Best Practices Archives - SPOTIO #1 Field Sales Engagement Platform Tue, 16 Jan 2024 16:44:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 https://spotio.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/favicon-1.png Best Practices Archives - SPOTIO 32 32 13 Remote Selling Best Practices for Reps and Managers https://spotio.com/blog/remote-selling/ Fri, 23 Sep 2022 13:35:55 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=23371 Look out, there’s a new kid in town: remote selling.

COVID-19 turned the world upside down, forcing sales teams to adapt to new work arrangements and buyer preferences, amongst a thousand other things.

These days, sales reps are just as likely to engage with prospects through the phone as they are via in-person visits—even if said reps work in field sales. Because of this, more sales professionals work remotely than ever before.

This is quite a shift when you realize that only 5% of sales and related professionals in the U.S. had access to telework arrangements in 2019.

To succeed in this new sales environment, you need a solid understanding of what remote selling is, why it’s important, the challenges associated with this form of sales, and the top remote selling best practices known today.

Don’t worry, we’re more than happy to share all of this information with you. Let’s dive in!

 

What is Remote Selling?

Remote selling, sometimes referred to as virtual selling, is the process of prospecting, engaging, and selling to potential customers from a remote location.

If, for example, a salesperson prospects for leads on LinkedIn, makes initial contact with them via email, talks with them on the phone a few times, and then closes a deal using a video conferencing tool, he’s engaged in remote sales.

It’s important to understand the difference between remote selling and field sales.

To sell remotely, one must use technology to engage prospects from a distance. Field sales is different. Those who engage in this form of selling actually visit prospects, have face-to-face conversations, and attempt to close deals in person.

In 2022, many sales professionals use both remote selling and field sales strategies.

 

Why is Remote Selling Important?

There are many advantages to remote selling.

The most important advantage has to do with buyer preferences. 92% of B2B buyers, for instance, would rather engage with sales reps via digital channels.

Why? The majority of people became comfortable with digital communication during the pandemic, when in-person meetings were off the table. Since 45% of the U.S. workforce still works remotely, at least part-time, the trend has continued.

There are other advantages to virtual selling, too, including cost and time.

Remote sales is much cheaper than field sales because companies don’t have to pay travel expenses. The cost of gas, plane tickets, hotel rooms, etc. really add up.

Remote sales is more time-efficient as well, and can help reps become more productive. A field sales rep has to travel from one prospect to the next. The time he spends in his car is time he can’t spend talking to potential customers.

A remote seller, on the other hand, can easily engage and sell to dozens of prospects in a single day—all from the comfort of his home office.

 

Top Challenges for Field Sales Teams

To be clear, we aren’t saying remote sales is better than field sales. We’re saying remote selling best practices can be a great compliment to field sales strategies.

But before you can take advantage of selling remote, you must overcome a few challenges. Here are the main things standing in your way:

 

Teams aren’t equipped with the right technology

Effective remote selling requires reliable technology.

If your sales team isn’t equipped with a strong WiFi connection, CRM software, an email and text marketing solution, and a video conferencing app, you’ll have a hard time closing deals from a distance. But the problem runs deeper than this…

Your team doesn’t just need access to technology, it needs the knowledge to use (and occasionally fix) the various tools in your company’s tech stack.

 

It’s more difficult to engage and build rapport

Virtual selling strategies make it easier to communicate with prospects, but harder to connect with them on deep levels and build rapport.

Field sales is effective, in large part, because it allows sales reps to meet with their prospects in a face-to-face manner. This naturally increases trust between reps and the people they sell to, leading to better, more meaningful relationships.

How much better and more meaningful? According to a recent survey, nearly 70% of sales pros say that selling in person is more effective than remote selling.

 

It’s harder to stay motivated

We need to consider the motivation levels of your sales team, too.

Most sales reps are outgoing, extroverted people. They enjoy connecting with others and having face-to-face conversations. When they don’t get to experience these things on a regular basis, they tend to lose steam.

Obviously, remote selling doesn’t allow for the same amount of human interaction as field sales does. This could lead to low levels of motivation if you’re not careful.

 

There are more communication channels

Wait, more communication channels… That’s a good thing, right?

Yes and no. More communication channels give reps additional ways to connect with prospects, which is good. But it also means that reps have to monitor multiple channels to close deals, which some reps may find cumbersome.

To succeed with remote selling, your field sales team needs to develop a multichannel communication strategy that includes the phone, emails and texts, and social media. This may prove challenging for some teams.

 

It’s difficult to preserve team culture

Finally, virtual selling can result in poor team culture. This is especially true if your sales reps work from home, rather than from a shared office space.

Sales is a team sport. Yes, each individual rep must close their own deals and reach their own quotas. But this is much easier to do when company culture encourages reps to share their best strategies and motivate each other to success.

 

Key Elements for Success in Remote Sales

So, what do you think? Are you ready to try your hand at remote selling? If so, you’ll definitely want to keep these three things in mind:

 

Research

It doesn’t matter what kind of sales you’re doing—inside, outside, or virtual—you have to understand the people you’re selling to. This requires research.

So, before you email a prospect or call them on the phone, put on your detective hat and dig for information. Who do they work for? What position do they hold? What challenges do they face on a day-to-day basis? What are their goals?

If you can get a feel for your leads before you actually engage them in conversation, you’ll be much more likely to succeed with remote selling.

 

Listening

You’ve done your research and have a potential customer on the phone. What do you do now? It’s simple: ask the lead questions and listen to their answers.

Too many salespeople think they know what’s best for their prospects. Because of this, they push products and/or services that people don’t want. To avoid this scenario, just listen to what your leads tell you. Let them guide your conversations.

This will make your prospects feel heard and appreciated, while giving you the information you need to succeed with remote selling.

 

Clarity

Finally, once you’ve listened to your prospect and fully understood their pain points, present your solution with total clarity.

Nobody will buy your product and/or service if they don’t understand what it is and how it will help them. You need to explain these things in simple terms. (Note: we suggest practicing your pitch before you actually deliver it to prospects.)

A clear pitch, delivered to a prospect who actually needs the product or service offered, will help you achieve success with your virtual selling strategy.

 

Remote Selling Best Practices for Reps

We covered the key elements of success when it comes to remote selling. Now it’s time to share a few virtual selling best practices. Virtual sales reps should…

 

Focus on setup and presentation

There are a few things you need to do before you contact leads.

Make sure your remote selling setup is both reliable and pleasing to the eye. What do we mean by that? Invest in tools that will work when it counts, such as a good WiFi connection, solid computer, proven video conferencing solution, etc.

Speaking of video conferencing software, make sure the place you sell from looks professional. Pay attention to your background, make sure you have quality lighting, limit distractions, and dress appropriately during sales meetings.

 

Complete minimum daily sales activities

You can’t control who buys from you. But you can control the number of leads you dig up, calls you make, and follow ups you send every day.

Commit to a minimum number of daily sales activities. Then build your entire work schedule around them. Doing so will help you develop winning habits that will make it much more likely for you to achieve success with remote sales.

 

Be personable and engage your prospects

One of the biggest challenges that virtual sellers face is building rapport with prospects. To overcome this challenge, be as personable as possible.

No, you won’t be in the same room as the person you’re selling to. But you can still connect with them in real ways by using video conferencing software so you can see each other, sharing the occasional anecdote about your life so that you seem like a real person, and displaying a positive attitude that others want to be around.

 

Limit potential distractions

Distractions kill sales conversations. Do what you can to minimize them.

We suggest hosting your virtual sales meetings from a quiet location, silencing your computer and phone notifications for the duration of your call, and otherwise blocking out the rest of the world while you talk to prospects.

 

Use visuals to engage prospects

According to buyers, the second biggest remote selling mistake you can make is “Using no or poor visuals during online meetings.”

Visuals make it easier for buyers to understand what sales reps are talking about. They keep buyers engaged in sales conversations, too. Make sure you bring quality images, charts, graphs, and other visuals to all of your virtual sales appointments.

 

Record all meetings

Earlier we talked about the need for quality technology. Hopefully the tech you invest in will allow you to record your sales conversations.

