Guide to Profitable Sales
Selling
Even if you don’t have a salesforce, skim through this information. If you do have a salesforce, watch the videos. Most organizations find that one of the most effective sources of revenue generation is from personal selling. They use various geographic optimization deployment strategies to align the selling activity against its greatest potential. Keep in mind that different industries have different ‘go-to-market’ requirements. For example, if your product is directly sold to the end customer, your salesforce focus is on demand generation. If your product is sold in some other organization’s store your trade channel management strategy may have a salesforce deployed against objectives to increase ACV distribution, negotiate end-aisle displays, maintain shelf talkers increase shelf facings and location, and other trade channel advantages. In fact, you might have trade sales people who are more oriented to chain or regional headquarters objectives like trade slicks, slotting allowances, register ring couponing, free-standing insert inclusions and offers; and have a more junior level or broker relationship who handles store level tactics.
Keep in mind that it is not just the demand generating salesforce who has a selling role in your organization. Customer service staff can often cross-sell and up-sell in ways that really improve performance. Your leadership, and staff at every level represent points to interact with potential clients. All should be able to represent your company and products at some level and training should be provided to assure a minimum level of skill. The key here is that they “interact”. Traditional advertising was unidirectional; a print ad provided a message about the product or service and hopefully where to get it. A personal selling interaction is a dynamic exchange. Information is obtained and provided. Knowing a potential client’s situation and needs is an important way to align the features or attributes of what you are offering. A good sales person will also know the importance of a personal rapport and engage the client at levels tapping or aligning with their personal values. If you are familiar with the concept of the ‘Value Ladder’ you might think about engaging the selling conversation at the highest level of functional benefits or even at the emotional benefits while conversationally aligning to their personal values.
Consultative Selling
Consultive selling is a personal selling approach that leverages important conversational skills in the sales process. At the simplest level think of it as having the goal of first understanding if the customer has a problem they would like to solve for which your product or service would be a fit. You really shouldn’t be rattling off all sorts of features or even benefits of your product or service as the conversation starting point because that is providing random information of which most is likely not relevant to the prospect. Rather, have the objective of understanding their situation, goals, and even personal values or desires, then speak with more direct relevance and your message will be heard.
There are a whole bunch of videos on consultive selling but this one is quick and clear. It hits these seven process points:
1) Bring Insight. 2) Disqualify. 3) Dig Deep. 4) Know Their Drive. 5) Solve. 6) Use Case Studies. 7) Focus on Next Steps.
To bring insight you really need to do your homework in pre-call planning. Be prepared to find that your probes on the initial sales content disqualify some of your offerings but align to what does fit. And dig deep, surface level communication often fails to uncover underlying concerns; think as if the client is on the analyst sofa and use your personal rapport building skills to probe for full understanding. To know their drive point is that personal value level of the value ladder engagement you hope to achieve. Now you can logically offer routes to solve the problem(s) you have uncovered and don’t be afraid to story tell with use cases. The focus on next steps is an acknowledgement that this might be filling out an order but it might also be a follow-up contact to bring back more information. Let’s talk more about this follow up and its fit in your CRM or Customer Relationship Marketing system..
Selling Objections
Prospective customers, especially those you might being making just an initial contact with, often raise conversation ending selling objections. This is where being curious about your prospect’s truths by first engaging in a conversation aimed to gain understanding makes consultive selling very effective. You should also be aware that other, more specific selling objections will occur during the personal selling conversation. While that video link is to a sales training company, one critical point being made is to ‘map resolving customers objections’. Good sales training should include the use of situational selling scenario practice. Aim toward mentally mapping the most common objections and enhance your skills to address them. Many organizations with well managed professional sales forces do this at district meetings each POA or Plan of Action Cycle.
