One important fact to remember when thinking about sales training is that there is a big difference between individual selling skills and sales prospecting. Training to “sell” is about how a person interacts with a singular customer. Training to “prospect” is about how to find qualified, potential, new customers.
- At first it can be tough to discern where prospecting stops and selling starts.
- One of the reasons for high failure rates among salespeople is the blurring of these two issues.
- Not only are prospecting and selling two distinctly different disciplines, each is suited to a certain group of personal skills that are, in many personalities, polar opposite in nature.
- By looking for the one person who can “do it all,” companies seek a rare find and end up asking too much of individuals.
Ultimately, the better the prospect is, the easier the sale. Even a mediocre salesperson can sell a well qualified, interested prospect. But the best salesperson in the world may not be able to sell or keep a lousy prospect on the books for long.
Can you see the trend line that therefore emerges? Investing in more traditional sales training is not likely to resolve this dilemma. Instead, you may have to embrace a few other structural changes.
Separating Prospecting and Selling
See prospecting as an empirical responsibility and separate prospecting from selling. This means prospecting from the top down.
- Make it a company responsibility to find, own, and control the stream of qualified, currently interested new prospects.
- Build the company’s relationships and not necessarily the individual salesperson’s relationships.
- Know your market as a business, and don’t let it be defined by the accident of “current salesperson relationships” alone.
- Sure, teach salespeople to be on the lookout for new prospects, but don’t make it a primary responsibility.
Since salespeople will be getting a stream of new, “free” leads, ask for something in return.
- Develop your salespeople into relationship builders and record keepers.
- Keep your standards high and don’t hammer prospects. Every prospect who doesn’t buy will be called again by the company.
- If a salesperson keeps dropping the ball, you’ll know it soon enough.
- The company is building a relationship with the prospect beyond the one-on-one interaction from the individual salesperson.
- All prospects must be tracked using a uniform database.
- Further, all common outcomes to interaction (and the date that interaction occurs) must be recorded using numerical codes. For example, I called you on December 13, but you weren’t in = “3” (Code “3” means, unavailable). I called you on February 4, and you wanted me to send you something = “2” (Code “2” means, send something by mail). I called you July 6, but you had moved to another country = “9” (Code “9” means, disqualified).
Each step in the sales cycle gets a code. “Initial Contact,” “Presentation/Quote,” “Thinking About It,” “Release,” etc. Each step is codified and, at all times, each prospect exists within the confines of a step. In this way, the company can sort the database for all “1,” “2,” “5,” etc. prospects and know how many prospects are in what stage.
In such a system, the company can sort its database for empirical opportunities. Such opportunities include adding company based “touch” to the sales cycle. Thank you letters, follow up questionairres, service descriptions, product releases, etc. All such activities help build the company’s relationship with the prospect over time.
Down the Road
To be relieved of the burden of prospecting is a fair trade for these concessions. Additionally:
- When a salesperson begins to spend all of his or her time on selling, he or she will sell more and get better at selling.
- This new structure focuses and clarifies a salesperson’s activity. For most, it will better suit their personalities than the rough and tumble of prospecting.
- Some salespersons will find this all so refreshing, they will experience a re-birth in their sales careers.
The goals are to:
- Build direct company relationships with prospects.
- Track and assess the company’s sales efforts.
- Be better able to respond to your sales opportunities.
- And, to improve the selling cababilities of your field salespeople.
With all these in line – you’ll ultimately sell more products or services.
If you are looking for better sales results, try rethinking your sales structure and not just throwing money at sales training. Create a companywide list of prospects so you know who your prospects are and what you are doing as a company to develop those prospects. Within such a structure, train salespeople to focus on one-on-one skills, record keeping, relationship building, presentation ability, closing techniques and service transition. Do so effectively, and all the elements of your sales operation will be set to improve by a wide measure.
