You are not alone. There are fewer vacant sales jobs and more sales people are coming on the market every day.
So how do you stand out from the crowd and land that great job?
I am delighted to interview gift card recruitment expert Hadie Perkas. She agreed to share her secrets of success selling yourself when on the job market.
Watch the show and learn:
📜 To avoid your CV become part of 80% failing the first selection round
📜 Your sales results are most important
📜 Why real life examples of your sales success keep your interview on track
Sales leaders recruit, train and motivate salespeople to push the line on anything that can be sold without crossing that line. That is what businesses want and is the difference between growth and exponential growth.
Yet, if salespeople oversell a product feature or benefit, the future relationship with the customer and more is in immediate danger. Not only will it require valuable management time and intervention to re-align the relationship, it also affects the deal, revenues, profitability, and crucially company reputation. A damaged business reputation can have huge business impacts, but for the salesperson they will most likely find it more difficult to generate and do business with other customers as his/her reputation has been tarnished along with the business reputation.
There are good levers to prevent overselling and overpromising by salespeople, whilst allowing salespeople to have the autonomy they need to thrive.
Having the right team, training them well, and providing the right motivation such as appropriate compensation plans, effective and slick sales processes, and supportive sales leadership, make a powerful mix to not only prevent overselling, it will also increase sales across the board.
Anyone in sales knows how expensive and difficult it is to acquire a new customer and build a lasting relationship. Depending on what industry you are in, it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to win a new customer than to retain one. In addition to this, profitability from existing customers is a big motivator to nurture them. For example, in Financial Services a 5% increase in customer retention translates in 25% increase in profitability because customers tend to buy more products from the same company over time. They are happy to pay a higher price too to avoid having to find a new supplier. On the contrary, overselling affects a company’s ability to build lasting relationships with customers and miss out on future profits. The reputation of the business and the sales rep becomes a negative factor instead of a positive one. In the traditional bricks and mortars sales world, reps will find it harder to communicate with customers, leaving an opening for the competition. In SaaS, trials will not be converted, fewer deals will be closed, and subscription rates will fall.
Training
Training salespeople beyond the traditional sales techniques can help to prevent over selling. The onboarding of new salespeople is often driven by the overriding objective to have them selling as soon as possible. But; a fine balance needs to be struck in keeping costs of onboarding low and letting salespeople potentially damage your company’s carefully crafted reputation. For this can have profoundly serious consequences. One company we worked with was extremely focused on the ‘get them selling ASAP’ objective. The initial training consisted of selling techniques only. Product knowledge was not part of the curriculum. After one week of intensive sales training salespeople were sent out to potential customers. They had just two objectives: understand any needs and gain clear commitment. Back in the office, the sales manager would analyse the facts gathered and select the right product for the salesperson to present. This method presents a huge risk and inefficiency. The salesperson wasn’t knowledgeable on the product, features, and benefits, therefore they didn’t know when to dig a little deeper, to get clarity and uncover the real problem, and if or how their product could provide the solution. And of course, the sales manager had to interpret the findings of the inexperienced salesperson in order to present the right product, and much like a poor phone signal, details and clarity got lost in the communication. It was also a practice that contributed to churn, high sales staff turnover, in addition to a large mis-selling scandal and significant reputational damage.
Training is not an event, it is key in order to have a sales team that are knowledgeable, present your company as you would want it presented, and uphold the reputation you have worked hard to build. Training is a continuum where learning is encouraged throughout the workplace. Salespeople should learn about the products they sell, the benefits for the customers (and their customers) so that their customers see them as experts and trusted advisers. This should be complimented with a knowledge of the supporting business, how the product or service a customer has ordered actually gets to them or becomes available, and the process it takes. Knowledge and application exams should be considered as part of the induction programme. Salespeople should also learn why overselling or selling products their company do not have causes major problems with their co-workers and the rest of the organisation (see related article/related on The Reputation Impact of Overselling LINK). They should spend time with other departments and experience how even small errors or overpromises on their part affects the rest of the business.
This is not a one-way street either. The live sales situation is often a high pressure one where compromises must be made on the spot to win a deal. Salespeople should be encouraged to take co-workers to customer meetings to experience these pressures, ask for feedback, and review how these can be dealt with without overselling or over promising.
Conclusion
Overselling or over promising has a huge and sometimes irrecoverable impact on company reputation, future earnings, and also individual reputation. Salespeople should be encouraged to push the line without crossing it, but they need to know where the line is and how far is can be flexed. When training salespeople, product knowledge, internal processes and selling techniques are all equally important to prevent overselling and protect reputation.
