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How much training should I give my sales team?

November 18, 2010 in Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Planning, Sales Training

Highly effective sales people and teams do not happen by chance.  A study by Aberdeen Group (2009) of 8,500 top performing companies with a turnover in excess of $50 million, showed that the highest performing of these in each of their industries provided their sales teams with no less than 8 days of focussed sales training per year, and this did not include product training.

Another Aberdeen Group Productivity report (2008) showed that top-performing sales organisations were 24% more likely than all other companies to either have in place, or have short-term plans to implement, formal sales training methodologies.

It is plausible that larger businesses can afford to, and do invest in, the development of their sales teams on a more consistent basis.  Usually supported by Learning & Development departments, access to the latest research and training providers, corporates and larger businesses can appear to have the upper hand when it comes to highly skilled sales and service teams.

Providing regular and quality training and coaching can prove to be a challenge for smaller businesses.  Finding the time to take your sales team out of the field to train them, getting access to quality, customised training content and quality trainers at an affordable price is problematic.  Too many ‘off the shelf’ sales programs aren’t usually flexible enough to meet most sales teams’ requirements and are often limited to simple transactional sales interactions or motivational ‘rah rah’ sessions.  However, for many SME sales teams to compete head to head with the skills of larger businesses they need to be trained in more complex selling skills and processes which include:

  • Sales and account planning
  • Prospecting skills and strategies
  • Consultative/diagnostics selling skills
  • Negotiation skills
  • Interpersonal communication skills
  • Public speaking, pitching and presentation skills
  • Account management and development
  • Business acumen
  • Deal making and proposal/tender writing
  • Self or time management
  • Self awareness, resilience and insight

So how can SME’s continue to develop the skills, knowledge and mindset of their sales teams even though they do not have the resources of a major corporate?  We need to be clever about creating a continuous learning environment in SME’s. Here are a few tips:

  1. Think about what standard you need your sales and customer service people to be operating at.  This will help you determine the type of training you need to provide them with.
  2. Assess what you feel confident delivering in-house and what you need to access from qualified, external providers.  Research your external providers and make sure they deliver practical, competency based training that can be taught and transferred to others.
  3. Map out a 12 month learning plan which provides regular learning sessions and has clear learning outcomes so you can check progress and skills and knowledge development.  Not all of your training need be full day workshops.  The best value is gained from ‘mini’ sessions of 30 minutes to 1 hour run regularly (fortnightly or at least every 4 weeks) interspersed with more formal classroom learning i.e. between 1-4 days per year on key topics where you need formal instruction.
  4. The mini learning sessions can focus on specific topics.  A great way to include everyone and create accountability for learning, is to allocate topics to your sales and customer service people and have each of them select a topic they will research and present to the team.  This helps you spread the learning load whilst giving your people the chance to practice their presentation skills.  Rotate these sessions amongst your sales team. Make sure the environment is supportive and constructive to encourage rather than discourage participation.
  5. Reading material is in abundance.  Giving your people access to free sales articles, such as the ones I write, can be used to assist further learning.  Many of our clients’ sales managers use these sales articles to aid their sales team development.  Whether they send it out as a topic to read or use the topic as a point for discussion in their sales meeting, they are creating a continuous learning environment.
  6. If you are going to invest in external development, a critical area is sales management and coaching.  This can have the greatest return on investment for you and your sales team in terms of their professional development.  Between 60-70% of a sales managers time should be devoted to people development.  We suggest you get yourself or your sales managers professionally trained as sales coaches and trainers.  For instance, we have built a Sales Leader’s Tool Kit which includes sales coaching field guides and mini skill, drill learning sessions that sales managers can run with their sales teams on a regular basis.  This equips them to run structured, well planned sessions, and aids the development of your sales teams and shows your commitment to their ongoing development.

SME’s don’t need to be left behind when it comes to having high performing sales and customer service teams.

Continuous learning is a conscious choice and does not happen by accident.  Whether you have access to large sums of money or not you can create a viable learning environment and continue to enhance the capabilities of your sales and service teams.

