About Eliseo Manfron

Eliseo runs both in-person and distance workshops and coaching sessions for B2B sales and marketing teams to collaborate better and increase efficiency. Increased collaboration and situational programs make participants walk away with newly learned skills and the confidence to actually apply them in day-to-day situations. Get in touch with Eliseo for advice on how to enable the extended commercial team doing the right thing at the right time with the right people: eliseo.manfron@perpetos.com.

27
Apr 2021
2
Snackable and mobile learning to reinforce learnings

Remote learning for remote selling

In these times, professional salespeople are witnessing an unprecedented change in all aspects of the business world that

Remote learning for remote selling

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Competence Development, Remote Learning, Remote Selling, Sales Enablement

In these times, professional salespeople are witnessing an unprecedented change in all aspects of the business world that will echo for years to come. Being an active part of this shift is crucial to the success of your business and the individuals that keep it running. What the sales function is confronted with is an unavoidable shift to remote learning in support of the demand to master the skills of remote selling. 

In this blogpost, we discuss strategies to remotely train salespeople with new skills, refreshing their existing skill sets, and how to keep them motivated and engaged along the way in today’s hybrid selling world. 

Sales teams face the need to immediately master remote selling 

Today, selling has never been more difficult and requires salespeople to be very agile when selling virtually and connecting with their customers on a personal level. Now more than ever before, sales learning and development is extremely important for enabling salespeople to upskill and reskill  to meet the new demands of your business and the needs of your customers all while selling from home. Normal methods of learning won’t cut it in these difficult times, a new training approach is required to help your salespeople go through their own digital transformation.  

Turning in-person training and delivering via the web is not a solution 

It is not just about turning your in-person training and delivering it through a video conference tool like Zoom or Teams. Nor is it effective to resort to traditional e-learning through a learning management system. Content that’s in your learning management systems is most likely not relevant to the new sales models that have been put into place because of all the changes businesses are making regarding the effects of COVID-19. Also, every moment an impatient sales professional spends sitting through time-consuming LMS courses is time away from selling. We must find better ways to reinforce topics throughout the normal workday without disrupting anyone’s workflow. 

Step-by-step training 

Many learning programs deliver so much information in short periods that it can be unreasonable to expect employees to pick everything up immediately. They are human, and humans have a natural tendency to forget. A more effective and lasting approach is to introduce new skills to employees while continually reinforcing what was previously taught to improve long-term knowledge retention. Once they show proficiency with a particular skill, you can move on to the next one. The key, however, is making sure that employees don’t forget what they initially learned. One way to ensure sales professionals retain what they learn is to embed micro-learning into your Learning & Development strategy. 

Snackable and mobile learning to reinforce learnings 

Research has proven that a great way to avoid disrupting sales people workflow is by pushing “bite-sized” chunks – no longer than 2 minutes per topic – so they can stay focused on their work and implement teachings into their day-to-day with ease. Mobile-first remote learning is essential in this effort. Even with more people at home, the “device of first attention” for most people is their mobile phone (Fig. 1). 

Additionally, these reinforced training sessions can be done in pockets of free time rather than salespeople having to carve time out of their day to get it done. This way, everyone gets constant refreshers and reinforcement without any of the inconvenience.

Fig. 1: Bite-sized chunks of mobile learning through Qstream 

Bite-sized chunks of mobile learning through Qstream

Personalized learning paths that support corporate objectives 

Your salespeople all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences, some may have already sold remotely before, so you need to take into consideration the different variations of knowledge sets by analyzing the knowledge gaps and using personalized learning that will meet the needs of each salesperson. Personalized learning paths can only be routed by understanding the proficiency and knowledge gaps of each individual.  

We see 2 ways to personalize learning paths while supporting corporate objectives: 

  • Through popular microlearning applications like Qstream that allow to identify proficiency gaps and guide personalized development programs  
  • By means of qualitative and quantitative interviews, investigating common areas that affect sales performance. This deep dive into audiences’ learning needs will surface blockers and boosters of commercial performance and will allow to go directly into implementation mode with tailored content within a coherent corporate development program. 

Interested in microlearning? Qstream is the only microlearning platform scientifically proven to increase knowledge, develop skills, and change behaviors.  

