Train Your Sales Team: A Systematized Approach

 

This article is based on a conversation with Tom Black, author of The Boxcar Millionaire: Tom Black’s Proven System of Sales Success. Tom Black is the president of The Tom Black Center for Selling and is in great demand as a public speaker. He can be reached at 214 Overlook Circle, Suite 130, Brentwood, TN 37027. Tel: 615/377.7752. Web: www.tomblackcenter.com

Most companies have sales processes that are needlessly complex, with dozens of steps and milestones. That complexity serves only to blind the sales professional to the few elements that are really important in sales. Selling, in fact, is a relatively simple behavior, with success dependent almost entirely upon three key elements:

The quality of your prospects. If you’re calling on the people who are likely to buy, you’re going to make more sales. If you’re calling on people who aren’t likely to buy, you’re wasting your time.

The quality of your presentation. If your sales presentation makes a persuasive case that the prospect should buy now – from you – then you’ll close business. If not, you’ll spin your wheels.

The number of people you see. If the first two elements are correct, your ability to sell is only limited by how many times you can give your presentation to qualified prospects.

To simplify your sales process, you must simply make improvements in each of these three areas. If you can simultaneously get better qualified prospects, improve your presentation skill, and increase the number of sales calls, selling (and therefore your sales process) will become very simple indeed.

Step 1: Improve the Quality of Your Prospects

Use more referrals. Rightly or wrongly, most people distrust sales professionals. As a result, most prospects tend to think of reasons not to buy, rather than reasons to buy. However, if you come into a sales situation with a referral, those barriers are lowered somewhat. The prospect knows somebody who has purchased from you and therefore has vetted you as a trustworthy person.

Only see decision makers. Only go after prospects who have job titles that match the buying level of your product or service. Because you have a limited amount of time to sell each day, don’t waste it calling upon people who don’t have the authority to purchase. If you find that you can only get access to a gatekeeper, you’re better off moving to the next prospect.

Only call on big buyers. It takes about the same amount of time to make a small sale to a small customer than it does to make a big sale to a big customer. (Often less, in fact!) If a prospect doesn’t have much money or can’t spend much money at this time, they’re not really a qualified prospect. You’re better off spending time pursuing a handful of big deals than chasing after a hundred small ones.

Step 2: Improve the Quality of Your Presentation

Don’t try to accomplish too much in the initial meeting. There’s a natural tendency to want to close business when you’re meeting with a decision maker. However, most B2B sales situations require more than one meeting to close a deal, if only because there is often more than one decision maker. You need to find an appropriate goal for the initial meeting and achieve that, then move the sale forward to the next step. The exact “rhythm” is different for various products and services.

Don’t repeat yourself. Many sales professionals are secretly afraid that the prospect won’t believe what they’re saying, so they start repeating themselves, hoping that repetition will add credibility. Actually, repetition beyond what’s necessary for structuring the presentation detracts from credibility and makes you seem unsure and uncertain. It’s better to state your main points once, forcefully and with confidence, than to repeat them like a mantra.

Don’t anticipate objections. Unless you are 100 percent certain that a specific objection is going to surface, don’t surface it yourself and answer it. While prospects almost always have objections, the last thing you need to do is to provide them with a laundry list, even if you’re pretty sure that you’ve got the answers to everything on the list. It’s much wiser to build the answers to the likely objections into the presentation…without identifying the objections themselves.

Pinpoint the real objection. If a prospect stalls (e.g., “I need to talk this over with my staff”) or surfaces a vague objection (e.g., “I’m not exactly certain this makes sense”), ask questions that will clarify the situation so that you know how to proceed.  Examples: What issues do you think your staff is likely to raise? What particular element of this solution is giving you pause?

Test for the close, then close. When you have told your story, check to see whether it’s time to close by asking a question that confirms the prospect’s interest in buying, such as, “Does all of this make sense to you?” Once you’re reasonably certain that the prospect is ready to buy, close the deal. Every minute that you hesitate past that point makes a successful close less likely.

Step 3: Increase the Number of Sales Calls

Never present to anyone who can’t make a decision. If you can’t present to a decision maker, call another time. While it often seems like a good idea to go ahead and present to whomever will see you, especially if you’re already at a customer site, presenting to someone other than the decision maker means that you’re probably not going to get to see the decision maker, because you’ve defined yourself as a supplicant rather than a potential partner.

Take control of your calendar. Don’t jiggle your calendar around to accommodate prospects. When you first make an appointment, agree to whatever time is convenient for the prospect. Then, once the appointment is in the prospect’s calendar, request that the appointment be moved to match what’s convenient for you. Ninety-nine times out of  100, a prospect does not mind changing the time and date once the prospect has already agreed to a meeting.

Optimize your meeting schedule. Figure out the optimum number of sales calls you can make during a day and then craft your calendar around making that many calls every day. For example, if you find that your typical sales call takes half a day, always schedule meetings at 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. If you schedule a meeting at 11:00 a.m., you’ll only able to make a single call that day, which means you’ll be half as effective and sell half as much.

Make sales calls when prospects are available. Don’t waste prime sales-call time (i.e., working hours) fussing with your CRM system, doing research, answering emails, and so forth. The crux of your job is to sell; all the rest is just busywork – necessary, perhaps, but secondary to getting the real job done. If possible, offload the electronic paperwork onto a clerical staff.

Keep your prospect list on paper. Computers are wonderful, but they 1) run out of battery power, 2) crash unexpectedly, 3) get stolen, 4) break down, 5) lose files, 6) won’t connect to the network, 7) require complicated commands, and 8) strain your eyeballs. If you’ve got your prospect list on paper, the only excuse you’ve got for not contacting a prospect is if your dog eats it. And that rarely happens.