Recording your meetings will give you something to refer back to in the future, making it much easier to remember key details about your prospects. You’ll also be able to assess your own performance and improve it the next time around.

 

Always be following up

You’ve heard the stat before: 80% of sales require five follow ups or more.

If you’re not following up with your prospects, your sales numbers will be abysmal. Take advantage of the numerous communication channels that remote selling gives you access to and call, email, text, etc. your leads on the regular.

When should you stop following up? When the prospect tells you that they aren’t interested and asks you to stop contacting them. Never before this point.

 

Keep your CRM up-to-date

Your sales department uses a CRM, right?

Make sure your customer relationship management solution is always up-to-date. When you contact a prospect, input the information into your CRM. When they respond to you, input the information into your CRM. When the prospect downloads one of your sales materials… you get the idea.

 

Remote Selling Best Practices for Managers

Are you in a management position? Then you have different responsibilities and goals when it comes to virtual selling. Here’s what you need to do to be successful:

 

Define sales activities

You need to define the sales activities you want your reps to engage in. If you don’t they may waste time on activities that don’t move the needle for your company.

Remote selling activities include prospecting, contacting leads, hosting product demonstrations, following up with potential customers, checking in on current customers, posting on social media platforms, and running reports.

 

Enable reps with content

As a sales manager, it’s your job to prepare your reps for sales meetings.

One of the best ways to do this is to give them access to top-level content. That way they can share said content with their leads and entice them to buy.

Here are a few content ideas to get you started: product demo videos, ebooks and white papers that explain the challenges your product solves, slide decks that cover product features and benefits, and positive customer testimonials.

 

Track sales activity and performance

Has your department found success with remote selling? You won’t know until you track sales activity and performance for your team. This is so important!

You need to make sure that your reps are putting in the work. If they are, you need to make sure that the work they’re putting in is actually benefiting your company. The only way to do this is to monitor your team on a regular basis.

 

Coach team members

Once you track your team, you’ll know how to coach them to greater success.

Do they need to find better leads? Or make more sales calls? Or follow up in a more consistent and effective manner? Maybe you need to share a few of the remote selling best practices above to elevate their performance.

We can’t tell you how to coach your reps. All we can do is encourage you to take your role as sales manager seriously and help your reps achieve their potential.

 

Nurture team culture

We’ll say it again: sales is a team sport.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to foster collaboration and good vibes inside your sales department. You could, for example…

  • Host Sales Meetings: Gather all of your reps together (virtually, of course) and share department-wide updates so everyone is on the same page.
  • Hold Sales Contests: Create friendly competition by letting reps compete for awards, or even just bragging rights, in exchange for peak performance.
  • Celebrate Every Win: Your reps work hard. Celebrate their successes as a team to build comradery and motivate reps to greater heights.

 

Invest in remote sales technology

Finally, make sure you invest in the tools your reps need for remote selling.

Some of the most important tools include a CRM software like Pipedrive, a video conferencing solution like Zoom, a meeting scheduler like Calendly, a quality microphone, and a team chat app like Slack.

We also suggest investing in a sales engagement platform like SPOTIO.

SPOTIO was specifically designed for field sales teams who want to take advantage of remote selling opportunities. As such, it’s equipped with everything your team needs. Lead generation capabilities? Check. Task automation features? Check. Multichannel communication tools? Check!

To learn more about SPOTIO, sign up for a free demo today!

 

Benefits of Remote Selling

We’ve already talked about why remote selling is important. But before we sign off, we want to list a few specific benefits of this sales strategy.

Once you dive into the wide world of virtual sales, you’ll be able to:

  • Keep Pace With Buyer Preferences: As mentioned previously, a majority of customers prefer to interact with sales reps via digital channels. Give your target audience what they want and invest in remote selling best practices.
  • Minimize the Costs of Closing Deals: Field sales is effective, but expensive. You can minimize these expenses by engaging with prospects through the phone, email, text message, and social media—instead of in-person visits.
  • Connect With More Potential Customers: When you sell remotely, you aren’t limited by physical distance. This means you can sell to someone in the UK just as easily as someone in San Francisco, CA.
  • Boost Rep Productivity Levels: When reps spend less time in their cars, they can spend more time engaging with potential customers. This is obviously a more productive way to spend one’s on-the-clock hours.

 

Succeed With Remote Sales

Remote sales is growing in popularity—with good reason.

Many customers prefer this methodology and it lowers costs for companies, while boosting individual rep productivity to never-before-seen heights.

That’s not to say that remote selling is better than field sales. We believe the two should be used in tandem. This will allow you to enjoy all the advantages of virtual sales and benefit from the relationship-building qualities of in-person visits.

Just remember, to succeed with remote sales, you need to implement the remote selling tips we listed above. Do that and you’re sure to find success.

Speaking of success, have you tried SPOTIO yet? Our industry-leading platform will empower your virtual and field sales teams, thanks to an easy-to-navigate interface and powerful features. Check out this demo today to see what SPOTIO can do.

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Using SPOTIO to Improve Field Sales Management Process https://spotio.com/blog/spotio-improves-field-sales-management/ https://spotio.com/blog/spotio-improves-field-sales-management/#respond Fri, 02 Jul 2021 09:34:34 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=14622 Tired of inconsistent sales numbers? If you and your team are unable to hit quota on a regular basis, it might be time to invest in an effective sales management process.

In its simplest form, a sales management process is a series of repeatable steps you can use to better manage your reps and track deals as they progress from initial contact to conversion. A sales management process can also lead to better teamwork, fewer tedious admin tasks, and the ability to consistently achieve sales goals.

The Importance of a Sales Management Process

A software like SPOTIO can help you achieve all of your sales goals — but only if you have a repeatable sales management process in place first.

To achieve success and hit quota, you need to follow a repeatable sales management process to set your team up for success. Doing so will lead to higher conversion rates, better leads, faster sales cycles, and more.


A successful sales management strategy involves four main phases:

  1. Hire the Right Sales Associates
  2. Design Effective Selling Procedures
  3. Accurately Forecast Future Sales
  4. Measure Your Team’s Sales Efforts

If you follow these four steps — and optimize them for peak effectiveness — you’ll be able to build a winning sales management process for your company. Once you do, sales software can help you kick it into overdrive, while eliminating less-than-desirable tasks.

SPOTIO For Sales Management

SPOTIO was specifically built for field sales teams and enables management professionals to better direct their teams through real-time performance indicators. That way they can easily evaluate reps and make necessary changes quickly.

The result is a holistic view of the sales process that empowers sales teams to close more deals in less time via the intelligent use of cold, hard data.

While SPOTIO is chock-full of sales-boosting features, there are four that specifically pertain to the sales management process: territory mapping, real-time field visibility, detailed data analysis, and sales rep productivity.

We’ll explore each in greater detail below.

1. Territory Mapping

As an outside sales manager, you know that territory mapping is crucial because it gives reps a plan of attack, ensures their efforts aren’t overlapping, and keeps them from targeting poor prospects who will never purchase a product from your company.

Unfortunately, many sales managers map and assign territories the wrong way. For example, a common approach is to print out a Google Maps image, highlight a portion of it, and tell a rep, “Here’s your territory. Get after it!”

This approach doesn’t take into account the number of prospects in a given territory or whether the prospects are a good fit for the goods being sold.

Territory mapping with SPOTIO is different. Inside our software, sales managers can create territories on digital maps that reps can access from their mobile devices. Each map will contain pins that represent leads, which managers can give specific colors based on data points like pipeline stage or the result of past visits.

These visual features keep reps focused on the right prospects and enable them to organize their efforts in the most productive way possible.

2. Real-Time Field Visibility

To really improve your sales management abilities, you need to understand how your field reps spend their time. SPOTIO makes this incredibly easy to figure out.


Are your reps in the field? Use our software’s geo-based tracking feature to pinpoint their current location and their travel path history. Doing so will allow you to evaluate their routes and suggest more efficient ones when necessary.

Note, this feature can be disabled in order to preserve rep privacy.

SPOTIO also gives sales managers real-time visibility into their team’s communication efforts with prospects. Let’s face it, the need for multichannel communication grows every day. Each of your prospects wants to be contacted in a specific way. To increase sales, you need to figure out their preferences and act on them.

