Don’t let your sales team go on an appointment without great sales tools!

1.) Make sure they know how to whiteboard – forget about Power Point Presentations unless it’s a large group

2.) Have competitive information in everyone’s hands and in your sales toolbox – keep it updated

3.) FAQs

4.) Pitches

5.) Marketing Brochures

6.) Press Releases

7.) Whitepapers

8.) Best Customer Stories

9.) Product Specs

10.)Financial Data

11)Research Reports

12)Internal Contact Sheet (executives, service professionals, customer service)

 

STEVE JOBS BUSINESS MATRA

A recent post of mine ask the question: Does The World Begin And End with Engineers, Sales, Or Marketing? Depending on who your senior management team is and their experience in life you will get a different answer every time. But as I stated in the post, it takes a team effort to win and all have to be respected. I think that the Steve Jobs interview on 60 minutes makes for a good listen. Steve says that his model for business is the Beatles because as a group of four they kept “all the negative tendencies in check, they balanced each other out”. “The total was greater than the sum of the parts”. “Great things in business are done by a team of people”.

So to my mind we always must think that all talents matter.  As you garner more experience outside your own area of expertise, you grow and gain additional expertise in other areas that help you become more understanding of how to do what you do and at being a better manager.

How to lose your best sales person

The number one way to lose your best salesperson is to offer them the job of sales manager without any sales management/leadership training. If you’ve familiar with any of my earlier posts or my podcast on the subject, you know this is one of my pet peeves.

It’s a fact that a very high percentage of first time sales managers fail miserably within the first six months on the job. Yet, companies continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. DAH!!! This is not rocket science – stop hitting your executive heads against the wall and help yourselves and your BEST salespeople by getting them training months before they take the position and keep up the training for as long as needed. I’m ranting about this because I’ve just heard about several failures that did not have to happen.

To see why they fail, check out my post titled: “Top 10 Mistakes New Sales Managers Make “

Top 10 Mistakes New Sales Managers Make

1. Not knowing how to coach and evaluate

2. Not stepping out of the sales role as a manager but instead making sales calls with a salesperson and taking over the job of selling to the prospect.

3. Inability to manage time for management tasks including administrative, financial, personnel, sales management & marketing

4. Inability to train sales team

5. Hiring the wrong sales people (no technique developed, no knowledge of what to look for in a good fit)

6. Still trying to be one of the guys with the team

7. Not buying into managements objectives

8. Not getting rid of non-performers in time

9. Not knowing how to manage disruptive and troublesome sales people

10. Not clearly defining goals and measuring results

HOLD BACK AND LET THE SALES PERSON DO THE SELLING

Are you the type that takes over when going on a sales call with a member of your team?  You just can’t help yourself, you have to butt in and take control. Do you find yourself doing this frequently? If you do, you need to keep reading this post because by taking control your sales people can’t improve and you’ll wind up de-motivating, making them dependent on you and worse – you’ll fail in the end.  The only time you should have to take control in a sales meeting is when the sales person gets into trouble or ask for your help.

I’ve seen it happen over and over where the sales manager manages to make the client and the salesperson dependent on them in-order to close the deal.  In many cases, a salesperson never learns to close properly because this type of manager can’t lead properly.   Frequently, this type of sales manager fails to make the company goals because they are doing all the selling themselves and the quota is based on a team effort not a single person. You often find this style of managing with people who were the major producers before being made sales manager.  These types frequently need to be coached in letting go, leading and mentoring. If this sounds like you or someone you know or if your about to manage a sales team – ask your management to pay for a coach who can guide and mentor you away from this behavior. 

Does the world begin and end with engineers, sales, or marketing?

How familiar are you with the senior management of companies in technology that think the world begins and ends with engineers only? On the other hand, how familiar are you with CEOs and Presidents that think that sales or marketing are the keystones of the company? If your like me you’ve worked for all of the above and found that attitudes can get out of hand.

I generally find that all too often a lack of respect for what the other does creates the problem and having a senior management team that focuses on a particular group often creates the framework for the attitudes. The people who know that they are “special” will take advantage and get focused on their own areas of expertise and think they have all the answers. In my opinion, you need to take the bull by the horns and let everyone know that while there are always people who excel at particular areas of expertise it still takes the entire teams effort to win.

If your a senior sales executive, it’s critical that you and your sales team understand the organization that you work for and it’s culture and do your best to sell your internal constituency as well as the external. Everyone needs to communicate about their part of the business and how it interfaces with the other parts – learn what everyone does and how it fits into the overall picture. Everyone needs to be heard and respected.  If others don’t see sales as “special” but as a “necessary evil” don’t give in to negativity. Keep reinforcing the need for the entire team to be on board. No matter which area the CEO comes from, don’t let sales people get out of control, request only positivity.

Technology Sales

Technology Sales Teams

If your team sells software, hardware or IT services to the enterprise you will need to focus and refocus them on why people buy tech anything. Today, just to get noticed you have to offer something of real value. “Value” is a tricky word since it means different things to different prospects – sales people need to understand the prospect and what “value” means to them. Sounds simple but unfortunately it can get complicated if team members don’t get it, don’t stick to the plan or worse never got the right message in the first place.

As a sales manager you will want to work closely with marketing to establish key values that you’ve identified your prospects look for and see that they are easily conveyed across all forms of communications. If you’ve been in technology for any length of time, you know that technology executives tend to place value around reliability, scalability, compatibility, security, productivity, and costs. Your sales team really must understand all of these and which of these is most important to their buyer and tie it to your solution. Everyone in the organization must be on the same page – especially sales.