The Sales Blog Customize Training Consultancy

Sales Training – The Do’s & Don’ts

Sep 2nd, 2011
by Customize.
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Customize have conducted scores of sales training programmes with delegates from most industry sectors in various stages of their development and this experience has led to develop a list of do’s & don’ts from a sales training point of view.

Don’ts

Don’t think that the problem with sales performance is purely found at the end of the sales process – in closing for example

Don’t expect the training to be a quick-fix solution to long-standing problems without on-going management support

Don’t underestimate the importance of a high quality training environment on the motivation of delegates

Don’t just go ahead with the training without thinking about some of the important strategic aspects of sales that impact on performance

Don’t avoid the training or abdicate responsibility to an external trainer, as your involvement is important

Don’t fudge important but uncomfortable issues that might arise in the training that need management attention

Don’t underestimate the importance of changes to motivation and rewards to encourage new actions and behaviours

Don’t miss the opportunity provided by the training to create an on-going culture of performance improvement across the entire sales team

Don’t only focus on end results and achievement of targets in rewarding sales performance

Do’s

Do review the entire sales process prior to any training to identify all the causes of poor sales performance

Do provide coaching and support to encourage transfer of the learning to actual sales activities and behaviours

Do provide a conducive training environment that is comfortable, spacious and preferably off-site

Do give some thought to key aspects of sales strategy such as an ideal value proposition, customer strategy and the sales process prior to the training

Do take part in the training if you are a sales manager to provide support and clarity on strategic issues

Do be prepared to make changes to key elements of the sales strategy and sales process after the training

Do create new sales performance measures by which to evaluate the new sales actions and behaviours

Do use the training to create a development plan for the sales team based on required competences and standards of performance

Look for ways to identify, acknowledge and reward the new sales actions and behaviours

© Customize Sales Training, 2011

Posted in: business training, sales skills, sales training.

Making the step up to Sales Manager

Aug 29th, 2011
by Customize.
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Most sales managers have previously been salespeople, but the management role is entirely different, requiring higher level skills and behaviours. Customize have worked with many sales executives and sales managers from a variety of organisations in the B2B marketplace, which has given us a unique perspective upon which to compare and contrast the key differences between these roles.

Sales Management – The Key Differences

A different range of skills

The management role is very different from the sales role. Whereas they keys to success in selling were communication skills, presenting, negotiating and closing; they are very different in management were leading, planning, monitoring, coaching, motivating and developing reign supreme.

Managing not selling

Newly promoted sales managers should resist the temptation to hold onto their existing customers. Customers are very demanding and will reduce the time that sales managers have to actually manage.

Management is creating performance through others and therefore the biggest impact a sales manager will have on sales performance is improve the performance of all members of the sales team. A small improvement from each salesperson adds up to a large improvement in aggregate.

Providing a strategic direction

Perhaps the most important part of the management job is to provide an overall strategic direction from the sales team. This direction includes such things as the overall vision of the future and the strategy by which this vision is to be achieved.

From a sales point of view, this strategy includes the nature of the Value Proposition offered to customers; the Customer Strategy which specifies which customers are the most important and the Sales Process, which defines how each type of customer is to be approached and engaged.

Developing the team

Perhaps the most important aspect of the sales management role is to develop the effectiveness of each member of the sales team. The role of coaching and motivation is therefore particularly important and requires levels of skills that sales managers may have to acquire themselves from external training providers.

Acknowledging success

A further aspect of the sales management role is to create a climate of success, where achievements are acknowledged and celebrated. This success is not just about the traditional measures of achievement against target, but based on other aspects of success such as improving individual skills, adopting more professional behaviours or attitudes or helping others to contribute more to the team as a whole.

Customize, August 2011

Posted in: customer strategy, sales management, sales skills, sales strategy, sales team development, strategic sales.

Sales Strategy Consulting – why it adds value

Jun 30th, 2011
by Customize.
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Using consultants to help with issues around sales, customer strategy and business development can be a significant and cost-effective resource in boosting business performance.

