of your major accounts – covering new suppliers, business volume, new projects, changes in personnel, etc. Ask detailed questions about the selling techniques employed in the last call. Let your rep know you expect professional selling skills to be applied in each call. Your efforts will bear fruit only if you constantly expect your salespeople to become task oriented. 3. Travel with your complacent rep. Remember, your sales rep respects what you inspect. Ask your rep to demonstrate professional selling skills in a few joint calls. Make sure you pick the clients to visit. Insist on reviewing the objective for each call. Ask the sales rep about the buyer’s purchas- ing habits before the actual call. In your field coaching, you may find some surprises: Some salespeople “protect” buyers from purchasing your latest product. Others avoid offering a special promotion because they assume the buyer won’t be in- terested. Others don’t bargain for the best possible deal.
SELLING TIP
Role Play to See What You’re Really Doing
Role play is a valuable training tool for both the sales manager and his or her sales force. Salespeople benefit when they get the chance to see what a skill looks and sounds like when it’s performed well, then “try it on for size” in a nonthreatening environment. Sales managers get to work with real performance – not just talk about it. To make your role play most effective:
• Identify the skill you want to develop. • Decide who will participate. If you’re not good at a particular skill, enlist the help of someone who is.
• Create the scenario – sticking as closely as possible to real-life situations.
• Assign roles, clearly defining them, e.g., should the person playing the counterpart be tough or easygo- ing?
• Create the atmosphere. Give the learner a degree 20 | FEBRUARY 2016 SELLING POWER © 2016 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
Review each call by asking your sales
rep to describe the best and worst moments of the call. Make the sales rep aware of the inconsistencies you’ve observed. Then share your ideas on how different selling skills could have helped produce better results. 4. Review lost sales. Ask your salespeople to keep track of sales made by your competitors. Develop a “competitive-sales report” form. This will tell you not only about individual sales performance, but also about the effectiveness of your overall market- ing strategy. 5. Train your salespeople. De- velop an ongoing sales training program. Teach professional sell- ing skills. Put your salespeople to the test. Use role-play exercises to improve their verbal and nonverbal selling power. Teach your salespeo- ple about the dynamics involved in their relationships with buyers. As their relationships grow, there will be an initial period of learning about each other, where salespeo- ple are on their best behavior and
use their best professional skills. As buyer and seller get to know each other better, they tend to exchange experiences outside the business area – thus moving farther away from their initial task. That’s when many salespeople become victims of their assumptions about their customer’s business. As a sales manager, you can keep salespeople from becoming compla- cent. You can help by stepping out of your own comfortable relationship with them by communicating higher expectations and reviewing their performance on the job and their lost sales. A key step is to commit yourself to an ongoing sales training program. Following these steps can mean a dramatic increase in your sales and profits. But, more impor- tantly, keeping your salespeople from getting complacent will prevent you from going the same route!
CHECK OUT THE SALES MANAGEMENT BOOK
of control to help make the situation seem less arti- ficial and awkward.
• Use real props whenever possible. A telephone, promotional material, etc., all add realism to a simulation.
• Allow enough time to adequately play through the whole scenario.
• Make sure everyone understands that role play is serious training, not a game. Also make sure the learning environment does not become threatening. Control the urge to laugh at people who play roles.
• Use audio or video to record complex or tense sce- narios – such as sales calls or customer complaints – so the performance can be examined carefully, piece by piece.
• Make sure everyone understands that this is a learn- ing experience, and that the session will be fol- lowed by a positive critique of the key performance.
• After every role play, the learner must make a positive critique of the key performance. Learning comes from understanding the behaviors that work toward the objectives you want.
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