Month: March 2016

Sales Management, Sales Training

4 reasons why sales training today is broken

Posted on by Tom Lavery

How often are you running sales training sessions? Maybe you’re doing it once a month, or once a quarter. Maybe you’re the sales manager leading the training scrambling for content at midnight the night before it kicks off or maybe you’ve hired an expensive consultant. You might feel good being able to tick the box that sales training is complete, but how much did it impact your team?

Because sales training is so infrequent we build up to a one-day training session and dump as much information as we can on our sales teams in 8 hours. Would we dump information on our sales prospect in one meeting then expect them to buy from us?  Of course not, they want information broken down for them at the right times when it’s useful. So why is our sales training treated differently? Here is why I believe sales training is broken in B2B companies today.

Are you using your most valuable training resource?

Common practice is for training to be run by someone who is in a senior role or external with ‘experience’,  but what sales professionals really want to do is learn from people who are doing their job successfully every day. 68% of reps say they would rather learn from their peers than anyone else when training. I’ve found this to be true in my experience. Sales professional crave to learn from someone who is doing the same job as them, who are performing well and achieving results.  That is what inspires them to improve.

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Sales Management, Sales Productivity, Sales Techniques

5 ways to give your sales prospect a kickass trial of your product

Posted on by Tom Lavery

So many software companies happily demo me their product but never offer me access to it so I can use it myself.  I find the biggest concern sales leaders have about offering a free product trial is the assumption it would devalue the high price that was trying to be charged. I don’t understand that way of thinking and believe if you’re obsessed about the price you can charge you’re not thinking about how best to help your customer with their decision to buy. My obsession is to always do everything I can to show my prospects the value of our product and service and I’m always excited to let them get their hands on our product.

Here are 5 things you should consider doing when implementing a free trial of your product.

Set a time period for the trial

Once you’ve understood the timeframe your prospect is working towards for a decision, then I’d suggest offering the free trial in line with it. So if they’re looking to have sign off in 6 weeks then say “I’m going to give you access to your trial site for the next 6 weeks to support you and your team in your decision and it will expire on the 30th April” This is much better than offering ’30 day access’ as a blanket offer for everyone, the trial period needs to benefit your customer and their buying process. Setting the trial period to end on the ‘decision date’ is a nice way of keeping you and your sales prospect focused on it.

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Sales Techniques, Sales Training

How to handle a prospect whose first question is “How much?”

Posted on by Tom Lavery

If you’re one of, if not the highest price provider in your market, you never like it when the first question you get from your sales prospect is..

“Can you give me an idea of the cost of your program?”

It’s tricky, right? You don’t want to give the pricing to the sales prospect until they understand the value of what you can offer. Here are 5 simple steps on how to handle this question.

Step 1:  Gently divert attention on price away from the beginning to the end of the call

First of all, you don’t want to piss them off so you need to answer the question. But I hate answering the question without the opportunity of helping them understand the value of what we provide, I feel like you might as well price a black box with no idea what’s inside. So my answer is always the same “Yes, I’ll give you a rough idea of pricing before we finish the call, I’d like to understand a little about how we can help first” Then lead with the next step..

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Sales Techniques, Sales Training

Put your elevator pitch to the test

Posted on by Tom Lavery

The elevator pitch is tough. You’ve spent weeks trying to get your sales prospect on the phone, they finally pick up and now you have the challenging job of having to ‘pitch’ what you do and excite them about it in 30 seconds. So are you doing a good job of it or are you falling at the first hurdle? Let’s find out.

Grab a friend, recite the elevator pitch you use on your sales calls and once you’ve finished ask them one question. “What can you see?”

As humans, we need to make mental pictures from words to really understand what the words mean. So if at the end of your elevator pitch your buddy can’t imagine anything, has no vision for what you’re talking about at all, there’s a pretty decent chance your sales prospect can’t either.

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Sales Techniques, Sales Training

How to get your outbound sale off to a winning start

Posted on by Tom Lavery

When you are selling outbound the biggest challenge you face is to get your sales prospects attention.  Here are some ideas that will help give you the best chance to get noticed by the companies you want to sell to.

Target your ‘decision-maker’ to get introduced to your ‘champion’

The thing we want to do is to sell straight to the decision maker, the tricky thing is they’re very senior and therefore, its hard to get their time. But what if you don’t ask for their time and instead ask for someone else’s time. It’s a much easier request to respond to, it requires much less thought and effort and is, therefore, more likely to get a response “Can you put me in touch with the best person in your team that looks after X”  You’ve accomplished 3 things here. A) You have the right person in the team to now approach. B)You have created urgency because you can now say “Your manager” has asked that I reach out to you as you’re the best person to discuss X.” C) You’re now on the radar of the buyer, even if it’s just a little, its better than not at all.

Have multiple contacts you want to sell to 

Every company has a different organisation structure so it can be hard to easily understand who looks after what.  It’s likely there are multiple people you can sell your product or service to in any business so if you’ve only got one contact that you’re targeting then you’re significantly reducing your chances of starting the conversation.  Make sure that you have 3-4 contacts in your CRM you can target one after each other. Many times I have had a situation where one contact might tell me they are not interested and  then their colleague is happy to start a conversation with me. The opportunity is not lost just because one person said no.

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Sales Techniques, Sales Training

A sales guide to dealing with your competition

Posted on by Tom Lavery

If you’re obsessed about hitting your sales number,  when the name of one of your competitors gets mentioned by a sales prospect it’s natural to feel a little defensive inside.  Your prospects will be curious about exploring a few providers and you will want to deal with questions about your competition with a calm, cool head. Here’s my advice.

When they ask a question about the competition, be direct in your response

If someone asks you what other providers are in your market, or what providers you get compared to, don’t try to sidestep it. Don’t say there isn’t any whilst pulling a puzzled face, no-ones believes you, and don’t try to point them in the direction of another space in your market, no-one compares buying a Ford with a Porsche. Get straight to the point and be honest.

Compliment your competitors

If you’re nasty about your competitors, you’re not making them look bad, only yourself. If you’ve got competition, then people must be buying from them, which means they have value. What is that value? Why would someone buy from them and not you? When you get asked about why another provider is different lead the answer with a compliment. “AB Media is a really attractive solution if you’re under 25 employees because its pricing model benefits smaller business”.  “T&T Solutions are a good choice for people who are looking for a simple product that doesn’t require any internal resource to make it effective” It’s an incredible way to build trust with your prospect.

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Sales Techniques, Sales Training

Don’t sell on product features, sell on customer success stories

Posted on by Tom Lavery

In the last four weeks, 6 different companies have pitched to me their product online.  Not one of them mentioned any client success stories as they pitched me their product. Only 1 followed up with a case study after.

They spent 90% of their time talking about themselves and their product rather then relating back to me real examples of how they are helping their clients to achieve their goals. I’ve always pitched my client success stories when trying to win new business and I’ve always found it hugely successful. It made me wonder if we’re doing enough to train and prepare our teams with, the stories they need to sell. Here are 7 ways you can start doing this today.

Client Service

The most connected team to success stories are your service team.  If you’re a growing business there’s most likely 10 new stories a week. Outline what’s important for your sales team to understand first of all.  Think about the clients buying reasons, their goals and what they are doing to achieve them, alongside where you need more success stories, is it in a particular size company? Industry? Or particular challenge?  Then work with your service team to create a way this information can be easily shared. Is it through a monthly lunch & learn? Is it a webinar? maybe it’s a SlideShare? Most importantly think about how you collate the information and store it somewhere people can access it in the future.

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