Start with the end in mind –sales mastery is a way of life not a fad.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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Planning for 2011

November 11, 2010 in Marketing, Sales Planning, Sales Research, Sales Training

Budgeting and developing strategy for 2011 should be near the top of your ‘to-do’ list right now or be bedded down already.  People complain about being too busy and never having enough time, however if you do not make time for regular planning you will let everyone down.

Make time to work on:

  • Forecasting
  • Evaluating staff hiring and implementing staff development plans
  • Ensuring that your marketing calendar is planned through to June 2011 at a minimum

Right now we are working with several clients on their sales plans for 2011 as well as planning out their 2011 sales training schedule.

Here are several ideas for you to consider.  The questions below should be handed to each of your management team and each person should prepare their answers.  Ask them not to be soft in their responses, and to set aside some quiet time to apply the appropriate amount of thoughtful reflection and analysis in compiling their individual answers.  Have everyone compare their responses with the rest of the team at your next management meeting.  You may even like to reward authentic and well constructed ideas.

  1. What went well in the past 12 months?
  2. What did not work or go well?
  3. What are the key drivers influencing our market, our customers and our competitors?
  4. What are the key metrics that are giving us the right information?
  5. What are the risks we are facing internally and externally?
  6. What are the opportunities or ideas that could lead to better business growth, client retention and increased market share?
  7. What are the factors we know we will be facing in 2011?
  8. What are the assumptions we are making about the market in 2011?
  9. What were the assumptions we made in 2010?  Did they hold true and are they still true?

We use these questions and many more during our strategic sessions with clients and with ourselves to help everyone get on the same page and build a vision for each organisation.

A Best Practice hint: set a date!  For example, by 17 December 2010 all budgets, compensation plans and marketing programs must be completed.  This will keep everyone working towards that deadline.  That is what we will be doing at Barrett to ensure we are well set up for 2011.    Special thanks to John Garrido, our Director of Sales, for bringing this article to light.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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How can we learn from our best sales performers?

November 4, 2010 in Sales Leadership, Sales Talent, Sales Training

How do we get the rest of our sales team learning from our top performers?  Should we get our top sales performer in front of our sales team to teach them how to be more effective?

Well that all depends…

  • How well does that top sales performer understand how and why they sell well?
  • Can they articulate what they do in a step by step process?
  • Can they teach to the others in a simple and meaningful way?
  • Do they want to teach others?

The reality is that most top sales performers are unaware of what makes them ‘good’ which in turn makes it really hard for them to transfer and teach what they know and do to others.  So how do we capture their talent, knowledge, skill or wisdom?

Job Design
One way of teaching our sales people what our best performers do is to first profile these sales superstars by using a Job Design process to map the core capabilities or competencies of top sales performers.  By mapping the core capabilities or competencies of our best sales performers we make explicit the behaviours expected for effective performance in the role, and these behaviours can be easily observed in selection, development planning and performance assessment contexts.

Sadly, many organisations use generic capability or competency definitions for profiling, development and succession planning of their people if they use anything at all.  However, our research has revealed that these generic competency definitions are often too generalised and not relevant to specialised roles such as sales.  This drastically diminished their usefulness in performance development, coaching, talent management and so on.

A Job Design process can provide very specific behavioural criteria for all levels of sales and service roles.  Once mapped, they can be implemented into recruitment kits, performance management systems, coaching, succession planning and induction processes.

Video Role Modelling
Another way is to video tape our top sales performers performing true to life role plays where they can demonstrate their sales capabilities across the sales spectrum.  This works most effectively when we have a sales process that can be followed and the sales people we want to teach can see the process in action and how it’s supposed to be done via the video.  If we then combine this with capabilities developed from the Job Design process, those sales people we want to teach can see the behavioral markers being applied for themselves.

And besides, positioned properly, it’s great kudos for the top sales performers and can really be an aspirational target for sales people to aim for.  If you are fortunate to have a team large enough to have several top performers, video tape them all and make them available to your team.  Kath Podnar, GM Sales for Jeans West, knows how effective this can be.  This forms a part of their ongoing education of their front line staff, is easy to set up and inexpensive to do.

Modelling good sales capability is like learning to dance.  We watch the dance moves performed by an experienced dancer while listening to the rhythm, and then we try it out for ourselves and practice, practice, practice.

