butterfly

Why Sales Transformation May be Your Easiest and Most Meaningful Initiative Ever

by with No Comment Blogs

These days many people cringe at the thought of a transformation project. After trying or surviving digital transformation, cultural transformation, business process transformation, and organizational transformation, does anyone really want to endure another transformation project?

The very word transformation implies difficulty. Oxford languages defines transformation as “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” It is in essence a 180° turn from what we do and how we do something today. Sounds overwhelming, exhausting.

But imagine how that changes if what we do now, and how we do it today, is actually the hard way? What if today we are swimming upstream, or for my cycling friends, we are riding into a strong headwind. If that’s the case, this “transformation” or 180° turn is actually going to have us going with the flow. It’s going to make our lives easier and allow us to move at a significantly faster pace. For most companies, that is exactly what sales transformation is about. 

Today, most sales organizations are actually fighting against the natural flow in three very important ways.

Sellers and Buyers Have Competing Objectives

First, when it comes to how salespeople engage with buyers, the approach generally has buyers and sellers at odds, with different and sometimes even competing objectives. This creates tremendous friction and tension that reduces the pace and undermines effectiveness. Here’s a simple example to illustrate the point. When it comes time to present a recommendation, most salespeople have a singular objective – to convince the buyer to select their solution. However, most buyers have a very different objective – to figure out what is best for them. This difference in objectives often causes buyers to shut down, to withhold information about what they really think about our solution, making it even more difficult for salespeople to achieve their objective.

However, something magical happens when salespeople abandon their objective of winning a sale and instead embrace the buyer’s objective of determining what’s best for the buyer. Buyers open up and share more information, allowing for a more productive and candid conversation. Issues can be discussed and often properly addressed. If the solution really is right for the buyer, the two parties can figure that out together in a more efficient and relaxed way. If it isn’t right, the seller wastes less time on an opportunity that they will not win anyway.

That’s just one example, but throughout the typical buyer-seller journey there are many more opportunities to transform the engagement in ways that radically improve results while reducing effort.

Training Events Don’t Align With How People Learn

Now let’s move to the second major way in which sales organizations are typically fighting against the natural flow – how people learn. In most organizations, implementing a new sales methodology, improving the team’s skill in a particular area, or preparing them to sell a new solution is accomplished primarily through training events. To be sure, these are more often virtual than they used to be, and more often on-demand than they once were. However, they are still events in that salespeople are presented with content that they are then expected to consume and apply. While there may be considerable effort put forth to make the experience pleasant and the content engaging, this approach is actually contrary to how people develop skills and apply knowledge.

The learning cycle for acquiring a new skill or becoming incremental more proficient with an existing skill is actually well understood and documented. For our purposes here, we will use the Learn, Practice, Apply, Evaluate or LPAE model. For each new skill to take hold and become a part of the salesperson’s toolkit, they must complete the full cycle. However, each cycle also requires sleep, which is where our minds actually do much of the work associated with learning. So, we cannot stack multiple skills on top of one another in a two-day or three-day training session and expect anyone to get good at them. In fact, those people who do acquire new skills after attending this type of event generally don’t do it because of the event, they do it in spite of the event. Believe me, I know. We spent two decades training salespeople in traditional training classes before numerous studies conducted on our behalf by Western Michigan University’s Evaluation Center with our clients made clear, people who were using what they learned were acquiring the skills after class by breaking the learning down into small pieces that they would develop one at a time.

So, a radical transformation in how we train and develop salespeople would be to abandon traditional sales training classes in favor of a model where everyone on the team is expected to acquire or further develop a new skill every week, as a standard part of what they do. Instead of putting people in classes once or twice a year and overwhelming them with more than they can digest or apply, they would become comfortable at developing a new skill or acquiring new knowledge on a regular cadence. When it comes to skills associated with a sales methodology initiative, this can dramatically increase adoption and impact. Instead of 20% adoption of new skills, this approach, has allowed some organizations to achieve 80% adoption. Not only is it more effective, but it’s also dramatically easier to execute as scheduling hassles are significantly reduced.

Managers Provide Feedback Instead of Coaching

The third area in which most sales organizations are fighting against a strong headwind is in how managers interact with sellers. Unfortunately, this topic requires a more in-depth exploration than we have space for in this article. But not to worry, if you’d like to read more about transforming managers into exceptional coaches, simply click here to download our free Guide to Sales Coaching. This brief paper will show you how transforming the way companies set sales goals and how managers interact with sellers can drive continuous improvement and dramatically better results, with considerably less stress.

While it’s true that a transformation requires effort, anyone who has turned to downstream after paddling against a river’s flow or turned downwind after pedaling into a headwind can tell you, the benefit far outweighs the effort. For most organizations this is exactly what sales transformation will be like.

Not sure sales transformation is right for your organization? You may be correct; it isn’t right or even possible for everyone. If you’d like to learn more, let’s schedule a brief call to talk about your organization. We’ll give you an honest assessment, not a sales pitch, so you can figure out if sales transformation is an initiative worth exploring in your situation.

At Axiom Sales Kinetics we’ve spent thirty years helping sales teams coach, learn, and sell more effectively. We offer a unique, mindful alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Enjoying the view

How Can Good People Become Exceptional Sales Professionals?

by with No Comment Blogs

I still remember the conversation as if it were yesterday. It was the second day of a three-day workshop when one of my students came in early. I was still setting up the classroom when she (we will call her Alisha, though that’s not her real name) asked if she could speak to me.

