Sales simulations – they’re better than ever!

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Richard Ruff

Sales simulations

Sales simulations are more versatile, more effective, and more affordable than ever.  So companies are increasingly embracing them. What are some innovative companies doing with sales simulations? Here are some examples:

Creating integrated learning experiences. In the real world sales call execution skills and sales strategy are intertwined – the best sales strategy cannot succeed when poorly executed and vice-versa.  Sales simulations provide a realistic methodology for combining face-to-face sales skills and sales strategy training into a single sales training program.

Addressing strategic business challenges. Companies repeatedly face the challenge of implementing new business initiatives like moving from selling individual products to selling an integrated solution.  Sales simulations are uniquely suited to help the sales team adapt and adjust their exiting skills to the new selling challenges.  They can be customized to focus the skill development on the key business issues the sales force will be facing in making the shift by dragging the real world into the classroom.

In this situation they allow a third option for a classic dilemma: Do you replace your existing sales training with a “new” sales model? The downside risk is you end up replacing the existing common language with an alternative and confusion rather than improvement results.  Doing nothing, and hoping sales people will adapt and adjust on their own is equally problematic.

Sales simulations represent a third option that allows companies to help their sales teams adjust and adapt their existing skills sets to the new buying environment, yet maintain the common sales language in which they are already invested.

Increase the “sticky” quotient”. Clearly a challenge in every learning experience is how you prevent the decay of the performance improvement that resulted from the training.  This is why post-program coaching is such a big deal.

Sales simulations provide an additional answer because they are highly customized to represent the day-to-day challenges that the sales team will face.  So the learner does not have to translate what they learn before they apply it in the field.

If you would like to take a deeper dive, tune in to this video on sales simulations.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in Sales Simulations, Sales Training, Sales Training Best Practices, Sales Training Design | Tagged , , , , ,

1 Comment

Professional service sales – leveraging the power of the team

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Sales teams in professional service firms

Team selling does not guarantee sales success. As a matter of fact, teams are frequently misused and ineffective. On the other hand, some organizations have cracked the code and consistently leverage the power of team selling.

This can be a particularly important competitive advantage in the professional service sale. For many companies, selling as a sales team simply means two people going on a call.  In professional services, there are field-based engineering and technical support staff, or implementation managers that are on-site and have unique perspectives about the customer.

In addition, professional service firms often have project teams in different divisions working with the same company, department or agency. In the past often one person did not voluntarily introduce a colleague from another division to “their client”.

In a professional service firm two reasons drive the push for team selling across divisions.  First, professional services firms are realizing they are “leaving money on the table” if they don’t leverage relationships across divisions in the same company, hospital, or other organization.  Second, while professional services staffers may consider their products as separate silos, many buyers do not. They look at their total spend with a professional services firm and want to leverage the volume.

So, in general how can professional service firms get a little bit better at team selling?  Let’s take a look at some characteristics of successful sales teams:

  • They have a compelling clear vision of the firm’s total capabilities.
  • Everyone believes there is benefit to the firm – and to them personally for working as a team.
  • Because they perceive the potential benefits as significant, they invest their time and effort.
  • Each team member is clear about their role and the expectations.
  • They recognize attitude is critical to success – one team member’s attitude can spread like a wildfire when others are exposed to it.

Underpinning these characteristics is the role sales management plays. While some individual teaming sales activities will occur inside any professional sales organization, for a corporate-wide initiative to succeed, senior management must be at the forefront: introducing the idea, reviewing the financial incentives, modeling behavior, and providing the staff with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.  And right behind them, middle and front-line sales managers must support the idea and help their salespeople succeed as they participate in sales teams.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted in Sales Best Practices, Sales Leaders, Sales Management Coaching, Sales Training | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Leave a comment

Developing internal champions – it’s important and it isn’t easy

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Sales - leveraging internal champions

A lot of selling goes on in major accounts when you not there. Top sales performers know they need someone to “tell their story” when they’re not there – because they’re not there most of the time.  That’s why top sales performers develop internal champions.

Logical? Yes. So why doesn’t everyone leverage internal champions? First, it takes a lot of time to develop internal champions and not every sales rep concludes the investment is warranted. Second, some sales reps have had negative experiences with internal champions because the sales rep fell into the classic trap of spending time with people who are “willing” but are “not able” to tell their story.

