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Are you missing your road warrior days? You know what I mean: you’d start the day with your favourite coffee, head out early to avoid traffic, and get an early start on your first customer sales meeting. You’d continue your day with several other customer meetings, including a great customer lunch. Can you believe these road warrior days were your everyday normal just a short time ago?
Even though businesses are starting to open up and you’re getting itchy to get out on the road to meet face to face with your customers, the reality is that many of your customer sites are not allowing sales professionals on their premises. You want to get back to normalcy, to seeing your customers and hitting your sales numbers. You’re getting frustrated and feeling the pressure to increase sales.
There is a way to build rapport, establish trust through technology, and maximize your productivity while working your territory, from your home office. You can use your road warrior selling approach to become a tech Titan.
Here are ways to turn your territory into a tech-driven performance plan to get results:
It’s all about what you do BEFORE, DURING and AFTER your customer calls, and that means mapping out your series of Purposeful Conversations.
SELF-TALK Conversation
It begins with you and your mindset. You may not love technology, your CRM, or the volumes of virtual calls that fill your day. Yet, you like the idea of becoming a Titan – top of your game and ahead of your competitors. This is the opportunity to unlearn your traditional territory selling approach and embrace the Trusted Titan way.
STRATEGY Conversation
Map out how you work your ideal week, without even leaving your home. How will you re-gig your territory to meet with the right buyers on their terms? Identify technology that will save you time and hours of driving, and provide you with the time to enjoy breakfast AND dinner at home with your family. Maybe you convert your typical drive time into a new hobby, or finally put time towards optimizing your CRM.
REASON to MEET Conversation
Our recent conversations with buyers revealed that they are receiving hundreds of cookie-cutter emails each day that do not succeed in winning their attention. To secure a meeting with a buyer, it’s about quality over quantity and using exciting technology (eg. customized videos in emails) to win attention.
Our buyers said that a customized video email would get their attention, as they are getting very little of these types of emails as a means of securing a meeting. Buyers also told us that texting, or the old fashioned technology of a telephone call with an email, would give them the gentle nudge to differentiate you from the competition. At Teneo, we call that the double whammy to increase sales efforts. Again – it’s technology other than yet another email that will get a buyer’s attention.
PURPOSE Conversation
This is the opportunity for you to shine. It’s no longer about your products or even having the best price. It’s about having a Purposeful Business Conversation to ask even more questions about the challenges and impact on your client’s business. What new problems are they trying to solve? How are they trying to become more efficient and optimize costs? What are they doing to pivot and grow revenue? Using different virtual platforms will allow you to be the Titan! Have a discovery call to develop trust in a video call. Demonstrate your new product line, or host an interactive lunch-n-learn using polls to impress and get their attention. Customers will have to validate every decision and cost expenditure – turn your products and promos into a purposeful proposal with ROI that will help them grow their business.
FINAL YES! Conversation
There will be more objections or budgets on pause than ever before. As a Tech Titan, you are armed to anticipate those objections and address these even earlier in the buying process to influence and collaborate on new solutions that will make your buyers heroes! It’s all about making your customers look good – that is what Tech Titans do and it is what you can do to turn things around- both for your sales and for the economy.
Harness your Road Warrior Approach to become a Tech Titan Hero and enjoy your summer, even more!
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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Last week, we interviewed two buyers to uncover their expectations of how to effectively sell to them virtually.
The buyers we interviewed were:
Susan Ryan – LBM Millwork Buyer – Home Hardware. Susan has more than 20+ years of buying experience and currently works with more than 80 strategic vendors across Canada.
Scott Prygiel – Senior Buyer – Petsmart. Scott holds more than 15 years of buying experience in both the pet food and grocery sectors.
While both Buyers had their own preferences, they did share some common expectations for having productive virtual meetings with Sales Professionals:
- Be technically savvy to manage different virtual platforms
- Some Buyers have a preferred virtual platform – get familiar with the most common ones to avoid fumbling while on the call
- Be more prepared than ever!
- Test your technology in advance and prepare a PowerPoint presentation with an agenda & structured outline for great dialogue. Both buyers prefer you to share your PowerPoint with the Buyer 24 hours in advance.
- Allow time for most relevant content, especially hot topics like e-commerce.
- Buyers expect your meeting to be compelling, professional and feel like a natural conversation.
- Dress as you normally would for a face-to-face meeting. This conveys that you’re still serious about the business.
