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Performance Through People
- SALES TRAINING THAT DRIVES TOP LINE RESULTS
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The Sales Transformation program has been awarded the Best Training Award by a prestigious industry body.
The program combines sales skills, solution selling
and tools usage in the real customer environment by working on actual customer/prospect accounts. The work is
sustained by the sales managers coaching their sales people on these accounts and opportunities. This approach
ensures that the training is relevant, measurable and delivers value in the real working environment. In the first
six months of the roll out, a revenue increase of 15% has been measured as directly attributable to the training.Watch the webinar of how the training program was designed
Do you want a training program that really drives business results?
Contact me, John Fowler, on 01625-536187 or email me
- THE SALES BLOG
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Creating competency based sales training
March 23, 2012 – 4:38 pmI have recently been asked by a prospect
if I can create sales training based on competences for specific levels of sales people. In fact, I have done this a number of times for large global companies, but I have never documented the actual approach and methodology I followed in designing, developing and implementing this training curriculum. So the aim of this article is to document the generic approach I would initially suggest prior to the customisation for the specific customer requirements.Let me start with a quick definition of competences:
- What superior performers do more often, more completely and more consistently
- Observable behaviours that make a difference
- The “how” of performance
So what are the steps in creating sales training based around a competency framework?
Steps in the process of creating competency based sales training
Step 1. Understand and document the sales organisational structure including the roles and responsibilities of all the roles in the sales force. This is so obvious, but in my experience creates a large amount of discussion and work in the client company to standardise on a number of defines sales roles and levels in each role. For instance you may have internal sales people selling B2B to SMEs and create three levels who are assigned to bronze, silver and gold accounts. The accounts are defined by their spend, or potential spend, and generally a sales person would have 200 bronze accounts, 80 silver accounts or 20 gold accounts reflecting the greater opportunities in the gold accounts. This process is replicated for all the various selling groups.
Step 2. Understand what best in class sales people look like in each of the groups. The best starting point is a generic set of sales competences that can then be refined by observing sales people, interviewing sales managers and sales people, and understanding to sales process model for the specific roles. The sales process model is an important part of the design because your sales people will be expected to execute their sales plans against the model to drive consistent and repeatable business.
Step 3. From the above you can then create a competency framework of, say, 6 to 10 key competences that are appropriate across some of all of the roles. So, building customer rapport is something that all sales people need to do, but business acumen probably isn’t a key competency for B2C sales people. We must ensure that each competency is measurable and that we can identify levels of competency that are appropriate for the various levels of role. Ask the question “what does good look like for this competency and how would this be demonstrated by a sales person?” This is a very important point, any competency that we choose most be measurable in the customer’s business environment. As an example 7 functional Sales competencies could be Selling Skills, Customer & Industry Knowledge, Business Acumen, Sales Process and Tools, Products & Services Knowledge, Planning & Organizing, Teamwork, Customer Support, and each of those 7 competencies could have 4 levels.
Taking Business Acumen as an example we could develop an agreed definition of what it is and how the four levels can be described.
From there we can focus in on the best practice at each level, so as an example at Level 1 the Exemplar Behaviors could be:- Uses basic knowledge of business principles to achieve objectives
- Demonstrates an understanding of basic business concepts and vocabulary
- Uses standard business practices effectively
We could then describe potential development activities at this level as follows:
- Ask your colleagues and your manager questions about the business and the organization. You will increase your knowledge of operations and general business issues.
- Read the business section of your daily paper regularly. This will help you become more familiar with ongoing business issues.
- When reading memos or internal documents, underline or highlight business terms that are unfamiliar to you. Take the time to look these terms up in a dictionary or ask someone to explain them to you. You will soon become more knowledgeable about general business principles.
Step 4. Now we have a set of competencies and levels for each sales role, which is the competency framework for that role, we can now assess each member of the sales team against the framework. The assessment can be carried out online, by management observation or by full assessment centres. If time and budget allow, assessment centres are a great way to benchmark a sales person’s current competencies. This leads to an understanding of where the sales person is today against the defined levels for each competency, as detailed against their specific role and level – hence the reason step 1 is so important.
