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With the new year, new goals and likely new initiatives all underway, now is the time to prepare to crush your number this year. Here are ten ways to make it happen: 1. Plan to Make Your Plan. Whether you’re coming off of your best year yet and want to repeat that success or are looking for ways to improve this year, now is the time to put in the work and ask for what you need to do to make it happen.
The best athletes put in extra time, even just 15 minutes a day to improve their skill set. Extra shots after practice, another lap around the track, ten more reps — they put in the work to take their career to the next level. The same is true in sales. How can you put in extra effort?
Improve your ability to not just land high-value deals but also ensure positive customer outcomes and long-term account retention, by staying buyer-focused in your sales conversations. Elite sellers put themselves in the shoes of their buyers. They focus their sales approach on helping buyers understand their business problems and what’s needed to solve them.
Closing opportunities faster is easier when you tailor your sales conversations based on buyer needs. Sellers that exceed quotas excel at actively moving conversations forward by articulating value and differentiation in a way that ties their solutions to their buyers' most pressing business challenges.
Every salesperson has worked with a prospect that has dragged their feet on making a final decision. You may be working with one right now. We covered this topic in an episode of The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast. John Kaplan shared how to reignite your stalled deals and differentiate yourself from other competition that may still have a foot in the door (including a do-nothing or do-it-internally option).
It's incredibly difficult for even the most veteran salespeople to drive urgency and funding in their deals without attaching to a big business problem that your prospect is facing. Finding a big business pain is key.
Even the most experienced salespeople can find themselves in the middle of a challenging sales opportunity that they’re struggling to either move ahead or close. Take a step back to reassess your deal. How you can compel your buyer to action? After all, they've got problems they need to solve. Here are three common sales scenarios we see when deals are stuck and simple steps you can take to correct your course, or avoid the same challenges the next time around.
If you are just starting your sales career, it can be intimidating when you’re selling to much more experienced executives. After all, how can you convince them that you understand their business, when they can tell you’re only a few years out of college? The answer? Remember the key tenets of value-based selling. They’re your best weapon against combatting the bias experienced executives may have against you.
Accelerating growth is not always about closing new opportunities. It’s also about getting more out of the opportunities you have. That’s why the most successful companies are focused on cross-sell and upsell strategies, as well as net new business. How do you create and capture continued value for your customers? If you’re responsible for cross-sell and upsell opportunities within your organization, here are some key steps you can take to improve your ability to cross-sell and upsell within you
Healthy sales pipelines and accurate forecasts are grounded in structured territory, account and opportunity planning processes. Think about your most critical accounts. Do you have an effective plan set up around your top accounts? How are you going to improve and/or expand your organization’s position within those organizations?
One of the most succinct pieces of advice our sales performance experts often share with reps is to go in curious and listen. Going in curious means you’re not going in assuming you know what the buyer's problems are. Instead, you’re asking great questions and letting the buyer do most of the talking. The conversation should be focused on buyer needs, challenges, and desired outcomes.
There isn’t a salesperson out there who hasn’t dreaded a meeting with procurement. After all, that’s where late-stage opportunities (those you’ve spent countless hours on) may hit detrimental roadblocks. It’s important to remember that a professional buyer, just like your other decision makers, has specific interests and value drivers just like everyone else.
A critical way to minimize price-only sales negotiations is to provide multiple options to your buyers. In our Value Negotiation sales engagements, we often help sellers understand the concept of presenting multiple options, coaching them on how to execute in front of their prospects. This article covers some of those concepts and the steps you can take in your opportunities to present multiple options and sell more.
If you’ve been selling for a bit, you’ve been through your fair share of SKO events, sales training, sales methodologies, eLearning courses — the works. While some of these sales trainings may seem repetitive, others may have had a positive impact on your career. The way you approach these initiatives is directly correlated to how much value you get from the trainings.
Value-based selling demands an understanding of a basic buying process, the stages that guide a buyer from determining their requirements to actually signing a deal. Improve your ability to progress your prospects through these stages in a way that leads a buyer towards your solution and away from the competition (including a do-nothing or do-it-internally competitor).
There’s as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell. The most successful salespeople don't stand out from the competition by touting the features and functions of their latest product. Rather, they are diligent about articulating customer value and practicing good selling fundamentals. A salesperson who focuses on value and solving problems with business impact will make a lesser competitor nervous every time.
Role plays can play an important role in your ability to execute great sales conversations. They ensure you aren’t practicing your sales message in front of the customer. They allow you to test your agenda/question flow for gaps and prepare ways to pivot based on how the customer responds. When role plays are executed correctly, they provide valuable takeaways for everyone involved.
When you’re pursuing an opportunity and you earn that coveted time with a decision maker, you have to be ready to uncover their needs and articulate your value. Oftentimes, you only get one chance to get it right. Ensure you achieve your desired outcomes in your next sales conversation. Do the work up front to make it happen.
Elite sellers stand out not just by what they sell but by how they sell. How you sell virtually can help you differentiate yourself from competitors and help you build trusted advisor status within your accounts. Having a seamless and professional virtual presence is the least your buyers expect in remote sales conversations. This expectation leaves no time to let up on basic best practices.