Impact measurement and personalized coaching 

Analytics from an LMS is historically insufficient for sales managers or trainers in determining if their salespeople are understanding what’s being taught. Microlearning platforms enable you to track and compare the evolution of sales engagement, proficiency and performance. The insights gained from these can help to leverage each individual’s strengths for the benefit of the other team members. Real-time dashboards and proficiency heat maps (Fig. 2) show initial and current proficiency, allowing you to assess progress and offer personalized coaching for each team member.  

Fig. 2: Qstream dashboards with heat maps

Qstream dashboards with heat maps

Real-world scenarios 

The key to keeping reps engaged is to feed them information that is relevant to what they are experiencing every day. Microlearning platforms like Qstream provide an easy method for learning by utilizing spaced repetition, cases and testing (Fig. 3). This way instant learning is obtained, and salespeople are able to incorporate the lessons into their daily routines and use that knowledge in real-time. 

Fig. 3: Microlearning with roleplay on Qstream

Microlearning with roleplay on Qstream

Precise coaching 

Mobile platform tools can paraphrase classroom content into 12-15 yes/no, multiple choice or scenario-based questions, helping your team to jog their memories and repeat what they have picked up during training. The system thus reinforces knowledge, not only by testing but continuous retraining at the same time.  

Ambition, engagement and improving proficiency are encouraged through competition and gamification – with extra points for both speed and accuracy and real-time leaderboard. Managers receive suggested topics for coaching their team members as well as overview of how much progress individuals have made compared to earlier tests. Data-driven matrixes evaluate the impact of training, offering customized coaching opportunities for the team’s manager, based on individual and team results. 

Making Sales training Stick 

Competency does not come from periodic, one-time training. According to Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, learners forget 90% of what they learn from an event-based approach within 30 days, with most of the new material being forgotten within the first few hours after the training.  A solution to promote knowledge retention is spaced learning. 

Spaced learning implies multiple training opportunities. Repetition is indeed the mother of learning. We also notice great results by combining spaced learning with microlearning. 

A systemic approach to learning  

Key components of a systemic approach to learning for the mobile workforce will typically include a mix of learning strategies: 

  • Virtual training sessions that relate to the day-to-day operations and will equip salespeople with the confidence and capability to perform at their highest potential 
  • Experience-sharing sessions that will leverage peer-based support to unlock current difficult customer situations 
  • Individual coaching sessions to follow up on field implementation of newly acquired knowledge and skills 
  • Supplemental online training that will put the learner in contextually rich scenarios that are cognitively challenging.  
  • Spaced microlearning to break up complex or detailed job-specific learning content into scenarios and delivering this repetitively over time through a learning experience that fits into the daily flow of sales work 

Combining these learning strategies will ensure that your upskilling becomes ingrained in individual habits, thereby making sales people better performers and more likely to have a positive impact on organizational goals. 

Conclusion 

The digital age requires an agile learning environment, supporting continuous learning. Hence the need to integrate spaced and mobile learning for continuous knowledge reinforcement and proficiency measurement. Creating the capacity to objectively measure the impact of improvement initiatives, and even measure proficiency, enables you to create individual learning paths on the one hand and encourage the implementation of effective sales strategies on the other. 

Having questions on how to implement
effective commercial improvement initiatives?

Challenge us with your plans

  Personalized and Snackable Digital learningPrecise coachingVirtual Selling
18
Nov 2020
0
3 steps to help salespeople engage with deep buyer empathy

3 Steps to Help Salespeople Engage with Deep Buyer Empathy

To improve your sales chances and engage customers, it’s important to identify where your customer is in their

3 Steps to Help Salespeople Engage with Deep Buyer Empathy

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Competence Development, Sales Performance

To improve your sales chances and engage customers, it’s important to identify where your customer is in their buyer journey. Do they need to change supplier? And if so, why should they choose you? Or are you already their supplier, and you need to convince them to stay? These different situations call for different messages, so you need to gain insights into your customer’s roles and challenges, create targeted messaging, and train your salespeople to deliver it correctly. 

Get Checklist – what do customers expect from your sales people

Driven by insights, Marketing must build targeted communications and content. This should drive action and conversion, both before and after sales engages with customers.  

Engage customers with deep buyer empathy 

Your sales force needs to adapt its messaging to the particular situation so it can communicate your added value efficiently and effectively. But sales pitches often focus too much on internal issues, causing commercial professionals to simply act as talking brochures and lose sight of the messages and skills they need to convince your customers. 

So instead of talking about what you do and why you think you can do it better, you need to create a buying vision that defines a new set of challenges that align with your particular strengths. For example, the key question that new prospects need to answer – to break their status quo and initiate their buying journey – is: why should I change?  