I love talking one-on-one with students, so naturally, I was all ears. Here is how the conversation went.

 

Alisha: “I want you to know that I was going to quit my job yesterday.”

Me: “Really? Why is that?”

Alisha: “Well, I’m really struggling right now. I’m only at about 65% of my quota, and, honestly, based on what I’d seen and heard about selling, I decided that to succeed, I’d have to become a person that I don’t want to be. But yesterday, you showed me that being a good person AND being successful in sales aren’t conflicting goals. You showed me that if I use this process, I can help my customers and sell significantly more! I’ve decided to apply what you’re teaching us and stick it out.”

 

Quick update: I understand that Alisha finished that year over 130% of her plan. I hope she’s continuing with her sales career because she’s the type of person we need to develop and support when it comes to sales skills — the type of person who elevates our entire profession through her commitment to customers and to her own development.

Bad Sales Training, Not Bad People

My student’s story illustrates one of the fundamental challenges we have in our profession: The idea that our salespeople compete with our customers — with the prize being the customer’s money. Nothing could be further from the truth or more damaging to our long-term success.

Too often, the sales techniques we provide our people put them at odds with our customers. We damage our relationships and alienate customers and prospects by teaching salespeople to “tie down” the customer or “ignore their objection until we hear it three times” or by using closing techniques designed to manipulate people into buying what they don’t want.

Unfortunately for many salespeople and their managers, the pressure to perform is so overwhelming that they feel they must do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to close business.

There's a better alternative.

By helping salespeople develop the skill and knowledge needed to bring value to buyers throughout their engagement, we can elevate the perception that prospects and customers have of our company AND sell significantly more. Conceptually, this may make perfectly good sense. But let’s face it, we don’t operate on the conceptual plan.

We work in the real world where real competitors are vying for the same business.

4 Steps to Differentiate Ourselves

How do we differentiate ourselves by virtue of the conversations we have with our customers? These four simple steps will provide the framework for more productive conversations and a dramatically better relationship.

1. Make certain to explain the purpose of our discussion.

Our job is NOT to sell them something. It’s to help our prospects achieve THEIR objectives. We need to let them know from the very beginning that this is our MUTUAL objective and how we expect to accomplish it. A customer-focused objective and agenda will help set the stage for a productive discussion and keep us working FOR the customer, not against them.

2. Learn about them.

This isn’t idle conversation about the weather or local traffic. If we’re going to show a customer how our product helps them achieve their goals and objectives, we must know what those goals and objectives are, and we need to understand what obstacles are getting in the way of their success.

In a B2B selling environment, this means we learn about their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, their business processes, and how they’re organized — just to name a couple of the key topics we want to cover. It also means we dig deep enough to understand how these various business issues are impacting their success in terms of things like revenue, expenses, productivity, the image they project to their customers, and the safety and security of their people, customers, and information.

Retail salespeople aren’t exempt from this requirement; we need to understand how our customers live and work and what they do for recreation to understand the value our products and services can bring to them. 

3. Help them develop differentiated decision criteria.

Uncovering the buyer’s basic needs is not sufficient to differentiate us and bring real value to the customer. Today’s buyers face more choices than ever before and what they really need is help developing criteria that will enable them to determine which alternative is really best for them. When salespeople have the skills to help buyers with this, they build relationships that allow them to become trusted advisors and uncover tremendous opportunities to differentiate their products/services more meaningfully.

4. Present our solutions based on the impact they deliver.

Buyers don’t care how enthusiastic salespeople are about their solutions — they expect that. What they want to understand is how the solution will meet their criteria and help them achieve their objectives. If we’ve done an effective job of gathering this information, let’s not forget to use it properly when we present our recommendation.

We should never show any capability or feature of our product unless/until we can link it back to meaningful impact based on the buyer’s criteria and their goals and objectives. Moreover, it’s our obligation to show them everything that will impact them and/or their business so that they can make the most informed buying decision possible.

How Does Your Sales Team Measure Up?

  • How is your team doing in these areas?

  • Do they always begin meetings with clearly defined customer-focused objectives and agendas?

  • Can they tell you about their customers and their goals and objectives?

  • Do they know exactly how the customer will determine which alternative is best for them?

  • Are they prepared to address the customer’s criteria and demonstrate how their recommendation will deliver the best value to the customer based on the customer’s criteria?

Room for Improvement

Having worked with thousands of sales professionals over the past two decades, we know that when people like Alisha dedicate themselves to helping their customers make better decisions and achieve their goals and objectives, better relationships and dramatically better sales results ensue.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage these and other best practices to build a winning sales team and sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s connect.

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Posture

Do You Have the Right Posture to be a SaaS Super-Seller?

by with No Comment Blogs

No, we aren’t wondering about your monitor, keyboard, or chair position when we ask this question. We are wondering more about the position of your heart and mind.

You see, one of the definitions Oxford languages provides for posture is this: “a particular way of dealing with or considering something; an approach or attitude.” Now certainly having the right approach or attitude can be a critical element in sales success in any field. But the right posture is even more significant if you want to excel selling a SaaS solution.