There’s no clear path to developing internal champions, but some best practices are:

  • Don’t just focus on the first person you run into – meet multiple people at a company before “settling in” on whom to develop as an internal champion.
  • Find someone who really is interested in your product or service.
  • Make sure they have the access and are “able” to help.
  • Remember there can be more than one internal champion in an account.
  • Recognize that time must be spent rehearsing the internal champion.
  • Distinguish between a friend and an internal champion – a friend likes and supports everyone.
  • Consider that this is a two-way street – there must be something in it for the champion.

Developing internal champions is only one of the success factors in major accounts.  It is, however, one that deserves a little more attention.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted in Sales Call Execution, Sales Strategy, Sales Training, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Leave a comment

Has your sales team been trained to be futurists?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Richard Ruff

Salespeople - focus on the future, too

Today we are living and selling in a time of “compressed history.”  Changes driven by the global market and advances in manufacturing technologies make the past a bad predictor of the future.  As a result, competitive advantages that once lasted a long time now disappear quickly.  In sales if you want to prosper thinking about the future matters.

We recently came across Mark McNeilly’s article in Fast Company – How the Most Successful Brands take a Peek into the Future. He points out “things are changing too fast to predict the future … if a person or firm comes to you saying they can predict the future you should turn and run as fast you can.”

However, McNeilly goes on to sharethere are ways to know and take advantage of the long-term macro trends that are happening.  If you are in Sales this idea is relevant, important, and too often neglected

To focus these notions about futurism to the every day world of Sales, let’s examine it from the perspective of customer value.  There are important defining characteristics of the notion of customer value.  A fundamental one is the idea of Value Migration – that is, what constitutes value tends to shift over time driven by a set of trends that impact that market.

Whether you analyze it from the perspective of the individual, company, or an entire industry, the expectations about value are dynamic.  History is rich with examples of companies that had very viable value propositions but failed to accurately judge the shift in the market’s value expectations, subsequently ending up with a business model and a product portfolio that were no longer responsive to their customer base.

So how does one get a handle on Value Migration in their market?  Two requirements come to mind.

Early Warning. First, every day large B2B companies have hundreds of really smart salespeople interacting with really smart customers.  We suggest that the sales team could be an early warning mechanism for value migration.

What if each sales person took just a little time to discuss with customers topics like: “What market trends will have the most impact on your future success?” or “What will be more important to you tomorrow than it is today?” or “What are the obstacles that are preventing you from doing what you need to do to adapt to the changes in your business?” or “As you look at the shifts in your market what could we do to help?”

Would you ask every customer contact – of course not?  But all you need is a few exceptional people and every sales person has several.  Plus we would suggest that such discussions might not only help you understand the future but also help differentiate you from today’s competition.

Sales Training. The second piece of the puzzle is getting Sales Training into the game.  Salespeople cannot be expected to effectively and efficiently be an early warning mechanism for Value Migration without sales training.  One cannot simply read The Futurist magazine every other month.

Now since we have been in the sales training business a long time, we realize that training salespeople to be an early warning mechanism for Value Migration, that is becoming futurist, is not on the short list of training priorities.  As a matter of fact most often it doesn’t even make the radar screen.

But what if it did?  What if you trained your sales team to not only uncover and develop existing needs but to also discuss where the customer wants to be in the future, how they want to get there, and how you might help?  First of all – that type of sales training is feasible.  Second, if you did do it, you might not have to worry about predicting the future because you could invent it.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Posted in Sales Best Practices, Sales Simulations, Sales Training, Uncategorized | Tagged , , ,

2 Comments

Sales excellence – understanding the clutch player – An STC Classic

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Richard Ruff

A Classic - '63 Corvette

An interesting article – Performing Best When It Matters Most – appeared in the Kellogg Insight (August 2011).  The report was a summary of the authors’ work on understanding the “clutch player” – that person that consistently performs well under pressure. As one might guess, a lot of the research was done with athletes and high stake jobs like stock traders where the collection of quantifiable data is easy and there are a number of well defined moments of pressure.  However, we thought the findings were also applicable to B2B sales since major account executives clearly face their fair share of high stakes moments. First let’s just review some of the major insights from the report:

1. Individuals differ significantly as to their ability to perform under pressure – some people raise their game while others “choke” or allow anxiety to degrade their performance.

