Handling A Concern

“We are satisfied with our current provider…”

I am sure that many of us have either heard or seen this type of reply from a prospect.  The key to a crisp reply is understanding and listening:

To Whom It May Concern:

We have been working with Paul Peterson for many years now. He has always done a fantastic job of offering good coverage at a fair cost. However, what sets Paul apart is his outstanding customer service and speed in accommodating our needs as a manufacturing company. Many of our staff actually employ the talents of Paul’s firm because of the level of comfort that we have with him. Over the last 10 years, there have been countless other electrical contractors knocking on our door trying to earn our business. We respectfully decline and tell them we are satisfied with our current provider; just like any happy homeowner would.

When you read this don’t you just wish that you were Paul?  In the Sales Pro Professional Selling System PSS class we teach that this is a customer concern.  Other sales classes might refer to it as an objection.  Frankly, there is an army of salespeople that turn on their proverbial heels when this statement is made and they are out the door.

Please understand, in Sales Pro we teach that this is a good thing.  We want to hear these comments.  This is not an objection, it is a concern.  What we want ourselves to hear is I have been using my current provider for the last 10 years and I hope my trust in them is being met with the very best in innovation and advanced technology.  You see, raising issues or concerns that our firms are able to deal with up front, demonstrate our ability to provide what the customer needs today.  Needs change over time.  So should our investment in listening to the current needs of an organization or its people.

Here is a sad truth that you can take to the bank.  The very best customers are used to using their current providers and many of them let down their guard and do not ask for special considerations in the form of expanded services and greater profitability.  An easy example is to call your current cell phone provider and shop for a new plan today.  In most cases where you may love the provider and their platform, that very firm is giving new customers off the street a better value than you currently have.

So what do you do?  First acknowledge what is important to the prospect without endorsing the company.  Never say, “They have a great reputation!”  Why?  Simple you are not their marketing department.

A better acknowledgement would be, “Being confident in your choice of vendors is extremely important as the technology advances today.”  Now seek permission to probe on a limited basis.  I never want to overstay my welcome as I am now on borrowed time.  If I introduce a time frame I will say something like, “I will take no more than 10 minutes.”

Now I am going to explore what the current situation is. 

·         “Tell me about the three most important factors that go into your maintaining the relationship with your current provider?”

·         “Please put them in order of priority for me.”

·         “Over time, what changes have you seen in that relationship that has kept it returning greater investment for you?”

Next I want to pick up on something the prospect says that is very important to them and look for more detail.  I am looking for an opportunity.

·         “You said….… was important – would you expand on that for me?”

·         “Mmm that is very interesting.   More and more of our clients are telling us the same thing.” 

      

      Here I am acknowledging.  (In our program we talk about the extreme importance of acknowledgement.)

Now I want to explore the effect on their business if this factor is not all that it can be.

·         “What have the consequences been for you to discover after the fact that you might have configured your…. differently?”

·         “How do you feel about that?”

·         “How has that affected you?”

Finally I want to confirm that there is more than potential in what my firm can do for this prospect.  I want to confirm that during this interaction potential has become desire to accomplish or to have something.  It has become a need!

·         “It sounds as if you would rather have……Is that correct?”

·         “So you need……right?”

·         “Would you like to have a way to……?”

The Key to Making Sales Training Stick

Sales training is a method of teaching employees how to accurately and effectively offer a product or service to a customer, as well as, follow through and closing sales for an organization. The learning objectives of effective sales training programs are generally to improve the relationship between sales professionals and their clients, as well as to improve the sales performance and close rates of sales professionals.

Organizations engage in sales training programs for many reasons. Despite the best of intentions, many  sales training programs often fall short of the mark and fail to deliver the business results that the executive team was originally looking for. This failure is frequently caused by a lack of clear expectations.  What is supposed to happen differently on the day after the training?  How will the key skills be reinforced after the sales training? What will the sales managers and or coaches do before, during and after the training to support the program and help ensure adoption of the new skills?

Countless studies have shown, unless there is a well-planned reinforcement program in place, sales professionals will likely forget 80% of the sales training material within 90 days after the training is delivered.

There are many options to consider in a comprehensive reinforcement program, including on-demand reinforcement videos, intermittent testing, periodic role plays, one-on-one coaching and group reinforcement sessions. In our experience, each of these can be an effective part of a reinforcement program, however, the overall initiative will likely not succeed without the direct involvement and engagement from the sales managers and or coaches.

The best way to protect your organization’s investment in sales training is through sales coach training. Sales coaching is the most direct way to impact sales team performance.  We can help to equip your sales managers and coaches with the skills and strategies they need to make a positive difference and guide their sales professionals to superior sales performance.

Sales Pro Professional Sales Coaching System provides your sales managers and coaches with the  framework, communication skills, and planning tools they need to build and maintain a superior sales team—one that generates mutually beneficial, long-term business relationship..