Follow these three steps below to identify where your customers are on their buying journey, work out what specific messaging you need to use, and deliver it correctly… 

Step 1: Gain insights into roles and challenges 

Wherever the customer is in their buying cycle, to build a compelling case, you first need to find out more about their situation. 

  • Start by talking to the decision-makers to gain an understanding of their KPIs, challenging projects, and any blocking issues;  
  • Use contextual interviewing techniques to build trust, create credibility, and gain valuable insights into their specific challenges – and find out what capabilities they envisage will solve them; 
  • This will help you collect, organize, and build messages for your salespeople to create empathy and demonstrate business acumen; 
  • Salespeople who understand their prospects’ and customers’ roles and challenges can adjust accordingly, so they’re better placed to influence the buying criteria and improve the returns on their sales efforts. 

Step 2: Create three types of messaging 

To improve your sales chances, salespeople need to articulate value messages that resonate with customers’ specific challenges and have access to decision-makers who are much better placed to convert leads into deals. But they still need to know how to have successful conversations which promote a shared vision early enough in the decision-making process. It is therefore essential to understand buyers’ roles and relevant business challenges when creating this vision. 

For example, staying the same is safe and comfortable, whereas change is associated with threat and risk. If too many deals in your pipeline are being lost to ‘no decision’, rather than to your competitors, your real threat is the status quo – because buyers are deciding they prefer to do nothing instead of change. This means you need tell a story that explains why they should change and leave their current situation, and why they should do it now.  

Acquiring new customers and developing new accounts therefore requires messaging and an approach to customer conversations that is distinct from those used for existing customers. So marketing needs to equip your commercial people with three different types of sales messages and tools: ‘why change’, ‘why choose us’, and ‘why stay with us’.  

These three messages need to align with each member of the decision-making unit’s journey, which increases the number of conversations, and unfortunately this complexity can undermine sales performance.  

But whatever the customer’s situation, you need to explain why their current approach is putting their business at risk. To do this, you need to demonstrate that you know and understand their business, and can deliver insights into what they’re missing that will improve their performance. So, to address your buyer’s situation, you need to equip your salespeople with the right messaging to take advantage of any opportunities at early an early stage – to gain and keep control of the buying cycle right up until the deal is sealed. 

Step 3: Train your salespeople to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time 

Prospective customers are a different proposal to existing customers – customer acquisition is all about challenging the status quo to highlight the benefits of switching to your solution, whereas customer retention and expansion requires you to reinforce your position as their status quo: ‘why change’ and ‘why us’ messages will resonate with prospects, but ‘why stay’ is designed to foster customer loyalty. Make sure your marketing tells the right story for the right customer. Bearing this in mind, you need to: 

  • Help your salespeople gain access to executive buyers early in their decision-making process, and work consultatively with those buyers to shape a vision for their solution; 
  • Build a messaging kit that covers what to say to whom, and when, in order to ensure engaging conversations; 
  • Train your commercial force, use role play exercises to practice typical scenarios and conversations, share best pitches through the use of videos, promote ‘intervision techniques’, and provide constructive feedforward from the customer perspective. 

How can messaging kits help? 

Developing messaging kits can help marketing help salespeople gain access to executive buyers early in the decision-making process, and work consultatively to shape the vision of the solution they can provide. These messaging kits offer insight-driven content so your salespeople can engage more deeply with buyer empathy. This can enable sales through having a messaging repository and customer-centric presentations, impacting customer stories, and organizing training sessions for salespeople to learn how to sell certain solutions. 

23
Oct 2020
0
How to Get Engagement in Sales Meetings?

How to Get Engagement in Sales Meetings?

Collective intelligence makes your sales team smarter.

How to Get Engagement in Sales Meetings?

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Competence Development, Sales Enablement, Sales Performance

Collective intelligence makes your sales team smarter. Empower your entire team to help one salesperson solve a problem by using intervision techniques to leverage collective intelligence. 

Collective intelligence 

Put simply: ‘two heads are better than one’. Intervision techniques therefore help you harness every member of a team’s own thoughts and ideas to promote group intelligence – investing in each member and increasing the potential of overcoming one salesperson’s specific challenge. 

