High Performance Sales | Blog

Everyone wants to sell their offerings for more, but sales teams are continually torn between the corporate message “we need to sell value; what we offer is worth more than what we're getting” versus the customer message “we can’t spend that” or "your competitor's price was better."

Here’s the reality. Value selling is hard. It’s very doable, and quite frankly, it's the right thing to do, unless you want to erode margins to the point of zero profitability. But to do it right, you’ve got to face seven hard truths head on.

I spend a lot of time interviewing sales leaders to diagnose their sales challenges. The number one theme I hear? Their teams don’t know enough about their customers. They don’t ask the right questions, don’t ask enough questions, and don’t apply what they learn to sell more.

Typically, my question back to them is, “So what are you doing about it?” I’m a firm believer that teams will rise to the expectations of their leaders, but those expectations need to be clear, succinct, and consistently applied and measured.

I also know that it takes 30 to 60 days of consistent focus to change behavior (the behavior of the sales professional AND the leader). Widespread, long-term change is daunting, though, so, here is my challenge to you… Take a 60-Day Sales Discovery Challenge with your team.

Whenever I work with a group of salespeople, I notice one prevailing theme.  They love to interact with each other and share ideas.  When we give salespeople an activity that involves sharing their experiences and asking for feedback from their peers, the level of engagement and enthusiasm skyrockets... especially when teams are dispersed and are working remotely and virtually. To build on that, most surveys that we receive post sales training show that the sellers want more opportunities to share with and learn from their peers.

If sellers love collaboration and learning from each other, shouldn't sales leaders be running their teams to foster these dynamics?

We know many sellers who are about to bust down the doors of their home offices … craving the ability to shake a (sanitized) hand and engage with more than a head on Zoom.  Unfortunately, this may not be possible for a while longer.

See our 9 steps for improving virtual sales calls in a handy infographic.

What if TODAY, during this crazy pandemic, is the day that you create a customer for life?

If you’ve sold to small or mid-sized businesses, you’ve inevitably run into THAT customer who isn’t going to buy from you no matter how low you drop your price or how superior your offering is.  This customer is fully dedicated to one supplier because that company helped his business in a fundamental way – either by helping him get his start, or saving him from a fate that threatened his business.  He has relentless loyalty and implicit trust in this supplier.

What if TODAY is the day you create this kind of loyalty with customers? Not just “right now” loyalty, but enduring loyalty that your customers will talk about 5 or 10 years from now? The kind of loyalty that gets you out of the price game and into the value game?

What if today’s unprecedented circumstances could actually help us to build stronger relationships with our customers? What if today, when faced with insurmountable barriers like quarantine and social distancing, we could actually get to know our customers better and be the type of sellers we always say that we want to be – the type of sellers who genuinely care about our customers’ success, who empathize with their challenges, and who bring vital information that is insightful and highly relevant to the situation our customers face today? But how?

The general presumption among sellers has long been that if you really want to develop relationships, you have to get face-to-face. While we find that many sellers interact with their customers over email, text, and phone, they really rely on those face-to-face moments in the office or over lunch to build strong relationships. But maybe today, when we take away the “easy” part, we’re actually left with what really matters… it’s not the lunch or the warm smile and firm handshake (Yikes! Where’s the sanitizer? Will we ever do that again?), it’s the trust and the value that really matter… that’s what builds and sustains a firm foundation.  We can build solid relationships remotely… in fact, we might even be able to do it better – we just have to adjust our approach.

The fundamentals don’t change. We believe there are 4 key components – We call them the 4 R’s: Be Relevant, Be Real, Be Relatable, and Be Reliable.

I admit it, I was that kid in school.  I sat in the front row, and I generally had my hand raised.  I studied every night and wouldn’t dream of coming to school unprepared.  Straight As were important to me, and I would do anything to keep my teachers or parents from seeing me unprepared or not in “straight A” form… 

Fast forward a few years (okay maybe more than a few), and I’ve had a realization working with a lot of awesome “type A” sales professionals … the real world of B2B sales is not at all about getting straight A’s – it’s about getting numbers on the board, and many of the things you have to do to win are completely contrary to straight A habits.

Walking away from the biggest opportunity you’ve had all year?  Walking away from an opportunity where you’ve already invested weeks or months cultivating the relationships and building your proposal?  Taking yourself out of the game?  For most sales professionals, these are some of the hardest decisions to make; However… they can be the decisions that make or break your year. 

They can be the decisions that keep you from wasting time on opportunities that aren’t real, investing valuable resources on opportunities you can’t win regardless of how awesome your pitch is, or spending countless business development dollars on a deal that will ultimately be discounted to the point it is barely profitable.

Why do sellers waste time on questionable pursuits and how do we focus them on the right deals?

The value proposition. It’s at the core of everything we sell, right? Value propositions come in many varieties, but essentially they are the statements that say, “You need what we have to offer, and we are uniquely positioned to sell it to you.” We’ve seen the statistics that tell us how important clear value propositions are to buyers… But is the value proposition statement alone enough?

So you need to train your sales force, but you want to minimize their time out of the field. eLearning is the perfect answer, right? In today’s world of cost and performance pressure, eLearning can easily become the silver bullet to “check the box” on sales training. After all, IBM saved $200 million, a 2/3 savings, by adopting a virtual training program for its employees (Source: IRRODL). But beware… you can easily make a significant investment that won’t move the needle as much as you think.

The other day I was sitting near a friend who had to complete “mandatory eLearning” on a new trend his company was trying to position with clients. As someone who is generally on the other end of these courses (the designing and building of them), I was fascinated by his running commentary. I listened to a few of the videos and heard some of his frustrations along the way, and it crystallized my perspective that there are some right and wrong ways to do eLearning.