The Big Challenge with SaaS

SaaS companies face a unique challenge in that many ONLY make money when customers renew their initial services. The customer acquisition costs (CAC), including sales compensation, are often high relative to the up-front revenue associated with a new customer. Meanwhile customer and revenue churn reduce the overall lifetime value of the customer and can, if not properly managed, cause SaaS companies to experience enormous financial problems, despite closing tons of new business (more on key SaaS metrics can be found here). As a result, SaaS businesses, perhaps more than any other, require customer satisfaction as much, if not more, than customer acquisition.

In fact, for most SaaS solutions, activating a customer who doesn’t renew, or worse, cancels service shortly after activation, will cost the company far more than it will earn in revenue.

The implication for SaaS sellers is clear – selling a solution that isn’t right for the customer is actually WORSE for the company financially than not making a sale at all.

A Servant’s Heart

By now it’s almost certain you are familiar with the term servant-leader – the approach to leading others whereby serving them, helping them achieve their potential is the attitude or posture the leader takes. In this environment, the leader views themselves as responsible for serving their staff, and not the other way around. Genuine servant-leaders must therefore be mindful of the needs and objectives of people on their team. They must be careful to put people in positions where they can do their best work and be fulfilled. And they must look for opportunities to help them achieve their personal and professional objectives while delivering value to the business. But why is servant-leadership so popular and effective? After all, it isn’t always an easy approach to take. However, the result is generally worth the extra effort as effective servant-leaders typically develop tremendous respect and achieve personal fulfillment as they deliver results for their people and their company.

And this same approach, one we refer to as mindful selling, will deliver equally compelling results in sales – especially in SaaS businesses. By adopting a posture of serving prospects, even before they become customers, salespeople will develop productive relationships with nearly every contact they meet. This mindful approach will focus the seller’s attention on helping the buyer figure out what is best for their business, instead of trying to pitch the seller’s SaaS solution to everyone they meet. In fact, mindful sellers periodically find they shouldn’t propose a solution to a given contact at all. However, those contacts often become great sources of referrals and even customers at a later date because the mindful seller chose to serve the buyer rather than pitch them, developing a level of trust that transcends any transaction.

Why, What, and Now How

We’ve highlighted WHY selling SaaS demands we take a different approach from pitching solutions to everyone we can. The economics simply require that we go beyond closing transactions to building profitable relationships or SaaS companies may actually lose financially because they are winning business that doesn’t stick.

We’ve also talked about WHAT this different approach should look like. If we are going to win the right business, we need to focus on helping buyers determine what’s best for them and sell our solution where it really is a good fit. As importantly, we need to avoid pitching to customers who won’t be well-served by our solution. Not only will this mindful approach result in better sales, but it will also result in stronger relationships and less time wasted.

Now let’s talk about HOW we do it – and this is perhaps the most challenging part of becoming a SaaS super-seller. Becoming an expert mindful seller requires mastery of the five key conversations we outlined in this blog a few months back so we won’t rehash that here. However, the key point to stress here is that mastering these five conversations isn’t something that can be achieved by completing a sales training class. It won’t happen in a few days, or probably even a few weeks. Mastery is an ongoing pursuit and SaaS super-sellers have the same posture or attitude toward their profession as great athletes, in that they are continually striving to improve even while they excel in their field. Amateur athletes often like to imagine that exceptional professionals have learned some advanced technique and that’s what makes them great. However, that is very rarely true. In nearly all cases, the great athlete has simply achieved a higher level of mastery over the exact same skills and techniques amateurs are taught, but the professional has been practicing for many years. Become an exceptional SaaS sales professional is no different.

So, let’s revisit the question posed in the title of this blog. Do you have the right posture to become a SaaS super-seller? More specifically, are you prepared to:

  • Mindfully focus on helping everyone you meet, even if that means not selling a solution that isn’t right for a particular contact?

  • Commit to mastering the skills needed to execute your profession at the highest possible level through continuous, incremental improvement?

If you answered yes to both of these questions, we want to help with your journey. At Axiom we’ve developed a comprehensive methodology for mindful selling that has helped thousands of salespeople experience better results and more fulfillment than they ever thought possible. We want to give you FREE access to several key modules in our online learning library. Simply click here to register and you’ll receive access to:

  • How Business Make Decisions – an overview of the key motives behind all business decisions to help you better speak the language of your buyers.

  • The DIG Questioning Model – a unique approach to engage buyers in a discussion about their business that can transform your interactions and reveal tremendous opportunities to impact their success. 

Want to talk about how to scale a mindful selling approach in your SaaS business? Click here to schedule a call with one of our consultants and you’ll receive helpful insights without a sales pitch.

At Axiom Sales Kinetics we offer a unique, mindful alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

 

Running in lanes

Do Sales Stages Really Matter?

by with No Comment Blogs

If you’ve taken the time to start reading this post, then you are probably aware that sales stages are highly visible in most CRM systems and used in a variety of ways by most sales organizations. Sales stages can be used to trigger content, make recommendations, determine win probabilities, and even enforce documentation or process requirements. But are sales stages the best vehicle for these various selling, enablement, operations, and marketing functions?

In many cases, the answer is no.

Static Selling vs. Dynamic Buying

Even in the most thoughtful organizations, sales stages represent the linear progression of the buyer-seller engagement. Generally, this means moving it from the earlier stages of identifying the opportunity to the later stages of proposing, negotiating, and closing. In this environment, recommendations and content to help create interest are presented earlier, content to help differentiate our solutions presented later. And win probabilities often improve automatically as opportunities are moved further along the sales stages.