Worksheet – Reverse engineer your Marketing Funnel

Intervision techniques call on collective intelligence 

Intervision, also known as ‘group coaching’, ‘peer coaching’ or ‘co-development’, refers to an activity with a small group of professionals who have a professional context in common. It emphasizes the multilateral contribution between colleagues – as opposed to supervision – because collective intelligence is a kind of wisdom and knowledge that grows out of a group. 

The intervision technique provides sales managers with a different way to interact with their team and team members. Similar to group coaching, it relies on questioning and active listening, but also employs brainstorming techniques and makes it possible to tackle both technical and conceptual problems. The main difference, however, is that intervision covers topics that will benefit the entire sales team and make it more effective, whereas individual coaching aims to solve a problem specific to the salesperson. 

What sales problems can intervision techniques help to resolve? 

Team meetings are too often laborious and ineffective, and this is where collective intelligence can help. Intervision techniques relate to sales team coaching. They develop sales efficiency, strengthen team spirit, and increase corporate identity. They can be used to generate new ideas, discover new ways to analyze situations, and find new possible solutions. 

There are a couple of conditions for its effective use, however: the presented case must be real, and it must relate to a real blocked sales opportunity, for example in a situation where a salesperson experiences repetitive failure or a persistent communication issue. 

The exposed situation very often reveals a common problem – something that sounds familiar to all salespeople, which they might have been exposed to in the past or are still facing today. This is why the intervision session can benefit the whole team. 

How to moderate an intervision session 

The session can be done with or without a facilitator, but it’s always crucial to stick to the allocated time for the exercise to be effective and stop the group from dwelling on details. It is recommended to spend 45-90 minutes on each issue as a group, depending on the group size and complexity of the topic.  

  • During an intervision session, a participant raises one issue, which could be a new challenge or a problem that they have encountered. It’s essential that it’s an ongoing issue.  
  • The other participants then act as consultants and commit to share ideas, collaborate, and help the salesperson who wants to overcome a difficult situation. Group members ask questions to find out more about the topic and clarify particular points. It’s important not to start discussing solutions at this stage, but simply to focus on clarifying the issue. 
  • The next stage is for the group to start brainstorming possible ways of approaching the problem and suggesting possible solutions. The issue owner is invited to listen and to take in the proposals without joining the discussion.  
  • Following the brainstorming session, the group makes a number of recommendations and suggestions to the issue owner, who can then provide feedback on what he/she has heard from the group: how it helps or not, what they can take away from the exercise, etc.  

Selling in uncertain times 

This technique is particularly relevant in today’s market – with fierce competition and rapid change. Sales organizations need collective intelligence to be more agile and adaptive without burning talent.

Talk to our experts to find out more. 

  coachingcollective intelligenceintervisionsales team coaching
23
Oct 2020
0
3 Behaviours & 9 Tips to Increase Team Efficiency

3 Behaviours & 9 Tips to Increase (Commercial) Team Efficiency

To stimulate improved sales performance, it’s important to understand and practice digital behaviors that promote a sense of

3 Behaviours & 9 Tips to Increase (Commercial) Team Efficiency

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Competence Development, Sales Performance

To stimulate improved sales performance, it’s important to understand and practice digital behaviors that promote a sense of psychological safety. You can encourage this psychological safety in your commercial team by: 

  • Framing the work as a learning process,  
  • Acknowledging your own fallibility; 
  • Modeling curiosity and asking lots of questions. 

Remote working and digital communications 

Psychological safety and trust in leadership are more important than ever before as sales forces are increasingly working remotely and communicating digitally.  

Leverage psychological safety 

Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, defined the notion of psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and being vulnerable in front of each other. In other words: team members feel accepted and respected in psychologically safe teams. 

This means that members of effective teams feel comfortable asking questions or bringing up new ideas – without worrying about being judged – and are confident they won’t be embarrassed or punished for making mistakes.  

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts 

In line with this phrase first coined by the philosopher Aristotle, we also believe that members of efficient sales teams can achieve more by working together than working alone. An efficient commercial team is therefore more than the sum of its individuals – so even though getting these individuals to all work together can be tough, it’s critical for team effectiveness. They need to plan, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress. And they need each other – and efficient leadership – to get this work done successfully. 

3 behaviors that increase team efficiency 

A Google study reported in The New York Times Magazine highlighted several factors that boost team efficiency, and psychological safety came top in the order of importance. The most effective leaders are therefore those that create a safe and open ‘digital dialogue’ with their team members.  

