The post, Part 7 - Understand the Buyer’s Process explored the “buyer’s process” which has changed radically in the past decade. Buyers today access multiple sources of information before a salesperson is ever involved including:
I recently attended a talk by Justin Gray, the CEO of LeadMD. LeadMD helps companies implement marketing automation software which is typically used to manage a wide variety of marketing “channels” such as email marketing, webinars, seminars, social media, etc. and link them to lead generation / sales.
Part 4 of this series must have struck a chord because it got more than double the amount of readers than the other parts of the series. There are a lot of unhappy customers out there and a lot of sales managers that are trying to walk the fine like between corporate mandates and customer satisfaction. The KISSmetrics post had some good suggestions and here are a few more that I have used over the years:
Great salespeople are sometimes called “rainmakers.” It is such a popular term that Wikipedia has an entry for it, “Rainmaker - Business,” and explains that ”the origin of the business sense of rainmaker may be an allusion to the Native American practice of dancing to encourage deities to bring forth the rain necessary for crops.”
One of my most important responsibilities for almost 15 years as a Sales Manager was acting like the United Nations peacekeeper between the customer, the salesperson, and the company I worked for. It didn’t matter if the salesperson was an employee or a sales representative working for another company, the issues always started and ended the same way.
As explained in part 2, salespeople face a variety of obstacles when maximizing their selling time. One of the more challenging issues is making the internal sale. This can be the result of a variety of factors:
Do you know what your salespeople are doing with their “selling time?” If so, excellent, but you are in the minority. Many companies I work with dramatically over-manage salespeople. Some symptoms include:
This post starts a new series called “Technical Sales 101.” After managing salespeople for over 15 years and consulting for the past two years, one thing has become clear: many technical salespeople have no idea what they are doing! Reactive behavior, inconsistent follow-up, lack of focus, support based selling, no work ethic (made worse by home office environments), etc. are just a few of the issues I have seen. To be fair, it is not entirely the salesperson’s fault. Many are capable, personable engineers who are hired because of their knowledge and abilities within a certain field. They move to sales and are taken out of a supervised office environment, setup to work from a home office, and sent out to “earn while they learn.”
I came across two interesting articles recently that are follow-ups to the posts “Amazon Plays with Fire and Finally Gets Burned” and “Part 1: Making Every Salesperson into a Sales Manager.”
It is interesting to examine how the Girl Scouts teach young girls to sell their famous cookies. They start by explaining to customers why the Girl Scouts sell cookies. These are called ”The Five Skills” and they teach young girls “goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics—aspects essential to leadership, to success, and to life.” They then use this foundation to present an extremely well developed sales training program appropriate for an absolute beginner. This is called “How to Sell Cookies.”