Every Sales organization spends significant amount of resources in designing a new sales process or in aligning an exiting one to their customers buying process, in training their sales teams to sell using a certain type of sales methodology. A well defined sales process is a must to have, it helps and guides the sales reps to move forward, it helps the sales managers to measure and manage sales activities, to focus their attention on what matters most, is allowing them to ask the right questions and offer constructive feedback, to drive desired behaviors and sales performance.
But having one process and using one methodology is enough? Having one emergency plan for all types of emergencies is efficient?
As we all know, a sales rep has more than one objective to achieve, he has to up-sell, to sell new products, to gain new types of customers, to address a certain industry or to prolong an existing collaboration. In the same time he has to be proactive in contacting different customers with different objectives or reactive in responding to a complaint or to a cancellation request. In proactive selling they follow their sales process and they use a consultative approach to identify or create a problem or a pain, they focus on how they can match a certain product and on making value propositions, but in reactive selling they (have to) follow their customer buying process as they already made their homework and the early sales stages are already burned.
According to numerous studies, nowadays “buyers are 57% to 90% of their way through their decision journey before they’re ready to speak to sales reps“ and when that happens they are lucky if they were called first, as customers usually speak to more than one provider before making a final decision. Therefore, the situation is completely different and quite complex. In cases like this, is not efficient to spend time in developing a need or discovering a problem, to spend time in showing the implication or the impact inside the organization or to call for a certain action. The problem or the pain is already there, a decision to purchase has already been made, so they need to focus on understanding the evaluation and decision making criteria, they need to focus on differentiators and USPs, they need to be prepared and know their competition strengths and weaknesses.
Along our projects we’ve seen to many times situations where sales reps were asking their managers for help – “chief, I have this customer that…what should I do?”, we’ve seen to many situations where, in front of their customers, the sales reps were panicking as they didn’t know how to handle a situation which was new or different than the one they were prepared, we’ve seen to many managers spending lots of hours advising their team members on how to handle or respond in different customer scenarios’- we call this continuous on-boarding.
Preparing sales teams for different sales scenarios doesn’t necessarily guarantee the success for every situation but for sure will increase their efficiency, will bust their confidence, will help them to fight not flight.
Sales Force Readiness is the key to maximise their success.
Felix Dumitrica