Complimentary Webinar: Creating Compelling Presentations

Are your presentations a missed opportunity? Your sales presentation is likely to be the last impression the client has of you and your company before deciding who to do business with. Join Richardson’s 60-minute interactive webinar, Creating Compelling Presentations to Engage, Inspire, and Motivate, this Thursday, December 10th at 3:00pm EST to learn tips and tricks to creating engaging, high-impact presentations. This session assumes you do not have the time or interest to study design and typography, but would like to know how to make your visuals look better and differentiate yourself from the competition. Along the way, you will be provided with a good balance of principles, concepts, and practical examples. Can't attend our live webinar? Continue to register today and WebEx will automatically send you a link to view the archive after the live event has concluded.

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Goal #1: Shorten the Sales Cycle

Last week in a webinar with a group of high-performing salespeople and technical specialists, a salesperson asked:

Salesperson: “My company’s number one goal is to shorten the sales cycle. How can I do that?”

His question was timely and challenging. It seems as if your customers’ number one goal is to lengthen it! The economy and an environment of heightened skepticism have doubled or even tripled the length of the sales cycle in many industries.

So what can you do that is in your control to accelerate the close?

1. Early on, qualify more diligently. Position every qualifying question from the perspective of meeting the customer’s need. Find out:
   
   - Budget — Has it been allocated? How much? Who controls it?
   
   - Time Frame — What are the timelines to develop and implement? (In today’s world, the two schedules can be very different.)
   
   - Compelling Event — “Must do” dates are a blessing and the absence of one can signal a long decision cycle.
   
   - Decision-making Process — Who will be involved in the decision — economic, technical, users, and other influencers? Clarify the buying process and steps.
   
   


2. Understand the BUSINESS need that your solution will address. How will your solution help your customer achieve his/her business objectives.
   


3. Develop a compelling Value Proposition to show ROI (ideally year one or soon).
   


4. Identify milestones of the sales process so you can measure progress against them.
   


5. Set a call objective that is measurable for every meeting — face-to-face or virtual. And debrief each meeting against the objective.
   


6. Continue to check for change.
   


7. If things slow down, ask the hard qualifying questions again, but start with the driving need — is it still a priority? Tactfully ask questions to multiple customers.
   


8. Develop a coach! Almost nothing will help you win the deal and know where things really stand than a well-placed coach.
   


9. Position your benefits and ask for the business.
   


10. Know when to put a deal on the back burner or no burner and when to try to resuscitate it.

Talk to Me

How are you changing your sales dialogues to encourage customers to open up to you and tell you about the impact the economy is having on their businesses and how that has changed their priorities? Customers won’t really open up unless they trust you. And gaining and keeping trust is not easy in light of what most customers are going through.

Preparation

Trust is earned over time. One way to establish and reinforce trust is to demonstrate extra-ordinary preparation. There has been a shakeout in salesforces and salespeople across industries are facing tougher competitive situations. Customers have raised the bar for what they expect from salespeople and many are cynical. “Normal” preparation just won’t do it. One sales manager provides his salesforce with daily up-to-date data. For example, a competitor advertiser just lost 18% of its readership — a fact that will help his salesforce take budget from that competitor. He also requires every week that salespeople on his team bring in an article or information to share with the team to raise their game. Extra-ordinary preparation is what it takes. You can do it and customers notice and reward it.

There is so much more for you as a salesperson to know today. Fortunately, the information you need is at your finger tips with a simple click. For example, you can learn more about customers as individuals and make connections with resources such as LinkedIn and Facebook. You can scope out your competitors’ messages and products to figure out how to position against them. The phrase “I know my customer” simply no longer exist without continuous dialogue and research.

Just how have you changed the level of your preparation?

• What kind of research/homework are you doing before every call? Do you reference your preparation to leverage it during the call to gain trust and credibility?


• What questions do you prepare?


• What ideas are you generating?


• How do you justify the investment in terms of savings or revenue generation and the customer’s new priorities?

The more you understand about customers and their needs, their businesses and industries before your sales calls the more likely you will be able to engage in meaningful change conversation to understand and satisfy new priorities.

Engaging in the Change Conversation

There is a lot of fear out there and the change question is not one you can ask head on. I have never been a proponent of the question, “What keeps you up a night?” I find that question intrusive, presumptive, and over used. But you can broach the subject by asking about the kinds of things that are concerning your customers in this economy. To get at what is worrying them. Start your questions indirectly. Ask how the economy has impacted their customers. Based on the response you get, ask the worry question directly if you have a good relationship and if not, take one step back and ask how your customer’s priorities have shifted and listen and probe.