Sales strategy consulting brings many advantages to clients during the consulting relationship including:

Experience

Working with many sales organisations in many different industries gives consultants a unique perspective.

This experience may not have been gained in the client’s specific sector, but it will have probably included many of the business issues the client is nevertheless facing.

There are also advantages to be gained from bringing a different perspective to traditional industry issues

Objectivity

A client is often too close to the woods to see the trees – they are so close to their issues that they sometimes cannot see the bigger picture or a solution that is staring them in the face.

Consultants are not constrained by “how we do things around here”, but are more objective in their diagnosis and more creative in introducing new ways of thinking for old problems.

Technique

Just as you would expect a professional tennis coach to know the latest techniques for hitting the ball hard and low and for out-smarting an opponent, consultants in sales strategy will utilise best practice in their specialist area.

They will know about developing value propositions, defining customer strategy, establishing key account planning, creating sales processes, undertaking sales audits and formulating training & development plans.

These latest techniques should ensure that any solution is fit for purpose and will meet the expectations of clients.

Influence

To be effective in their work, consultants need highly development inter-personal skills.

This means they will be effective change-agents and will be well used to dealing with the internal politics that can get in the way of implementing cross-functional initiatives.

Value

External consultancy is an out-sourced, variable cost.

This means that clients only pay for what they get and can turn this effective resource on or off like a tap, which makes strategic sales consultancy a highly cost-effective resource.

Typical sales strategy consultancy projects

In the sales and customer strategy arena, consultants are often called for to add value in the following areas:

Development of Customer Strategy & Value Propositions

Perhaps the most important strategic sales consultancy projects involve thinking about what should be offered to which customers.

This requires the evaluation of customers to identify the most appropriate relationship for each customer group, together with the definition of what the various customer value propositions should consist of and how they should be communicated.

Sales Structure & Processes

Having defined the customer and the value proposition, an additional important area of strategic sales consulting revolves around creating the most appropriate sales structures and sales structures needed to deliver sales strategy.

Strategic Sales Skills & Account Planning

Some of the larger and more important customers in the B2B sales environment require more sophisticated handling and management.

The development of higher level strategic sales skills and the creation of account planning techniques will often be needed to give these more important customers the attention they demand.

A major element in the sales strategy consulting toolbox are therefore templates for key account planning and for business development initiatives, to give senior sales executives more sophisticated and powerful sales techniques.

Performance Management

The need to more effectively manage senior sales executives who are using more sophisticated account planning techniques calls for higher order sales management skills.

The traditional sales management tools of call rate, strike rate and activity management are simply not up to the job of managing higher-level sales performance.

As a result, much sales strategy consultancy work revolves around developing the sales management skills of leadership, performance management, coaching, motivation and team development.

Customize, June 2011 – Sales Strategy Consulting

Posted in: customer strategy, sales skills, sales strategy, sales strategy consulting, strategic sales, value propositions.

Growing the Business

Jun 2nd, 2011
by Customize.
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A great product will take a business a long way, particularly when aligned with the drive and commitment coming from the business owners, but how does an organisation that has survived and prospered in its earliest days grow into an organisation of the future?

Starting out

The early phase of business development is about creating a place in the market and about attracting customers to its original offer.

As the business develops and more people are recruited to handle this growth, those coming into the organisation will want to see certainty and consistency of direction and management style. They will also be concerned about their own success and future opportunities.

Necessary change

The next phase in an organisation’s development will raise issues around three key areas:

Business Direction

A review of where the business wants to go in the future is the essential starting point for this next phase. The organisation might need to review its product offering, its competitive positioning and its target customers.

These strategic issues need to involve all those responsible for implementing this revised strategy.

New Structure & Operating Processes

This business review will inform any changes to how the organisation operates. Whereas speed of response and flexibility are critical in the early stages of a business, they can work against the effective working of a larger business.

In larger organisations, certainty around business decision making is important, together with more formal operating processes and procedures, so that people around the organisation know what they should be doing.

