April newsletter

Emma: The Sales Manager’s view

As an industry, we often face some tough price negotiations, especially from the larger customers. Over the years, I have noticed that salespeople have an inbuilt instinct to want to give discounts. There is a misconception among many of them that buyers have all the power. This year, I have been laying the ground work with my team to put us in a stronger position for when these moments arise. The quote from Alice Walker says it all for me:

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

So, we have been doing workshops on our key accounts to map our power. What I have seen is that once the sales team is aware of their power, they find it much easier to say no to requests for discounts. How do you map power then? I definitely recommend “Negotiation for Purchasing Professionals” by Jonathan O’Brien. Seeing as he trains professional buyers, I figured it was a great place to start!

Here are some questions I get the team to work through:

1. How dependent is our customer on our product?
2. How easy is it for them to change?
3. How good is our reputation for excellent service?
4. How strong are our relationships across multiple contact points?
5. How can we use time to our advantage?

If we find accounts where we have very little power, we have an action plan to steadily improve that over time. It’s a bit like the Chinese proverb:

“When is the best time to plant a tree? Either 20 years ago, or today!”

The sooner we make a start, the sooner we will create more power.

Tips from the Frontline

Recent research published in the International Journal of Sales Transformation (Dr Simon Kelly et al – Q3 2019) identifies 3 emerging key competencies for the modern sales person:

1. The ability to execute company / marketing strategies.
2. The ability to connect the dots from customer needs to company solutions.
3. Balanced advocacy (on behalf of customers).

Based on in-depth interviews with C-level executives, the research gives a clear focus for activities that we can focus on in sales.

At a higher level, when sales teams can truly execute a sales / marketing strategy, it gives a company a powerful competitive advantage: We call such organisations “agile sales organisations” because they can re-direct their sales teams quickly to target certain products to specific customers.

Sales managers can build ‘agile organisations’ by paying attention to these areas:

1. Robust KPIs that show if a strategy is being lived.
2. Regular, effective behavioural & pipeline coaching to help salespeople change and sell new products / services.
3. Fast, responsive sales enablement: Giving salespeople the tools and training they need to follow a strategy in time.
4. Effective knowledge sharing: Reducing the sales learning curve by rapidly identifying best practices and diffusing them to the sales team.

A good read

With the rather misleading title of “Success in Selling: Developing a world-class sales ecosystem” by Reza Sisakhti, is in fact a fantastic resource for competency assessment in sales. If you want to carry out a very robust assessment of sales capability and capacity, this is the book for you. With very many examples of actual competency profiles across a broad range of sales roles, it gives practical processes to build your own competency profiles and use them to good effect for training, coaching and recruiting.

Trending: Struggling to find a fun event for your sales team?

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, we were planning a Gin Tasting. This took place In March when we had our first ever virtual gin tasting client event. It was a huge success and a fabulous way to start a training programme. The participants really appreciated it as it was the next best thing to getting together in person. The Little Gin Company did an amazing job of organising the event, Nicola our host was perfect as was their unique gin made in Stratford upon Avon and their very unusual tonics. They also did non-alcoholic gins where required. So, if you are looking for a fun, informative virtual event, whether it’s for a corporate event or friends & family then we can thoroughly recommend The Little Gin Company.

Our back yard

We are really excited to have a new associate for 2021. Suzy Hunt has 14 years’ experience in sales & sales management and is also a qualified coach & certified DISC practitioner, so she is a great asset to the team. We are already working with Suzy on a major sales improvement project, and we look forward to many more.

You can find out more about Suzy and the rest of our team here.

We are very proud of our strong associate network and we have been chosen again to run Warwick Business School’s legendary ‘Business in Practice’ programme for 2021. This will involve 16 of us training a fully global group virtually on 2 consecutive days.

Our team is based across Europe, Asia and America, so if you are looking to organise a global sales event with impact in multiple languages, do get in touch.

 

Posted on April 20, 2021 | By selling | Posted in Sales excellence Insights