But is that really the way buyers are evaluating our solutions? In many cases, it’s not. Particularly in more complex environments, people move in and out of the evaluation at various times and given evaluators may be at different stages for the same decision. In fact, many of us have progressed an opportunity to the negotiating stage only to have another evaluator enter the mix or some other event force us back to the qualifying stage. It may also be necessary to find a way to demonstrate meaningful impact to some buyers even before we have a chance to begin qualifying. Similarly,

Now certainly, most CRM deployments will allow sellers to move an opportunity back and forth among stages. However, this in and of itself may well point to the downside of being overly focused on sales stages.

Should We Eliminate Sales Stages?

It may appear that in writing this that we’re advocating the complete abandonment of sales stages. That is definitely not the case. There are some clear reasons why sales stages can help support effective sales execution. For example, in a typical sales organization, prospects won’t buy something that hasn’t even been proposed. Requiring salespeople to move their opportunities through stages and demonstrate that milestones for the stages have been met, can be very helpful and can help the company avoid committing resources to pursue opportunities too early; before they are properly vetted. And of course, looking over a salesperson’s committed forecast only to find opportunities projected to close this month that haven’t even been proposed yet probably should set off red flags.

In addition, there are certain selling environments where critical documentation must be completed as an opportunity progresses through various stages, and these gates help make certain these milestones aren’t forgotten. 

While we aren’t suggesting sales stages be eliminated entirely, we are recommending an alternative approach to enablement actions such as triggers or prompts for sales learning and selling recommendations, and even how companies calculate win probabilities.

An Alternative: Information Equals Opportunity

Despite the fact that most CRM systems automatically increase win probabilities as opportunities progress through sales stages, this progression rarely reflects the true likelihood a seller will win a given opportunity. In reality, the likelihood we will or won’t win a specific opportunity has far more to do with what we know about the customer than what stage we assign to the opportunity. Key information objectives include things like:

  • Their business issues

  • The evaluators, their roles, and their level of influence

  • Other alternatives they are considering

  • Criteria they will use to evaluate the alternatives

  • Steps they will go through in order to make a decision

Our chances of winning (and our ability to avoid wasting time on things we will not win) improve significantly when we better understand what someone wants to buy and how they will go about determining who has that.

Given the strong correlation between knowing how to win and winning, why not provide tools, training, and tips to aid sellers based on what they do and don’t know rather than what stage they select for a given opportunity?

For example, a seller who doesn’t yet demonstrate a clear understanding of a prospect’s buying criteria may need dramatically different coaching and support from a seller who fully understands this, despite the fact that both of their opportunities are at the exact same selling stage.

Conclusion

While it’s certainly easy to create triggers, content, and workflows based on sales stages, it may be doing little to help salespeople better engage buyers and win more business. Want to test the theory in your organization? Here are two simple questions that can help you determine what emphasis should be placed on leveraging sales stages versus leveraging your sellers’ understanding of the buyers they are working with:

  1. How often do we lose opportunities because we fail to change the sales stage?
  2. How often do we lose opportunities because we fail to properly understand the customer and/or their buying criteria?

If the answer to question #2 is greater than the answer to question #1, it may be time to stop tying triggers, tools, playbooks, etc., to selling stages and start tying them to information.

Want to talk more about how buyer information can be leveraged to accelerate your sales enablement initiatives and drive sales effectiveness? Let’s schedule time to talk.

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

Cycling Competition

3 Things Sales Managers Must Do Well

by with No Comment Blogs

One weekend not long ago, I was reminded how useful competition is in helping us get an objective view of our effectiveness. So, there I was on a lazy weekend bike ride when a few random cyclists pulled up near me. I didn’t think much about the extra company at first, but the next thing I knew, we organically started pushing each other competitively. There isn’t anything quite like a little friendly competition to show how strong and effective you can still be (or perhaps how strong you used to be). Naturally, this got me thinking about sales managers and the difference between selling and many other jobs.

Selling is unique in that it is both a production and performance profession. (Click here for more information on the production part of selling). Unlike engineers and accountants, salespeople constantly compete directly with each other. And while winning more frequently might be related to their environment and variables such as the solution they represent, the economy and their competition (in the same way my bike and the weather could impact my cycling success), nothing exposes opportunities to improve one’s selling skills like competition. And nearly every competitor knows the immense value of an effective coach in helping them achieve their full potential.

The good news is that nearly every sales professional has paid for and is probably still paying for performance coaching – the sales manager. But are managers really doing all they can to help their sellers compete more effectively?

In many cases, the evidence is clear that they aren’t. However, this because sales managers don’t want to be good coaches, they generally do. Unfortunately, the difference between being an effective player and an effective coach is significant. And being a great player doesn’t necessarily make you a great coach – see Michael Jordan.

3 Critical Behaviors For Effective Sales Managers

The fact that sales managers are often falling short as coaches isn’t because no one cares about sales coaching. In fact, there is a growing sense of urgency among sales organizations to transform their sales managers into effective coaches. In one study, sales coaching was rated as the single most important effectiveness initiative.

Several more studies suggest that effective sales coaching improves average team performance by as much as 20%, and coaching solutions have been among the top requested apps for salesforce.com users for several years.

So why is quality sales coaching so elusive? For starters, many companies and their sales leaders seem unclear about the role of the sales coach. So, in this blog, let’s focus on just the high-level, the three things every performance coach must do well.