Sales Pro Professional Sales Coaching System addresses common issues that salespeople encounter when using Sales Pro PSS in interactions with their clients. Each issue is aligned with a module that can help address it.

Sales Pro Professional Sales Coaching System Audience:  Sales managers or others in your organization with sales coaching responsibilities. Sales Pro Professional Selling System is a prerequisite.

Delivery to Sales Managers and Coaches:  Sales Manager/Coach training is delivered by a 60-90 minute monthly webinar.

Sales Manager and Coach Delivery: Modules may be delivered in a meeting, telephone call, Skype or webinar. In some cases our coaches are available to deliver the reinforcement training webinars directly to your sales force.

Sales Coaching Webinar Topics: A few of the monthly topics include opening the call, listening, dealing with indifference, closing, acknowledging, confirming and checking and planning a sales call.

Contact us for a complete list of modules and monthly investment: Call 239-599-8408 or email Jim@c4oe.com or Joanne@c4oe.com

Selling Has Changed Dramatically

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. William Arthur Ward Yes,  Jim Ullery has changed, too! The next  Sales Pro PSS  Public Session  July 16 & 17, 2015 in Fort Myers, Florida Sales Pro Information Registration Form Contact Jim Ullery Visit our Website If I asked you what has changed in the last year with regard to your sales process, what would you say? Selling has changed dramatically in the past five years. It's much more difficult for sales professionals to overcome the combination of resistance, lack of available money and desperate companies selling at dangerously low prices. More experience does not necessarily mean that sales professionals being hired are any more effective than their less experienced counterparts. This means that training is more important, not less important. It means that you need more, not less training. And it means you need to focus on differentiation, value, listening and asking questions, consultative selling, becoming trusted advisors, and prospecting. It means having a customized, optimized formal, structured sales process with strategies and tactics to help your sales professionals move through the process.    Whether you've been in sales for two weeks or two decades, learning new sales skills can be the most rewarding and challenging step you can take to move your career forward. Sales Pro Professional Selling System is specifically designed for sales professionals who want to improve their skills at building strong relationships and delivering outstanding value and results to their customers and back to their own organizations. Sales Pro, our two-day sales training will help sales professionals Increase sales Reduce sell-cycle time Increase margins Create loyal customers Continually improve

Consultative Sales Training

The basic concept of consultative selling is to view the selling process as helping a customer to solve a problem or achieve a goal through the use of the seller's offering. However, while most salespeople are familiar with the concept, they have no idea how to go about implementing it. This is because most salespeople have been trained to believe that the best way to sell a product is to educate the user on the product.

Good Managers Manage, GREAT Managers Coach

Recently researchers conducted a study that indicated after sales training, if there was no coaching or reinforcement activity, there was a drop-off of 87% of the knowledge acquired. That’s a waste of 87 cents on every dollar spent on formal development efforts. Knowledge is power… ONLY if it is applied!

So why is it so difficult to do well?

In my opinion, it all comes down to coaching, which is something most sales managers aren’t particularly adept at — especially if they were promoted to their position from a sales representative role. Representatives-turned-managers likely got into management because of their ability to sell, not necessarily their ability to coach, and this negatively impacts the way they work with struggling sales representatives. This is compounded in distribution channels where wholesalers are overly dependent on their channel partners to sell their offerings.  Weak loyalties exist in these channels unless the wholesale entity partners with distribution in providing exceptional sales training and coaching models.

Evidence repeatedly shows that turning around a sales team starts with turning around the sales manager. Sales managers are uniquely positioned to influence and empower sales reps to greater levels of success, but sales managers sometimes become so busy and distracted that they neglect their own professional development as they get caught up trying to survive the latest fire drill.

What we commonly see are sales managers and leaders who:

• Don’t have time to coach sales representatives
• Aren’t sure what sales coaches are supposed to do
• Don’t have access to the tools and resources that help them get the most of coaching
• Don’t establish consistent rhythm of coaching
• Can’t lead great coaching dialogues
• Don’t have time to build coaching lessons that fit within the brief sales meetings they hold one on one, in groups, on line, on the telephone or in person with sales representatives
• Ignore animosities that exist between financial and sales professionals
• Don’t have a sales coaching coach

Sales coaching is an ongoing process of developing sales representatives to be better at what they do. It’s a process that is really up to the individual representative to do the work. The sales manager’s job is to facilitate, to hold the individual accountable to the growth or improvements they’re looking for. Coaching is the number one activity that sales managers do to drive performance.  Effective coaching hits the bottom line.

Sales representatives receiving great coaching reach over 100% of goal, in contrast to sales representatives reporting poor coaching who achieve dramatically lower percentages of their goals in large part due to unrealistic forecasts. 