- Build rapport at the beginning of the meeting to loosen up and make the conversation flow naturally. Do some digging to find out what their personal interests are, customize your virtual background, or comment on something in their background.
- Buyers are receiving more emails than ever – use the Double Whammy approach (a call followed up with an email) to get noticed.
- Both Buyers agreed that in your initial email, you should quickly introduce how your product fills a gap in their product line.
- Consider sending a customized video with your product or a strong compelling message – Scott said this would get his attention…and not many Sales Professionals are doing it!
- Have a plan to grow product sales now & for the future (after COVID-19) for retail stores and e-commerce!
Their Final Advice:
- Collaborate on a customized solution & demonstrate- how it is the right fit for your buyers and WHY! Show you really care about helping them and their customers with the perfect solution.
Yes, COVID19 is producing obstacles and curveballs that affect selling, but don’t let it bring your sales to a full halt! Download our [Download not found] to overcome your obstacles, including virtual selling.
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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You have been calling all your clients with an empathetic “check-in” to see how they are doing. You’ve been pleasantly pleased that it’s easier to speak to clients live and they are appreciative of your call showing care for them and their families. You’ve been brave and even called customers you haven’t spoken to in several years.
Now what? Do you call them again and check-in? Or do you call to seek sales, as you’re getting pressure to change the declining sales numbers?
For some, this is becoming an ethical dilemma.
How can you prevent your team from inappropriately “Selling Too Soon”?
The PURPOSE Consultative framework provides a step by step process to show care, build trust, and simply ask questions to pivot the conversation about how COVID19 is impacting their business.
It will guide you to transition the conversation from check-in to asking more about their business to help you determine their priorities…and if it is suitable to explore your solutions with them.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing PURPOSE framework with the sales teams I’ve been coaching. I’ve also been applying PURPOSE framework to my daily 10 sales calls each morning! It’s working very well and a few opportunities have even emerged.
- P – Prepare well before the customer meetings
Visit their website and/or social media to research their COVID19 update, as most have posted on their business continuity plan. Prepare with your own positive self-talk – you’re here to help, care and if suitable explore your solutions. Prepare by reviewing the PURPOSE framework and the business type questions you can ask and not ask depending on their response.
- U – Understand the customer’s personality style, generation & decision-making role to adapt their conversation
The Trifecta factor will help you to adapt to a more comfortably chatty conversation. If they are exhibiting a driver personality style, it may be appropriate to pivot to a discussion about impacting their bottom line.
- R – Rapport building to kick off the meeting
How is COVID continuing to impact you (and your family)? You can even get more personal and ask about their favourite Netflix, kids’ activities, to cooking. One Sales Leader even joked, “Hey, I have tickets for the Raptors game- are you interested?”
- P – Purpose of the meeting by stating the meeting objectives and/or agenda items including length of meeting
This is the turning point in the check-in conversation. The purpose of my call is to further discuss how COVID is impacting your business and ….
- O – Open-Ended Questions, at least 5-10 questions focused on their business impact & ideal outcome
Create your list of great business questions.
How is this impacting the efficiency of your plant operations?
Have you laid off any staff?
Have you adjusted your budgets for …?
How is this impacting the bandwidth of your internet services with your entire family working and doing school from home?
What is your go-forward plan when lockdown ends?
- S – Summarize & Solutions
Use their words to repeat back a summary of their situation and then provide your solutions if suitable.
So, what I’m hearing you say is….. Have you considered ….
- E – Execute the next steps by scheduling the next meeting or call to present the proposal
Suggest a next call with a specified date & time to come back and provide a working proposal with options for them to consider.
Download the PURPOSE Conversation Template to coach your sales team to have more PURPOSEful Business Conversations.
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 new way to work from home…
For the last week or two, you likely have been working from home and balancing your children’s schedules and you may find home and work are colliding. Our work week will not be normal for at least the next few weeks, and possibly the next few months.
Yet, sales teams need to be productive to turn this economy around.
This is a time when we have to be creative and productive to take care of customers and children. Download our
Creating-My-Ideal-Week-Template.pdf
to map out a productive work week while working from home.