Before you read further, it may be helpful at this point to pause for a moment and think about your own experience outside any sales role. If you’ve ever played team sports, taken lessons for a musical instrument, had golf or tennis lessons, or even had a personal trainer, then you have likely experienced first-hand the three critical coaching behaviors:

1. Expert Analysis and Advice

While the average weekend warrior may not need a personal trainer in order to enjoy her sport of choice, consistently winning against a field in any competition requires more expertise than the average competitor possesses. Not just because they don’t study the behavior as thoroughly as the typical coach, but also because few of us are able to evaluate our own performance as objectively as an unbiased third party.

The role the coach plays here is essential to comparing the seller’s performance against an ideal selling model. This implies that there is an agreed upon ideal model, because without one, the seller and coach will likely spend more time debating the optimum selling behaviors rather than evaluating the effectiveness with which the seller is executing on them. In this area, the coach’s job is not only to identify opportunities for improvement, but to evaluate the seller’s performance in a manner that identifies the root cause of performance and behavior gaps. Once these are identified, the coach must be able to recommend specific activities that can be completed in order to improve skill, knowledge and selling behaviors – ultimately leading to better business results.

2. Inspiration and Motivation

While expert advice and counsel are critical technical skills for the effective sales coach, motivation and accountability are no less important to overall effectiveness. If you have ever worked with a sports coach or trainer, you personally know the power of encouragement when, just as you think you’ve hit your limit, your coach shouts out, “one more set, you can do it!” It would be an oversimplification though, to suggest that positive reinforcement and encouragement is all that’s necessary for a manager to inspire and motivate her team to better sales performance. The ability to motivate doesn’t simply reveal itself when someone is pushing through a perceived wall. It starts well before, in the earliest planning and introductory stages of the relationship.

By taking the time to understand the underlying motivation of the person being coached, the manager can determine exactly what drives them and use this to help motivate and inspire them to be the best version of themselves.

Unfortunately, many organizations drive nearly the opposite type of interaction. Managers are given their goals, which they pass down to their sellers. Just imagine hiring a personal trainer and rather than trying to understand what you want to accomplish, they give you the objective, “I need you to be able to run a 6-minute mile!” Crazy as it sounds, that is essentially what we are doing in sales, and it doesn’t have to be this way. 

In fact, the vast majority of salespeople we have worked with have personal goals that are higher than their quota. We can gain more leverage and inspire better performance by understanding our people first and showing them how to achieve their goals. 

3. Accountability with a Purpose

Shifting the goal-setting conversation is the key to our third required behavior. Effective coaches become critical accountability partners. Whether you want to lose weight, ride faster on a bike, play better golf, or sell more, chances are it will require effort beyond what you are presently putting forth. This is the nature of improvement in a competitive environment. You are either moving forward or falling backward relative to your competition.

Many of us have experienced that conflict between getting the long-term results we want and the near-term pain of putting in extra effort. This is where the coach’s role becomes indispensable. Effective coaches understand our underlying motivation, know exactly where we need to improve, and are able to leverage this knowledge and their personal relationship with us to hold us accountable for doing things we may not want to do in the moment. 

In fact, the great Tom Landry, former head coach for the Dallas Cowboys phrased it this way, “Leadership is the ability to get a person to do what he doesn’t want to do in order to achieve what he wants to achieve…it’s getting the best out of people.” Great sales coaches go beyond holding people accountable for results. They hold their people accountable for the behaviors that produce results including learning and practicing. 

Most sales leaders agree, sales coaching is the pivot point for driving all sales effectiveness initiatives. Most sales managers want to be great coaches, and most salespeople, like most professional athletes, want to work for great coaches. To be sure, there are obstacles to putting these ideas into practice, but there is enormous opportunity for scalable, sustainable differentiation when you develop and enable a truly effective coaching culture.

Want more detail on what it takes to become an exceptional sales coach? Click here to download our free Guide to Sales Coaching, which includes an overview of our 5-step GUIDE coaching model and a coaching readiness assessment for sales enablement leaders.

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.

training

Is Sales Training a Scam?

by with No Comment Blogs

We’ve all seen the statistics – 87% of new skills are lost within a month of the sales training class (Xerox). 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI (HR Challey Group). Not only can you find many more examples of how sales training is failing salespeople, but you can also find hundreds of articles about how to fix sales training – including several written by us.

But that’s not the point of this article. The point here isn’t to pile on with the group of people pronouncing the demise of sales training (though I did exactly that in jest a couple years back at this Sales Management Association event). In fact, this article will argue the exact opposite – that sales training events are essential, provided they achieve a singular but critical objective.

Training isn’t an Event

We’ve argued multiple times in a variety of posts that effective sales training isn’t an event. The fact that we think of sales training as an event says something about how the term has been co-opted over the past several decades. After all, if I told you I am training for a triathlon, would you actually think I was going to attend a three-day class and then I’d be done? Of course not, and we shouldn’t think that about sales training either.  

That’s because training isn’t achieved when we are introduced to new information or skill, it’s achieved when we can do something different or perhaps better than we did before. Training is generally an ongoing process of learning and improving our ability to perform. Yet, if we tell someone we are taking sales training, a two or three-day event is precisely what will come to mind because for decades now that’s been the model for sales training programs. Sure, there would often be follow up activities, refresh sessions, or other reinforcement. But the training itself was primarily the event.

