complex, as are the products being sold, and the sales process in and of itself, depending on the product.
Technology has given us real sales enablement tools that bridge the gap of awareness and ensure that reps can still deliver on customer needs without needing to invest untold hours into research, planning, and creating content.
Proving ROI from marketing activities is the highest voted corporate marketing challenge of the last two years (Source: Marketing Charts) which means that these kinds of insights are going to get more and more essential.
Sales enablement KPI's can provide reps with several analytics capabilities that enable reps to know exactly what the buyer is interested in, what will entice them to further develop their buying stage, and how future similar buyers an be acquired by marketing.
Buyer's are getting more savvy, and research alone won't level the knowledge field. Best-in-class sales reps have deep insights into buyer interactions.
Keeping Lines of Communication Open
Back in the day, it would have been limited to just written letters, and then phone shortly thereafter. Today, we have several mediums of communication, and countless channels within each medium. We have so many mediums that content which works through one channel, fails on another. Keeping the conversation going in order to develop buyer stages and decision journeys has more options, and less effectiveness.
Software for sales enablement does more than count KPIs, it allows the rep to maintain a consistent communication with the same buyer through several mediums. It doesn't matter what device the rep uses, it matter's what device the buyer uses. Reps must be able to consistently deliver communication and brand value across multiple channels, at any time, anywhere. Real sales enablement goes a step further to ensure that whatever content a rep may have in their playbook, can be sent, consumed, and tracked by reps to buyer's.
Enabling digital sales is an essential function of today's sales reps, in any industry.
If you're stressing about your sales skills, remember it's not about being smooth talking and fast thinking. It's all about establishing trust, remaining relevant, keeping in communication, and adding value to the conversation over time. Sometimes it's easier said than done, but as technology seems to make people harder to reach and understand, it also empowers sales to achieve just that.
How are you managing to maintain buyer awareness and multi-channel engagement? are you struggling? perhaps some technology enablement can help.