Harvard Business conclusion? The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% — your core performers. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19% {defined “performance” as a representatives gap to goal (i.e., percentage of quota attained)}. In fact, even moderate improvement in coaching quality — simply from below to above average — can mean a six to eight percent increase in performance across 50% of your sales force. Often as not, that makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.

We offer Sales Pro Professional Coaching System. Be sure to set up time with me (Jim Ullery) to talk in more detail about this subject: https://www.timetrade.com/book/YBWCC to set an appointment to talk or reach out to my email Jim@c4oe.com

Sales Coaches

Who generally make the best sales coaches? Oddly popular notional are that the best sales people make the best sales coaches. NOT SO!

Here are five reasons why not:

1- The roles are very, very different. A professional salesperson is responsible for delivering tangible results. Sales managers are responsible for delivering tangible results... through other people. Managing a sales team is a role that engages in dissimilar activities than sales reps such as: coaching, ride-along evaluations, recruiting, hiring, performance appraisals, holding salespeople accountable, and termination. None of these are required for professional selling.

2- The capacities required for success are different - It's easy to assume that since a salesperson performed so well at selling, that leading a team of salespeople would be the natural next step. The capacities required for professional selling are not the same for sales leadership. One is patience. It takes patience to coach someone on a particular skill for months not always a strength for many superstar sales reps.

3- They struggle translating their instincts - A great player often cannot articulate why they are good, let alone transfer their skills to someone else. Great performers in any area almost always rely, in part, on natural instinct for their success. Instinct is very difficult to breakdown into measurable parts and communicate to others. Therefore, it becomes very hard to replicate their success through systematic training and coaching.

4- The urge to sell supersedes the will to coach - Your new sales manager will be tempted to take over sales calls instead of developing the skills of their players. The new sales manager, still focused on their own individual performance, will tend to step in over and over again to save deals and justify this dependency-causing behavior driven by quota demands. Plus, they would rather carry a poor performing sales rep than go through the tedious process of firing and replacing them.

5- You'll lose the revenue from your best sales rep - Instead of gaining a great sales manager,you'll lose the revenue from your now former great sales rep. This is an unintended consequence that many organizations often overlook. In addition, some companies believe that their new sales manager will replace their previous revenue stream by scaling the success of the sales team to new levels of performance, which is generally not the case.

Celebrating Employee Anniversaries

Listen to this Blog Post

Celebrating employee anniversaries may seem trivial. It may not significantly add to your bottom line or even be a key initiative in your strategic plan. But by treating each employee’s anniversary with your company as an achievement and a special occasion, you create a positive work environment and encourage employee commitment (and thus increase your employee retention rate).

The fact of the matter is, employees remember their hire date. It’s the career equivalent of a birthday (and who doesn’t love birthdays?) You know who else remember employees’ hire dates? Great managers, that’s who.

Celebrating an employee anniversary can also has a domino effect around the office. It will get fellow employees excited because they know you will offer them the same celebration upon their anniversaries. In the end, taking a day to show your gratitude for commitment of service boosts employee morale and has lasting positive consequences for your organization.

Now, your event doesn’t have to be ornate or extravagant. Here are some simple steps you can follow to create an Integrity HR approved employee anniversary celebration.

We recommend establishing a policy to designate when you will celebrate anniversaries, whether annually or on more momentous anniversaries such as five or 10 years. Take into consideration the size of your company and the amount of your party budget when deciding how you will celebrate.

It is important to maintain consistency so you do not hurt anyone’s feelings by celebrating someone earlier or more frequently than another. (Remember: it’s the small things like hurt feelings that make people leave an organization.)

·       Get Out the Calendar: The first step toward recognizing employee work anniversaries is to         make sure you’ve recorded start dates in the calendar! Depending on the size of your company, you may need to designate someone for this task  (for smaller companies) or use your HR software to be notified about the day (for larger companies). Getting the dates recorded is an optimal way to ensure no anniversary is overlooked.

·       Be Sincere and Make it Personal: We recommend acknowledging each employee’s anniversary every year, even if it is just with a small gesture (save the big celebrations for special anniversaries). Make it personal with a card, letter, phone call, personal visit or some other gesture. Don’t worry about making it formal. It just needs to be a genuine expression of appreciation. A few sincere words from management will be noticed and appreciated by an employee and greatly improve their morale. Often times, just a few sincere words of appreciation are worth more to the employee than an expensive gift!

·       Think Twice About Giving Monetary Gifts: In employer-employee relationships, money is associated with compensation. The last thing you want to do is confuse employee recognition with compensation.

When you are celebrating an anniversary, you are expressing appreciation for the employee’s service. Compensation is something that is earned. If a gift is perceived as earned, then it really isn’t a gift. Is it?

In the end, it’s important to make it part of your company’s culture to notice and recognize employees. It’s a great gesture to celebrate employee anniversaries, but it’s even better to also frequently celebrate employee successes, accomplishments and contributions as a part of your company culture.

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