The same is true in sales. Guide sellers on
“I need to triple our services revenue over the
next five years.” – SVP ENTERPRISE SALES, FORTUNE 100 COMPANY
stakeholders to start the sales conversation. This means early-stage selling—and the actions you need your team to do each day—looks drastically different than it did five years ago. Technology alone can’t solve this. Your reps must analyze the data about your customers’ business landscape and interpret what it means for organizational and functional priorities. Sellers should hypothesize about potential opportunities and feed the top of your funnel. This will lead to more opportunities and provide visibility into where growth comes from.
STEP 2:
GUIDE SALES CONVERSATIONS The second step is to guide your sales team by providing conversational guardrails. Train sellers how to get from point A to point E in a conversation and how to progress a deal through a series of conversations. Growth comes from new logos, new strategies, and new offerings. The problem is this typically requires a new sales motion or way of working with your customers. Salespeople want a guided selling process that prompts them on how to operate, how to engage with the customer, how to guide the customer, and how to use technology to optimize the experience. Teaching tactics such as how to do discovery or
qualify opportunities is insufficient. Sellers want and need more structure and a holistic approach. They need to see how these skills fit together in a conversation or set of conversations. Today, most sellers are left to figure this out on their own. Consider the football team that focuses on blocking, tackling, and catching. These are good things to focus on separately, but how do these skills come together in the context of a play? And how does each play contribute to the vision of winning the game?
what the flow of each conversation should look and sound like. Define a pathway for them and emphasize the outcomes that are desired from each conversation. Most importantly, ensure they learn how to string together multiple conversations to win a deal and don’t just focus on a single conversation.
STEP 3:
COLLABORATE AND SHARE KNOWLEDGE The third step is to proactively drive structured collaboration and enable sellers to learn and share with others who are doing the job and facing the same obstacles. Customers don’t buy solutions every day, but you sell to multiple customers. Use that knowledge to guide your sellers forward. All sales organizations want their people to
collaborate. However, in today’s remote, fast- paced environment, it needs to be structured. I was working with the CEO of an SMB firm who wanted to double revenue in the next two years. One thing stood out: The firm’s sellers never collaborated in a structured way. Information sharing was only via informal conversations with close colleagues. Yes, they had coaching from their managers in one-on-one sessions. The BDRs and outside sellers spoke when they had time. But this was a group of people literally sitting next to one another who were not collaborating. What about salespeople working from home?
Salespeople want to collaborate. Seasoned
sellers say they need help. This can easily come in the form of structured discussions. Set up cohorts and provide a framework to discuss account strategies, deal strategies, common challenges of getting to line of business owners, etc. You pick the subject matter but use this to drive discussion and best practice sharing.
DRIVING GROWTH IN 2023 Enabling your sales team to drive business growth in 2023 and beyond is about these three things: Simplify – Guide – Collaborate. Don’t let the other noise get in the way. You know how to do this. Let’s get it done!
SPECIAL EDITION 2023 SELLING POWER |
ALLEGO.COM | 21 © 2023 SELLING POWER.
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