Step 5. This gives us an individual GAP analysis for each sales person that then allows for the creation of a personal development plan to close the GAPs, and also show what needs to be accomplished to move to the next level. The development plan may not lead directly to traditional training in the classroom but could be shadowing a best in class sales peer, or some of the activities described above for level 1 Business Acumen.
Step 6. The competency framework also allows us to create training programs or modules that map to the competencies. Generally, most companies have a base-line sales training program that everyone is expected to attend, and this is often used as part of the induction process for new hires to the sales function in the company.
Each training course will have a course aim, for example for the base-line training: To enable delegates to understand the basics of telephone/face-to-face selling and building customer relationships. The course will help them to become personally more successful in their sales role. The program is suitable for people who are relatively new to selling, as well as more experienced people who wish to refresh their basic skills.
There will also be a set of objectives:
- Understand how to build rapport with prospects
- Explain and demonstrate the Selling and Buying Processes
- Plan and prepare for telephone/face to face meetings
- Develop questions in a sales context and actively listen to the customer
- Explain how effective communication can assist them when conducting a sales interview and when building long term relationships with customers
- Match product solutions to customers’ individual needs
- Identify different buyer types and how to interact with them
- Demonstrate how to gain customer commitment to the next step
- Detail how to close a sale effectively, or gain commitment to future action
This would lead to the development of specific modules in the training course to develop the individuals in that area, so a planning module could have the following objectives – Participants will be able to:
- Recognize the difference between “ineffective” and “effective” selling behaviours;
- Demonstrate effective rapport building behaviours on the phone and face to face;
- Identify strategies and practice overcoming personal challenges to connecting with difficult customers;
- Develop and demonstrate an effective opening for different types of customers;
- Develop an effective Value Proposition for different customer types and situations.
A half day module for planning could have the following agenda:
From this point the training developer can easily create good interactive content for the customer based on the objectives and the flow of the agenda.Step 7. The curriculum is developed out to include standard (mandatory) sales training courses that take account of the various levels and functions in the sales organisation. Remember that in practice some training will be e-learning, some webinars, some reading, some classroom training and some will be on the job working with your manager or peers. For example, for a bank that sells to personal, SME and corporate customers the framework could be
Step 8. Finally, we must remember the logistics from a training roll out perspective:
- Pilots will need to be run and evaluated, and changes made as required
- The materials developed – participant workbooks, facilitator guides, slides, role plays and case studies, etc. (with language and translation considerations)
- The trainers who are to deliver the training (possibly in multiple languages) need to be trained and certified
- The training needs to be measurable with some pre and post course / training assessments to both monitor the effectiveness of the training and to ascertain how the individual is developing. This is key to ensure that there is a real ROI from the program.
So to summarise, seeing the amount of work we need to do, we may want to affirm the benefits a Sales Team Competency Framework:
- It allows you to build a profile of what the best, ideal sales person looks like (do they exist already?)
- You can benchmark all of the sales team against this best in class model
- Individual training and development needs can be identified for each sales person based on their gaps
- The sales leader can measure progress on each sales person’s development
- Sales managers have a framework which they can coach to
- Sales people have a clear understanding of the expectations and how they can develop within the organization
- It reinforces behaviours that are consistent with the company’s mission, goals, culture and sales process
- You can recruit people who are more likely to succeed thereby reducing costs
- You will retain more high performers with individual development plans
- You can deliver a transformational development program that will result in greatly improved performance
- Overall it gives you an objective roadmap for recruiting and developing successful sales people
Posted in Sales Process, Training Tagged culture, sales competencies, training needs analysis Comments (0)
Coaching – the Sales Manager’s most important tool
February 14, 2012 – 8:45 pm“Catch a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and feed him for life” – unknown.