Strategies to Maximize Your Sales Time Working From Home
Here are a few key sales strategies to allocate your time to be productive:
- Reach out to your customers to take the best care of them
- Allocate time each day or week to identify & research new markets/industry who are buying or could be recession-proof
- Allocate time each day to improve your sales processes, such as your CRM or proposals
- Allocate time to develop new programs, promotions, and product offerings
- Work with your marketing team to develop marketing campaigns and stronger messages
- Allocate time to stay healthy – work out your body & mind
- Allocate time to review your sales goals, plans & alternative strategies during COVID-19 and to re-build business for the remainder of the year
Some of you may have to plan a better work schedule to also care for children, in addition to customers while working from home.
As a working Mom with a home office for over 17 years, I learned to balance when our girls were young. We created signals so the kids knew when I was on a call with a client and they knew they could not interrupt the call with a request to have a cookie or watch their favourite TV show. They loved to write messages to me on the whiteboard in my office like, “Do you want a grilled cheese for lunch, can we watch TV, can we go to the park?”
Strategies to Maximize Your Parenting Time
As salespeople and sales leaders, we need to adapt. Trying to work and keep a second eye on our children can be tricky.
The workday doesn’t have to be your typical 9-5 day. Working from home means your schedule can be flexible to accommodate children, a workout, or even a grocery run during the middle of the day.
Here are a few different ways to plan your day:
- Parent A begins their day @6am – 9am.
- Parent B begins their day @9am – 12 noon, while Parent A cares for children.
- Parent B takes lunch with kids, Parent A works 12-1 to check emails and respond to urgent requests.
- Parent A takes care of children or continues their workday from 1-4pm, while the alternate parent does the other.
- Parent A works from 4-7pm, while parent B cares for the kids and makes dinner.
- Or another option is each parent takes 1-2 hours shifts to balance work and children while working from home.
The way you decide to schedule your time work and family time, if working from home is new to you and/or your partner, it’s important to be creative and patient while everyone adjusts to new situations and especially to working from home.
In the meantime, stay healthy and hopeful that we’ll get through this!
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.
Blog
I don’t think anyone could have forecasted last week’s turn of events. As the majority of the world is asked to work from home in self-isolation, it’s hard to put a pause on sales goals.
You may be asking yourself how a sales team can remain productive while working from home and being banned from traveling or meeting with customers/retailers.
As you navigate the next few weeks, here are 7 tips you can do to Be Strategic, Proactive, Brave…and Healthy among sales teams.
Yes, you can maximize this time and not COCOON!
- Sales Planning – this is a great time to review, strategize and reflect on your sales plans & strategies to STILL achieve your 2020 sales goals.
Blow the dust off your Sales Goals. Review your Q1 goals and plan for Q2 goals. Schedule a call with your manager or another colleague to strategize and share ideas.
- Daily Virtual Team Huddles – your team will need to hear sales successes, best practices, and have a few laughs on a daily basis. Early morning or 4pm huddles – keep your team engaged, accountable & social!
Zoom/Skype video calls are a great way to see & hear your team. Assign different topics, 5-5-5 & agenda teams to your team.
- Research new Markets/Vertical/Competitors – assign each team member to research, learn about this market, create a list of SUSPECT companies and people to contact.
There is never enough time to do this and NOW there is….Prepare and Plan your future plan!
- Strengthen Strategies & Messaging – Territory Plans, Key Account Plans, Value Proposition Messaging, Your Ideal Week, Great Questions Template
Download the complimentary templates from our website and start strengthening your sales.
- Call & schedule customer & prospect calls via video or live voice. Encourage them to still make 10+ calls each day.
We are hearing from many sales professionals, how customers/buyers have more time for these conversations and willing to schedule them! Feel free to give us a call.
- Improve Sales Process & Customer Experience – great time to review & improve your sales processes. At Teneo, we are scheduling a daily 3pm call to review one process each day & improve.
Your CRM, proposals, order processing and even when to ask for a referral are all great processes to review, improve and create a better customer experience!
- Positive Self-Talk & Have Fun! and Stay Mentally Healthy. Sales teams are social and need fun and interaction.
What is your craziest toilet paper story? OMG – why has toilet paper become the scarcest commodity? Share jokes, videos and lots of text emojis! 😀
We have great interactive live training through our “Sales Performance Sessions” via Zoom with break-out rooms, chat conversations, virtual whiteboards, plus a final Sales Practicum. You’ll learn each week and apply the concepts & tools in between the live sessions to improve your skills and GET RESULTS with clients.
Let’s have a conversation at 519-863-3975 or lisa@teneoresults.com.
Please share your best practices and comment which tips you choose to implement.
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.