And please, please, please understand the value in systematically collecting selling objections from each sales interaction. How one sales person successfully overcame an objection should be the lore of sales management meetings to cross-fertilize effective sales training. Your marketing department should be mining these objection so they can address them; be that be via advertising, providing improved selling materials, script development for call centers and customer service units, or even aggregating them across account profiles to improve segmentation and targeting and their unique persuasion power messaging enhancements. Your product development research should be provided access to this information as well; they may clarify feature-benefit statements that can be made or assure clear customer input into their development work.
CRM Connection
Now we get to the thing that will really make your salesforce effective and efficient. It is likely that if you do the math, you will be paying hundreds of dollars to have someone do a personal sales presentation. Next extend that math to look at the prospective customer ‘reach’ that is possible given the number of sales people you have on staff. You are very likely to find you aren’t touching even a small portion of your prospective customers and you are not following up with previous contacts in a timely manner to further the selling process. Yes, think of selling as a process rather than a one-and-done contact logic. If you were to supplement your sales people with call center contacts in between personal contacts you are probably extending reach for 10% or less of the cost of a face-to-face sales call. If you were to send digital or direct mail between telesales or face-to-face calls you will achieve continuity of contact with much lower cost. However, the messages being delivered need to be relevant to be persuasive. This is where your CRM system needs to pick up selling objection and other information from all of your sales contact and share them to tune messages. Your CRM system also integrates all touchpoints for a cost effective ‘cost per call’ performance; one of the key drivers of reduced customer acquisition cost. ARMTEC, Inc. has designed these approaches for sales groups as small as half a dozen to as large as 4,000.
SG&A Expenses
Sophistication is powerful and can produce effective and efficient results. However, doing some of these things can push your SG&A (Selling, General, & Administrative) Expenses upward. So it is important that the approach be developed with careful sequencing but under an overall well integrated plan to provide payback. Here ARMTEC, Inc. has helped organizations first develop a Pro Forma outline of approach to assure success.
In the trenches reality
You can certainly see how management of a salesforce well deployed and enabled by a CRM technical backbone can provide lots of opportunities for tracking, metrics, and dynamic adjustments. Don’t be surprise if marketing MBAs and the finance department aren’t ready to model and shift deployment toward optimization on an on-going basis. But don’t be surprised if your Sales Management pushes back pretty hard on some of this. They shouldn’t push back on measurement nor facilitating communication improvements. However, make sure you full incorporate their input into your action plan. A little example from ARMTEC, Inc. real world experience can help explain why we eventually became very good at consulting in this area:
Early in our principal’s training he took over the territory of another sales person. She had been a strong performer and religiously filled out 3” by 5” file cards on each target she called upon. She recorded important things about them and their family. She recorded what she presented and what objections were raised. She reviewed this information before making her next call and packed the supporting material she needed to overcome the previous objection(s) to move the prospect forward in the sales process. I was given all her cards, the keys to her company car, and told to hit the bricks with my own selling actions.
There were about 200 physicians on the call list. The math didn’t work to cover a territory of about a quarter of the state given the number of weeks in our plan of action cycle. So I started making called on hospital based physicians who had shift rotations that put them in their offices as early as 8am and as late as 10pm. I was still having trouble making the number of calls needed to cover everyone. When I ran into another sales representative from our company while restocking my literature and samples I mentioned my challenge. He suggests I might benefit from riding along with him for a day to see how it was done.
While I had been sitting in waiting rooms for long periods to get two minutes with the physician, he walked in the back door of the offices he called upon. He greeted the office staff, asked about their kids, offered donuts, and restocked their sample closet. The physician popped out of one exam room and before going in the next, by colleague caught his full attention. He “asked” about case challenges and only then pitched what was relevant to the doctors needs. As they parted, he coordinated weekend plans with the physician to attend a local football game.
The experience taught be that the relationship he had developed with his sales target made him more efficient than the math alone would ever predict. It taught me that later in my career when I had responsibility for sales force geographic alignment that >avoiding disruption of pre-existing relationship must take a high value in planning.</i>