Sources:
1.Harvard Business Review
2.Bain and co, Frederick Reichheld
3.Are you overselling? Forbes 2017
About:
This article is part of the Sales and Operations Dynamics series that explores business challenges from both the sales and operational perspective. To help business leaders, sales leaders, operational leaders, and teams understand how to align these functions through understanding, process, structure and collaboration.
Gert Scholts: I help sales professionals and their leadership create more sales opportunities and close more deals. After 30 years in sales and sales leadership roles, transforming large sales and account management teams at BUPA, Bank of Scotland and Travelex I founded www.salescoaching.pro in 2012. I believe corporates can learn from start-ups and start-ups can learn from corporates. This particularly applies to the natural tensions between sales teams and other functions in organisations.
Sonya Kimpton de Ville: with 20 years of experience in operational design and leadership I have seen and dealt with first-hand the challenges due to disconnect between sales and operations, and the impact on customers and the broader business; and have coached teams and leaders on how to work more effectively together. Now founder and CEO of my own technology start-up Grapvyn (www.grapvyn.com), I am helping businesses become more efficient and work smarter, to increase the opportunity, accelerate sales, and drive business growth.
Business leaders know that reputation goes a long way in impacting a sales outcome, in fact 25% of market value can be attributed to reputation, and reputation is closely linked to cashflow; this is why – more-so than ever – reputation will be critical as businesses open their doors following the catastrophic disruption of Covid-19, and with customers being more selective.
Of course, in the current climate, with businesses recovering and rebuilding, the temptation, (understandably) will be to sell what the customer or prospect ‘wants’, close the deal, find a way to deliver it, get the revenue, and nurse that damaged bottom line. Regardless of whether the ‘want’ is something your business already has in its portfolio or feature set.
And surely, if your business is adding product features to meet the needs of every customer, this is going have a positive impact on reputation, cashflow, and bottom-line right? Wrong.
Deloitte reports that 41% of businesses say that the biggest impact of a negative reputational hit is revenue, with a further 41% citing brand value; therefore, being overly accommodating and negatively impacting reputation can cost more in future sales opportunity than the value of the single sale.
It is easy in theory to say (or write) that your business should only sell what you already offer, but, in reality all businesses need to have an element of flexibility, especially now – but how can this work in practice?
In order to balance the ability to flex and increase revenue with a structured portfolio and supporting operational infrastructure, you have to understand the trade-off between effort and impact.
Effort versus Impact
Standardised services, products, and product features are a known entity within your business (or they should be), people know how to manage and deliver them. At a foundational level, your salespeople should have solid product, service, and feature knowledge (see this article/link on Sales and the Impact of Overselling), and the rest of the business should have product and service knowledge at a level that is appropriate for their role. This means orders can go through your existing delivery or on-boarding process in a standard way, as fast as the process allows (even standard practices aren’t always efficient), with few or no unexpected hurdles.
As soon as you allow your business to creep from your standard products or feature-set you introduce friction into the process, create unknowns for your delivery teams, slow delivery tasks down, and increase the effort required to deliver. All of this extra work and effort is referred to as process ‘noise’. Process noise uses up time that the standard portfolio doesn’t, and a 20% variation in orders can require anything around or beyond 10% more resource to manage and deliver. This creates a backlog of orders and lengthens lead times – and not just for the exception orders, but potentially for all of your business’s orders.
The impact of the ‘noise’ becomes tangible in your business and bottom line when you pay for extra resource (whether it’s additional staff or overtime), to keep the lead time steady; develop new features; or to resolve queries with the client and internally. If your cost-of-sale starts to increase, your profit-margin is likely to decrease, and then you consider increasing prices which are passed onto customers.
If you choose not to implement additional resource then you may have to accept longer lead times, which is felt by your customers when expectations are not met, or you are slower than the competition.
Of course, the other option is to mandate to your teams that they deliver within the same standard timeline. The risk here is that delivery is rushed, mistakes are made, and effort is spent on rework and remediation, manifesting itself as dissatisfaction with your customers, and frustration for your teams.
We have seen all three approaches used, and whichever route you take the customer experience is often negatively impacted, and you will suffer reputational damage that will propagate throughout your existing customer base, market, competition, and future customers, as well as having a long-term impact on your reputational resilience. 95% of customers are likely to share a bad experience, compared to 87% of good experiences, and it can take only one bad experience to break years of good experience and reputation.
Enabling Structured Flexibility
So, whilst you need to have some flexibility, there still needs to be some structure around it:
Is the addition to, or amendment to, a product feature something that is a one-off, or is it something that can become part of your standard offering? One-off requests are going to have a longer life-time cost than something that can be integrated and offered to all customers to drive incremental revenue.
