Sales Training Tips!
One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is weak and unqualified sales pipelines / funnels. Sales leaders are pushing their people to prospect constantly. But the struggle persists.
The most common reasons many fail with prospecting are; fear; lack of know-how, lack of desire.
Making matters worse are the sales managers who enable the excuse making by allowing fear or a lack of enthusiasm for prospecting to become the accepted culture on their teams. Brutal. Sales managers write me for help cbennett62@shaw.ca
Prospecting is mandatory not optional.
Developing and maintaining an enthusiastic, optimistic, whatever it takes attitude is vital to success. I talk more about how to begin building that here.
No one is coming to rescue your attitude. If it is crummy fix it. You are 100% responsible.
Your sales training winning approach for successful prospecting & rapid pipeline growth:
- Vanilla vs. Compelling Value. Is your approach focused on pitching value props and products (vanilla, boring) or about arresting their attention, being helpful and learning more (Compelling Value)?
- Forget about you. They don’t care about you. Really they don’t. Don’t talk about yourself.
- Your # 1 job is to uncover a goal they want to achieve or a problem they are efforting to fix right now, and then book a discovery meeting.
Two winning approaches:
1. Be a name dropper
We helped so and so do something great, can I show you next week?
Hi it’s CB from Peak Performance. 007 company was able to increase their managed services and cloud pipeline by 105% using a simple question nobody thinks to ask. In 5 months it resulted in $21 million in new booked sales. How open would you be to seeing how they did that?
Hi it’s ______ from _____. ______ Company was able to ____________ by ________ using ____________. In 5 months it resulted in ____________. How open would you be to seeing how they did it?
If leaving a v mail then I say the above and add this at the end.
I’m CB sorry we did not connect. I’ll reach out to you again in the future. In the interim if you want to grow pipeline faster and see what 007 company did I’m at 604 789 5678
The magic:
- You hopefully dropped a name they recognize and respect.
- You focused on a business result that is very important to them. (pipeline up 105%, significant new sales booked)
- You have vital insider knowledge (a secret) they need to know.
2. The new stuff
a) There seems to be a big push right now to sell cloud, managed services and MRR. How are you ramping up to sell more of it?
or
b) I have the newest way to sell cloud and mgd services. When would you like to see how?
The goal is to break their pre-occupation with their task at hand and begin a conversation. Find some type of difficulty or struggle and then book the discovery meeting.
REALITY CHECK
Obviously nothing I can teach you will work on every call. These tactics will only increase your odds of getting more meetings. So, if today you book 4 meetings per 50 calls where you actually speak to a person using these tactics you can expect to double or triple that. 8 or 12 meetings per 50 calls that connects with a person. A 100% increase in your effectiveness is profitable.
FOLLOW UP OR LOSE
The last sales training tip in this post is follow up. 80% of all sales are made after the 5th follow up. So keep good records, and follow up with a different approach, different value, and different examples each time until you get your discovery meeting booked.
In summary:
- Weak, unqualified pipeline and sales funnel is sadly common.
- Developing a winning attitude around prospecting is the FIRST key to your success.
- No one cares about you, your value prop, company or products. Do not bring them up.
- Identify a goal or problem they want to make progress on now. Book the discovery meeting.
- Follow up at least 5 times or lose.
If you want yourself or your team to build and maintain a pipeline that crushes quota predictably and consistently reach out to me here to talk about a customized approach for yourself / your team.
Rock and roll sales pros!