There are three specific behaviors that strongly correlate with high-performing managers: 

  1. Expressing doubts: Do you feel safe saying ‘I don’t know’, or are you worried about seeming ignorant or incompetent? Managers who admit not knowing the answer to a question – and who create the same sense of security in their direct contacts  – are more effective than those who do not.
  2. Requesting feedback: Asking for and providing feedback increases effectiveness and engagement. Digital interactions through video conferences, chats, or email are good opportunities for providing constructive feedback – and constructive feedforward.
  3. Sharing opinions: It’s important for team members to feel confident that nobody else in the team will embarrass or punish them for offering ideas or questioning the status quo.

Our 9 tips for building psychological safety 

  1. Create a forum to discuss issues and concerns
  2. Establish a common language
  3. Ask for input and opinions, stimulate feedback, and provide feedforward 
  4. Share your communications and personal preferences, and encourage others to do the same
  5. Clarify team member roles and responsibilities
  6. Communicate team objectives and determine how each member can contribute to the team and broader company objectives
  7. Explain what work you are doing and the impact it will have on customers and the company
  8. Adopt a customer-centric evaluation method
  9. Seek continuous improvement  
  efficiencypsychological safetyteam effectivenessvirtual teams
21
Nov 2019
0

Agile learning and coaching for sales: how do you do it?

A study from CSO Insights shows that sales coaching empowers reps to improve selling skills and close more

Agile learning and coaching for sales: how do you do it?

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales Content, Sales Performance

Why sales coaching?

Research by CSO Insights has shown that sales coaching enables sellers to substantially improve their sales skills and so win more deals. The second benefit is that it allows sales managers to shift their focus from simply helping people to do their work to actually developing their skills. Which is surely an advantage, isn’t it?

Get Checklist – what do customers expect from your sales people

But how?

Sales managers need to use coaching techniques, tips and tools. Even though some may have a talent for coaching, many don’t know how best to go about it. Sales management coaching programs help them gain the skills and self-confidence they need to integrate coaching as part of their daily routine. Fortunately, there’s technology available to help them. Sales coaching software doesn’t just make it possible to personalise the coaching, but also to measure it by looking at the sellers’ individual actions, monitoring their progress and providing a visual representation to make things clearer, rather than simply using their own perception, gut instinct and experience.

Sales coaching tools

Coaching isn’t the same thing as providing solutions or giving everyone the same advice. A good sales coaching tool can chart progress and zoom in on the lowest level of knowledge, and combine this with the extent to which this knowledge is actually applied.

Sales coaching tools

It differs from eLearning or other content offered by Learning Management Systems (LMS) in this sense, because a sales coaching tool combines software for teaching sellers and ensuring they retain this information, stimulating behavioural change, making everything measurable, and providing suggestions for the management to reach the right conclusions and implement the right actions. Altogether, it forms an integrated solution that provides content exactly when it’s needed.

Enabling just-in-time coaching

This flexible (agile) method for developing sellers’ skills is called ‘Coaching Enablement’. It allows you to organise, manage and individualise coaching while ensuring sellers retain the information they’re given. It also provides dashboards for sales managers, higher management and HR. This means HR can now measure, support and adapt each employee’s development and the impact they have. Peer-to-peer learning is also provided.

A good example of this is ‘video pitching’, where the seller records an answer to a client situation using their smartphone, which can then be used as coaching input for the sales manager, and good examples can be shared with other team members. This enhances the performance of the whole team, contributes to continuous development and improves team spirit.

Enabling just-in-time coaching

The main advantages of just-in-time coaching are:

  1. Identifying possibilities for personal development
  2. Building self-confidence
  3. Strengthening desired behaviour, knowledge and skills
  4. Installing a culture that stimulates continuous improvement for each individual and the team
  5. Measuring the impact on sales results

Read more about agile learning, knowledge retention and just-in-time coaching

Qstream app

Perpetos Improves Customer Sales Proficiency from 53% to 80%

Qstream’s mobile microlearning application was selected by Perpetos as a continuous sales training reinforcement solution for their sales performance programs which help their customers improve conversion rates and lower the cost of sales.

Want to see a demo ? Contact us at inquiry@perpetos.com

Read more
  sales training
03
Oct 2019
1

Sales Development Representative: strong link between marketing and sales

One might say the missing link, but I prefer the term “strong link”: the link that unites teams,

Sales Development Representative: strong link between marketing and sales

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales and Marketing Alignment

One might say the missing link, but I prefer the term “strong link”: the link that unites teams, creates solidarity and strengthens synergies.  I’m talking about the Sales Development Representative (SDR for short).