Training & Development

An agreed strategic direction and more formalised structures and operating processes will allow for the creation of training and development plans to increase organisational capability.

Training and development will develop personal effectiveness across the business; it will create a climate of motivation across the motivation and will help to identify those managers who will eventually run the business when the founders adopt a reduced day-to-day role.

Conclusion

As a business develops a revised strategic direction together with more formalised structures and processes will challenge the organisation to adopt increasing complexity whilst maintaining speed of response and flexibility.

Rennie Gould

Customize, June 2011

Posted in: business development, sales strategy.
Tagged: ·

Customers Create Business Value

Jun 2nd, 2011
by Customize.
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Microsoft’s purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion illustrates the new metrics of business valuation and how business performance will be measured in the future.

Customer Franchise

Skype has built a massive global franchise of millions of customers largely on the back of customer value and customer recommendation.

The ability to reach millions of customers around the world is priceless and impossible to replicate with traditional marketing programmes.

Marketing Effectiveness

Marketing effectiveness will be increasingly be measured by customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer reach and customer recommendation – all aspects of the customer experience. This will have profound implications for how organisations operate internally.

Business Valuation

Measures of the customer’s experience are increasingly important metrics for marketing programmes, but they will become increasingly important measures of business performance in their own right and crucial for business valuation.

Whereas profitability and other financial measures can be creatively accounted, it is impossible to hide from poor product and service performance – experiences that are increasingly shared by customers online.
Businesses of the future will only optimise shareholder and maximise business value if they embrace these new customer driven measures of business performance.

New Customer Measures

The Customer Experience

The customer experience is the most important measure for the business, as this experience drives customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

This experience is based on what sellers actually deliver – information increasingly shared by all customers online.

The Customer Franchise

Customer experience is now communicated worldwide at digital speed light speed and is the key factor involved in growing the customer franchise and customer reach.

The nature and extent of an organisations customer franchise will become another key measure of business performance that will impact on business valuation.

Customer Feedback

The customer experience also drives those all-important reviews and recommendations that can make or break a business.

Customer reviews and recommendations provided by Amazon’s customers are more influential than any amount of advertising spiel put about by sellers. A pattern of negative reviews can kill a company’s reputation stone dead.

Google Position

A page 1 ranking on Google is a key target for those organisations that generate their business online and natural search is now seen by most customers as being more reflective of their needs and requirements rather than sponsored links.

The valuation of a business will soon depend on its Google rankings rather than on more traditional financial measures.

Conclusion

Measures relating to customer performance are therefore destined to become more important than traditional measures of financial performance.

The value of a business will therefore depend upon the customer experience it delivers and on the size and reach of its customer franchise.

These measures will drive business valuation and will finally put the customer at the forefront of management thinking.

Rennie Gould

Customize, June 2011

Posted in: customer experience, customer strategy, customer value, marketing.
Tagged: · · · ·

Creating Value Propositions

Jun 2nd, 2011
by Customize.
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Customers do not buy products or services, they buy what these products and services do for them. They buy value.
The task for sales is therefore to understand the extent of their product and service offering and to create unique value propositions for their various customers.

The Total Proposition

The organisation’s total proposition consists of every element that can be offered to customers. It is a combination of both product and service elements that can be identified using the following framework.

The Total Proposition

It is a very positive exercise to go through each of the categories identified above and to list all possible aspects of the organisation’s product and service offering. It is surprising how big this list can become if the whole sales team is involved in this initial brainstorm.

Having identified the extent of the total proposition, the next step is to identify which of the various elements of this proposition offer competitive advantage.

These are the elements of the proposition that are attractive to customers, are unique to the company and are difficult for the competition to copy.

These are the elements that in a particular combination can create unique customer value.

Creating Customer Value

Having identified the extent of the total proposition, we now need to turn these elements into value that customers will recognise.

Value can be created in a number of ways that are identified in the diagram below.

