Categories: Sales Negotiation | Buyer Alignment
Whether you've recently launched a sales initiative or are simply looking for ways to support your sales team as the quarter progresses, one thing is certain — you've got numbers to hit. While driving a lasting change to front-line numbers takes consistent effort and leadership, find simple strategies to help your sales reps improve on core areas of sales effectiveness. After all, great selling is great selling. Encouraging reps to hone their sales skills will only further the success of your current initiatives and help your salespeople focus on closing more deals, faster.
Best Practices to Focus Your Salespeople on:
As you move forward with your initiatives, share these focus areas and resources with your sales team to help them continually sharpen their sales skillset and significantly increase quotas.
Finding business pains
There is no better way to increase win rates than to help your reps focus on uncovering challenges that have prominent business implications. Regardless of what you may have recently launched through a strategic sales initiative (i.e., new methodologies, processes, products, etc.), uncovering and attaching business pain is a critical skill top performers leverage to improve quotas, and customer outcomes. As any veteran sales leader knows, if your reps aren't digging deep enough during discovery, it will be near impossible to quantify pain later in the sales cycle and leverage it to close at a premium. If your front-line salespeople don't understand the negative consequences of a buyer's business challenges, their likelihood of winning the deal will quickly diminish.
Here are resources you can share with your salespeople to help them focus on executing great discovery and clearly defining a buyer's business pain, and the negative consequences of that pain.
Articulating differentiation
There are a lot of organizations that tout what makes them different from the competition. However, at times, that differentiation is simply talk because sales reps are unable to articulate and align that differentiation to buyer needs. If your salespeople can't align your differentiation to what’s meaningful to the customer, your solution will sound expensive or more than the customer needs. We refer to this common challenge as the seller deficit disorder. As a sales leader, help your salespeople overcome this challenge so they can further the success of your recent initiatives and sell more.
Enable your reps to truly understand how to articulate their differentiation in a way that has meaning to the buyer. Consider sharing this article with your sales team in an upcoming email, training, or even add it to new-hire training processes. It's a great resource your salespeople can bookmark to ensure they're consistently aligning your solution's differentiation to buyer needs.
Elite companies equip reps to leverage their differentiation to win more and charge a premium price, see how you can leverage a similar approach.
Negotiating early and often
You and your managers may be seeing great progress in your salespeople's performance as a result of your recent sales initiatives. However, if too many reps are still losing margins or opportunities in the final stages of their deals, consider how you can help your reps understand how to effectively negotiate early and often throughout the sales process. Negotiation starts with the first sales conversation and continues through the latter stages of the deal. If you have reps going up against seasoned procurement professionals, provide them with the skills to sell and negotiate on value. Here are best practices managers and sales reps can instill into their negotiation process to ensure that procurement buyers view their solutions as valuable.
We've compiled all of our most popular resources on building an elite sales negotiation process. Leverage them as you aim to increase win rates and drive sales impact following a strategic sales initiative.
Moving deals forward at the right time
With a new sales initiative and/or a heightened focus on hitting their number, it can be easy for even veteran sellers to skip over key steps in their sales conversations. Inaccurate forecasts are a clear red flag that one or both of these scenarios are at play. Support reps in making quotas this quarter by focusing your team on aptly preparing for their upcoming sales conversations and voraciously qualifying their opportunities during those meetings. Help your salespeople understand the benefit of taking their time on the front-end of their deals to discover, qualify and capture all of the necessary information they need before they move on. If you have too many sellers advancing deals too quickly, here is a resource on "Backing Up Your Deals" that will help them course-correct in current and future opportunities.
Driving predictable sales revenue starts with salespeople who are equipped with a voracious qualification methodology and process. Your qualification methodologies and sales processes should enable your salespeople to ensure they’re spending their time effectively and closing only the highest-value opportunities.
Planning to make their plan
One of the most overlooked yet effective ways to improve win rates and quotes is to help your salespeople set a results-driven, sales planning mindset. When reinforcing an initiative or enabling sales to hit aggressive company goals, it's critical that you provide your salespeople with a planning process that helps them build consistent pipelines and focus on high-value accounts.
Rather than focus reps only on the opportunity level, help your salespeople see the benefit of using a sales franchise mindset. The sales franchise mindset is what we refer to when sales teams build their pipeline starting at the territory level in a way that cascades down to the opportunity level. Using the sales franchise mindset, sales teams can begin to see their territories as their own business unit. The result is an improved ability to drive a predictable pipeline and increase win rates.
Maximize Sales Impact on the Number
Increasing win rates and overall sales productivity demands attention from the top-down and the ground-up in a sales organization. Each year companies spend a significant amount of time and resources to launch sales training initiatives to support their revenue goals. If you're in that boat, consider how you can sustain sales impact and help your salespeople hone the skills they need to significantly increase quotas, win rates and margins. Drive immediate and lasting sales impact following the launch of a sales training initiative with five intentional actions that deliver results.