Making clear and explicit the behaviours you expect to be applied in a sales role is key.  Linking them to a clear sales process and giving people examples of others who can model and apply the desired behaviours and process well helps people learn more effectively.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

October 27, 2010 in Ethics & Values, Procurement, Sales Skills, Value Creation

I recently had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the 6th CIPS Australasia Annual Conference for the procurement profession.  It was my third invitation to speak at a CIPSA event in my capacity as a professional representing the sales profession.  The theme for this conference was ‘Managing Volatility’.  A key message I gleaned from the conference was Value Management rather than the narrow band width of Cost Management.

Don’t get me wrong, the Procurement Profession is still interested in cost, however, there was a distinct awareness about ‘cheap being a false economy’.  While it was important that it look to secure supply, and at the same time reduce total supply cost, it was not after ‘cheap’.

At the ‘Pricing Insight’ session, one of the many sessions I attended over the two days, the famous Warren Buffett quote: “Price is what you pay … Value is what you get.” defined the issue.

Many of the procurement professionals in the ‘Pricing Insight’ session commented on the stupid pricing games played by sales people and their companies.  They still found that too many sales people were product fixated rather than business oriented, and defaulted to unnecessary price wars at the expense of developing real value propositions.  When something was offered up as very cheap, the procurement professionals were concerned about the guarantee of supply and quality of the offering.  They did not want to buy ‘cheap’.

Contrary to the popular myth that all procurement people want to negotiate down to the lowest price, the procurement profession is far more sophisticated than most sales people give them credit for.  The sales profession is doing itself a disservice if it pitches the ‘Us versus Them’ scenario when it comes to dealing with procurement.

The procurement profession is learning its lessons too.  We cannot deny that there has been a climate in the past of procurement focusing on cost management only, and maybe some lingering effects still exist in some industries.  However, they are learning that supply and demand are inextricably linked and not managing these issues well can cause greater costs and harm to their organisations and industries.

Take for example the European auto manufacturing industry.  Prof Dr Nicolas Reinecke, a world expert on Procurement, cited how recently the major European car manufacturers had to bail out the world’s largest manufacturer of bumper bars to the tune of $100M because a climate of reducing prices by 1-2% every year finally sent the business into bankruptcy.  What that auto industry had to learn was that they nearly killed off the only major quality supplier by being short sighted and self centred, as their own cost management behaviours had made it near impossible for other equivalent auto suppliers to exist.  Bailing out this bumper bar business cost the industry much more than if they had have worked in a sustainable partnership model that allowed all parties to continue trading in a healthy manner.

David Noble, Chief Executive of CIPS worldwide, says that the volatile environment is the new norm and being near sighted about cost management only will harm everyone.  The key differentiator, he states, is the Supply Chain as it touches all corners of the organisation and is the face of the enterprise.  He commented that Value Add is increasingly generated external to the enterprise and that strong supply chains need to be fast, flexible and robust with the ability to control risk and environment.

The Supply Chain efficiency is increasingly seen as the key differentiator in business with the majority of value add in an enterprise coming from outside the organisation’s boundaries.

Sixty percent of major corporations now have Procurement and Supply at the top table with the world globalisation, recessions and environment all sitting squarely in the procurement space.  David states that, the spotlight is on their profession and volatility is at the heart of supply chain management.  Controlling volatility and managing value gives an organisation a huge competitive edge.

We are witnessing a quickening in the development, thinking and sophistication of the Procurement Profession – they are definitely on the front foot.  They realise that they do not have to make negotiation a part of every sale – it is not about being adversarial for the sake of it.

The Procurement Profession has access to more information than ever before.  Most clients know what they are after even if they don’t know how to articulate it.  Today, clients expect to communicate and deal with a real professional who knows their own business and how they can best serve their clients’ needs with creative solutions and fresh ideas.

They don’t expect to be coerced, bullied, tricked or intimidated into buying.  They don’t expect to be treated like an idiot by sales people who just talk at them and flash brochures or product sheets.  Nor do they necessarily want to make ‘friends’ with sales people.