Of all the tools available to a sales manager
to drive the performance of individuals in their team, coaching has been shown to be the most important in terms of achieving business results. Studies show that the optimum amount of coaching for an individual is 3 hours per month and that this has a dramatic effect on their business performance. Unfortunately, coaching is often the first activity that gets cancelled when the blizzard of requests for a sales manager’s time hits their desk.Once the coaching session and longer term development of the sales person is postponed, we fall back to the same old management using the order entry numbers, rather than analysing the problems earlier in the pipeline and using coaching to develop the sales person’s skill set.
In our analysis of sales management behaviours, coaching is the activity that is most misunderstood and although coaching is often claimed, it is rarely seen. If “coaching” sessions are actually observed, the sales manager at worst tends to be very directive (confusing coaching with telling) and at best seems to be using clever persuasion to get the sales person to adopt their point of view. Very little coaching that is open and non-directive is observed.
The real problem with coaching is that it takes more time and is harder than just telling. It is also mainly effective in the medium to long term, so when the heat is on for numbers at the quarter’s end, coaching isn’t the tool of choice for closing business. However, if good coaching is embedded and has been practiced earlier in the quarter then the mad dash at quarter end may be avoided or at least be more controlled.
Coaching is often seen as “fluffy” but it can actually be very effective when used in business performance issues. When you are diagnosing performance problems you need to look at two areas. The first is the sales person’s performance against the target, the second is the sales person’s performance against the key sales metrics that you need them to deliver. This diagram shows a formula which represents sales person’s revenue.
That is the number of opportunities that we need them to bring into the pipeline, the average size that we would like that opportunity to be and the close rate that we expect. This would be divided by the average sales cycle length or velocity we need them to achieve. Having done this we would need to assess the sales and execution behaviour and then analyze the root cause of the problem to ensure that we are focusing on the real performance issue. This is where coaching comes into it’s own, and allows the sales manager to work with the sales person to create a set of actions to drive future performance.Posted in Coaching, Sales Management Tagged Coaching, sales competencies, sales managers Comments (0)
Knowing your metrics – driving the pipeline
February 14, 2012 – 8:38 pmGraphically a pipeline, often called a funnel,
looks like the diagram shown here. It should contain all of the leads and prospects that you generate through marketing and business development activities. These will then convert into opportunities that your team are working on and track their progress through the sales stages. The pipeline takes on a funnel shape, usually narrowing from top to bottom, as opportunities move through the sales process. Leads enter at the top, some of them will ‘fall out’ and some of them will move to the next stage. It is the reduction in opportunities that occurs as they move through the stages which creates the funnel shape.With the correct analysis of the pipeline, we should be able to see the conversion rate as the opportunities move through the sales stages and the average time taken for the deals to move to the next stage. Generally as sales managers we would take a granular approach to our team’s opportunities, tracking them as they move from one sales stage to the other. However, some sales people will demonstrate a consistently lower conversion rate between some stages, as compared with the rest of the team, and this is a great opportunity for a coaching conversation with the individual.
The starting point of the funnel is new leads coming in to the pipeline. It is vital that we understand how many new opportunities the team needs to generate each month to create an above target amount of closed orders. Furthermore, something that has a big effect on the number of opportunities is the size of the opportunities. If the team is generating small deals then we will need more opportunities; if they are generating bigger deals then we will need fewer opportunities.
The next thing that we need to look at is the velocity with which opportunities move through the pipeline. If it takes one year for an opportunity to cycle through the pipeline, our pipeline will need to deliver target coverage at the beginning of the year. Again this is a good opportunity to coach individuals that have velocities that are slower than the team average between certain stages.
Having determined the first three metrics (opportunity number, size and velocity), we need to calculate the ratios between the key stages in the pipeline, which tends to be company specific and based on how the sales process has been developed (and any CRM system parameters). These are very important metrics to calculate as it will determine the number of leads that we need to bring into the pipeline.