Does the additional product feature deliver sufficient revenue to cover cost-of-sale and gross margin targets for the next 6 months, or 1, 2, 3 years?
Are you truly understanding the customers’ needs, or are they potentially not understanding the breadth and depth of your existing products and services? It’s remarkable how often the customers interpretation of their problem – and solution – isn’t what you should be solving for, and your team need to guide the customer through this exploration.
What are the delivery implications of the additional product feature? How much additional resource is needed? What is the impact on the rest of your orders commitments? And are you willing and able to absorb these impacts; be them operational or financial? Of course, you should not be absorbing anything that is damaging to your reputation.
If you can consider all of the above you can make an informed decision, you can accept or reject additional product feature requests with eyes-wide-open, for the right reasons.
At a foundational level, your teams – sales, operations, finance, need to be on board, so that they can sell, deliver, and support your products and services. They are likely to be aware of some of the challenges of selling outside of your standard offering, but often unaware of the bigger implication around reputation and cashflow. Conversely, your business functions also need to understand that an additional product feature, or product variation may be necessary in some cases, and can have a really positive and long-term benefit to the business. If they [where appropriate] are involved in the discussion, and understand how decisions are made, then they will be best placed to deliver your products and solutions as you and your customers want it delivered.
And, when it comes to measuring, if you measure Quality as well as Quantity and Customer Satisfaction you will be able to understand whether you have the right level of flexibility. Has productivity reduced (quantity), have queries increased (quality), has your customer satisfaction changed, and is revenue increasing and profit margins steady? If all of these KPIs are stable or going in the right direction then you are enabling structured-flexing.
Conclusion
Building, maintaining, and protecting your reputation doesn’t have to mean being everything to everyone, it is ok to decline some business in the same way that it is ok to flex for other business.
Your businesses Reputation does precede your business, and once damaged can take years to recover, therefore it is crucial that you make your decisions in a structured way, being consistent, and executing with consideration.
Sources:
1: Deloitte 41% of businesses surveyed
2: World Economic Forum
3: Customer Thermometer
About:
This article is part of the Sales and Operations Dynamics series that explores business challenges from both the sales and operational perspective. To help business leaders, sales leaders, operational leaders, and teams understand how to align these functions through understanding, process, structure and collaboration.
Other articles in this series:
Sales and the Impact of Overselling
About the Authors:
Sonya Kimpton de Ville: with 20 years of experience in operational design and leadership I have seen and dealt with first-hand the challenges due to disconnect between sales and operations, and the impact on customers and the broader business; and have coached teams and leaders on how to work more effectively together. Now running my own technology start-up Grapvyn (www.grapvyn.com), I am helping businesses become more efficient and work smarter, to increase the opportunity, accelerate sales, and drive business growth.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonyakimptondeville/
Gert Scholts: I help sales professionals and their leadership create more sales opportunities and close more deals. After 25 years in sales and sales leadership roles, transforming large sales and account management teams at BUPA, Bank of Scotland and Travelex I founded www.thebestsalescoach.co.ukin 2012. I believe corporates can learn from start-ups and start-ups can learn from corporates. This particularly applies to the natural tensions between sales teams and other functions in organisations.
This sales ideas is aimed at sales and account management people who are unable to work due to COVID-19 furlough measures, and want to be ready when business returns.
Being furloughed is no fun. Not being able to temporarily reach sales targets or look after customers is alien to sales people who seek high sales growth. They are natural achievers and target orientated. Not being able to perform in the usual way is frustrating for them.
Yet, every cloud has a silver lining when you look for it. Most sales people are also optimists by nature.
The UK government is encouraging furloughed people to train or volunteer where possible.
Volunteering benefits those who need help today. Sales Training is an investment for a high sales growth tomorrow.
Stephen Covey, author of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ describes the 7th habit as Sharpen The Saw.
It is the habit of renewal and continuous improvement. I support sales people learning new skills, knowledge and attitudes now for a better tomorrow. Consider it, there will probably never be a better time.
In this guest blog James describes 5 key core characteristics to look for in a new candidate. James Fray is a highly respected and experienced recruitment consultant. He is an expert placing high performance sales people in demanding sales roles.
Are you in knots hiring quality Sales candidates ?
Remedy; Look for “Big Waves” !!
When interviewing Sales candidates there are 5 key core
characteristics required , candidates needs to demonstrate.
These can be labelled as W.A.V.E.S
W; When “Rebuttals” happen – can they cope ?. Rebuttals are not a
sign of dis- interest, in fact can be the exact opposite. Is there
any facet of any kind of sales that does not encounter them ? –
No chance !! Rebuttals are rungs on the ladder to sales success.