2. Both nature and nurture contribute to an individual’s ability to perform under pressure – some of the capability appears to be about “talent” and some is a learned skill.

3. People recognize the importance of the ability to perform under pressure but most individuals tend to rate their ability to be greater than it is.

In a typical B2B sales process there are a number of high pressure situations and the consequences of being able to raise your game are significant.  The situations vary by market but include interactions such as: meetings with senior level decision makers, discussions with buying committees, and final shoot out presentations.

So what might all this mean to those of us concerned about sales effectiveness?  Three considerations deserve highlighting.

1. Selection. Because selling is one of those professions where ability matters, an individual’s skill in this area should be assessed during the hiring process.  It would be easy to incorporate questions into the structure interview guide that tap into the skill set.

2. Training.  Since a portion of one’s ability to deal with high pressure situations is about practice and feedback, high pressure situations should be identified and incorporated into sales training programs. A good design approach would involve crafting role-plays and case studies where the participants have a chance to practice and discuss alternative approaches for handling the high pressure situations.

3. Coaching. A third approach would be to place the ability to deal with high pressure situations on the coaching agenda. Sales coaching is a particularly effective approach since the manager and sales person can agree on and target very specific situations where the rep is experiencing difficulty.

Since the difference between winning and losing is often determine by how a sales person handles a few critical discussions in a few high pressure situations, helping folks to perform better when it matters most is a worth while priority.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Coaching, Sales Training | Tagged , , , , ,

2 Comments

Sales managers – stop assuming majority rules works best

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Managing Sales Teams

It’s easy to manage a sales team when there’s consensus on where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. But what happens when there isn’t consensus? That’s when sales managers face some challenges.

Randall Peterson, a professor at the London Business School, found that when dealing with small groups, majority rule doesn’t work – it simply makes for an unhappy minority. “They have nothing invested in success and often have something invested in failure,” Peterson says. “Particularly for a group under the size of 10 people, majority rule is a bad way of going about business.”

Since many sales managers deal with sales teams with around 10 sales reps, we were intrigued with Peterson’s recommendation – “qualified consensus” – where everyone has to at least agree they can tolerate the outcome; they can live with it.  But if agreement can’t be reached even at that level, then the sales manager makes the call.   So the idea is the sales manager needs to provide a discussion about all that and sales team needs to get engaged.

Good enough – everyone needs to know and agree to the decision-making rules of the road.  The problem is the discussion is often never held and the notion of consensus of any type is simply not on the table.

We thought Peterson’s recommendations were straightforward, smart, and particularly will suited for the sales environment.  His approach seems useful whenever dealing with conflict inside a sales team and appears to be especially important when limited sales team resources are being spent.

A couple of additional thoughts on the topic:

  • Understand Why. Delve deeper into why there is disagreement – by identifying what’s really driving the disagreement.  By doing so you will be able to craft a solution where the minority can at least see the logic of the decision.
  • Respect Measurement. Define metrics to measure the success of the decision (e.g., increased sales, reduced costs, new customers, shorter sales cycle) –this will provide those who both agree and disagree with the decision a better basis for their argument if it arises again.
  • Inspect. Check progress periodically to ensure you’re on track.

There is more to team building then just hiring the right people.  This topic is one of the other pieces of the puzzle.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

Also, if you find this post interesting, you can find more about sales leadership and sales coaching here.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Sales Best Practices, Sales Leaders, Sales Management Coaching, Sales Training, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , ,

Leave a comment

Selling value – the bar has been raised

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Selling Value

Company knowledge and product expertise have been and are critical components of any sales rep’s success. Today, however, customers expect sales people to know more about each of those plus be knowledgeable about the customer’s industry, their competition, and how they can bring greater value.

They expect the sales people to understand how their products can help deliver a better solution for customers – for example, to provide the imagination and insights to:

  • manufacture products more quickly
  • improve product quality
  • shorten order times
  • improve the customer service experience

Global competition and advanced manufacturing technologies have made it increasingly more difficult to sustain a competitive advantage by product alone.  To win you need to sell value and the bar for what it takes to sell value has been raised – for example, understanding your customer’s customer is now a foundational requirement.

