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Nothing is more frustrating for a Sales Leader than seeing poor sales in action, especially when a sales professional is face to face with a potential buyer.
My husband, Tom & I, were at the Toronto Home Show last weekend as we plan to build our next home in a few years, on the lake. We wanted to start scoping out the exciting new home features as we begin to develop the plans.
We arrived at the Home Show before the doors opened to allow for an early start before the show became too busy to talk with exhibitors. We stopped by a window distributor, who was very knowledgeable. We spoke to him for over 10 minutes as he highlighted the features and benefits of his beautiful windows. My husband quickly asked for his brochures and his card. Surprisingly, he did not ask for our information. I thought this was odd as we walked to the next booth.
During the next two hours we spoke to six different exhibitors who we were keenly interested in their products. It was disappointing that not one – that is 6 out of 6 – DID NOT ask us for our contact information to follow-up with us. Many referenced their brochures, gave us their card, and suggested we go to their website. They were all very knowledgeable of their products and demonstrated their expertise. Several that we spoke to were senior sales or even the owners.
Another disappointing observation was the number of exhibitors who were spending more time on their mobile devices in their booth rather than interested in working the aisle or starting a conversation with us.
Exhibiting at a tradeshow is a big investment in both money and time. With talk of a slowing real estate and economic market, I was surprised to see the poor sales in action. These salespeople did not see the importance of their role in the next stage of the buying process. With the increase of AI – artificial intelligence – salespeople can be easily replaced. With the many decisions that my husband and I will have to make in the next few years, we are looking for consultative sales professionals to help guide us during the many buying decisions we will have to make.
There are 3 important strategies to ensure you are effectively working a tradeshow. What will you do before, during and after the tradeshow to maximize your outcome?
Before the Tradeshow:
- Determine: What are your goals for the tradeshow? How many leads do you want to generate?
- Set up appointments – even breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings with key clients and prospects. It can be great ROTI at a tradeshow to meet with customers/prospects. You will have more purposeful conversations if you set up the meetings in advance rather than a quick conversation in your booth.
During the Tradeshow:
- How can you work the aisles to start conversations with the attendees?
- How will you effectively network during education sessions, networking time or in the evening? This is a great opportunity to expand your network, meet new prospects and start new conversations.
- Attend or even offer to speak at the tradeshow education sessions to share your expertise and education.
- How can you create more interest in your booth with demos or 5-minute talk sessions? At the National Home Show, Home Hardware set up their booth up with DIY demos to get the attendees learning about DIY home projects to provide practical hands-on advice.
After the Tradeshow:
- It’s exhausting working a tradeshow and then trying to catch-up with your emails. Block time in your calendar during the next week to follow-up on all your leads.
- Co-ordinate with your marketing team to send out follow-up emails/eblasts.
- Nurture those leads!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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As more and more B2B sales conversations are moving to a consultative approach to gain a competitive and strategic advantage, it’s even more important to ensure your suppliers are aligned with your consultative sales process.
Customers are becoming more vocal about the problems they want solved and the solutions they are looking for. An effective way to expand your solutions and value is to leverage your supplier’s expertise and expanded products and services.
But before you do, you want to ensure that you and your distributor/channel company have the same consultative sales preparation and philosophy – especially if you invite them to be a part of your customer meeting.
In working with many sales teams, they have come to understand the importance of consultative selling and identifying customers’ needs and goals through great question asking, rather than a sell-and-tell approach when they are in a meeting. Your suppliers and third party partnerships must be an extension of your consultative go-to-market approach.
Third party relationships can consist of:
- Companies who act as distributors and represent many other suppliers or manufacturers. Can also be known as distributor or channel sales.
- Multi-Line Representatives who are sales organizations who represent several manufacturers.
- Channel Partners who represent a small select group of companies to compliment or become an extension of their core services/solutions.
- Referral partners who sell to the same type of customers and are not in a competitive line of business, but rather a complementary line of business. For example, in the financial industry, they may refer insurance, lawyers, and other specialty insurance.