Our software automatically tracks every call, text, email, and in-person visit your team makes. That way you can evaluate success rates for each and implement the best tactics.

3. Detailed Data Analysis

Data makes the business world go ’round. The more you have of it as a sales manager, the better your sales management process can become. SPOTIO will give you access to important performance reports and leaderboards you can use for sales tracking purposes.

Performance Reporting

See exactly how each of your reps is performing and how close your team is to quota at any given moment. With this information, you can design new sales strategies when needed, double down on effective tactics, and forecast future sales with much greater accuracy.

Additionally, SPOTIO can be programmed to send email notifications regarding rep performance and activity on a daily or weekly basis, ensuring you always have the information you need, when you need it most.

Leaderboards

While it’s important to build sales team camaraderie, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging a bit of friendly competition. Doing so can help motivate sales reps to work harder to achieve goals. It can also make a sales career more enjoyable.

Create leaderboards for a variety of different metrics (knocks, meetings, revenue, etc.) so that your field reps can see how their efforts stack up against their peers. You can even create incentives for top performers if you wish.

Both performance and leaderboards inside SPOTIO will give you and your team the necessary data to build a winning sales management process for your company.

4. Sales Rep Productivity

Finally, a good sales management process will make it easy for salespeople to accomplish their tasks, thus boosting team-wide productivity levels to new heights.

SPOTIO is equipped with numerous productivity features, such as:

  • Data Capture: Our software automatically logs prospect interactions in real time, allows reps to easily take written notes and voice memos, and snap photos onsite from the convenience of their mobile phones. This ensures your CRM records are accurate.
  • AutoPlays: How much time do your reps waste just figuring out what to do next? AutoPlays, a new feature inside SPOTIO, helps salespeople prioritize high-impact activities via machine learning that suggests specific actions.
  • Messaging Templates: Track the texts and emails your reps send inside SPOTIO to figure out the best messaging techniques for your audience. More than that, build reusable templates your reps can use to send conversion-optimized content quickly.
  • E-Contracts: A deal isn’t done until a prospect signs on the dotted line. Help your reps close faster with e-contracts that are easy to pull up inside SPOTIO and can be legally signed electronically on a mobile device.

Because of these features, SPOTIO users see a 46% improvement in sales team productivity, a 14% reduction in staff turnover, and a 23% increase in gross revenue. Win!

Wrapping Up

Your sales management process is vital to the success of your company. SPOTIO can help you supercharge the processes you have in place with convenient territory mapping, real-time field visibility, detailed data analysis, and sales rep productivity features.

Learn more about our revolutionary software and how it can help your field sales team close more deals in less time.

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19 Practical Sales Team Management Strategies for 2021 and Beyond https://spotio.com/blog/sales-team-management/ https://spotio.com/blog/sales-team-management/#respond Mon, 10 May 2021 06:08:50 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=10084

Let’s be honest, managing a high-performance sales team is hard. Especially when you consider that 57% of sellers missed their sales quotas in 2019. How can anyone be expected to effectively lead a group of sales reps when over half of them are likely to underperform?

Missed quotas aren’t even the worst of it. The average annual turnover rate for sales teams is a whopping 35%. Since the cost to replace a departing employee is, in general, 1.5 – 2x their annual salary, turnover gets expensive fast. No wonder upper management is always trying to raise sales quotas. 

Now, we’re not trying to discourage you. We simply want to give you a clear understanding of the situation so that you can better prepare yourself for success as a sales team manager. Success is 100% possible. You just have to follow a few proven team management strategies.

Whether you manage an inside or outside sales team, improving your sales management process is the most critical step to increasing rep satisfaction, improving performance, and growing company revenue.

In this guide, we’ll look at 19 sales team management strategies you can use to win at sales and propel your company forward in 2020 and beyond.

19 Sales Team Management Strategies to Follow in 2020

Ready to improve your sales  team management skills? Then follow the 19 strategies listed below. Let’s dive in!

1. Set Sales Goals

Setting proper sales goals is an art. You want them to be ambitious enough to stretch your sales team and ensure they give you their best effort. But you also need them to be realistically attainable so that your reps don’t continually miss quotas and get discouraged.

To find the perfect balance, set S.M.A.R.T. goals, an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Specific: The more specific your goals are the better. This will give you and your team a tangible target to shoot for.

Measurable:
Make sure the goals you set are easily trackable. That way you can gauge progress along the way.

Attainable: Like we mentioned, goals that are too ambitious will discourage your employees, which is definitely not what you want when managing a sales team.

Relevant:
Don’t simply choose goals at random. Aim for targets that are relevant to your company’s overall objectives.

Timely:
Lastly, goals without deadlines rarely get achieved. Make sure everything you aim for has a desired due date.

Set S.M.A.R.T goals for your sales team and you’ll have more success managing salespeople.

2. Clarify Your Sales Model

There are two main sales models to choose from: the island and the assembly line. Let’s look at each one in greater detail:

1. The Island: This is the traditional approach to sales where every salesperson on the team is responsible for each aspect of the sales process. They generate their own leads, make their own sales calls, close their own deals, etc. It’s an easy model to implement and manage because there aren’t a lot of moving parts to worry about.

2. The Assembly Line: The assembly line method splits sales duties between four different groups. There’s the lead gen team, sales development reps, account executives, and customer success associates. Each group deals with leads and customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Both models described above can be effective. The one you choose for your organization largely depends on what phase your business is in. For example, the island method generally works better for startups, but the assembly line methodology is generally ideal for established brands.

3. Assign Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Everyone on your team should know exactly what their role is. If they don’t, you can’t possibly expect them to consistently achieve objectives. The trick is doling out responsibilities that correlate with personal skill sets. This is much easier if your company is using the assembly line sales model, described above.

For example, you might manage an employee who is dynamite when it comes to generating leads, but crumbles like a cookie any time he has to actually talk with a potential customer. This person should be asked to join the leads gen team and allowed to focus on what he does best.

Do your best to assign tasks and responsibilities to those who have the best chance of completing them successfully.

4. Create a Scalable Sales Process

One of the keys to managing a sales team effectively is creating systems and processes that can scale. By implementing a systematic approach, you’ll enable your sales team to work more efficiently and increase margins.

Your sales process should be customer-centric, clearly defined, repeatable, predictable, goal-oriented, and measurable.

Develop a sales system that every one of your sales reps can follow. That way, when new reps join your company and are onboarded , they can immediately begin selling at a high level.

5. Configure an Onboarding Plan

Since we just mentioned it, let’s talk about onboarding.

Onboarding is the process of integrating a new employee into a company. It includes all of the legal paperwork that must be signed, any training a new team member needs to go through, introductions to other employees within the organization, and more.

To improve your sales team management skills, configure a consistent onboarding plan for all new sales. Make sure it trains them properly and teaches them the scalable sales process you’ve implemented.

Lastly, look for ways to improve your onboarding the process. The easier it is for new reps to become comfortable selling your company’s products, the more success your team will have.

6. Set up a Sales CRM

Unfortunately, most salespeople only spend 35% of their time selling. Which means your sales team is probably spending two thirds of its time on tasks that don’t directly relate to selling products and boosting revenue.

A good sales CRM can help your team win back a significant portion of their day — especially if you invest in one with automation capabilities. Sometimes sales team management comes down to simply providing your reps with the tools they need to succeed.

7. Identify Activity Metrics and KPIs

So many things in business are out of our control. For example, we don’t decide what the next big trend is or when natural disasters happen. If we did, trends would hardly ever change and hurricanes wouldn’t exist.

Sales activity metrics measure things that we can control. In most circumstances, we decide how many cold calls to make a day, the number of times we’re willing to follow up with prospects, etc. When managing sales reps, it’s important to take notice of these figures.

Track sales activity metrics like the number of leads created, number of calls made, and meetings scheduled for each of your reps, as well as standard KPIs.

8. Create Transparency

Marketing teams often talk about the need to be transparent with customers. As a sales team manager, you need to be transparent too — with your sales team.

Craft a selling environment that’s focused on the key sales metrics you’ve identified for your company and allows the natural competitiveness of your team to work for the common good of your company. In other words, make each team member’s sales numbers visible and allow them to compete with each other for top seller honors.

