Sales Process Change Efforts

I am venturing dangerously close to the issues of marketing in my previous posts because sales tools require it. We should probably get back to sales force effectiveness and the implementation of methods for successful selling.

One place where sales process change efforts often fail is through sales management. Too often, when a new process is developed for selling or engaging customers, all the attention is placed on the sales force, even in their many different roles. This is necessary. But sales management must also understand the new method and have tools for managing to it, lest the changes go the same way as many legacy organizations go—nowhere.

Questions to Ask When Designing Sales Tools

Another question you can and should ask of any piece is this: How will your own people use this? Will they show it during a sales call? Send it after a prospecting phone call? Offer to them to show others in the target company? And what should come of it? What are the specific circumstances of its use?

Too often, the design and development of sales tools is general, as if it is a better investment to create and use half-hearted tools that can do many things than it is to use a single tool for a single purpose.

Customer Profiles

Often, my clients and my new writers resist the profile idea that I talked about in my previous post. Here’s what I tell them. Okay, fine. Go ahead and write your piece without it. Let’s see what it looks like. They do so, and we read it together. I may offer a few comments.

Then I say, okay, I have humored you, now you go and humor me. Write the profile of the customer you are trying to connect with. Make it detailed. I expect at least 3 single spaced pages.

When that comes in, I invite the writer to now use that profile and write the person a letter or other piece that appeals directly to the person in the profile.

When done, we sit down and look at the two, and ask one question: Which is more compelling? The second piece always wins.

More on Designing Sales Tools

The next piece needed for excellent sales tools is a detailed understanding of how the tool will be used in the sales process. What have you already achieved in the sales process? What lies ahead? And what is the specific goal this tool is meant to help a sales professional achieve? Leave behind the descriptions and case studies, web copy, brochures, and many other items that fail due to this misunderstanding. The piece is meant to have someone do something of significance to your sale. Be specific and know what that is.

In my experience if you do not do this, the tool will certainly fall flat on its face. Either customers will not respond, or the sales force will quickly conclude it doesn’t work and stop using it. Both bad outcomes.

Today’s Customer

Today’s customer, whether it is B2B or B2C, is a much more savvy customer than they were recently. And, their expectations of how people and companies communicate with them have changed. Amazon.com suggests books of interest to people like me based on things I bought before. The internet is changing much in relation to this—most of which is not the purpose of my blog. But whether you view Amazon’s specific targeting as annoying or helpful, it has become expected. As a result, if you can’t do something similar, your customers are likely to overlook you.

Better sales tools begin with a detailed customer profile of the specific person you are targeting—not the company. Who are these people? What point in their career? What do they struggle with? And so on. Write a profile that is up to five pages long. Yes, it requires that kind of detail.

Designing Sales Tools

I wanted to share a few experiences regarding the design of sales tools, because these are often the most misunderstood part of the process. The result can be an awful lot of material created by well meaning marketing communications professionals who understand marketing much better than they understand the sales force, the customers, and the interactive sales process.

One customer of ours is developing a set of sales tools for the sales force that describes the service offered and provides a case study. It all seems simple enough, but our client works in the complex market of health care, where the links between various benefits are not always clearly understood. As a result, their inspiring stories about patient outcomes and benefits are thought to be motivational to the employers they have targeted to buy their service. But it turns out that the employers have only a modest interest there. Primarily, they want the costs reduced. The problem is that the program description didn’t link these patient outcomes to cost reductions. That part was left to the customer to work out.

This is a common problem. I will share ideas of how to fix it next week.

Understand Your Client

The comments I posted the other day are only possible if you can really understand the client, their business situation, and their strategic initiatives. Training programs like the one I am working on should be designed within the customer context. We know that this is not the end of the game for sales force effectiveness with this company because their goals and direction are bigger. They need to sell all kinds of solutions products, not just this one. Again, that happens only with context and knowledge of your client.

Customer’s Perceptions

Sometimes, your customers just do the talking for you. So, here’s one piece of feedback from the sales management about the program I blogged about the other week:

This is truly something I have been trying to make a difference on. I am completely on board.

If this works the way I think it will, we will have better role clarity, better results and field staff will have a clearer understanding of what they are to do and be happier doing it. All good.

I see this (hoping other managers do as well) as a huge benefit in helping us manage our teams and formulate good process to what we do.

Final Thoughts on Filling the Gap in Training Scenarios

Problem based learning is especially helpful in sales team situations because the team has to work together to solve the problem—much as they do in real life. All the scenarios replicate situations we know these teams confront every day. Now, they learn from each other and work on the problem together—much as they do in the regular regional meetings, and so on. This puts in place a reference point as well—a common experience about the product or performance being trained, one that serves as an undergirding for that group to have subsequent discussions. “Remember when we said…” becomes a common phrase—or at least, it could.

Enabling this kind of transaction is key to success because these teams confront varied situations all the time in the field. They make a big difference.

Filling the Gap in Training Scenarios – Part 4

Another key element to success in problem-based learning for sales teams is that it is always hands-on. This was no exception—the field people thanked us profusely for the “hands-on” time for the project. The reason is that these people have to be able to do certain things at the end of the day, and so in the training, when they gets hands-on time, they walk away being able to do something—because they did it. It make s ahuge difference.