Signorelli Sales Force Effectiveness

How to Use Sales Process in Complex Sales

tonysignorelli — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:47:24 +0000

Sales process is essential to success in complex sales. Here’s why:

Mental Map: The sales process is a mental map of what is happening in the sale. In a well-managed sale, a good sales executive always know where they are in the process.
Cover Bases: Customers will inevitably skip steps. A good rep knows that when certain key steps are skipped, the likelihood of a successful complex sale goes down. He makes sure the customer covers those steps somehow.
Target Your Team: By knowing the map of the sale, a good sales executive knows exactly where to target his team. If you don’t; know, you cannot direct resources properly.

In a one-to-one sale, the power of persuasion can move a sales professional along rather nicely. In a large, complex sales environment, persuasion often matters less—a lot less. Intelligent organizations try to rationalize the buying process to ensure that large expenditures are vetted properly. Many have been burned before. That’s why you have complex sales.

For anyone involved in a complex sale, the only way to keep your feet is to understand the process. Customers will have their own processes, to be sure. But you need to have yours. You know what it takes for customers to successfully buy because your company supports those decisions day in and day out all the time. Your customer does do only rarely. Harness your own internal expertise on your product, and guide the customer through a successful process. They may or may not even realize you are doing it, but at the end, everyone will be more satisfied.

Signorelli Simulations Presentation Launched

tonysignorelli — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:08:50 +0000

I just announced the release of Signorelli Simulations talk, a presentation meant for training professionals who want to learn how to create and facilitate Signorelli Simulations. These simulations have been helping our clients meet sales training objectives without resorting to hokey games, dreaded role plays, or interactive e-learning. You should check it out here.

As we have launched and utilized this form of training, it is amazing how well people learn. I am creating a new one again—this one for selling services. We have a two-day session with the new reps who have gained some baseline knowledge, but who also need to truly apply it. The program launches later in October, so I will try to check in again with how it worked.

Trend to Economic Buyers

tonysignorelli — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:13:03 +0000

Across my work and client load over the last year, I see a trend that effects sales force productivity. Because of reduced budgets and increased financial scrutiny, customers across the board involve economic buyers in their decision making process—people like procurement officers, CFOs, and executive directors. For sales forces that focus on the product, this is a death trap. Economic buyers don’t really care about product features, and reps who are not prepared to talk about anything but features will seriously underperform.

Sales leadership needs to support field personnel in making a transition to selling to economic buyers. This is not easy. Often the company doesn’t know what economic buyers want, nor do they know how to find it. Once you do find out, most reps won’t naturally have the skills, and they need to be retrained on this particular type of sales interaction. Quite honestly, this is where outside consultants come in and can be very useful.

Email Avalanche

tonysignorelli — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:51:43 +0000

Although I often look at customer engagement process as a lynch pin to optimizing the sales force, there are many other factors. One of my clients recently conducted a time use study and discovered that their primary field force personnel categorized themselves and spending 21-24% of their time in administrative tasks. Everyone understood that was too much, and the temptation was to simply tell people to do that less.

When we looked into it further, however, we found that the overwhelming portion of those “administrative tasks” consisted of communicating by and processing email. The teams worked very hard to work together, and we found that people were in constant communication all the time, but the result of that was an avalanche of email. That more nuanced insight has led to a careful look at the technologies the company can employ.

Defining Expectations

tonysignorelli — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:07:08 +0000

The big result in thinking through these issues is not the issuing of an edict that everyone is a sales person. Nor is it the unfounded belief that we are doing it right. The result that matters is a detailed definition of the interaction and role of every person affecting customer experience, from the front line to the back end pricing and finance people. Definition of that expectation provides clear definition to management, leadership, and the front line men and women serving customers. It means that everyone knows what they are supposed to do. Fail to provide that knowledge, and I guarantee you will not get the result. Provide that definition to a professional sales organization, and the green will begin to flow.

Executive Leadership—Evaluating Your Organization

tonysignorelli — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:07:43 +0000

In Selling in Tough Times, Hopkins lists the traits of good sales professionals. He lists things like sales professionals are on a mission, they are detail oriented, empathetic to client and customer needs, etc. These are all good, and in my experience, true. Probably, all sales professionals should ask such questions of themselves. But what about sales management? Sales leadership? The sales process? How you engage customers? It is critical to think like an organization if you are in management and executive leadership. What are the traits of your organization? How do customer individuals and customer organizations experience you? Do you follow up effectively? Handle change well and effectively? Look for customer needs to solve? Do you even ask the questions at the organization level? If not, you are likely underperforming the potential of your organization.

Changing Tactics in Tough Times

tonysignorelli — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:49:00 +0000

I was fortunate to have clients who realized things had to change. One of those clients, in the depths of the 2008 meltdown, actually committed to adding headcount their sale organization based on a detailed analysis of customer need. The report showed that certain needs were not being met and could not be met by the current organization. Exactly when companies everywhere were pulling in, this client invested. Based on good analysis, a positive pilot test, and excellent follow up training, they drove sales up by 103% in 2009 on a multi-million dollar number.

Selling in Tough Times

tonysignorelli — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:27:02 +0000

Despite its limitations, Selling in Tough Times carries a theme that is necessary for succeeding today—things just ain’t what they used to be. The year 2009, and probably 2010, are probably the most difficult selling years you and your company have ever faced. The normal buyer’s budgets dried up, buying processes changed with higher and higher approval levels required in customer organizations for smaller and smaller orders. Sales professionals and companies everywhere were hearing: “Sorry, we just are not buying now.” Sales people and organizations that kept on selling the way they did in 2008 didn’t do so well. Those who realized the world had changed, and they would have to as well, found ways to prosper. Selling in Tough Times is a challenge for individual sales professionals and for sales organization alike.

Leadership Skill: Preparing Your Organization to Meet All Your Customer Organization’s Needs

tonysignorelli — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:02:37 +0000

In business-to-business sales, success usually results from a comprehensive team effort, not from one individual. Hopkins’s book focuses on the individual sales person. His, and books and training programs like it, can help individuals on the sales team who never thought of themselves as sales people—like account managers, account support, customer service, technical support, and maybe many others—to understand the expectations of them as front line sales people. As helpful as that is, effective leaders have to go at least one more step and look at the organization-to-organization interaction. While we need to understand the needs of individuals and meet those needs, we must also look at the needs of the customer organization and make sure that our organization is prepared to meet those needs from prospecting and marketing, all the way through support and the development of new opportunities.

Hopkins and Professionalism

tonysignorelli — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:43:45 +0000

Tom Hopkins recently released a new book titled Selling in Tough Times, a good title for a book that is helpful to the individual sales person. Unfortunately, the book falls short of its promise when you are dealing with complicated business-to-business sales. There are several keys to succeeding with sales in tough environments, and I take the professionalism of the sales person as a central assumption. Professionalism cannot be viewed as a competitive advantage, for it is really an expectation. Except in markets that are hideously unprofessional, differentiating on professionalism is a poor strategy. Your clients and customers are expecting much more than that.