9. Confirm Commission Structures

There are many different ways to compensate your sales team. Should you pay them a base salary + commissions or commissions only? Should they make higher commissions for selling specific numbers of products? And what about residual and variable-rate commissions?

There is no one size fits all approach to sales team compensation. The key is finding the right commission structure for your specific organization. Study the different structures out there. Then choose one that fits your company’s needs.

10. Incentivize Your Team

A commission is a percentage of a sale, awarded to the salesperson who closed the deal. For example, a $25 commission would be given to a seller everytime he or she sells a product worth $500 at a 5% commission.

An incentive, on the other hand, is a reward of some kind, granted to a salesperson who achieves some predetermined level of excellence. Incentives are used to motivate sellers.

When managing a sales team, part of your job is to motivate them to work as hard as they can. That’s why incentives are so powerful. Choose an incentive plan for your team that will get them excited and want to put in extra effort.

11. Use the Volume-Versus-Value Ratio

The volume-versus-value ratio will help your sales team become more efficient. To implement it, task your top sellers with the lowest volume/most important jobs, such as building relationships and securing referrals. Then assign your lower performing sales reps with high volume/low pressure activities like generating leads.

This philosophy can also be applied to prospecting. Rather than trying to build giant lists of so-so leads, focus on finding ultra-targeted prospects who have a high probability of buying.

12. Assign Territories Strategically

Territory assignment is an important sales team management skill. You need to make sure your sales rep’s territories don’t overlap, that each rep has enough accounts to work, and that your top sellers are given the highest value areas.

A tool like SPOTIO can help with this. The solution’s territory management software will help assign sales territories effectively and boost results.

13. Empower Reps With Data

Data is the lifeblood of modern business. If your sales team doesn’t have the ability to source up-to-date information for each and every lead they generate, they’ll waste a lot of time.

SPOTIO’s Lead Machine feature ensures this doesn’t happen by giving sales reps the ability to tap into 50+ data points for their prospects instantaneously. This means that they only focus on high-value prospects with the greatest chance of becoming paying customers.

Succeed at sales team management by giving your reps the ability to quickly sort leads via income, credit capacity, age of home, and more.

14. Enable Cross-Training

One of the best ways to train new and/or struggling sales reps is to pair them with a top seller in your company. That way under performers can see, first hand, how to succeed at their jobs.

You do have to be careful with this sales team management strategy as not every sales master is interested in mentoring others. We don’t suggest forcing your sales reps into mentorship roles. But if you find a few willing participants, take advantage of the opportunity.

15. Set up One-On-Ones

One-on-one meetings are the secret weapon for all management professionals. They will allow you to build solid relationships with your employees, get a general feel for team morale, provide constructive feedback, and learn new insights you can use to improve your sales processes.

Be sure to prioritize these get-togethers. It can be easy to shrug them off because of a busy schedule, but this is a mistake. Meet regularly with your team and watch your success soar.

16. Give Reps Detailed Feedback

As we just mentioned, one-on-one meetings are the perfect time to deliver feedback to your sales reps. Just make sure you’re doing it the right way.

Feedback should be constructive and detailed. Tell your employees what they’re doing right and where they can improve. As long as you’re delivering criticism in a respectful way, your team will appreciate your candor. In fact, 65% of employees wish they received more feedback.

17. Invest in Ongoing Training

If the only training your reps receive is during the onboarding process, your sales team management approach needs work. Training should be an ongoing process.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to train your employees. You could, for example, send them to sales conferences, invest in sales training courses, and invite notable sales experts to come to your office and speak to your team.

You could also take a more DIY approach and ask your top sellers to share key strategies they’ve been using during lunch breaks.

18. Establish Communication Channels

Communication is key to sales team management success. If you can’t contact your reps, or worse, they can’t contact you, your company will fail to close as many deals as it could. Make sure your team has multiple channels to get in touch with you, from any device — even if they happen to be attending sales meetings in the field.

19. Prioritize Team Retention

Finally, if you want to retain your staff (trust us, you do!) then you need to make retention a priority. Fortunately, implementing the strategies listed above will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you in this regard.

Employees want to work at successful companies where they feel appreciated and engaged in their duties. By giving your team every chance to succeed, providing them with training opportunities, and giving them regular feedback, you’ll create an environment they enjoy being a part of.

But if you’re looking for bonus ways to retain sales reps, consider offering retention rewards for employees who stay for multiple years or giving your top sellers more autonomy.

How to Choose the Right Sales Management Platform

It will be much easier to implement the sales team management strategies listed above if you use a sales management platform. Make sure the solution you use allows you to:

Prospect Smarter

Have you ever spent time researching a lead, only to call them and realize that what your company offers isn’t of any interest to them? All sellers have experienced this. Save your sales team time by empowering them to prospect smarter.

A tool like SPOTIO with its sales intelligence software will allow your reps to quickly and easily generate lists of warm prospects who are ready to buy.

Empower Your Reps with Sales Collateral

Want to know the key to  managing a successful sales team? Put your reps in a position to succeed. That’s the secret! One of the best ways to do this is giving them access to sales enablement collateral.  We’re talking about customer maps, pre-recorded sales presentations, contracts that can be signed electronically… Anything that can help your sales team close more deals in less time.

The sales management platform you choose for your company should make it easy to empower your reps with sales collateral.

Get Visibility at Rep and Team Levels

The best sales management platforms provide complete transparency and allow sales team managers to see, at a glance, how close each of their reps are to hitting their quotas. They also enable management to view their entire team at once and assess general effectiveness. This information can then be used to adjust strategy if need be.

enable managers to view performance at the team and individual rep levels:

Assign Sales Territories

Do you manage outside sales reps? Then you know all about territory mapping. The sales management platform you use should allow you to easily assign sales territories to each member of your sales team.

The SPOTIO solution has been proven to save field sales rep management professionals up to three hours a day because it makes territory management so simple. Make sure the software you use when managing a sales team is just as intuitive.

Spot Pipeline Bottlenecks

It’s important to track your company’s sales pipeline and ensure it’s free of bottlenecks. This is much easier to do with an intuitive sales management platform.

This kind of tool will usually feature CRM capabilities that will enable you to analyze customer journeys and remove common roadblocks, thus increasing sales. It will also allow you and your team to easily catalog new leads and classify them appropriately. 

Communicate With Reps

Sales is all about communication. Your reps need to properly communicate product information to their potential clients and you, as the sales team manager, need to clearly communicate goals, feedback, and praise to your team in order for them to improve and enjoy their jobs.

Choose a sales management platform that allows for quick communication between you and your sales team. If possible, choose an app that’s also accessible on mobile devices so any outside sales associates on your team can contact you at any time.

Be the Sales Manager You Wish You Had

Managing sales people isn’t an easy task. Fortunately, the 19 sales team management strategies listed above will help you do it effectively. We encourage you to read back through this guide and begin implementing the strategies that make sense for your organization.

And don’t forget to invest in a proper sales management platform! If you’re not sure which solution is right for your company, request a free demo of SPOTIO. Our solution is powerful, affordable, and loved by our many users.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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18 Experts Share Top Sales Enablement Best Practices https://spotio.com/blog/sales-enablement-best-practices/ https://spotio.com/blog/sales-enablement-best-practices/#respond Thu, 28 Feb 2019 17:16:08 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=7331 The B2B landscape has changed...a lot.

The traditional sales process used to look something like this:

  1. Marketing would hand leads over to the sales team
  2. The sales team would try to close the deal

The two departments operated in silos. And, while this simplistic “us vs them” mentality used to work, it doesn’t anymore.

Today, there are an average of 5.4 stakeholders involved in the purchase process. Consumers are more educated, and sales cycles longer.

The growing complexity of the B2B sales environment has blurred the lines between sales and marketing. It has become harder to ensure reps are having the right types of conversations with prospects, while being equipped with the right tools and content to drive deals through each stage of the pipeline.