Sales Training Events aren’t too Short, They are too Long

So, now you may be thinking based on the comments above that we’d argue that sales training events are too short. After all, when the sales profession was originally brought in-house by companies like Xerox and IBM, sales training programs lasted a full year. Only through decades of budget cuts and operational pressures did companies shorten training classes to a few weeks or even a few days.

However, that’s not the point we are making. In fact, we’d argue the exact opposite – most sales training classes are not too short, they are far too long! And the reason they are too long is actually quite simple, they have the wrong objectives.

Good training programs are naturally built around learning objectives. Learning objectives are stated in terms of things people will know, or even better, things they will be able to do as a result of the training. The problem with most sales training events is that the learning objectives are far too ambitious for the content and time available. Good sales methodologies often include a dozen or more new skills that are then introduced in training sessions lasting only a couple days. Unfortunately, we now know from neuroscience that acquiring a new skill actually requires a complete learn, practice, apply, evaluate (LPAE) cycle and that each new cycle requires sleep for the mind to fully process the learning. Therefore, it is physically impossible for participants to become proficient with a dozen or more new skills in a couple days, it simply cannot be done.

However, rather than arguing for longer training events, we propose they actually be even shorter. Yep, shorter! After all, why would a sales training company need to keep people in class for several days if no one is going to get good anyway?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question will likely make some readers uncomfortable. The simple truth is that sales training buyers have been conditioned to pay more money for more content and longer classes. Therefore, if a training company wants to charge you $1,200 per person, they really need to cover lots of information and keep your people in class for at least a couple days in order to justify that expense. While it may not work well for the participants, it often works well for the companies that provide the training.

A Radical Approach

So how long should a sales training event be? Before we answer that question, let’s go back to the objective for the event. We’ve already established that people cannot get proficient with skills in such a short time, so what is the purpose of the event? In a word, OWNERSHIP. That’s because sales training that works will facilitate the ongoing improvement of one’s skill and knowledge such that they engage with buyers more effectively. That makes training a change initiative, and we all know that in order for people to change, they must believe that doing so is in their personal best interest. So, the natural objective for an event at the beginning of training program (change initiative) is to provide people with enough information to decide IF they are committed to learning and applying the new skills.  

And how long does it take to provide people with enough information to make that decision? Much less time than you’d think. In fact, it is possible to provide participants with enough information to evaluate even the most comprehensive sales models in just a few hours. Assuming they agree that developing proficiency with the new skills will benefit them, their buyers, and their company, they can then begin a regular cadence of LPAE learning cycles that will help them become progressively more proficient with each element of the program.

But What About the Money

Of course, spending a few hours with your team instead of a few days makes it hard to justify the crazy up front “licensing fees” charged by some sales training providers. After all, how much would you be willing to pay for the privilege of being introduced to their methodology or intellectual property but not get good at it? Probably not very much. Unfortunately, the length of many sales training events today is masking the fact that companies are actually paying very high fees for just this privilege … and in some cases much more down the road for reinforcement or refresh training programs.

Time to Make a Change?

So sales training, when done properly definitely isn’t a scam. However, expensive multi-day events may well be. If you want to avoid paying crazy fees and pulling your people out of the field for days only to find they are unable to apply what they supposedly learned, we can help. At Axiom, we help sales teams achieve amazing results, with less stress by transforming how sellers engage with buyers. Our training events launch the program, last only a couple hours and are 100% guaranteed. If your people don’t agree that selling the Axiom way will produce better results for them, their buyers, and your company, you pay nothing.

When they do agree, we leverage that enthusiasm to implement an ongoing program that embeds continuous learning and improvement into your existing sales cadence. With Axiom, you don’t pay to see our methodology, you pay to get good at it. If you’d like to learn more about Selling the Axiom Way, click here to download an overview. Want to talk about your situation to figure out if Axiom is right for you, click here to schedule an introductory conversationwhere you’ll get help, not hype. We are dedicated to elevating the sales profession and are anxious to help you in any way we can. 

Mindful Approach

Video: A More Mindful Approach to Handling Objections

by with No Comment Blogs

Objections can derail even the best opportunity and cause incredible stress for buyers and sellers. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a more mindful approach, based on three simple steps, that can eliminate stress for buyer and seller and result in stronger, more productive relationships.

During this session, will discuss:

  • Why hearing objections is actually a positive sign for your opportunity

  • Why objections create stress for buyers and sellers

  • Three steps you can take to handle objections in a more mindful and effective way.

Handling buyer objections doesn’t need to derail your sales opportunity. These three proven steps can help you better address any objection from any buyer.

Click here to sign up complementary access to our online handling objections program.

Team Learning and Practice

Is Continuous Learning the Secret to Sales Excellence?

by with No Comment Blogs

For too long, the sales profession has viewed learning as an event. We conduct sales training workshops to help people handle objections more effectively. We deliver training classes on the latest product release or a prospecting technique. We serve up a lunch and learn to update our team on one of our competitors.

While none of these activities is inherently bad, training events often ignore the fundamental principles of learning, especially as it relates to skill development. Unfortunately, participants in sales training events typically forget 80% of what they learned within the first 30 days after training. How big an issue is this? A Google search of the phrase “sales training doesn’t work” returns 241M results in just .7 seconds! As a result, sales teams miss out on the opportunity to gain a sustainable competitive advantage through continuous, incremental improvement.