Aspects of Value

Value is very customer specific, depending upon the individual issues and opportunities affecting each customer. This of course implies that salespeople must identify these issues before attempting to create the specific value proposition.

The Value Proposition

Having understood the customer’s circumstances, the sales team is now in a position to communicate the proposition in terms that delivers value in the mind of the customer.

The Customer Value Proposition is a statement of what the customer receives in return for the investment they make. It identifies what the product or service will do for the customer in language that the customer understands. This language is the language of value.

Customize Sales Training & Consulting, June 2011

Posted in: customer value, strategic sales, value propositions.
Tagged: · · · · · ·

Sales Force Motivation

Sep 10th, 2010
by Customize.
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Motivation is probably one of the most talked about aspects of sales management, but probably one of the most mysterious.

Although there has been an immense amount of academic research into motivation, not enough of its output has found its way into the sales management toolbox, or been translated into practical advice that sales managers can use to improve sales performance.

An analysis of the various theories of motivation provides a number of guidelines that can help sales managers bring out the best of each individual in their sales team.

The Sales Force Motivation Framework

The objective is desirable

Motivation only exists where salespeople have a positive incentive to achieve some objective. This incentive is often provided by financial rewards, but other objectives such as achievement, recognition, status and satisfaction can also provide powerful incentives for achievement.

The challenge for sales managers is to identify the range of motivators for each individual salesperson and to provide the opportunities for these objectives to be striven for.

Capability to perform

All the motivation in the world will not result in achievement if the capability to perform does not exist.

The challenge for sales management is to identify the specific tasks that salespeople have to perform and to ensure their development and coaching process produces this required mix of knowledge, skills and behaviours.

The objective is a stretch but achievable

Most salespeople are highly goal oriented; that is they like the challenge of achieving targets. However, for targets to be motivational, they need to be both stretching but achievable.

The challenge for sales management is to design targets and objectives that are within the realms of possibility but also  require near maximum effort in order to be reached.

Chunked down goals

Splitting objectives down into bite-sized chunks is important for motivation as it allows for earlier sight of achievable objectives and creates the opportunity for earlier success and feedback.

The challenge for sales management is to be creative in designing objectives and targets that allow for the achievement of stepping stones along the way.

Fairness & absence of de-motivators

Many incentive schemes fall foul of the fairness factor and become de-motivators rather than motivators. Additionally, some issues such as working conditions and interpersonal problems (the so-called Hygiene Factors) can de-motivate, but their removal will not in themselves result in positive motivation.

The challenge of sales management is to remove the de-motivators, but more importantly to ensure they create a positive climate of motivation for each individual.

Early success & feedback

The importance of early success and the accurate feedback on performance is vital for motivation.

The challenge for sales managers is to design objectives that allow for early success to develop the positive momentum of achievement and to ensure that salespeople receive early and accurate feedback on their efforts and achievements.

Implications for Sales Management

The creation of a high performance culture within sales, requires managers to design a motivational framework around the achievement of performance goals, whilst simultaneously offering the opportunity for individuals to achieve their personal goals.

Customize, September 2010

Posted in: sales management, sales training.
Tagged: · · · ·

Developing Sales Skills

Sep 10th, 2010
by Customize.
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The question of whether salespeople are born or made is often debated within the sales community. If salespeople are born, then all that money spent on training and development is largely wasted. If they are made, where does natural talent come in?

The reality must be somewhere between these two extremes, with some salespeople having greater natural abilities than others, but all able to respond positively to training and development.

So what are these mystical abilities that separate the great salespeople from the merely average? It is at this point that things become a little confused, with the confusion caused by whether we are talking about Competences or Attributes.

The Competency Approach identifies those capabilities or abilities that salespeople require to be successful.

Key Sales Competences

Competence theory also suggests that the more developed these abilities are, the more successful salespeople are likely to be. So all sales managers have to do, is to work on each of these competences and success will surely follow? Well not quite and perhaps it is time for a golf analogy.