The stats reflect this:

  • Content: Only 35% of salespeople think marketing knows what content they need
  • Communication: ⅓ of marketing and sales teams don’t talk regularly
  • Accessibility88% of sales professionals are unable to utilize critical sales material on their smartphones

The disconnect is evident. But, the opportunity is clear. Organizations implementing sales enablement best practices see big bottom line results, such as:

  • 99% overall team attainment of sales quota
  • 32% higher team sales quota attainment
  • 4% year over year growth in average deal size

But, with so many moving pieces – content, communication, tools, processes – where do you start?

To help surface the answer, we reached out to 18 experts from leading sales organizations and training programs such as Sandler, and asked the following question:

List your top 3 sales enablement best practices for 2019?

While we recommend looking through each of the expert responses as they have unique takeaways, we compiled the five most popular best practices below.

 

Inside Scoop on Outside Sales podcast banner

 

Top 5 Sales Enablement Best Practices (Based on Expert Response)

We read through all the responses and compiled a shortlist of the top 5 sales enablement best practices to apply in your organization. For more information on each best practice, please read through the expert responses below this section.

#1. “Institutionalize” high-performer activities

Identify the best practices of your top sellers and “institutionalize” them for the rest of the team to leverage at relevant points in the sales cycle.

#2. Give reps quick access to content

According to the American Marketing Association, 90% of content goes unused by sales teams. The leading cause: sales reps simply cannot find it.

Experts recommend adopting a sales enablement software that is:

  • Flexible: recommends content based on performance and different sales event triggers informed by your marketing automation platform. This keeps sales conversations aligned with the different stages in the buyer journey.
  • Organized: acts as an easy-to-use repository for all content and sales tools.
  • Integrated: connects with other tools to automate and streamline the sales process.

#3. Provide continual training

According to research, 87% of new skills are lost within a month of sales training.

Successful sales organizations provide ongoing training and communication across their content, tools and workflows so that reps know exactly what will be most effective throughout the entire sales cycle.

#4. Align content with the buyer journey

95% of buyers buy from someone who gave them content at each stage of the buying process.

Align a) your selling processes and b) content strategy to the customer’s conversion path in order to drive meaningful customer engagement.

#5. Streamline with technology

This might seem like an obvious one, but a study by CSO Insights found that 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to a lack of proper tools.

The right technology stack can fuel sales efforts because they help with forecasting, goal-setting, training and more. In order to maintain alignment, try to leverage the same technology as the marketing team, where possible.

18 Experts Reveal Top Sales Enablement Best Practices

Ok:

That’s a quick recap of the most popular sales enablement best practices. Now its time to dive deeper and see how the experts are applying the different best practices to achieve success in their organizations.

Gavin Harris

Apptega | Vice President of Sales and Operations
  1. We have created a value model using DecisionLink that allows us to easily align the value of Apptega to our customer’s unique requirements. Using the platform, we are able to quickly deliver high quality documents that help our champions internally position the financial benefits of moving forward with Apptega.
  2. We leverage hyper-personalized and professional quality video outreach for prospecting to new customers and prospects. Leveraging the Cyranoapp.io platform, we can easily engage our executives to participate in packaged outreach efforts to their peers in prospective companies.
  3. We continually try to provide value, sharing blog posts and other relevant pieces of content that provide value at every touchpoint throughout the sales cycle.

Colleen Francis

  1. Use your best to coach the rest. Identify the best practices of top sellers and “institutionalize” them for the rest of the team to leverage.
  2. Create small bites of “just in time” skill development tailored specifically to active deals in the pipeline. Serve these up to sellers in your CRM based on sales stage, deal size, competition and product set.
  3. Following every win, get the seller record a quick video documenting the top three things they did to successfully close the deal. Use these videos for real time training served up in your CRM based on when the training will be most effective. For example, trigger the questioning skills training video once the deal reaches the qualify stage.

John Barrows

  1. Find a way to tie content to revenue. Determine which content types reps are watching/learning that drives the best results, and share them with everyone else.
  2. Interview your best reps and ask them to walk you through their most recent and best sale, starting with qualification and going through each stage of the sales process. Cut up the content, tag it by stage, and put it into a repository where reps can go view what good/great looks like.
  3. Invest in a tool that provides “just in time” learning for reps when they need it, instead of training them in-person once and expecting them to remember what to do months later.

Nate Bishop

TextUs | VP of Voice Solutions

My top 3 sales enablement best practices include:

  1. Training/coaching,
  2. Embracing technology,
  3. Industry knowledge.

Everything is always progressing and we need adapt to the ever changing environment. To keep our team at the forefront of industry knowledge we leverage a variety of training and coaching solutions. It is important that we have a finger on the industry pulse, and upcoming trends.

Through weekly coaching we equip our team with a tool set to deliver deep industry insights to our customers and future customers. We’re continuously evaluating new technologies to improve our sales processes and operations to enable our team to focus on having meaningful conversations.

Steve Richard

ExecVision | Founder
  1. First define your call types (cold call, lead follow up call, discovery call, demo, closing call, etc.). Then define the 7-10 key ‘behaviors’ that your sales reps should exhibit by call type.
  2. Create coaching plans to follow that the reps are moving toward mastery on those key behaviors. Coaching plans need to be a series of coaching interventions over a period of time in order to beat the ‘forgetting curve.’ Google “forgetting curve” if you don’t know what that it. You need to move people from unconsciously incompetent to consciously competent.
  3. Run a call of the month contest to make learning fun. Celebrate catching examples of what great calls sound like in the wild. Build your library of best calls to ramp the next generation of reps in half the time.

Bob Apollo

Inflexion Point | Founder
  1. Sales enablement is a team effort. You need to actively involve your top sales performers in developing the program. Learn what it is that makes them successful and work out how to equip and enable their colleagues to emulate their success.
  2. Package your sales enablement materials into easy-to-find, easy-to-consume, bite-sized chunks that are accessible anywhere. Proactively serve up the materials that are most likely to be useful to the sales person in their current situation.
  3. Carefully analyse what is and isn’t used, and look for correlations between the use of specific sales enablement tools and subsequent sales success. Do more of what works, and stop doing what doesn’t.

Tamara Schenk

CSO Insights | Research Director
  1. Formalize your sales enablement approach: Align your enablement strategy to the organization’s strategic initiatives. Create a sales enablement charter (business plan) and achieve up to 2-digit win rate improvements.
  2. Focus on the customer: Align a) your selling processes and b) your enablement services to the customer’s path to drive effective customer engagement. Those who do, see better win rates.
  3. Sales coaching remains a critical gap when it comes to adoption and reinforcement. Mature enablement functions develop sales managers as top sales coaches to improve win rates.

Daniel Disney

The Daily Sales | Founder
  1. Utilize all the tools your customers are using. This could include the phone, social media, email, video, networking, post etc. If your customers are using it then you have an opportunity to leverage it to reach them.
  2. Don’t fear technology, use it! A lot of salespeople are scared AI will take away their jobs, but the best salespeople are learning how to use it to enhance their jobs. Look at what tools are available, try them, practice and master them.
  3. Start learning how to use video. Video is a huge part of the content world right now and is a fast growing platform for sales conversations. It’s also difficult to get comfortable with so now is the time to start practicing and getting past those initial challenges.

Craig Klein

  1. Organize leads and prospects by source & disposition/outcome.
  2. Ensure all leads (even the cold/dead ones) are getting automated emails from you regularly.
  3. Call leads that engage with your emails quickly (within 4 hours).

Chad Burmeister

BDR.ai | CEO
  1. Add more virtual BDRs – Until your quota carrying reps are completely booked up, add more virtual BDRs!
  2. Remove low value work – Every quarter did into what your SDRs, BDRs, and AEs are doing. Then optimize their daily work so that they focus less on low value work, and more on higher value work (it’s good for them, it’s good for your company).
  3. Look at Saleshood – Elay Cohen and their team is amazing. Great solution that will change how you train your sales team!