So, again as sales managers we need to focus earlier in the sales process and ensure that the right things are being done early on, to ensure success. Obviously, when we get this information we need to work with individual sales people to enhance their skills in any development areas, and this is where coaching comes in.
Fishing where the fish are – segmentation
February 14, 2012 – 8:24 pmThe span of control for first line sales managers can now be is high as 12 or 15 sales people, so the amount of joint customer calls is greatly reduced. So being able to control where the sales team are spending their time is key to making the team’s numbers.
This is a massive topic, and absolutely key for a sales manager to get right. If the sales team are spending their time in the wrong places, with the wrong potential customers, how will you ever make your numbers?
In some companies, accounts have already been divided up in some way e.g. industry segment (IT, Oil & Gas), size (SOHO, SME, Enterprise) or geographical location, or a mixture of methods. As a sales manager, if this hasn’t already been done, you have a tremendous opportunity to shape where the sales force spends their time and get them to “Fish where the fish are”.
But even if this work has been done at a high level, each sales person has been allocated 30/50/80/200 potential customers, so how many of those can they actually have a meaningful dialogue with? How many potential contact points are there in each account, how many people have authority to buy your products/solutions/services?

So we need to do some more work on where we want the sales people spending their time, and this is where segmentation comes in. Generally I like to develop a two-axis graph which means that specific accounts can be mapped into quadrants and visually it is very easy to see which accounts warrant more time being spent on them. The question is “How do you choose the axes of the graph?”
The above example has customer attractiveness to us and the relative strength of our proposition, but there are many possibilities. These are the high level criteria you want to use to segment the accounts and understand where your sales team should be working. Obviously, you can change these and, in fact, the skill of this exercise is in getting these criteria right for your business. So, for instance, I could have chosen “value to us (now)” and “potential business” and this would affect the results we would get.
Refining the method
The following table gives an example of factors you could include in “attractiveness to us”.
As you refine this technique you may want to consider a number of sub-criteria for each axis, and to add more granularity you could weight each of the criteria relative to the others. Our suggestion is to use just 2 or 3 sub-criteria per axis so that the method doesn’t become too unwieldy. Again, we have found that running this as a facilitated workshop gives the best results, as an experienced facilitator who has used these models a number of times can get quickly to a reasonable set of criteria.Finally, you will be able to map the accounts into the four quadrants and we can clearly see which accounts warrant our focus. This takes some time and effort but the rewards are massive. For a sales manager, or group of sales managers, to undertake this exercise is extremely worthwhile. Just consider the results of your whole sales force calling on worthwhile accounts, how much time is currently wasted on winning business you don’t want or chasing business you cannot win.
So we have done some work in understanding our value to a customer and deciding which customer segments will yield the best results. The next part of the process is to manage the pipeline of potential business using metrics that focus on more than the order value.
Posted in Customer Focus, Sales Management, Sales Process Tagged business drivers, segmentation, strategy Comments (0)
Creating meaningful value propositions
February 14, 2012 – 8:13 pmThe first answer to the question “what can sales people do differently” is to educate their buyers, adding value by teaching them something they don’t already know. This approach takes time, skill and resource, but ultimately is the only way to differentiate themselves from the competition. To do this, sales people need to be able to create customer-specific value propositions, and this is where the sales manager comes in.
Let me start by saying that meaningful value propositions are meaningful to a specific customer and not the vague statements seen in general product/service/solution marketing collateral. Many inexperienced sales people take these vague statements and try and sell them to customers and claim fantastic ROIs from implementing their solutions.
As we have already discussed, one of the changes in the buyer/seller relationship is that buyers do not want to be sold to by sales people. Rather, they want to be educated on developments in their specific industry segment that could help their businesses remain competitive. The difficulty is in how the sales person engages the customer without doing a detailed needs analysis, and this is where sales managers can help.