If the sales team is to do all this successfully they need help from others.  This means, for example, the often-flawed connection between marketing and sales must be addressed, front-line sales managers must be provided the time and expertise for coaching, IT departments need to provide the tools to manage the increase information requirements and top sales leaderships must create the culture that makes it possible.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted in Marketing-Sales Alignment, Marketing-Sales Chasm, Sales Best Practices, Selling Economic Value, Selling Value | Tagged , , , , , ,

1 Comment

Medical device sales – the book of knowledge is expanding

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Book of Knowledge

When we first began working with medical device companies, we heard a VP of Cardiac Devices open our sales training program.  More than ten years have passed since we listened to those program openings, but one thing Tim said always stuck with us.

He talked about a Book of Knowledge that sales reps needed to learn. To dramatize the importance of the challenge, Tim would raise his arms and open them to shoulder width.  According to Tim, this Book of Knowledge had “chapters” on clinical information, industry information, competitive information and sales skills that medical device sales reps would need to succeed.

Then he went on to extend his arms broadly, sharing that the Book of Knowledge is growing exponentially.  A major challenge for the sales reps was to keep up with that Book of Knowledge.   Tim’s prediction turned out to be right on the money – the Book of Knowledge is bigger and heavier than it was 10 years ago.  Medical sales reps need to know:

  • Responsibilities – issues, and concerns of the people you’re calling on – from physicians to clinical staff to administrators
  • Clinical Knowledge – anatomy, technical knowledge about devices, studies supporting your devices
  • Competitive Knowledge – how their devices work
  • Customer Environment – how the hospital works, do’s and don’ts for being onsite in Labs and the OR
  • Industry Issues and Ethical Standards – government rulings like Obamacare and FDA regulations, to AdvaMed standards
  • Healthcare Economics – how hospitals and other healthcare providers make money and how they are reimbursed
  • Sales Skills – how to constantly adapt and adjust your selling to the changes in the buyer’s environment

Our major observation over the ten years is – everyone needs to get in the game in order for medical sales  reps to stay up-to-date.

Sales training certainly can address some of these issues through formal sales training programs.   However, performance improvement cannot end there.  Marketing has to help, the IT department needs to get in the game, and the front-line sales managers must coach.

Last, medical device sales reps themselves must take personal responsibility for updating their knowledge base.  Whether it’s subscribing to industry newsletters, automated feeds to keep up-to-date on customer announcements, reading blogs, or just googling – sales reps must put time aside for updating their knowledge base.

For medical device sales reps updating their command of the Book of Knowledge is critical. Not to sound melodramatic but in some cases, like cardiology devices, life and death decisions can depend on it.  Being up-to-speed is the key to providing value – to your customer’s and to their customer’s – whether patients, physicians, or administrators.   The good news is although the Book of Knowledge is bigger – the resources for learning it are better than ever.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Global Sales Training, Health Care Sales Training, Sales Best Practices, Sales Training | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 Comment

Sales success: getting the comfort–risk mix right

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Richard Ruff

Sales people's comfort-risk mix

Sales reps, like most of us, have a propensity to stay within their comfort zone.  Some sales people think that’s what sales management wants so it is an issue of expectations. Others are fearful of being branded as tough to manage or a loose cannon if they take too many risks.  Yet others see their companies as espousing the virtues of risk taking but then labeling people as failures who don’t succeed.

While it is true that too much of anything is probably not prudent.  It is also true that achieving top performance involves some risk taking.  So the challenge may be developing the where-with-all to take “smart risks.”  Let’s take a look within a sales context at some of the considerations that might go into achieving that goal.

As is the case when it comes to all types of risk taking there are some up-front actions that are helpful.  Timing matters.  Taking some form of risk after a string of sales successes vs. failures is an easy one.  Also, reviewing your risk taking idea with a key player like your sales manager and checking to see if others might have traveled your intended path and how they did it, makes sense as well.

Another angle to smart sales risk taking is the potential payoff of the risk.  No sense to take a big risk that has a small payoff.  So for those that are up for the idea, what are some risks that could have a significant payoff?