Matt Sykes

Salescadence | Founder
  1. Shift from Managing Time to Measuring it. Effective Sales Enablers are ruthless with their time, they place real value on it, they never give it away for free and only exchange it for something in return.Tip: Divide your ‘To Do’ list up into ‘Unpaid Admin’ tasks and ‘Paid Revenue’ tasks and spend a minimum of 70% of your day on activities which you can directly or indirectly assign an invoice to.
  2. Develop Your Personal Brand. You are who Google says you are and in today’s social market place, it’s possible to position yourself as the ‘go-to’ sales person in your industry.Tip: Sharpen up your LinkedIn profile and always produce and publish content that’s helpful and of interest to your target market. Providing consistent, valuable information creates a ‘known, liked and trusted’ status.
  3. Invest in Your Personal Development. The world of Sales is ever-changing and Ultra High Performers don’t wait for their employer to send them on a training course, they take responsibility for their own success.Tip: Listening to one of the many sales podcasts available on your daily commute will keep you up to date on the latest trends and on what’s new in the world of Sales Training.

Mike Kunkle

SPASIGMA | Vice President, Sales Enablement Services

Let me start by saying that the next best move for any given sales enablement function is highly contextual, based on how they and their sales force are operating today, and where they both want to be (what they want to achieve) over the next quarter or six months. With that disclaimed, here are the practices I’m hoping we see more of in 2019.

1. Shift to a buyer-oriented selling system
I believe one of the best possible practices is to foster a buyer-orientation across the business. A buyer-orientation means changing the mindset, language and behaviors of the leadership team and employees to an outside-in, other-focused, buyer-centric orientation.This orientation changes language, such as shifting from “quota crushers” to “customer problem solvers,” or from “overcoming objections” to “resolving buyer concerns,” and more. It means understanding your buyer personas and their COIN-OP (Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Objectives, and Priorities) and shifting your prospecting approaches from product-centric to problem/solution centric.

In opportunity management, it means a focus on meeting each decision maker’s buying process exit criteria, or things that each buyer needs to see, hear, feel, understand and believe in each stage of their buyers’ journey, to feel comfortable moving forward to the next stage with you. To learn more, I have a (free) recorded webinar on Sales & Marketing Management Magazine’s SMMConnect channel.

2. Get a sales enablement charter in place
Have you seen the number of sales enablement definitions in the market? Every sales analyst has one, the Sales Enablement Society has one, the Association for Talent Development’s Sales Enablement Community of Practice has one, and I think your grandmother might have one at this point.

I’m hoping we see more consensus this year about enablement being not just marketing-related or readiness and training related, or technology-related, but that it continues to evolve to a cross-functional discipline including marketing/messaging/content, training/readiness/ongoing development, and technology and tools, at a minimum, with possibly an expansion toward sales selection.

I recommend that you review these various current definitions and get a solid understanding of all aspects of sales enablement, and then develop a charter that clearly delineates what sales enablement aspects your function will address, who you will partner with cross-functionally, the outcomes you will support, and how you will work together to achieve them.

As the old saying goes, “you can’t hit a target you don’t see.” A charter fosters alignment and sets clear expectations, ensuring clarity and focus and increasing your chance of success.

3. Evolve toward performance consulting and systems thinking
Once you have the building block of sales enablement in place (see this SlideShare for the building blocks) you can begin to evolve to a consulting practice that identifies and solves problems to improve sales performance. I believe this is the highest and best use of sales enablement and is where I believe and hope the profession is heading.

Performance consulting is a systematic and holistic approach to improve workplace performance and achieve business goals.

Performance consulting:

  • Is grounded in analytics, diagnostics, and root cause analysis
  • Considers of a broad array of organizational and individual factors that influence human performance
  • Includes selection, design, and development of the most appropriate solution to solve the identified performance problem
  • Implements initiatives using proven-effective practices for the selected intervention and change practices including communication, follow-through, measurement, analysis, evaluation, and adjustment to ensure results are achieved.I believe this is a natural evolution for sales enablement and that we will see the more advanced in the profession moving toward performance consulting and holistic systems thinking in 2019.

4. [Bonus] Create more effective learning systems

I’m going to offer a bonus fourth practice. I see more organizations trying to train more effectively and get a return on their training investment, and I believe this trend will continue in 2019.I believe we’ll see more organizations favoring bite-sized courses (microlearning that targets one or two key learning objectives at a time, but often strung together into a larger curriculum, as needed).

I believe video will continue to rise in popularity, as well, delivered in these online courses, with reinforcement, crowdsourced best practice sharing, and the use of job aids/performance support and workflow performance support.

Finally, I believe we’ll see continued growing focus on enabling managers to diagnose performance issues to target their time with reps, and coach reps to mastery, whether through virtual/video coaching, team coaching, or one-one-one field coaching. This will include not just coaching in general, but also enabling, empowering and engaging managers in sales onboarding and other ongoing training, as part of the learning system, to coach their reps to mastery with any key skills and competencies that are taught.

Brian Sullivan

Sandler | Vice President, Sandler Enterprise Selling

To share three 2019 best practices, I’ll start with the definition of the term – “procedures shown by experience to produce optimal results”.

First, meet with each new major account at the start of the business relationship to identify the account’s five most important success factors. These become the substance for client satisfaction, not boilerplate factors your organization uses to survey all accounts.

Second, convert your major account “quarterly business reviews” to “quarterly value reviews” focused on the value you’ve delivered in the previous quarter and the value you are expected to deliver in the upcoming time frame. This totally different perspective, while focused completely on client value, also breeds new business opportunities.

Third, understand that account retention is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s not what you get. It’s what you do. Honestly assess your organization’s performance regarding the reasons that major accounts stay or go – their critical retention factors. But beyond simply assessing your performance, build accountable action items in each area to improve the relationships and actively increase account retention.So, three best practices to help, by definition, produce optimal 2019 results.

Irene Becker

Just Coach It | Chief Success Officer

Sales enablement becomes very important as an organization grows past a sales team of 50 representatives. Smaller teams should, however, have a system in place that creates ownership and accountability for sales and revenue growth. Each sales representative, each marketing collateral or initiative is critical to the customer experience, and the customer experience is the hot button for sales success.

  1. Make the customer experience a vital part of your ecosystem.The customer experience is a vital part of sales the sales journey. Now, more than ever before the conversations/interactions/touchpoints (face to face or virtual) you have with prospects and customers need to be delivered in the right way, at the right time and include using the right technology as a lever for sales enablement.Sales and marketing teams must work together to provide the right incentives, channels and solutions that develop a strong customer management ecosystem that can be monitored; an ecosystem that will also identify any gaps in the customer experience that need to be addressed and how they will be addressed.
  2. Coach and train with an emotionally intelligent edge.Develop sticky coaching and training that helps people upskill, improve and also retain what they have learned. Xerox notes that 87% of sales training content is forgotten within one month of the training, we need to develop coaching and training programs that are tools, are aligned for maximum engagement and results.Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand your emotions, manage your emotions and understand the emotions of others is critical to every aspect of the customer journey and sales cycle. Giving your teams training and coaching is emotionally intelligent is critical to sales results and to preparing your people to be the best they can be under stress and also when dealing with different peoples and situations.
  3. Leverage marketing content and technology.It is important to use marketing content in whitepapers, videos, blogs and all social/digital media to support every stage of the sales cycle. Develop systems that create transparency and report between the marketing and sales department so that new materials can be created with the input of those who are at the front lineThere are many excellent digital sales tools and apps. Choosing the right technology and be a big help in goal-setting, training and more. The need to map the customer journey and to deliver the right message in the right format and at the right time is critical and technology can be a very important tool/resource.

Quyen Chang

Financialforce | Senior Director, Head of Global Enablement

As an enablement professional, it is important to remember the following:

  1. Focus on sales playbook. Content and assets for everyone to be successful.
    – Make sure to have feedback from product, marketing, sales contributors
    – Confirm that the playbook outlines the sales process and content to help throughout each sales stage
  2. Focus on productive technology. For those in the field to do their job: Salesforce, Saleshood, Outreach, Zoom.Focus on the people. How often are you working on continued enablement programs for managers, individual contributors and the collaboration with pre and post sales teams.