Customers’ needs have changed. So has their level of trust. Talk about your preparation for the meeting. Showing you are thinking about them helps build and reinforce trust. The old solutions you’ve relied on in the most likely won’t fit. It’s time to be more creative in the solutions you provide. It’s time to generate ideas and carefully justify price in terms of savings, productivity, or revenue generation, and be prepared to provide pricing alternatives — for example, one salesperson got two-non-competing companies to share a resource and split the cost. It’s critical to be out there with your customers listening to them and bringing ideas to show you care what happens to them.

It is an understatement to say closing sales is tougher today. The changes your customers are experiencing demand changes, not tweaking, on how you approach them — your preparation, your dialogue, and your follow-up. When things are slow, spend your time talking to your customers to get them to talk to you. Where there is trust, there is business to be won.

Learn more about Richardson's" Sales Training Solution at http://www.richardson.com/

A Sales Methodology

Do you have a sales methodology that your team follows? Let’s step back. What is a sales methodology? Sales best practices? A sales process? Documented steps/procedures in the sale? Sales skills? Tools? All of the above?

A sales methodology is the system a sales organization follows to win business. In one sense (not the best sense), every sales organization and/or salesperson has a sales methodology whether it is the remnants of one that had once been put in place, the norm people follow, or what a particular salesperson has figured out for him or herself.

An effective sales methodology is one that a sales organization has thought out clearly and provides it to its salesforce. The differences between a sales methodology that just exists because a company or most salespeople pretty much operate that way and a highly effective sales methodology boils down to six critical success factors.

 Documentation: Map out clear steps as a guide for salespeople to follow/repeat.
 Best Practices: Embed it with what your top performers consistently do.
 Training: Prepare your salesforce to ensure they have the knowledge and skills needed to carry out the steps.
 Tools: Give salespeople and sales managers tools, such as easy to use CRMs, planners, access to research … to make them more productive.
 Execution: Follow it and coach to it.
 Assessment: Ongoing feedback, tweaking and refinement.

The goal of having a sales methodology is to win more deals and to win them more quickly.

The initial question was do you have a sales methodology. The second question is if not should you have one?

Take the time to map out the steps it takes to identify and convert a lead into a customer. Make it a collaborative process with marketing team and your top performers. It is more than worth the effort. 10% of your reps will do fine without a clear sales methodology. But 80% will do better with one.

Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com

NO BUDGET – UNLESS OF COURSE

Many of the customers we are talking to may be like your customers. Their budgets have either been cut or all but vanished.

They also have something else in common: their goal to increase revenue and save money in the short-term. You already know how important it is to justify your value to a customer. But — never before has value justification taken on such a critical role in closing business. It now is the key to finding, unlocking, and creating budgets. And the nature of value justification has changed. We are not only in a spreadsheet world but a world that is demanding creativity in finding rationale to buy and identifying non-typical pockets where budgets may be found.

I spoke with a salesperson who, in my view, is a master at conjuring up budgets even when the customer had been unsuccessful in doing so him or herself. It is said that “Necessity is the mother of invention.” This seems true for the salesperson. His product was so new and original that not only was there no budget for it (even in good times), there was no one with the responsibility for it.

After identifying who in the organizations were most apt to have needs for his product and then engaging in need dialogues with them and being told there was no budget, he leaned heavily on metrics and creative analysis to prove his product was a smart move and would help his customers achieve their objectives. He captivated and convinced one customer by showing that if his product increased the performance of one of the company’s 500 sales reps by 5%, that increase would pay the full cost of the investment. This brought not only a smile to the customer’s lips, it gave the customer a rationale to bring to his boss and get the OK.

He showed another customer how his product amounted to .0001% of their total revenue and compared that to the increase in productivity. For another customer who put money aside for replacement of full-time equivalents in anticipation of the company’s 10% turnover, he showed that by reducing that fund by one person, the cost of the product was covered, and this potentially reduced turnover and gave needed support to his team of managers.

In each case, he was able to close because he spelled out his value justification in a way that was graphic, concrete, tangible, practical, reasonable, and believable.

Today, it’s necessary to go beyond “normal” thinking about value justification. It’s necessary to really understand the company’s business, deeply probe the customer’s needs and find a direct link of your product to the customer’s shorter-term objectives, and then justify the price specifically. It takes searching every nook and corner for ways to illustrate value justification.

Closing starts in prep time when you think about the value you bring to the table and continues in the deep need dialogue you lead so you can graphically show dollars and cents value. While the value you show can be longer-term, today, the shorter, the better, and the more specific, the more compelling.

Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com