Sales Training - Not Just For Salespeople
By Jennifer Goddard
Sales growth is typically a top priority for most businesses, yet many find themselves dissatisfied with their sales performance. When businesses are unhappy with their sales, they often focus on the following questions:
Why is our sales team not more effective?
Why are they not making more sales calls?
Why are their sales closing rates so low?
While these are valid questions, a more critical one to address first is: Are we putting our sales team in a position to succeed?
Sales can be likened to a military campaign. The better-trained and equipped army has a significant advantage, and those with superior intelligence, strategy, and execution have an even greater edge. Ensuring your sales team’s success involves providing them with the right intelligence, strategy, execution, equipment, and training—in that order. Training on selling skills should be the final step, yet many companies mistakenly treat it as the only step.
Traditional Sales Training
Effective sales success requires broader and deeper training than merely selling skills. Traditional sales training typically focuses on:
Product knowledge and company procedures and systems
Techniques for prospecting, qualifying leads, and closing deals
Effective negotiation strategies and handling objections
Communication and presentation skills
While these are valuable, they become far more effective when aligned with a comprehensive “total-company” strategy that facilitates sales success.
Developing a Winning Sales Strategy
A successful sales strategy emphasizes working smarter rather than harder, adding efficiency and probability to efforts, thereby reducing burnout and enhancing morale. Here are the eight keys to a successful sales strategy:
Customer Satisfaction: Make it a core value and consistently deliver exceptional products and service.
Downhill Rides: Focus on products and markets that offer easier success with growing demand and attractive margins.
Ideal Customers, Products, and Markets: Define these clearly and build your sales plan around them.
Compelling Value Proposition: Provide true differentiation to avoid “me too” products.
Brand Development and Promotion: Enhance prospect receptivity through strong branding.
SOAR Growth Engine™[1]: Optimize the elements that facilitate easier growth.
Customer Churn Analysis: Minimize customer loss and scale-back.
Pricing and Margin Strategy: Develop competitive pricing that covers all relevant costs and ensures appropriate margins.
Keys to Effective Sales Execution
Even the best strategy can fail without effective execution. Here are the eight keys to successful sales execution:
Strong Sales Leadership: Recruit, hire, coach, and motivate salespeople effectively, remove obstacles, communicate strategy, and hold the team accountable.
Realistic Goals: Set challenging but attainable budgets and goals.
Motivating Compensation: Develop competitive incentives that reward achievement.
Role Specialization: Hire "Hunters" for new business and "Farmers" for existing business.
Effective Website and Collateral: Ensure your website and materials support lead generation and customer acquisition.
Lead Generation Systems: Utilize advertising, SEO, social media, and other methods to generate leads and enhance your brand.
Sales Data and Equipment: Provide tools like laptops, CRM systems, and sales intelligence data to facilitate success.
Holistic Sales Training: Expand training to include sales leadership and the C-Suite and encompass other departments (like customer service, design, engineering, production, logistics) to create a company-wide approach to sales success.
Conclusion
Focusing solely on selling skills training for salespeople can lead to disappointing results. To achieve true sales success, a holistic approach is needed, optimizing strategy, execution, and selling skills. Successful sales training is expanded to include all people in the business who can impact customer experience and satisfaction. This broader view of sales training, when combined with a great strategy and highly effective execution, sales effectiveness and performance can be significantly enhanced.
[1] The SOAR Growth Engine™ is a proprietary process developed by The Parkland Group, Inc. – that helps businesses evaluate and prioritize all of their sales growth options – and sort them by degree of difficulty and probability.