  • Selling at the senior level. Most sales reps have a comfort zone when it comes to on whom they call.  For example selling to the senior level involves risks – getting it wrong is telling.  However, if you can skillfully get to the right senior person, at the right time, with the right message, the payoffs can be substantial.  The good news is today senior people are looking for sales people who can bring fresh new business insights.
  • Leveraging underutilized resources. In any large company there are under-leveraged resources that could be helpful to the sales efforts – people in marketing, technical and engineering support people, implementation managers or senior sales managers.  Now there are some political risks and some risks associated with getting non-sales types in front of customers.  But if you believe in the importance of bring “fresh new business insights,” then skillfully leveraging others is one way to do it.
  • Challenging the customer. Some smart people just wrote an entire book about this risk-taking scenario.  Are there risks in challenging the conclusions and points of view of the person on the other side of the table – no question?  But if you have done a really good job on your homework and you have been thoughtful about the “right time and right person” then the payoffs are there to be achieved.

There are some specific situations where challenging makes particularly good sense.  For example: the customer may hold a misperception of your capabilities or is working with too narrow set of decision criteria or has a limited view of the solution options.  Helping the customer to redefine these ideas can be helpful to you and to the customer.

If one travels the road smartly and with care, some of the risks can be taken out of risk taking.  In today’s competitive markets staying in one’s comfort zone may avoid failure – unfortunately it may also prevent success.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in Sales Best Practices, Sales Strategy, Sales Training | Tagged , , , , ,

4 Comments

Can you sustain a competitive advantage by product alone?

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Janet Spirer

Sustainable competitive advantage?

Sometimes a company has a superior product as compared to all the other competitors.  There is also the “killer product” scenario like the Xerox copier vs. the mimeo machine.

Unfortunately due to global competition and advanced manufacturing technologies, it is very difficult to sustain a competitive advantage by product alone.  In today’s markets a competitor is likely come out with a product that is just as good or better than yours, in half the time you thought it is going to take – plus make it cheaper.

Now it is possible to differentiate by added value such as customer service.  However, with a lot of work even added value can be replicated by the competition.  In the end a common situation is – you’re in a market where the competition is equal, good enough or better than you if viewed strictly from a product and service perspective.  Are there exceptions – of course, but there are a fair number of folks who now wish they had not consider themselves as one of those?

Obviously one does everything they can to develop superior products and service.   They are key ingredients to the success story and most everyone devotes a lot of time, money and effort to achieving superiority in those areas.

There is, however, a third ingredient to achieving success to which a lot companies pay less attention – developing a superior sales team.  Not a good sales team – but a superior sales team.  There is little doubt that a superior sales team cannot only sell a competitive advantage; they can be a competitive advantage.  It is not just a matter of what they sell but how they sell.

A great case in point is Xerox.  While they had a superior product on the market they also devoted substantial resources to developing a world-class sales team.  In most every market you can identify one or two companies which have done what it takes to develop a superior sales team and everybody knows who they are.  In most cases they are ease to spot because they are the market leaders.

If you were tasked with developing a superior sales team what are some rules for the journey? Well, three that make the short list are:

  • Recognize the pivotal job. The front-line sales manager is the pivotal job for developing a superior sales team.  It is not a matter of having two or three great sales managers.  Greatness needs to be a characteristic of your entire front-line sales management team.  It is a difference that matters and one for which the lack of is hard to compensate.
  • Get sales training in the game. No matter the selection process or the sales coaching efforts, building and sustaining a superior sales team requires a substantive sales training effort.  The dynamics in most markets are such that customers are constantly changing what they buy, how they but and what they are willing to pay for it.  Sales training needs to help the sales team to adjust and adapt their sales skills to the new sales challenges and call points.
  • Address the marketing-sales chasm. No sales team will ever be superior if they have to go it alone – they need help.  One of the most effective sources of help is marketing.  Unfortunately for many companies marketing and sales have been like two converging trains in the night – they just pass each other.  That requires correcting – building a superior sales train requires superior support from marketing.

So the short answer to the question is – probably not.  It is unlikely in today’s markets you can sustain a competitive by product alone.  Great support and services are required … and a superior sales team.

If you found this post helpful, you might want to join the conversation and subscribe to the Sales Training Connection.

©2013 Sales Horizons, LLC

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in New Product Launch, New Product Launch Training, Sales Training, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

4 Comments