Advantages to Third Party Relationships
- Expands your solutions, with additional options to create long term partnerships.
- They can provide additional knowledge, expertise and be problem solvers for your toughest customer challenges and accompany you in the customer meeting.
- They can help to grow and strengthen your sales team to potential buyers.
- Expands your product options. For example, you may represent many alternative suppliers for your decision maker to consider in their buying process.
- The can provide importing options.
- Some of these companies don’t deal directly with the customer and will provide you with leads through their channel distribution.
- Allows you to be more of a one-stop shop for your customer, expanding the expertise to companies with specialties.
- You can collaborate and create a strategy to grow a market or a customer with defined goals. For example, to grow a category/customer, to increase market share, or shorten a sales cycle.
Disadvantages to Third Party Relationships
- The third party company has to be prepared and apply a consultative approach, like the PURPOSE framework, rather than a sell-and-tell or product dump approach.
- You have to manage the supplier’s timelines and delivery expectations.
- When this supplier doesn’t meet the expectations, it impacts your reputation and business.
Although not covered here, there are additional parameters, contracts, terms and agreements needed to reduce the risk of these third party partnerships.
To achieve your growth objectives, leveraging third party relationships and expanding them into stronger consultative partnerships will increase sales, margins, and efficiency by shifting non-core or specialized solutions to more experienced providers.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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If you look under the hood of your client’s and prospect’s business to understand what is happening in their business and financial numbers, it can turn into greater sales numbers for you.
Let me explain.
Rather than increasing product knowledge, you need to understand how business decisions are made. This is a new sales skill that helps in gathering client intelligence on how key decisions are made in your customer’s business or your next hot prospect.
The New Sales Skills: Business Acumen
It’s time to develop a business acumen for sales, especially in navigating B2B sales, to gain insight into their business.
You might be wondering what we mean by “business acumen”. Fundamentally, it means understanding how your client’s company makes and uses money and then using that knowledge to make smarter, more informed business decisions for your client.
Understand Your Client’s Financials
One of the ways of gathering client intelligence is understanding their financials. Reading and understanding a customer’s financial statements can seem like a foreign language. Below is one way to help you with this.
For publicly traded companies and/or non-profit associations, they have to post their financial statements for public access on their website under “Investor Relations”. You can easily download their annual and quarterly financial statements, annual report, and even listen to their investor relations calls and hear their CEO speak. It’s like sitting in the same room as the CEO!
Client Insights You’ll Gain
Here are client insights you can gain by going through this exercise:
- Status of their revenue over the last year
- Status of their profits
- Their net earnings
- Their gross margin
- Their EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation Assets), and how it compares to previous years
- Forecast for the coming months or year
- Major capital investments or acquisitions, if any
- Cash flow (to approve the expenditure of your products or services!)
- Major initiatives during the past year and into the future
- Future outlook as shared by the CEO and/or Chairman of the Board
- Changes in the Board of Directors and/or senior leadership team, if any
- Growth strategies and outlook for the future
This information can be overwhelming, yet very insightful to better understand their future direction and to find out if your solution is the right fit and if there is budget allocation.
Change your sales mindset and instead demonstrate how you can help your clients or prospects grow their business based on their strategic initiatives. If you do this, then you grow your business acumen, your business intelligence, and ultimately your sales.
Does your team need help in developing their business acumen? Contact me at Lisa@TeneoResults.com or 519-863-3975.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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A salesperson’s brand can help change the sales stigma and perception.
In prospecting, it’s even more critical to differentiate your personal sales brand to make a great first impression and secure the first meeting.
Mistakes in Prospecting
When prospecting, most sales professionals are asking for only 10-15 minutes of a potential customer’s time; are sending numerous generic type emails in hopes of it creating an opportunity to meet; and are using the word “unique” to differentiate their products and services.
This approach is not differentiating you or your brand.
That reality is, customers and buyers don’t want to meet with salespeople and they already have numerous vendors.
