Training your reps to sell in today’s complex environment
By Jeff Thull -- Industrial Distribution, 8/19/2008 12:01:00 PM
Today’s marketplace is characterized by the increasing complexity of the business problems we solve and the solutions we offer that address them. Combine that with a highly competitive market that offers abundant solution options and you’ll find that many customers are overwhelmed with choices and are looking for guidance in making quality business decisions. Salespeople are the obvious source for this guidance, and there may be more people influencing the decision to buy as it moves higher and broader in the organization. Unfortunately, this level of guidance is frequently not forthcoming from salespeople. But providing it can become a critical source of advantage for your company.How do you begin to develop and motivate your sales force to operate in this challenging environment when you know you have unique and valuable solutions that are not reaching or connecting to the right people, in the right place, at the right time?
Sales professionals who are capable of guiding their customers through the process of thoroughly understanding the problems they face and developing an optimal solution amongst the available alternatives are clearly the path to sustained profitability.
Designing sales development programs for these times starts with helping salespeople understand how their role has changed. Their role today is that of a business advisor and a source of competitive advantage. Their required skills are more similar to those of a process analyst or project manager than the historic persuader. The objective of today’s sales professional is to create a solution the customer would have been unable to think of or put together on his own. The sales professional looks at the issues beyond the expertise of the customer and collaborates with the customer to create such a solution.
The content of today’s learning programs must reflect the sales professional’s desire to become a trusted business advisor. The program needs to be about business, not about selling. It needs to be about guiding customer decisions, not about presenting volumes of solution information. The content needs to be integrated into the customer’s environment. As a guideline, the metaphor of “a bridge” provides a meaningful template. The bridge provides a roadmap or guide for a diagnostic conversation. It is literally designed to connect the customer’s business drivers to the value sources within your solution. It describes a series of relationships that extends significantly beyond the one-to-one nature of the feature/benefit relationship.
The intermediate relationships within the bridge are as follows:
1. The customer’s business drivers are shown to relate to various job responsibilities within his organization.
2. Job responsibilities are then connected to physical indicators, or symptoms, that would suggest the desired performance of the job responsibilities is at risk.
3. The symptoms must be associated with the possible causes of the symptoms—some your solution can address and some your solution may not be able to address.
4. The causes are connected to specific consequences that are, or may be, experienced by the individual and the business.
5. And finally, your solution capabilities need to be tied directly to the causes of the problem to be solved, noting how they eliminate those causes. If the cause of the problem is eliminated, so are the consequences of that problem.
The net effect of developing the bridge is a link between the absence of your solution and the customer’s ability to attain their desired business driver performance. The flow of the bridge content teaches a diagnostic strategy, provides the flow of a diagnostic conversation and supports the development of the skill to thoroughly diagnose a customer’s issues, design an optimal solution and deliver maximum results.
By designing learning programs with the objective of developing today’s sales professionals, your programs will connect firmly with the individual’s motivation to be accepted as a professional, respected by their customers and colleagues, and successful in accomplishing their goals. Their value to your organization will be clearly defined, and the knowledge and skills they are developing will position them in high regard with their customer and within your organization.
The commitment
The question asked by many organizations and sales professionals is, “What will it take to become successful in this new environment?” First, the learning path should be precise, including specific field applications and the expected time commitment. As you create the development plan, include information on how the sales reps will be supported. How will they be coached, what reference materials are available and, if relevant, would you be able to supply a sample of their expected output when the skill is mastered? With this in place, the learner who knows what they want to accomplish will understand exactly what is required to get there. This allows the learner to make an informed decision to “pay the price and do what it takes.”
Very specific application steps should be described as part of the learning process, and coaching guidelines should be built into the design of the program. Salespeople should not be allowed to participate in the program without being required to demonstrate the knowledge or skills being taught. I realize this seems like a basic tenet of program design, but sales training is notorious for being served as a smorgasbord of ideas—the “use what you like and set the rest aside” school of training. Built-in application and accountability ensures that the learner understands they are expected to take action and the manager understands they are expected to coach.
Finally, it is imperative to sales reps’ motivation that you help them recognize the progress they’ve made. This is dependent on defining measurable and relevant milestones for each learned behavior. The milestones should tie directly to the desired success and be defined in both quantitative and qualitative terms. But more importantly, they must occur early and often during the learning process. If the milestone selected is “increased sales,” it is certainly measurable in both a quantitative and qualitative sense, but waiting too long to recognize that success will no doubt “de-motivate” sales reps.
As an example of short-term measurement, let’s consider a module on questioning skills designed to lead to more sales. Assume that part of the skill taught is how to research your customer and craft high-gain questions. The first step or measurement of the application of the skill could be to research one company and build a questioning strategy or diagnostic map. Feedback and coaching would follow and progress is noted. For step two, the questions are used in a role-play with a colleague. Feedback and coaching follows and more progress is noted. In step three, the questions are used during a customer interview. Quantitative measurement: asked four new questions. Qualitative measurement: uncovered more in-depth information than I ever have before. Logical conclusion: I am uncovering more relevant information, building a closer relationship of customer understanding and I am measurably closer to a successful sale. In this sequence of learning, criteria number four, “recognizing progress,” is accomplished.
The challenges of today’s sales professional have vastly surpassed the level of learning required by historic feature/benefit product training. Companies should develop learning programs that reflect the characteristics of those that meet similar challenges in other professions—such as teaching scientific principles to research scientists, diagnostic principles to physicians, and the coaching of top athletes.
The goal is to develop learning programs that meet the requirements of performance: a system that will guide performance, skills that will enable the individual to execute the system, and the personal discipline to address the emotional inhibitors of performance. With that accomplished, you have successfully delivered a development program that will equip your sales organization with the skills and mindset to successfully bridge the value gap and become a trusted business advisor to your customers.
Jeff Thull is a professional speaker and author of Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High; The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale, and Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect and Win in High Stakes Sales. For more information contact Prime Resource Group, support@primeresource.com or visit www.primeresource.com
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