The Learning Sales Organization

If you want a real, sustainable, competitive advantage for your sales team, don’t default to the antiquated model of trying to “teach” them new skills in training events. Instead, create an organization that promotes continuous learning and is always improving – one that integrates learning into the normal work cadence. In their 1977 book, The Learning Company: A Strategy for Sustainable Development, Pedler, Burgogyne, and Boydell define the continuous learning organization as “a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.”

This concept was later popularized in Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline. In that book, he proposed the following five disciplines of a continuous learning organization:

1. Systems Thinking

2. Personal Mastery

3. Mental Models

4. Shared Vision

5. Team Learning

Let’s take a quick look at a few practical ways we can apply these concepts to sales.

Systems Thinking, Mental Models & Shared Vision

If we want to create a continuously learning sales organization, we must abandon the idea that selling is an innate talent or that customer engagement is an art form in which any approach is valid so long as the outcome is a sale. Systems thinking recognizes the complexity and interdependence between the sales interaction and the ability of the rest of the organization to deliver customer satisfaction. For this reason, customer interaction cannot be left to the whims of individual salespeople.

Instead, clear mental models must define how the continuous learning organization will engage with customers and one another to deliver exceptional service to customers and optimize sales performance. Moreover, these models must be part of a shared vision that everyone on the team owns. It won’t be adopted if individuals or teams don’t buy-in to the model.

Personal Mastery & Team Learning

Continuous learning sales organizations must encourage personal mastery while recognizing the necessity of team learning to achieve this end. Imagine a group of dedicated football players, each committed to mastering his position. Now suppose that the expectation would be that each person would achieve excellence WITHOUT practicing with others on the team. The concept is so absurd it doesn’t even seem possible. Yet, many sales teams take this same approach.

Since selling is interpersonal interaction, organizations must leverage team learning and practice to facilitate continuous improvement and personal mastery. Without this interaction and feedback, no person can achieve optimum effectiveness, and the team’s performance will suffer. However, team learning can accelerate everyone’s proficiency and provide a competitive advantage.

Getting Started

Becoming a learning sales organization may appear an overwhelming project, however three simple steps can help put your company on the path to continuous learning and sales excellence:

1.   Select your selling and coaching models — Establish criteria for each and identify or develop models that meet your criteria, as these will be the foundation for your ongoing learning.

2.   Integrate tools — Don’t implement CRM solutions or other sales effectiveness tools unless/until you have a model for the ideal selling behavior. When you do, integrate the model into the tools so that they support adoption of these key behaviors and bring real value to your sellers, coaches, and customers.

3.   Build a learning library — While training events may still be necessary, recognize the incremental nature of personal development and provide a library of reinforcement and refresh learning and practices that can be easily referenced and leveraged as learning opportunities are identified.

Want to talk more about creating your own learning sales organization? You can connect with us and share your thoughts here. 

Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about how our Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform helps sales teams integrate continuous learning into their sales motions, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com/kinetics-platform.

Business Conversation

Video: Three Steps to More Productive Business Conversations

by with No Comment Blogs

While nearly every sales person has been taught the importance of understanding their buyer’s business, few actually do this effectively. In this video we’ll talk about why that is and three simple steps any organization can take to help their people have more productive business conversations.

During this session, we will discuss:

  • Why salespeople struggle to have productive business conversations

  • Three steps organizations can take to equip salespeople to have more rich, meaningful business conversations

  • A visual model for how businesses operate and make decisions

  • A model for effective follow up questions

  • How every business issue represents an opportunity to differentiate ourselves and our solution

 

Handling buyer objections doesn’t need to derail your sales opportunity. These three proven steps can help you better address any objection from any buyer.

Click here to sign up complementary access to our online learning for how businesses make decisions and the DIG questioning model.

Customer Conversation

The 5 Customer Conversations Top Salespeople Master

by with No Comment Blogs

It amazes me when another new sales training program is launched, or a book is written. Sales performance is so important to both individual salespeople and the companies that employ them that there is a seemingly insatiable appetite for some unique competitive advantage. This creates tremendous opportunities for sales training companies and would-be sales experts who promise the latest, greatest tactics.

But is there really something new? Has buyer behavior changed so much that a radically new approach is necessary?

How Buyer Behavior Has, and Has Not Changed

  • Buyers spend more time than ever before evaluating products and services online before, and in many cases, while speaking with a salesperson. In fact, more than 90% of all B2B purchase decisions begin with an online search and many buyers won’t speak with sellers until they do their own research.

  • Buyers have access to more information, from a variety of sources, than ever before. In other words, salespeople rarely control the information available to buyers about the products and services offered.

  • Online review sites and social networking allow buyers access to unvarnished views about products and services. Salespeople no longer control references to the extent the once did.

  • As a result, buyers are better informed about the products and services they are evaluating than ever before.

Given that the explosion of e-commerce also means we can buy many things online, without speaking with a salesperson, this begs the question; why do buyers meet with salespeople at all? In reality, the reason buyers speak with salespeople hasn’t really changed so much as their access to information has made it even more clear what they want and need from sales interactions:

  • While buyers may have gathered enough information to narrow their available options to a manageable list of a few companies with which they will speak, they may not be clear which of these alternatives is actually best.

  • Buyers speak with salespeople from these companies because they need help making their decision or figuring out what is best.

  • Salespeople who act as expert decision consultants bring value beyond their products and services, they don’t just help buyers get comfortable the company’s solution, they help them get comfortable with THEIR decision.

