Why sales people are failing, and what to do about it....
What’s the biggest challenge in sales right now? Answer: just getting ATTENTION.
Sales leaders often tell me that we: “don’t have enough quality opportunities in the pipeline”.
And that other old chestnut: “the pipeline looks solid but we're just not closing, and we have too many deals that should never have been put into the forecast in the first place”.
I hear this stuff practically every day in my role at SalesTribe.
Put simply, most sales people are NOT having enough business conversations with genuine prospects. Worse, most salespeople are not only failing to get a seat at the table, but they are often getting a seat at the WRONG table.
Why is this happening? Obviously (or apparently not), when you drive sales people with 20th century measurements like ‘how many calls/meetings have you got’ and ‘make sure that you have 3-5 quota in the pipeline’ you will continue to see low quality pipelines that are filled with poor-fit opportunities because the salesperson is simply box ticking in survival mode. They are just doing what they have to do to survive…manipulating the numbers rather than focusing on genuine customer outcomes which leads to a healthy business.
What gets measured, gets managed, and if we keep relying on these misaligned 20th century KPI’s, then we will continue to see the same old ‘lack of opportunities'.
The fact is that it's getting harder and harder for sales people to ‘cut through all the noise, to get attention, and it’s even more difficult now to get a prospective buyer engaged in a conversation when they are being bombarded by desperate sounding vendor sales people. So what should we do?
‘OPENING IS THE NEW CLOSING' - but what does that even mean?
It means that we now have focus a almost all of our attention on the opening of new conversations, because if you can’t open doors, and get a seat at the table, then it won’t matter how well you think you can manage or CLOSE the deal…you’ll never get that chance if you can’t open.
Thus, we must learn how to sell smarter in a world of smarter buyers, and this means truly understanding exactly who your ideal customer profile (ICP) is and why– your sweet spot customer – your perfect fit prospect. Gone are the days of 'wishful thinking' sales people wearing happy ears trying to shoe horn the wrong-fit customers into a deal of some sort.
It means REALLY understanding your ICP and engaging them the way that THEY want to be engaged, and that requires us sales and leadership personnel to drop everything we think we know about our buyers (and how they want to be engaged), and in some cases this requires us to actually go and ask these ICP's what they want.
So what is the solution to this mother-of-all sales problems?
Rather than just continue talking about the problems, SalesTribe has actually created solutions to address the above - which are now being used by our growing list of customers – worldwide.
We have developed a range of sales enablement workshops which are designed to transform sales execution to create modern sales best practices, and convert buyers into raving fans, and this is what generates hyper growth, competitive advantage, and long term business sustainability.
Workshop 1 – BUYER JOURNEY MAPPING. The process of digital sales transformation begins with a process of mapping the buyer journey, and this workshop shows our clients how to become crystal clear on who their real ICP is, and what’s important to them at each and every stage of their journey towards problem resolution. Documenting each of the steps that buyers traverse as they go about solving problems seems so obvious and yet most sales departments have never done it, meaning that salespeople make an awful lot of assumptions about what modern buyers want. This workshop lays the foundation for a truly modern customer-pull sales model, but it will also highlight how ineffective your old fashioned brute force sales process has now become.
Workshop 2 – SALES PLAYBOOK CREATION. Once you truly understand your target buyer can you begin to transform your sales execution model to match this new buyer profile. Workshop 2 creates a Sales Playbook which reverse engineers and aligns every aspect of your engagement with a prospective buyer to make their buying journey so utterly enjoyable (probably delightful) that those prospective buyers will not only choose you as their supplier, but they will also tell others about what an amazing experience it was to deal with you. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Workshop 3 – SALES SUCCESS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA. This workshop teaches sales people exactly what‘s required these days in order to a) identify your ICP on social media platforms, b) find out what’s important to that ICP and then c) how to engage that ICP the right way. With 91% of B2B buyers now residing on social platforms (primarily LinkedIn), and with the vast majority of said B2B buyers now leveraging social content to help make business decisions, it’s no long possible to be successful in sales unless you learn to leverage social media platforms THE RIGHT WAY.
The best sales people are now engaging buyers where and how they learn...on social platforms - Matt Dixon
We don’t SELL on social (ever), so it’s not social selling, but make no mistake, being adept at leveraging social platforms is now a critical component in business success. Sadly, most salespeople have had no training (93% according to HubSpot) on social and this workshop will turbo charge your sales output like nothing else because it will teach sales folks how to get that critical ‘seat at the table’.
Workshop 4 – PROFESSIONAL PRESENCE. Having now learned how to open a conversation and get a seat at the table, Workshop 4 teaches salespeople how to show up. That is, how well do your salespeople perform when they first meet the buyer - in person? Can they create the right first impression along with an opening narrative that can then be carried forward?
If you believe (as I do) that you only get one shot to make a first impression, then you better spend some time understanding (and practising) how you show up in order to optimise your chances of sales success. This requires a deep understanding of Professional Presence, the importance of gravitas and a level of confidence that quickly portrays both competence and character so that buyers rapidly ‘trust’ you, and see you as a potential resource to help them solve business problems.
These 4 workshops address the major challenges facing businesses today:
- How to engage the right-fit buyers the right way - to get a seat at the table.
- How to make a great first impression (in person).
These workshops can standalone or they can be run sequentially (recommended) and they will create a new buyer-aligned sales model that can and will drive your business forward.
Outcome? - Sales Acceleration
These SalesTribe workshops can be truly transformative for a business for all of the reasons described above, but more importantly, they can be transformative for the individual salesperson also. Confidence is a crucial success factor in 2019 onward because confidence has a massive impact on the sales persons social and professional presence.
These workshops can transform the entire business, and not just sales: from marketing, sales, product development, and customer success….each of these functions plays a massive part delivering a delightful CX to buyers (pre and post sale) and therefore creating those sort after raving fans. This type of cross-functional change and positivity will also help transform and realign culture. Need I say more?
By Graham Hawkins
CEO & Founder - SalesTribe