This is a new sales function from across the Pond, reflecting the current trend of specialisation of sales teams in the B2B sector. Times when salesmen had to do everything themselves, from prospecting to concluding deals, are definitely over.

Let’s take a closer look: first and foremost, why the need to specialise? And what is the difference between an SDR and an Account Executive or an Inside Sales?

Why should sales teams specialise?

Traditionally, salespeople were responsible for the entire sales cycle, from prospection over qualification and sales negotiations to the management of the customer portfolio. Today, sales teams tend to specialise. But why?

Three main advantages:

  1. Better performance: specialisation allows each team to excel in what it does
  2. More easily accessible and better organised data: systematic processing of data from different sources, structured and encoded in a follow-up tool like CRM
  3. Improved customer relation: prospects who are not interested are not bothered longer than necessary. Efforts can be focussed on qualified prospects.

In short, the SDR will do research, look for and qualify prospects before passing the torch to an Account Executive in order to turn them into customers.

What’s the difference between the SDR and an Account Executive?

Like any other community, the Sales community has its own language. But it’s difficult to find two enterprises who have the same definition for the terms Account Executive, Sales Executive, Business Developper, Account Manager or… Inside Sales. For the moment, we’re going to keep it simple and limit ourselves to SDR on the one hand and Field Sales on the other. In other words, we’re going to make a distinction between the person who stays at the company and the person who goes into the field.

  • The SDR starts his activities rather early in the sales cycle. His tasks comprise the creation of lists of prospects, as well as prospecting through telephone calls, e-mail and social networks. In order to do this, he uses IT tools (CRM, data base, web sites,…)
  • The SDR identifies prospects and starts negotiations before referring them to the Account Executives, whose responsibility it is to conclude contracts. This means that the SDR is the customer’s first “human” contact with the company
  • The SDR contacts and qualifies the leads identified by the marketing team, confirms that an opportunity exists and refers the Sales Qualified Leads to the sales team
  • The SDR maps the key players of the key accounts and provides support to the Key Account Managers for an optimal decision-making process

It is therefore the SDR’s responsibility to arrange the first face-to-face meetings as soon as the lead has reached a certain maturity.

Doesn’t that resemble the responsibilities of an Inside Sales?

Yes and no. What they have in common is the qualification of the leads. The Inside Sales qualifies the incoming leads but, contrary to the SDR, he doesn’t have to generate leads himself. The latter also performs outbound sales, which means he generates new leads himself and maintains relations with them. This requires a wider range of competencies than the Inside Sales: he has to control social networks, marketing campaigns, incoming calls and cold calls after a written and personalised contact with the prospect. If necessary he also makes demos. One might go even further and state that after the qualification, he is able to conclude a distance contract. This is the case for transactional sales or for solutions of low complexity and value.

In short, the SDR knows and controls the offer and the needs of the market. He is able to have a well-reasoned conversation with the targeted prospects, to challenge them to discover new perspectives and to arouse their interest enough for them to want to have a face-to-face meeting.

The SDR creates added value during the interactions. He optimally paves the way for the Account Executive, who will then continue the personal contacts with the leads.

  align sales and marketing
10
Apr 2019
0
Customer-centric selling

Requirements that sellers need to meet in today’s digital age

Buyers don’t always know how to get good value from the information they gathered. And that’s exactly how

Requirements that sellers need to meet in today’s digital age

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales Enablement

Much has been said and written about the changes the digital age has to all commercial activities.
Specific for sellers you regularly read the following statements:

  • Customers have already completed 57% of the buying cycle before they want to meet a seller
  • The relationship is becoming less and less important and price is the most important decision criterion
  • Customers wish to meet our sellers less and less frequently

We have published 2 articles with more details and background about these themes. The first one is a ‘Checklist: What customers expect from your sales people’ in which you will find the 10 most important customer expectations.

The second article describes the most important market changes as well as how to overcome the resulting productivity challenges.

A recognizable example:

Thomas is Operational Manager for a logistics company with 23 lorries on the road. Tight margins in the sector brought the director of Thomas’ company to start looking for ways to cut costs. Together they’ve identified a number of issues that regularly cause problems, such as poor agreements about pick-up and delivery times and driving empty lorries back, all of which comes at a cost. Thomas’ bonus this year largely depends on him finding a solution!