Testing this characteristic is critical with Sales candidates and understanding how candidates handle these rebuttals on a regular basis.
A; Application; Any sales individual that assumes half efforts can be
effective need to be eliminated immediately. ” A small jump is easier than a large jump, but no one wishing to cross a wide ditch would cross half of it first”.
V; Visualisation; “The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak, becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong .”
High quality sales people spend time “Visualising” a successful sales
process, from introduction to closing the deal. A hundred metre world
champion sprinter will be able to visualise every stride of the race until they cross the line as the winner. The champions keep reliving their success as should successful salesman.
E; Expert ;Top Sales people must be experts in their field. In depth knowledge of Product/Services, pricing, USP’s, strengths, weaknesses, development needs. Can they demonstrate these qualities in the interview process ?
S; Standardised Presentations; Top Sales people virtually eliminate inconsistent performance on physically or emotionally “down” days.
If your selling is based on your personal brilliance, your results will plummet and be inconsistent on your “down” days .
” The wind and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators “
As companies increasingly tell their employees to work from home until the coronavirus pandemic gets under control, sales leaders must start managing their sales teams remotely keeping sales growth and motivation high. Trust, clear expectations, good resources for the team and increased communication are key strategies to keep sales going.
Trust
Hire salespeople you trust and trust the salespeople you hire. If you don’t think your actions will be rewarded, why make the effort at all. This problem can be worse in sales teams, which often structure goals around individual accomplishments. And when you have a remote sales team, it takes extra effort to build trusting relationships. After all, you don’t see each other in the office every day.
Communication is key to building trust, but it becomes more important in remote teams. Sales managers best plan their working schedule to overlap most of their team members. That way, if any issues or questions arise, you can respond immediately. When you pay attention to your team’s needs, even when they can’t physically tap you on the shoulder, you build trust. However, you also must avoid micromanagement. As a remote manager, your communication isn’t always immediate, and you can’t see or hear what team members are doing. Yet, when the activity is there and results follow, it is better to focus on sales motivation.
Resourcing the remote team
If you want to manage a remote sales team effectively, you need to invest in tools that match their work environment. If your team needs remote access, they will need a suitable CRM application all can use. In addition, Skype, Zoom or GTM are key tools to engage with customers. WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Messenger and slack are all tools available to communicate internally.
Make sure internet connections are be adequate and maybe team members need a printer and other minimal home office supplies. Decide on a home office pack and make sure all team members get it. Guide your sellers where needed to use quiet rooms when speaking to customers where possible. Make sure they have a good phone and earpiece.
Expect and inspect
Be clear in expectations for the remote sales team and inspect activity and results. This includes number of customer interactions, follow up standards, use of CRM and tips for managing time more efficiently. If need be, issue a document stating clearly what is expected. Don’t let your sales team just get on with it. Remote work requires expectations as well as management.
When setting expectations, encourage sales employees to meet higher performance levels. This is important as it improves employee engagement and subsequently increases sales productivity. Make sure that sales targets are achievable yet challenging
Encourage interaction
Increase communication levels between you and the team. Holding daily or weekly virtual meetings, will combat loneliness and it will keep team members on track. Use these meetings to help employees learn more about the company, its direction and different departments. Some companies use gamification technology to keep motivation and productivity up. Offer additional sales and business development training. Remote sales coaching will not only motivate, it will also increase sales.
I have been running remote sales teams since 2007, If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.
Your sales team’s activities and results should drive the whole business forward.
A highly motivated sales team achieves high sales growth by making plenty of quality sales to new customers, developing existing customer relationships and defending them against competitors.
That highly motivated team consists of individuals who have their own specific drivers to make it happen day in, day out. An effective sales manager knows these drivers and uses them to keep sales performance high.
Here are 5 simple strategies every sales leader should consider when building a highly motivated sales team:
1 Set clear direction and expectations in terms of markets, products, activities, sales targets and culture. You are the leader so lead!
2 Equip and train your sales people with the skills and product knowledge they need to succeed. A learning culture is key.
3 Make every part of the sales job fun and exciting through gamification, challenges and competition. There are parts of the sales process that can be tough and repetitive.Make it fun instead!
4 Monitor performance in every step of the sales funnel and provide feedback for improvement. This is an added benefit of having a sales process (you should have one!) Knowing where each opportunity is and what the next steps are, is key to sales success.
5 Celebrate success! Winning a new client or simply gaining a demo; each step forward deserves recognition.
Lead your sales team using these strategies and their motivation will rocket, even if you apply just one of these strategies. Your sales team should drive the whole business forward.
If your team is demotivated or not performing the way you want them to, feel free to contact me. I can help. Learn more
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