Clients, especially the procurement profession, are now after ‘business people’ who can sell, think about possibility and take information to the imagination phase.  They are looking for partners to help them map a pathway forward into the future.

As a sales profession, we need to be keeping pace with the procurement profession and rather than working against procurement we need to work with them in a spirit of cooperation where we can manage value together.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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Are you ready for Sustainable Selling?

October 21, 2010 in Ethics & Values, Procurement, Sales Relationships, Strategy, Value Creation

Sustainable Selling was voted by you as the number 10 Sales Trend for 2010.  With the green agenda comes Sustainable Selling.  More and more questions are being asked by many about how we can best manage this relationship now and for future generations?

I recently attended and spoke at the 6th CIPS Australasia Annual Conference (peak industry body for the Procurement Profession) where Sustainability was well and truly on the agenda.  The conference theme, ‘Managing Volatility’, had a range of national and international speakers presenting on how we manage and guarantee supply in an ever changing, often unpredictable world.  The key topic, which everything seemed to revolve around, was about managing value rather than only managing cost.  The messages I received was that the Procurement Profession wants to encourage real, measurable value, trust, transparency, substance, and ethical selling and procurement practices which discourages excessive consumption and greed.  The focus was on forging legitimate business relationships which serve the environment, people, businesses and communities.  ‘We are all in this together’ was the point that I resonated with.

Taking the lead from the CIPSA conference, other forward thinking professional bodies and emerging business practices such as Fair Trade, if we are to meet the needs of the present (economic, environmental and social) without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, we need to engage in Sustainable Selling practices which support the concept of Sustainable Development as part of our strategy moving forward.

The Brundtland Report that formalised ideas around Sustainable Development provides the basis for practical application of the principles of sustainability in the real world.  Sustainable Development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs.

Cradle to Cradle Design is one example of some clever thinking and action around sustainable development.  Cradle to Cradle Design is a biomimetic approach to the design of systems.  It models human industry on nature’s processes in which materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms.  It suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and synthetic materials.   Put simply, it is a holistic economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free.  The model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many different aspects of human civilisation such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems.

Sustainable Selling, I propose therefore, is made up of ethical selling principles, ideas, values and practices which values trust, transparency, substance, community, the environment and healthy profits while discouraging the exploitation of people and resources, excessive consumption and greed.  Sustainable Selling recognises that everybody lives by selling something and that selling is about the principle of exchange – the sustainable exchange of ideas, innovations, products, tools, concepts, feelings, money and value.

The focus is on creating Sustainable Selling business cultures by encouraging and training all people in sustainable selling and business principles and skills so they can forge legitimate business relationships which serve the environment, people, business and communities.

Take the Victorian Government and VECCI initiative Carbon Compass which was launched in April 2010.  Carbon Compass is a place where small and medium businesses can find knowledge, share information and get practical advice on how to reduce their carbon footprint.  The website has been developed to help us understand what carbon is and where it exists in our businesses.  It is designed to help us make our businesses more sustainable.  The carbon, climate change and sustainability solutions they host have been recommended by businesses for businesses.

At Barrett, we recognise the importance of minimising the impact of the way we do business.  We have a continuous improvement approach and have developed a purchasing and recycling strategy and sustainability checklist amongst other things – our goal is to live and work with a cradle to cradle mindset.  As one of our initial steps, we have signed up to Carbon Compass as well and find it a great resource.

However, our vision for Sustainable Selling extends beyond the day to day operations of our business.  On a broader business perspective, at Barrett we are in the process of developing the Sustainable Selling Manifesto & Charter where we are inviting individuals and companies to contribute to its formation.

Following on from our vision extends to the creation of a tribe or community of businesses and business people who subscribe to the Sustainable Selling Charter which would lead to the subsequent opportunity for businesses to do business with other Sustainable Selling Partners.

The Sustainable Selling Charter & Practices would support the concept of Sustainable Development and Cradle to Cradle initiatives which provides practical applications of the principles of sustainability in the real world.

Sustainable Selling is not a fixed state of harmony but rather an evolving process in which the application of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are balanced with future as well as present needs.  2010 and beyond will be about putting eco into sales.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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