How Thomas buys

He’s known for a long time that there’s software available for optimising the planning. And he’s already looked at how much it costs, but at the time he only saw the investment cost. Now, with pressure coming from management, Thomas decides to take to the internet again to get a global idea of the solutions available for his problem, work out roughly what it costs, and see how much it could help the company save in terms of unnecessary costs.

The conclusion of this ROI exercise is positive: Thomas finds that resolving the issue would cost considerably less than suffering more losses in the current situation. Then he keeps searching to see exactly what his company needs. He looks for opinions and feedback from peers, and tries to find out what differentiates the good software from the bad. He wants to know which providers are offering top notch solutions. And what differences there are between all these providers and their products.

With his list of ‘buying criteria’ ready, he invites three providers who seem to be offering more or less the same software. Together with his manager, Thomas decides to sign with the cheapest provider.

Sales reps still have an important role to play

There’s a good chance that Thomas’ story sounds familiar to many readers of this post. We speak with lots of companies whose margins are deteriorating in a price war with competitors.

But the fact that customers are smarter these days, and have already compared your product features with those of your competitors before ever contacting you, doesn’t mean that the salesperson no longer has a role to play. Online information isn’t always correct, for example, and it might even be irrelevant in the customer’s specific case. Buyers don’t always know how to get good value from the information they gathered, either. And that’s exactly how salespeople can help them – by leading them along the right lines.

Salespeople who succeed in the digital era often have this attitude:

  • Align the sales strategy with the phases the customer goes through in their buying cycle
  • Take the right action at the right time with the right contact person
  • Strongly believe that helping customers is their top priority

Read more about the CUSTOMER-CENTRIC SELLING open training, see if the next session fits into your schedule, and book your seat straight away:

Click here if you want to organize an internal program on this theme and related competencies.

  customer centric sellingsales trainingselling in digital era
10
Apr 2019
0
Complex Negotiation Skills

If you think buyers base their decision on price alone…

Nicolas keeps falling into the same trap of price discussions

If you think buyers base their decision on price alone…

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales Enablement

I used to be closely involved with a sales team at a medium-sized technology company. Nicolas, one of the salespeople there, often came away from meetings feeling a bit dazed, convinced that procurement’s only goal was to buy at the lowest possible price. But Bruno, one of his colleagues with the same types of customer, sells very successfully without always needing to lower the price. Is Nicolas just unlucky, or is there more to it?

What Nicolas isn’t seeing

Nicolas keeps falling into the same trap. He ends up negotiating on price because he hasn’t convinced the customer of his solution’s value, which leads to buyers trying to hammer the price down. Or he starts bargaining before other issues have been cleared up, such as delivery times or SLAs. And sometimes he simply gives up too quickly.

So what makes Bruno so successful?

Bruno, on the other hand, appreciates that negotiating actually means finding solutions. He understands his customers’ challenges and KPIs, and responds by offering them added value in his solutions. He keeps a ‘give and take’ list, which gives him self-assurance and helps him find a win-win situation together with the customer. Last but not least, he also always has a strategy and action plan. Customers see Bruno as a partner and adviser; he understands their situation and is there to help them.

Negotiating techniques

What’s crucial in negotiations?

  • That you, like Bruno, understand the procurement KPIs – there’s a lot more to it than simply buying at the lowest price
  • This knowledge gives the seller a certain amount of bargaining leverage
  • And that puts sales in a position to understand their discussion partners’ objectives and strategy, and predict their next move, so they can tailor their sales strategy accordingly

The moral of the story is to start negotiating as soon as the customer begins their buying journey, in the initial conversation. If you as the seller do everything right throughout the customer’s buying cycle, negotiating actually becomes very simple, even for complex matters. It turns the negotiation into a simple conversation that successfully concludes all previous discussions.

Click here if you are looking to set up a Sales Academy in your company

  negotiation techniquesprice warsales training
10
Apr 2019
0
INTERVISION AND SALES TEAM COACHING

Smarter together

Marc has been trying to get his foot in the door of this company for several weeks now

Smarter together

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales Enablement

Marc has many years’ sales experience. But it’s still often difficult to make contact with the right decision-makers in prospective customers’ companies. He’s been trying to get his foot in the door of an international technology company for several weeks, but he keeps being sent from one contact person to the next. Marc therefore doesn’t appear to be making any progress, and is gradually becoming more and more frustrated.