Mike Schultz

RAIN Group | President
  1. First, never stop training. Sales training is about changing behavior. This can’t be done in a 2- or 3-day training event and isn’t about one program or another. Sales enablement leaders need to provide ongoing training across a variety of sales skills in order to build a top performing sales team.
  2. Second, they need to provide sales coaching. An effective coach can be the most significant factor in a seller’s success. They motivate sellers, help them build goal and action plans, advise sellers to win deals, and hold sellers accountable. Unfortunately, too many sales coaches either don’t do these things or they don’t do them well and sales performance suffers.
  3. Lastly, building off of sales coaching, sales enablement should help sellers become extremely productive. Forty-three percent of sellers at Top Performing Sales Organizations have the skills to manage their time and day effectively, but only 26 percent of The Rest do. Running Extreme Productivity training and Challenges is a major priority for RAIN Group clients around the globe in 2019.

Michael D. Decker

Medallion Retail | Vice President, Marketing Strategy & Business Development

As a B2B Marketer and Sales pro looking to deliver road tested SQL’s, I employ valuable and consistent content marketing in the form of a weekly blog that simultaneously raises existing prospect awareness and new prospect accessibility on Search.The fun then begins in discerning client perceived “needs” from Vendor provided “solutions” that truly grasp and differentiate.

A great sales team delivers unexpected solutions that go far beyond expectations. This is what’s necessary today as digital solutions evolve at record breaking pace.

A great sales person leverages the advantages of seeing the forest from the trees.

  1. See your Clients real competition.
  2. Understand the gap.
  3. Leverage your product and services to fill it with a tangible and custom solution — seeing is believing.

Germain Brion

Chargebee | Vice President of Sales
  1. We are scaling heavily in 2019. Our biggest enablement pain is to streamline onboarding as we 3x team size. This means we hired someone to “own” onboarding and the LMS roll-out.
  2. The second best practice is to “trust the team,” they can be experts in very niche areas of their trade; by giving them space to share learnings and shine, we encourage a culture of growth and learning and source great ideas.
  3. Finally, we are now doing regular marketing check-ins to ensure the Sales Team has relevant collateral throughout the year.

What Sales Enablement Best Practices Will You Implement in 2019?

There you have it – 18 experts shared the top sales enablement practices to implement in 2019.

Which ones are going to use? Any others you’d add?

Let us know in the comments below.

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7 Ways To Drastically Reduce Your Sales Cycle https://spotio.com/blog/reduce-your-sales-cycle/ https://spotio.com/blog/reduce-your-sales-cycle/#respond Wed, 23 Jan 2019 18:28:47 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=6725 Reducing the length of your sales cycle is vital in order to positively impact your ROI. The faster you get deals through the pipeline, the more opportunities your reps can work on… increasing the number of possible closes. Below are some tips and techniques on how to shorten your sales cycle and get to more commissions, faster.

1 | Understand the Needs and Wants of Your Potential Client

Go to each meeting with a game plan in place. This comes from asking the right questions and understanding the true needs of the prospect.

42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information before making a call.

Two reasons why you want to do this:

  1. Not understanding the needs of your prospect can sabotage the entire deal. Not all prospects are capable of making a quick decision, so if you rush the prospect into a decision, you may close the deal only to have them gain buyer’s remorse and cancel the sale, which can cause the dreaded word: refund.

  2. There’s no one way to reduce the sales cycle. It differs just as your prospects differ in how they process information to make decisions. The only way to shave off some time in the sales cycle is to ask the right questions on the onset to set up the process and get the answers you need to direct the sales to a close.

Tailoring your approach with every prospect, you’ll save time and close more deals.

2 | Schedule The Next Call While On The Phone With The Current Call

A lot of downtime between meeting with a client and closing the deal is usually not needed to make a decision. Most of it is dead time when both sides are just waiting to schedule the next call or in-person appointment. Your best option is to schedule the next call or in-person appointment before you leave the one you’re on.

3 | Agree to a Timeline Early

It’s best to commit to a timeline as early as possible. This will also help reduce the time of the sales cycle. Don’t force the prospect into any agreement, but do  ask the right questions to gauge when you think the prospect will make a decision – assuming they get all of their questions answered.

4 | Address Any Obstacles Up Front

Most sales reps tend to ignore anything that looks like an obstacle instead of addressing it up front. You need to ask the prospect qualifying questions up front to screen them on whether or not they have the buying power, what’s their budget, and/or if there’s any doubt that your solution will work for them.

5 | Be a Tour Guide

Even though you may have been selling the exact same product or service, the prospect you’re in front of has never seen it. Don’t assume how a prospect would like to proceed, give them suggestions on how they might proceed. Take advantage of this by suggesting a roadmap for the process while offering your guidance at every turn. This is known as the Buyer’s Journey.

6 | Map Out The Entire Process in Advance

More than 50% of prospects want to see how your product works on the first call.

It’s important to be a great tour guide and plan on how the process will unfold and anticipate any obstacles. Mapping out the ‘entire’ buying process is important to avoid any obstacles and keep the sales cycle to a minimum. Make sure to ‘connect’ with and meet all of the decision makers, if possible, agreeing to any legal terms and making any amendments to revisions and conditions.

By being a great ‘tour guide’, as mentioned above, you can move the sales cycle along.

7 | A Breakdown of the Buyer’s Journey

Chart showing the evolution of the buyer's journey

Awareness Stage.  The buyer identifies they have a challenge or problem that they want a solution to. They also determine how big of a priority a solution is. In order to understand where your buyer is, you can ask yourself the following questions:

How do buyers describe their goals or challenges?

What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer?

Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge?

How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?

Consideration Stage.  The buyer has clearly defined the goal or challenge and has committed to addressing it. They determine how they want to approach the goal or challenge and the methods available to resolving that goal or challenge. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?

How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?

How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?

How do buyers decide which category is right for them?

Decision Stage.  The buyer has decided on a solution to the goal or challenge by going over pros and cons on what they want to pursue. Questions you can ask yourself in this stage are:

What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings?

When buyers investigate your company’s offering, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? What concerns do they have with your offering?

Who needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ?

Do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it?

Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

Answering these questions will provide a solid foundation of the buyer’s journey and help you reduce your sales cycle.

________

Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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Sources:

https://www.insightsquared.com/2015/05/the-best-way-to-get-your-reps-to-shorten-their-sales-cycle-its-not-what-you-think/

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/what-is-the-buyers-journey

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16 Sales Competencies That Define Winning Sales Teams https://spotio.com/blog/sales-competencies/ https://spotio.com/blog/sales-competencies/#respond Thu, 10 Jan 2019 21:45:37 +0000 https://spotio.com/?p=6452 Employee turnover is expensive. Hiring the best sales professionals is crucial for organizations.

Excellent sales candidates will have a specific set of core sales competencies. It is the manager’s job to uncover these competencies in the interview process.

What makes a great sales candidate?

Sales competencies for sales professionals are shared across the sales team in order to produce the most successful reps. These core competencies span every role on the sales team, from rep to manager.

In this article, we’ll define core sales competencies, discuss why they are critical to the sales and management process.

What Are Sales Competencies?

Sales competencies are the skills successful reps use to influence buying decisions.

These aptitudes are both inherent traits to their personality and skills or processes that can be trained and practiced. Understanding what these select proficiencies are, how they contribute to a sales professional’s success, and how to recognize them in a candidate will make a significant difference in your ability to hire the right people and reduce sales rep turnover.  

3 Core Competency Areas for Any Sales Professional

Whether they are converting inbound sales calls, fighting it out in the field or managing from behind the front-lines, sales professionals need a particular set of foundational skills.

Sales core competencies center around three areas:

1. Systems. How do you get a person from a prospect to a closed deal? Short answer: systems and processes. Systems encompass the ways your processes lead to sales. From prospecting to time management to uncovering new opportunities from established accounts, systems sales core competencies are ways sales reps achieve their goals. Per Rain Sales Training, sales reps should have skill areas that help them drive opportunities, account growth, and ultimately, success.

2. People. Sales is always about people, so reps and managers must have People skills – the ability to lead and manage a conversation, to create emotional engagement, and earn the trust of others.  

3. Sales. All reps need to effectively prospect, manage pipeline, uncover pain, capture benefits, demonstrate product-fit, and negotiate the close.