Five Essential Conversations

Salespeople who do a better job of helping buyer’s get clear about and comfortable with their decision provide immense value that extends beyond the products and services they offer. So how do salespeople engage effectively with buyers who already have access to so much information, but still need help determining what’s best for them? In reality, there are now, always have been, and likely always will be just five essential customer conversations that every salesperson should master if they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors, build stronger, longer-lasting relationships, and sell dramatically more. Without further adieu, here are the Five Essential Sales Conversations:

1. Generating Interest

Nothing new here. No matter what we sell or to whom we sell it, we need someone willing to talk with us to demonstrate the value we can provide. While social media channels like LinkedIn have created new avenues to reach prospects, they have enabled so much content and clutter that generating interest can be extremely difficult.

To capture the attention of today’s busy buyers, we need a compelling reason for them to spend time with us.

And this requires that we already know something about them — some way in which we can bring meaningful value that helps them. Unfortunately, far too many salespeople pitch a generic value proposition to every prospect they contact. A little energy spent finding a significant problem we can solve or an obstacle we can remove goes a long way toward generating enough interest to spark a meaningful conversation.

2. Understanding the Current Situation

Assuming we have engaged a key contact in a meaningful conversation, we must be experts at efficiently understanding their current situation. This doesn’t mean we should be asking the CEO of State Farm what business they’re in. It means digging into key areas related to the impact we can have on their success to uncover the most significant opportunities to help them better achieve their goals, execute their plans, leverage their strengths, minimize weaknesses, and so on.

If the key to generating interest is finding a meaningful issue you can help a prospect address, the key to developing a deeper understanding of their business is to have a clear questioning model that helps us understand their issues, how these issues are impacting their success and any gaps between where they are and where they want to be.

3. Developing Decision Criteria

A significant proportion of all sales training is based on needs-satisfaction selling. Identifying needs is absolutely important, however it is not sufficient for today’s sales professional. If a buyer is willing to meet with us and have customer conversations that matter, there is a very high likelihood that they:

  • Already believe we are one of several providers who can MEET their needs

  • Need help figuring out which alternative is BEST

Questions here must be designed to help buyers figure this out and help them make the best possible decision for their business. When skilled salespeople understand their prospect’s current situation and the characteristics that differentiate one solution from the others, this step becomes the key to dramatically better sales results.

At the end of the buying journey, nearly every prospect will choose the alternative they believe to be best for their situation. And most salespeople spend tremendous energy at the end of the process telling their prospects why they, the salespeople, believe they have the best solution. A far better approach is to help shape the buyer’s criteria at the beginning of their journey. In reality, most buyers don’t have clearly defined or differentiating criteria – if they did, they would simply make their decision, often without even meeting with salespeople. The seller who can master this conversation and leverage what they know about the buyer’s current situation, combined with an understanding of their competitive advantages, can help the buyer and themselves.

4. Presenting Recommendations

Once we’ve generated interest, learned about our prospect’s current situation, and developed clear, differentiating decision criteria, we are ready to present recommendations. Here it is critical that we fully understand what motivates behavior – something that hasn’t changed about people for thousands of years.

We are wired to do more to avoid near-term pain than to pursue distant pleasure.

When presenting recommendations, it is essential that we do not focus on the benefits (pleasure) our solution will bring, as that is comparing future pleasure (benefits we offer) to near-term pain (the cost of our solution, risk of change, etc.). Instead, we need to show the pain of not implementing our recommendation in terms of the negative impact the current or competing alternative may have on the buyer in terms of the things they care about most, such as:

  • Their productivity and efficiency

  • The image they project to their people and customers

  • Their revenue

  • Their expenses

  • The safety, security, and stability of their organization, their information, and their people

When we demonstrate to prospects how our solutions better address their criteria and have greater impact on these key areas, we are set to help them develop complete comfort with their decision and win at a dramatically higher rate

5. Addressing Concerns

Now for a dose of reality. No matter how effectively we execute the previous four conversations, we still need to address customer concerns. Note, we aren’t referring to this conversation as overcoming objections. Sales training programs have put too much pressure on sellers to overcome a buyer’s objections for too long. That isn’t the objective here; it can ruin the trust built up during the other conversations.

Remember, our only purpose in their journey is to help them figure this out. That same principle applies to this step. To achieve this objective, we need to get out of the telling mode and get into the learning mode. We need to completely understand the concern from their perspective, including how significant this issue is and whether or not this is one of several issues or the only thing standing between them and what they otherwise want to do. We then need to engage in a collaborative session where we both contribute potential ideas to determine what can be done to remove this issue.

We are here to help, but ultimately, only the buyer can decide what must be done to address a concern. However, our skill at leading them through this conversation can make all the difference between addressing a simple issue and facing an insurmountable objection. As we consider these five essential conversations, it is important to remember these three key points:

  1. A proper attitude can be as important as skill and knowledge. When salespeople don’t fully embrace their role of bringing value to buyers, no set of skills or techniques can help them build the trust needed to reach their full potential.
  2. These conversations are interrelated, not linear. This isn’t a set of steps to follow, and what happens in one conversation can have tremendous impact on the others. For example, it is not at all uncommon to find the only way to address a buyer’s concerns is to develop a better understanding of their current situation or further develop decision criteria.
  3. Customer conversations models and practice are invaluable in helping us master these essential conversations. Teams with a common understanding of the objectives of these conversations and shared models for how the objectives will be achieved become significantly more effective than individuals working on their own.

Want to learn more? Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.