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Analyse problem situations as a team

In the next sales meeting, he decides to present the problem to his colleagues in a intervision exercise. Marc is the client, the other salespeople act as consultants, and their manager moderates and keeps an eye on the time. Marc outlines the scenario and the consultants ask factual, open questions. This is because it’s important to first have a clear picture of the situation before you can come up with any solutions. For example:

  • Who are you talking to?
  • Who is your most important contact?
  • Why are there so many contact persons?
  • Which questions should you ask?
    Etc.

Collective intelligence

Marc answers the consultants’ questions one by one, and then clearly explains what he expects from the participants: “I’ve got lost in the customer organisation. I’m looking for specific advice to structure my approach better, find the right angle, get my foot in the door and develop this opportunity – without wasting any more time on conversations with the wrong people.” Thanks to this clear question, the other participants can now give advice and offer solutions.

Marc in turn provides feedback about the advice and presents his action plan. He remains in control of the scenario and retains the solutions he finds interesting to get out of the impasse.

Finally, the consultants are given the chance to offer their opinion about Marc’s action plan, and the sales manager asks what lessons the team can learn from the collaborative exercise.

Everybody learns from a joint effort to find solutions

The strict procedures in Marc’s example force all participants to ask relevant questions and form a clear picture of the situation. There’s no competition between the salespeople – about who comes up with the best proposal – because Marc remains the master of his case. The consultants are forced to actively listen, and aren’t allowed to interact with each other. Marc gradually develops the exercise to find a solution for his impasse, using the advice that he deems useful. The group then helps him to consider his solution in detail.

This technique is called Intervision or Co-development and relies on Collective Intelligence. The solution is created through collaboration and collective efforts focusing on one and the same person: the customer.

Benefits of Collective Intelligence

This technique has a number of interesting benefits:

  • Strong sense of collaboration: everyone is prepared to help Marc and trusts the other participants, so any doubts and concerns are easily shared
  • Efficiency: Marc moves off the beaten track and tries to have faith in the new solutions suggested by his team, so he can integrate them in his action plan
  • Strong commitment to each other and the company: Marc’s case is taken from the daily reality – it’s the type of situation that all the salespeople in the team could come across. They now feel more connected to each other

Read more about the INTERVISION AND SALES TEAM COACHING open training, see if the next session fits into your schedule, and book your seat straight away.

Click here if you are looking to set up a Sales Academy in your company

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Targets that Motivate Sales

  Energizers that motivate salespeople
  Determine targets that stimulate performance

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  collective intelligencesales role playsales training
10
Apr 2019
0
coaching sales people

Coaching isn’t the same as offering the solution

After a few weeks in his new role as Sales Manager, Eric has a number of Coaching sessions

Coaching isn’t the same as offering the solution

Eliseo Manfron Eliseo Manfron  |    Sales Enablement

After a few weeks in his new role as Sales Manager, Eric has a number Coaching sessions scheduled. He already benefited greatly from the coaching he received earlier in his career. In fact, the reason for him being promoted so soon by his new employer is precisely because of the excellent coaching  which helped him develop his skills so quickly in a previous job. He has very high expectations for the one-to-one session with his manager, and is therefore preparing for it very carefully.

Watch Webinar – How to Support Sales in Today’s Market?

He explains his objectives and challenges in his first Wednesday afternoon session. His manager appears to show commitment, listening attentively and asking a couple of guiding, closed questions. When Eric then explains a difficult situation that developed within the team, his manager starts to offer some coaching advice: “You’re going to have to tackle it like this: …”

This sets of alarm bells for Eric: that’s not coaching!

What is coaching?

Many managers are still convinced that coaching is the same thing as listening, asking a few questions, and then providing unilateral advice. But that’s not coaching …

So what is coaching?

Coaching enables your team to create new possibilities themselves.
And the person being coached is always the focus here.

The coach’s mindset

As a coach, you enable your team to come up with their own creative solutions by approaching the discussion with the following attitude:

  • Asking meaningful questions
  • Active listening
  • Offering constructive ‘feed-forward’

Read more about the COACHING SALES PEOPLE open training, see if the next session fits into your schedule, and book your seat straight away:

Click here if you are looking to set up a Sales Academy in your company

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[ON-DEMAND WEBINAR]
How to Support Sales in Today’s Market?

  How to boost your productivity and to increase your core selling time
  Which activities should be delegated to colleagues

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  sales coachingsales training