16 Competencies That Define High-Performing Sales Teams (By Category)

Prospecting
Upselling
Time Management
Plan for Success
Accountable
Ownership
Build Rapport
Lead Conversations
Drive Buying Decisions
Control Emotions
Maintain Positivity
Prospect Consistently
Define Criteria
Build Solutions 
Sell Benefits / Value
Negotiating Prowess

Systems: Competencies that Improve the Sales Process

1. Prospecting

Finding needs in the marketplace keeps the pipeline full of potential customers for new business. It’s essential to research industries, uncover the main friction points, and define the ideal customer profile

Essential attributes for this area would be the ability to comprehend various businesses and the related challenges of the sectors, a talent for asking the right questions, even the tough ones, and, as the sales training experts the Gulas Group says, a focus on getting prospects to “quantify the pain.”

2. Upselling


Reps need to be able to identify opportunities for expansion revenue. For sales managers, this area entails watching the team’s account management approach and training them to incorporate a way of “checking in” with accounts to stay on top of any changes or new opportunities.

Key attributes for this area would be active listening, attention to detail in account management, and knowing what questions to ask when.

3. Time Management

Self-management is a significant factor influencing success in sales because often there is little oversight and accountability for a sales rep’s activity day-to-day. It is incumbent upon the rep and manager alike to keep themselves on task and address each part of the sales process.

Necessary attributes of people accomplished at managing time are that they can communicate how they divide their time between the various stages of the sales cycle and what tools they use to measure their progress toward these goals.

4. Plan for Success


A talent for planning is essential because shows how sales professionals intend to accomplish their goals. Effective planners know the end goal and plan around achieving those goals. An effective planner has a day-to-day breakdown of their time and a way to record progress, as well as the ability to share why it works for them and examples of past successes as a result of their behavior.  

5. Accountable


When it comes to sales competency, the capacity to see how one’s actions create results is a huge predictor of success. People who understand how what they do creates reactions will be successful because they own their process and the results they get with it. Sales professionals who have an aptitude for taking responsibility tend to internalize the blame rather than accuse others. They also accept that it is impossible to control everything, and instead concentrate on managing their actions and reactions to situations. These individuals also recognize that it is okay to fail—even though they would rather succeed.

6. Ownership

Sales competency also includes the concept of owning one’s actions. A person who owns the sale asks tough questions at the appropriate times, knows when to push a deal that is dragging on, and isn’t afraid to get to a fast no. The Gulas Group says, when a sales rep owns the sale, he or she “doesn’t need approval” and gets the job done.

People: Competencies that Build Rapport and Trust

7. Build Rapport

It’s crucial that sales reps and managers know how to create emotional engagement with people and help buyers consider new ideas.

Key Attributes

– Understanding how to help people relax and get comfortable
– Communicate well
– Foster trust with others

In the case of the sales manager, you need to do what you say you will for your team always—a vital element for excellence in leadership—to build trust with your team.

8. Lead Conversations

An essential sales skill is taking control of the conversation when you need to, and knowing when to let the prospect speak.

Some important behaviors for this sales core competency are:

– The awareness to ascertain the comfort-level of the conversation participants and
– The ability to adapt and move forward, particularly when the unexpected occurs

9. Drive Buying Decisions


Sales is about getting people to buy, so knowing how to encourage people to make a purchase is essential. Key attributes in this area are fearlessness when it comes to asking for a yes and the ability to navigate back to an area of opportunity when the answer is no. Also, excellent listening skills are crucial as what a person says in a sales call long before the closing stages tell you what he or she wants to be included before saying “yes.”

10. Control Emotions


A vital core competency of successful sales reps and managers is the emotional intelligence to manage one’s feelings and the feelings of other people.  Controlling emotions requires much self-awareness and self-confidence.

People with strong core competencies in this area show restraint, do not panic, and know what to say or do at the appropriate time.  

11. Maintain Positivity


Sales is a demanding job, and that staying upbeat and optimistic in slow periods is essential to keep hammering on doors and opening new opportunities.

Sales: Competencies to Crush Your Quota

12. Prospect Consistently


Prospecting is a numbers game that fills the sales pipeline with new potential buyers. Successful salespeople recognize that it is a priority to find new accounts, so they set aside time dedicated to discovering them. The behaviors associated with consistent prospecting include awareness of how many calls it takes to find a new prospect, a record of making those calls promptly, and a willingness to learn from mistakes or outcomes of unsuccessful calls.

Sales managers should be monitoring and coaching their teams to dedicate time, energy, and understanding to this vital area of sales competency.

13. Define Criteria

Knowing who will say yes and how much they will buy are critical bits of information to uncover during the discovery phase of the sale process.

Sales professionals effective at discovering the parameters of a sale will spend less time on accounts with the smallest potential and focus instead on the best opportunities. These sales professionals can get past the gatekeeper and speak to the decision maker. Then, they are efficient at finding out the available budget.

14. Build Solutions

Finding a mutually beneficial way to yes is crucial in sales. An essential skill for sales reps and managers is the ability to read a situation and fix any challenges that occur.

For sales reps, this aptitude exhibits in matching the buyer’s pain points to the product’s features and benefits.

For managers, this sales manager competency presents as a talent for uncovering weaknesses in the team’s systems, process, or skills and addressing them with training.

15. Sell Benefits / Value

For reps, sales competency is shown in their ability to not only explain the feature of the product or service, but how it solve their pains. For managers, this manifests in the ability to convince salespeople to adopt their suggestions into their personal sales process.

16. Negotiating Prowess

While presenting value is critical to success, the ability for sales reps to customize the deal for the buyer leads to more sales.

Sales managers must also adjust their expectations to their team’s needs to get the best performance from their sales reps. People who are excellent at negotiation know it means getting mutual agreements in stages, knowing when to hold your ground, and having some wiggle room to get the deal approved ahead of time.

3 Competencies That Don’t Dictate Sales Success

We just covered seventeen sales competencies that are crucial to sales team success for both sales reps and managers. However, there are a few competencies that you should not worry about as much.

In other words, here are three areas you should stop emphasizing:

1. Education: It is natural to assume a person who has achieved many academic successes and a long list of degrees will be excellent at sales. While it is true that the best sales professional candidates should be smart and articulate, they do not have to have excellent grades or a slew of diplomas to be successful sales professionals.  

2. Geniality: Being friendly is a magnificent trait in a person and a co-worker. However, friendliness is not essential to sales success. Does that mean the best candidates are rude and unsociable? Of course not. While sales performance does not necessitate being the prospect’s best friend, it does need the rep to be likable and trustworthy.

3. Thoroughness: In nearly any other job, being a conscientious rule-follower is a plus for success, but not in sales. As we mentioned earlier, sales professionals should be hard workers that use systems, but they should also be flexible and adaptable to the situations as they present themselves.  

Let Sales Competencies Define the Hiring Process

Sales competencies are why salespeople can do what they do. Sales manager competencies are how sales managers get them to do it. Both are the skills and talents the sales professionals have for influencing the behavior of others.

There are core competencies for sales professionals that are critical to the members or potential members of any sales team. These sales core competencies fall within the three areas, which include Systems they use, People skills they have, and Sales mechanics they employ. From time management to leading conversations well to negotiating tactics, the sales competencies list is long and detailed.

However, while the list is long, some common competencies for success in other jobs are not on it. Education, geniality, and thoroughness seem like they would be vital, but experience shows they are not crucial for sales success. That said, having those competencies certainly would not hurt a candidate.

Understanding the key elements that fit within each of the core competencies will make defining job roles and expectations much easier, and ensure you are hiring the most qualified candidates. Perhaps most importantly, employing the most qualified candidates could also make you the least likely to be retaining their replacements in a few months.

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Sources:

Schultz, Mike. “Core Competencies of Successful Sellers.” www.rainsalestraining.com Web 21 November 2018. https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/core-competencies-of-successful-sellers.

“21 Core Competencies of Successful Salespeople.” www.gulasgroup.com. Web. 21 November 2018. http://www.gulasgroup.com/sales-competencies.shtml.

Lawrence, Ph.D., Amy. “5 Competencies to Focus on When Hiring Salespeople.” www.selectinternational.com. Web. 26 November 2018. http://www.selectinternational.com/blog/5-competencies-to-focus-on-when-hiring-salespeople.

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