You need to find a way to differentiate yourself, and still be valuable to the buyer.
How Are You Different in a Way That’s Valuable to the Prospective Buyer?
How will you differentiate your personal sales brand in prospecting, to position you as a trusted business advisor?
1. Change your words
Many sales reps use the words that focus around:
- pitch
- deal
- right products
- quotes
- best price
- sell
What kind of salesperson brand does this convey?
Change your language to:
- solutions
- expertise
- value
- conversation
- business
- ROI – return on investment
What kind of salesperson does this convey?
2. Do your research & customize
A unique value proposition is not about you or your services being unique. It’s about you customizing your email, your value proposition to make it unique to the customer/buyer you are approaching.
In our new Prospecting Power program, participants are quickly learning the power of doing their research about the buyer and customizing an email message or telephone call to the buyer. In this class, they are given time to customize their email and then send their email to a prospective buyer. They are surprised at how many are responding to their email within the hour. Very few sales professionals do the research and customize the message; it takes time – yet produces responses and results.
3. Send an agenda for the meeting
Very few sales professionals send an agenda for the meeting, in advance. This will differentiate you and improve your professional sales brand.
Ensure the agenda is focused on their business, not just a presentation of your company and products. You can even add your great questions to your agenda to give them time to prepare, and of course differentiate your personal sales brand.
4. Focus on their business – not your business
Is your email or telephone message focused on what you, your products and your business can do for them, or are you focusing on understanding their business, providing custom solutions and improving their business metrics?
5. Your title and email signature
What does your title and email signature say about you and your company brand? How can you improve your personal branding and position you as a trusted business advisor? This is great real estate space to link to an article, event or simply state a thought provoking question. Is your title “Sales Rep” or Territory Sales Rep or Business Advisor or Consultant?
6. Your LinkedIn Profile
Many buyers will check you out before they will agree to a meeting. What does your LinkedIn Profile branding look like? Does it demonstrate you as an expert? Is it a great professional picture? What does your summary say about you, your expertise and your brand?
7. Your clothing attire
In today’s business world, casual business attire is becoming more prevalent. What does your attire say about your brand? Do khakis and blue jeans represent your professional sales brand?
Sales Reps, work on differentiating your personal sales brand to help you in your prospecting efforts.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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Why is there still a stigma attached to the word sales, even after 25 years?
And why is there still a negative association with the sales profession?
When you ask people, including salespeople, their perception of a sales professional, you’ll still hear reference to the “sleazy car salesperson” – a profession ranked only second to politicians in least respected jobs according to a Global News Report from 2018.
Even though I’ve been in sales for over 25 years, it’s pathetic that this negative perception of salespeople still exists, and the needle has moved very little.
What do sales professionals have to do to change this perception?
It’s simpler than you think.
The good news is that the demand is very high for sales professionals with no immediate signs of it slowing down.
Professional Sales is ranked as one of Canada’s 7 most in-demand future-proof jobs, according to a recent study by the CPSA – Canadian Professional Sales Association. 90% of commercial sales professionals believe sales is a good job. 70% of sales professionals would recommend a job in sales to family or friends considering a new career.
But in order to change this sales stigma, we need to ask ourselves:
What do other career professionals, like accountants, engineers, human resource practitioners, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, do to earn respect and trust?
They simply ask questions to learn more about a person/business situation, and then they prescribe solutions and recommendations.
We need to do the same in order to change the stigma associated with the sales business.
When you look at the chart below, which side are you hanging out on?
| STOP the Sales Stigma |
START the Sales Movement |
| Talking |
Listening |
| Being an order taker |
Adding more value |
| Re-active |
Pro-active |
| Product & Price Conversations |
Purposeful Business Conversations |
| Being just another vendor |
Earning Respect, building trust & Partnerships |
If we want to change the stigma associated with sales and sales professionals, we need to be creating a sales movement.
Ask relevant questions, listen carefully, and provide solutions and recommendations that are in their best interest.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