To be a good golfer requires a number of competences including the ability to drive the ball long and straight and the ability to sink putts. However, the ability to putt consists of some other things such as the knowledge of how a ball rolls, the skill in reading greens and the mental focus to perform under pressure.

These other things are the Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours that competent putting requires, and it is these so-called Attributes that a golfer needs to work on to become better at putting and therefore to become a better golfer.

From a sales point of view, the Key Sales Competences listed above, represent a generic list of the abilities a salesperson needs to be successful.

However, as all sales roles are different, the first step for a sales manager is to develop his own list of competences by observing good salespeople and identifying what it is they do that makes them successful.

Having identified these competences, the next step is to develop the list of Attributes that each competence consists of. The table below lists those attributes that are usually the most important, but here again, sales managers may well want to develop their own list.

Key Sales Attributes

For example, the ability to Present Value Propositions, requires a combination of Knowledge of the Company Proposition and Skills in Presenting.

On the other hand, the ability to Identify Customer Issues and Opportunities, requires the Skills of Questioning, Probing and Listening.

Additionally, there are certain behaviours or attitudes that are also important for sales performance. Such things as Professionalism, Integrity and Self-Motivation are also vital elements present in good performers.

So the final question is whether Knowledge, Skills & Behaviours can be developed. The short answer is that they can: Knowledge can be acquired; skills can be practiced and Behaviours can be learned or changed.

Implications for Sales Management

Sales managers need to spend time observing the performance of their salespeople to identify those Competences that are most linked with success.

Managers then need to break these competences down into their constituent Knowledge, Skills & Behaviours and develop these sales attributes as part of an on-going coaching and development plan.

Customize Sales Management Training, September 2010

Posted in: sales management, sales training.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Sales Team Development

Sep 10th, 2010
by Customize.
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It could be said that sales is an individual profession, with most salespeople spending much of their time on their own, either with customers or travelling to them.

However, this image of the salesperson’s life is incomplete, as they also spend increasing amounts of their time with other salespeople, either acting in teams, learning from each other, sharing knowledge and experience or even just socialising.

For all these reasons, the development of the sales team as a whole is a vital component of overall sales performance.

But just like any team, throwing a disparate group of people together and hoping they will gel is not the best way of securing team spirit and team performance. Research into team development has identified a number of stages that teams go through in order to become effective and these stages have specific implications for sales management.

Sales Team Development: stages in the team lifecycle

Forming

In this first stage of team development, there is confusion and uncertainty as individuals become acquainted and look to establish rules of behaviour and interaction.

At this stage in team development, it is important that sales management is clear about roles and responsibilities and to define the key customer relationships that need to be developed, together with the ground rules about how the sales team will work together.

Storming

In this second stage of team development, there are often disagreements and arguments as team members jostle to find their natural position and role within the team.

It is important at this stage for sales managers to stress the role and usefulness of the team in achieving overall sales objectives and to make time to discuss and resolve specific issues and disagreements.

Norming

In this stage of a team’s development, the team has settled down and consensus over roles and responsibilities has been achieved.

The sales management role at this stage is to ensure that the team understands how it will share information and opportunities and how it will work together to support specific customers and to perform specific sales projects.

Performing

This is the end goal of team development. Such a team is performing at its highest level of potential and achieving great results.

A team at this stage in its development is also highly motivational for specific individuals as it provides opportunities for personal development, achievement and recognition.

The role of sales management at this stage in the team’s lifecycle is to sweat the assets i.e. to stretch and to push the team to extraordinary levels of performance.

Decaying

As with all teams, performance can decrease over time and the team itself can become inward looking and more concerned with past performance than on current achievement.

Sales management may well have to consider major changes to the team at this stage in order to inject new life and vitality, either by bringing new members into the team or even by completely reforming the team.

Implications for Sales Management

To exploit the major motivational and performance aspects of teamwork, sales managers must be conscious of where their team is in its development cycle and to provide the appropriate level of management support and direction at each relevant stage.

Customize, September 2010

Posted in: sales management, sales team development.
Tagged: · · ·

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