So, how do we develop value propositions that are more meaningful to customers prior to having a detailed discussion about their specific needs? The approach we have taken is to get sales managers to think about how their customers can increase shareholder value, and where their solution can create this value for the customer. In the past this process has descended into such a detailed analysis around business acumen that most sales people and managers now avoid it. This diagram gives a high level view of the pitfalls, and you may want to reflect on how many of your sales people, and sales managers, really understand this.
Making business acumen simple but relevantSo how can we use business acumen to help develop value propositions? Firstly, we can reduce the complexity and get the sales managers to think about how their customers can increase shareholder value using the 4 levers that executives can “pull” to achieve this. These four levers are the four headings on the previous diagram namely: increasing revenues, reducing costs, sweating assets and providing working capital. It is important to consider the four areas as this is how a CEO/CFO will think about their business, too often sales people are one-dimensional and only talk about cost savings.
The next phase is to start to segment your potential customers in terms of their specific industry or the problems they have in common with other customers (a more detailed view of segmentation is given later in the document). For example, we could focus on an industry segment – Telecommunications Operators – and think about some of their key objectives. In reality we are moving from right to left across the diagram whereas most selling companies move left to right. This means we always have our customer’s objectives at the forefront of our minds rather than our own product/solution/service.
This allows us to clearly link their objectives to those four levers. The interesting part is then bridging between your solution and the industry objectives. How we bridge the gap is normally achieved through a one or two day workshop of sales managers, senior sales people, customer facing technical people, product marketing and others who may have insight e.g. industry segment marketing. We recently ran this type of workshop for a large communications company. 30 cross-discipline people in the room divided into 5 teams of 6 people. Each team was given a specific solution sold by their company, together with a specific industry segment to work on.The exercise ran for about two hours and the outputs were outstanding – value propositions for five of their specific solutions for that industry segment. This gave their sales force an excellent starting point for educating their customers regarding specific industry benefits of their solutions and then going to the next stage of working with the customers own metrics to develop agreed ROIs.
So, thinking as a sales person or sales manager, what would this approach do for your business? Think about how this would allow you to focus on a specific industry segment (Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, etc.) with a consistent, value-based approach to potential customers. The next question is how we choose the segments, and the customers within the segments, that we should target.
Posted in Customer Focus, Executive Selling, Sales Management Tagged buying, change, gathering information, relationship Comments (0)
Business Development Strategies
January 30, 2012 – 5:34 pmTimes are tough, customers are delaying decisions, business is very competitive, customers are more purchasing savvy than at any time and they really don’t want to be sold to by sales people. But no-one told you that selling was easy!
So what is the standard response from sales managers (VPs/Directors/managers) to this situation? Unfortunately it is often to focus purely on the final outputs of the sales rather than the whole process, and a great analogy for this situation is golf. The sales person is on the tee, driver in hand and the sales manager is nowhere to be seen. The sales person can drive it straight (unlikely in my experience), slice it into the rough or pull it out of bounds. Whatever the outcome the sales manager probably has no idea what has taken place.
The good news is that the sales person got lucky and is in the light rough on the right, and is taking a long iron for their second shot. Again no sales manager is watching and the sales person hits it into the bunker at the side of the green. As they reach their ball the sales manager wanders past and says that they need it down in three from there, and could we do it in the next five minutes (something about quarter end)
They splash out to 18 feet and the sales manager is now standing over the putt with them giving advice and coaching using with phrases like “Remember, whatever you do don’t screw up!”. They putt to 3 feet, always a tricky one, and we notice the sales manager is now joined by their boss – great, the sales person is getting plenty of advice now.
The good news is that they make the putt, the sales manager and their boss leave without a word, and the sales person goes to the next tee by themselves. OK, so it’s an analogy, but it works for me on a number of levels.
Firstly, the sales managers only got involved in the dying moments of the sale and had little understanding of what has gone on in previous meetings with the customer. In fact, the first meeting may have been so bad that the sales person went out of bounds and never got a second shot. Secondly, we are focusing on outputs from previous work (the final putt) rather than shaping the business development efforts of the sales team by coming up with a clear set of practical strategies that can drive results. There are other parts to the analogy – and can you get it in the hole for quarter end – which I am sure you understand from your own personal experience, so I won’t labour the point.
