SalesFish Sales Training

What's the difference between marketing people and poor sales people?

Poor sales people only lie to one customer at a time!

Part 3: Smarter things to do, not say in a recession

This is the final part of a distillation of a presentation made by Liam Venter to the New Zealand RSN network of sales professionals. In part 3 we take a very quick look at 5 different selling methodologies and how to convert a strategy into a selling pocess.

The 5 main selling methodologies

1. Feature Selling
2. Relationship Selling
3. Winging it (freestyle approach)
4. Process Selling
5. Consultative Sales Process

I'm a process sales specialist so that is what we are talking about today. I will give you a 60 second overview of each of the five main selling methodologies as I see them.

A lot of sales training being delivered in the B2B space has been adapted from older retail sales programs that employ sales techniques that are actually counter productive in B2B sales environment.

Feature Selling works when:

• You have very short sales cycles – e.g. selling a skill saw.
• Selling to single decision maker.
• The solution directly benefits the decision maker.
• Retail sales of inexpensive products/services.
• Products that address a single compelling issue that is common to all of the target clients.
• Selling simple products with a very limited range of features.
• Selling products of low value where neither the purchaser nor seller can justify spending much time on the evaluation of the solution.
• Advantage - very easy to teach.

Relationship Selling works when:

• You are selling commodity products.
• The solution directly and personally benefits the decision maker.
• Useful when there are repeat orders for the same solution over long periods of time.
• Where you are looking to extend your sales through your existing client base to their friends and family. e.g. Real Estate agents.
• Relationships are one to one, not one to many.
• The interesting thing is that, counter-intuitively, relationship maintenance can be assisted with automated permission marketing techniques and tools.
• Relationship sellers often utilise CRM systems and campaign management software tools with great success.
• It's very hard to teach relationship selling – a good start would be to read Dale Carnagie’s book ‘How to win friends and influence people.’

Winging it (free-style approach)

The free style approach is pretty much just that. Salespeople rely on a wide
range of skills and techniques that they have been taught or learnt in a sporadic fashion and use their intuition to work out what to do and when. Sales people who work like this either quit in frustration or doggedly persist until they get enough experience that they can actually get reasonable results from this approach.

Does this sound like you?

Typically you get the most dramatic improvements from the free-style operatives when they get shown how to structure their excellent skills into an effective process.

Traditional Process Selling works when…

• There is a wide range of possible compelling issues and purchasing motives.
• You are selling into organisations where several people in the organisation will have different purchasing motives.
• There are longer sales cycles where the client has number of prescribed purchasing steps/requirements.
• The solution does not directly and personally benefit the decision maker.

Traditional Process Selling is focused on Business to Business sales environments and strategies.

The Consultative Sales Process 

• Is just an overlay to traditional process selling. It incorporates advantages of process selling plus...
• Focused on a consultative approach that discovers and develops sound, detailed and compelling R.O.I strategies for purchasers.
• Acknowledges a successful sale is the result of several value exchange steps. CSP creates and builds purchasing motivation with continual value exchange at each step to enable you to take the next step with the client.
• You build and sell your value as much as the products value – client can go to competitors for the products value only.
• Does not focus on controlling/manipulating the buyer’s psychology/emotions.
• Understands that the sales process commences earlier than your prospecting call or first meeting with the client.
• Includes built in metricing at each step of the process.
• Without a doubt though, the greatest advantage of Process Selling methodologies is that they break a sales process into small simple steps that are easy to teach and, most importantly, easy to implement and do.

Remember it is action, not thinking or knowledge, that changes results.

You need to develop and define a unique sales strategy that will suit your unique product, client base, competitive issues, etc.

...your product or services USP's are the key.

Marketing personnel develop their strategies by working back from what results their customer will pay to achieve …and then determining what USPs (Unique Sales Propositions) they need to provide their customers to give them these desired results.

Sales people. As sales people we don’t have this luxury. We often don't design the products we sell. We develop our sales strategies by working forward from our services or products USPs by determining what results our product can supply and then helping our customers determine if they need these results and how much these results are worth to them.

You need tools and processes that assist with this strategy – your sales training partners should provide these tools and help you embed them into you sales methodology. Typically these would be templates, milestone forecasting, litmus tests, and sales forensics tools.

Markets change and you need to evolve and change your USPs so that they remain relevant and compelling. Your in-house marketing and sales programmes need to periodically revisit and reassess these factors and automatically adjust for market changes.

Sometimes you don't notice the market changes until it's too late. I drove an old van every day and little by little the brake pedal travel got a little longer without me noticing it. It wasn't until I drove a friends identical van that I realised how long my brake travel had become.

Outside perspectives can be invaluable – it’s great to have a mentor you can use as a sounding board. It is crucially valuable to encourage client feedback.

Be wary - trying something exciting and new can be very seductive. Sometimes you might think the market has changed and all that has changed is you have got complacent and have stopped doing what got you to where you are.

Converting your Strategy into CSP processes

OK, if your strategy dictates that a flavour of Process Selling is best for
you....then you need to break your strategy into custom process steps.

When you break a sale down into a step by step process the sales person only needs to remember a few of the 1001 great things to do at each step.

When you break a sale strategy into a step by step process it enables simple templates for milestone forecasting, litmus tests and sales forensics.

A template is a bit like an examiners marking sheet overlay. Using the templates you can immediately spot where you are, what you haven’t done, what's wrong and what's not working.

CSP training provides a generic step x step sales process with pre-prepared:

Weighted milestone forecasting methodology
Sample litmus tests for each critical step

The processes and support structures to endorse a process  selling methodology for your sales people needs to be accepted and implemented throughout the company and embedded into your marketing, sales, operating processes and support mechanisms.

Create the support collateral for key steps

Embedding your steps into your operations makes it easy to perform milestone forecasting sales forensics and metricing

Your CRM or ERP system may be a crucial component in your marketing and lead generation strategy as well as supporting your sales processes.

Of course you have probably already discovered that if you want your staff to use your ERP or CRM system, using it must save them time and reduce their workload, automate their milestone forecasting and deliver them results.

If you want to know more about the Consultative Sales Process we recommend reading our sales training manual, ‘SalesFish’. You can obtain a copy of SalesFish as an ebook here.

This recession demands significant improvements in results from our sales teams

Most well run companies are only able to shave about 10% off their costs before they begin to severely limit their future viability.

Your recession strategy must deliver on the following:

• Platform and structure for sales growth
• Better FFM, sales forensics forecasting and metrics
• To survive this recession you might need to acquire new customers at a higher rate than ever before,  better lead generation, sales conversion, prospecting
• Significant % conversion rate gains
• More than 10% gain in sale
• A process for ongoing in-house development and assessment of staff
• Your sales training programme must absolutely and imperatively deliver results

Small changes can yield big results when you hit that sweet spot and the results become greater than the sum of the parts.

by Liam Venter:  Author of the popular sales training manual
'The Consultative Sales Professional'
You can obtain a copy here