In the next post I am going to explore what hat has changed with buyers that should drive a change in both sales and management behaviour.
I hope you enjoy the ideas.
Posted in Customer Focus, Executive Selling, Sales Management Tagged Coaching, priorities, sales managers, value proposition Comments (0)
What a Customer wants to see from a Sales Person
May 7, 2011 – 12:03 amI often run this as an exercise on a flip chart or whiteboard – down the left hand side I write

I
K
E
A
And I say these are the 4 things that a customer wants to see in a sales person (especially if they are Swedish!). So I is for?
Integrity – honesty, transparency, a relationship based on truth
K is easy
Knowledge – but what knowledge? Your products and services, your company’s processes, your customer’s company – their offerings, their market, their industry, their competition
E is more difficult and takes a bit of time to get.
E is for Empathy – putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, what’s it like to do their job, what are the key priorities and issues they face
Finally A – I sometimes have to spell out the first few letters A-U-T – famously on one course a delegate shouted out Autism (you wonder what’s going on in people’s minds sometimes).
A is for Authority – the customer will be evaluating you in this regard, so that if something goes wrong will this sales person have the authority and gravitas within their company to resolve the problem.I find this very useful for getting sales people to think from the customer’s perspective rather than their own. Let me know if this approach is useful for you.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
August 4, 2010 – 3:06 pm
It is interesting how companies and governments often fall into the trap of the law of unintended consequences. The basic idea of the law is that we try and set rules to create one set of outcomes but people (and sales people are really good at this) think of ingenious ways to use the rule to create benefit and unintended consequences for themselves.The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” that end being the public interest. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
An excellent example of this law and how sales people can manipulate results occurred in the great golf cart boom of 2009. An American government subsidy designed to promote the purchase of electric vehicles (cars) for the sake of energy conservation was exploited by clever golf cart salesmen who recognized that their products fit under the government’s definition of an electric car. The salesmen began to give away “free” golf carts to consumers, with the entire bill being passed along to the government.
From my own experience the sales commission plan is an obvious candidate for this law. When I worked at a large IT company, the sales people quickly worked out that the new commission plan, focused on selling more application licences, would pay large amounts of money for simply resigning customers on their current software licences. It took management about two months to catch up – happy days!
Let me know if you have any examples from your sales experience of the law of unintended consequences.
Posted in Sales Management, Sales Process Tagged complexity, consequences, sales managers Comments (0)
Sales Objections
July 20, 2010 – 3:32 pm
I was running a Resolving Objections workshop a few weeks ago and I always start by getting the group to call out the most common objections they face and I write them on a flipchart to work with later in the day. I always jot down the objections after the workshop and I have noticed that whatever the industry and whatever the product/solution being sold, the same objections appear again and again. As an aside, it amazes me that sales people getting the same objection day after day don’t change their approach (normally shock, horror, stumbling speech and concession).So back to the objections, here is a generic list that I have built from my workshops:
1. AAA (company) offers more options than you.
2. Your price is too high (what never heard that before!)
3. I don’t like your BBB (product/solution)
4. CCC (company) are doing a better job in this area
5. Solve all my problems, then I’ll listen to your suggestions for new products
6. Your product/solution doesn’t have the features we are looking for
7. My boss isn’t authorizing anything at the moment
8. I’d love to do it, but I just don’t have budget
9. I don’t have time now, send me some literature
10. I’m happy with my current supplier
11. You’re the third sales person this year
12. Company DDD does it cheaper
13. I bought from you 3 years ago and it was a horrible experience, why should I do business with you nowSo there are 13 on the list, some that are almost duplicates. I always say that the 10 most common objections that you hear will cover 90% of all the objections you face, so why not learn how to resolve them? I will cover a structured way to resolve objections in a later post (or posts). In the meantime are there any I should add to my list from your experience, please let me know.
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