We recently caught up with Force Management’s Senior Director of Consulting Patrick McLoughlin on the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast. He shared some lessons learned in his 30+ year sales career. Here are our top takeaways from that conversation.
If you want to steer a buyer’s solution requirements away from your competition (including a “do nothing” or a “no decision”), there are a few key areas of your sales conversation that you can focus on to successfully stack customer requirements in your favor.
Who doesn’t want to get higher in an organization and gain more access to people with discretionary funds? If you feel like you’re consistently selling to the lower rungs of your customers' organizations and your managers are telling you to get higher, you likely need to adjust your sales conversation. Remember, whoever you’re working with in a buyer’s organization is one of many.
If you are selling in complex B2B sales, you know there are critical factors in every opportunity that could influence whether or not you’re able to close the deal. Improve your ability to control the sale. Make sure you're uncovering key information in your sales conversations through effective discovery and a value-based sales conversation. It may sound basic, but consistently uncovering the right information from your prospects requires discipline.
Many salespeople find dealing with Procurement an unpleasant task. While it may be a thorn in the side of your sales process, it’s important to remember you can reframe the experience by effectively managing the value conversation and the important interests of professional buyers. Find ways to make the sales process easier on professional buyers and include them as critical decision makers along the road to a winning deal.
As you transition in your career to selling larger contracts and working with more decision makers, your ability to navigate the decision process with multiple business influencers will be critical to hitting your quota. We often use the phrase, “getting multithreaded in your opportunities”. It’s a skill set that takes discipline and commitment in order to successfully navigate the decision process.
Making the shift from selling smaller deals to enterprise solutions that require multiple decision-makers is a common career progression path. If you’re at this crossroads, congratulations, you’ve done the hard work to progress your sales career to this point. Now, make sure you’re prepared to adjust your sales process in a way that accounts for more complicated deals.
I recently participated in a fireside chat for the MongoDB SKO with my great friends Cedric Pech, CRO at MongoDB and John McMahon, Board Member of MongoDB. It is always so much fun to share my thoughts on how elite sellers are maneuvering through this environment with old friends and experienced salespeople.
If you sell for a living, you know the power of a customer testimonial. An effective client reference may mean the difference between a lost opportunity and a won deal. While your company may have great testimonials, if you don’t know how to use them in a sales process. their value will fall flat. There are numerous ways to leverage customer testimonials in the sales conversation.
Customer testimonials are an asset to any sales conversation. Providing tangible points on how your solution provides the results you promise strengthens your message. Making the connection between third-party evidence and your prospect’s business challenges can provide the necessary validation to turn an opportunity into a closed deal.
A seller’s biggest asset is their ability to articulate value and differentiation in a way that solves their customer’s most pressing business problems. Anything you share beyond what’s relevant to your buyer's business pains is just noise that could lead to you losing to competition altogether (including a do-nothing or do-it-internally decision).
Getting beyond technical buyers and in front of economic buyers requires you to make distinct connections between your solution’s technical capabilities and the business pains of your prospects. Conversations around technical requirements and buyer decision criteria can either propel a deal forward or cause problems that are difficult to overcome, like small deal sizes, stalled deals or discounts.
Champions can be a critical component to closing complex details. Identifying a Champion in your deal is a key step, but one where salespeople can struggle. Champions can easily be confused with Coaches. Make sure you know how to identify a Champion.
We write a lot about executing an effective discovery process. It’s one of our most popular blog topics, likely because it’s one of the most important components to a value-based sales conversation. Effective discovery helps separate you from other salespeople, putting you in a better position to influence the decision criteria, instead of simply reacting to it.
Sales calls can easily go awry when you try to accomplish too much. Your prospects may become overwhelmed or confused, and you may miss out on key opportunities to advance the deal. Before your calls, determine the key objective you want to accomplish in the conversation. Prepare your agenda accordingly.
You’ve found a champion, now ensure you are leveraging their power, influence and vested interest in your success. Are you guiding your champion through their buying process, or are you dragging them along through your sales process? Continuously help your champion drive the success of the deal by staying aligned with their internal challenges and coaching them on how to execute effectively inside the account.
“ Some people want it to happen, some people wish it to happen, others make it happen.” - Michael Jordan. You’ve likely got goals for yourself next year; to hit consistent quotas, gain higher commissions, speed up your close rates, etc. What’s your plan to make it happen for yourself? Top performers are constantly honing their craft, even if it’s just fifteen minutes a day — recapping what worked well in previous deals (or what didn’t), seeking advice from their team, or listening to tips from t
Great discovery questions can only get you so far if you’re not prepared to really listen to the answer in a way that enables you to dig deeper or pivot decisively. Listening is just as crucial, yet not always the easiest to master. Many people think they are good listeners, but sadly miss the mark. Active listening is a key skill that elite sellers possess — and they are able to speed up their deals and close at better margins because of it.
If you’ve been around Force Management for any bit of time, you know that we have some phrases we repeat often. Here are three: “How big is the problem?”. “Help them get to a place they can’t get to on their own”. “What you do matters”. They’re simple, but powerful reminders for any of us in sales. Put them on your mirror. Write them down in your journal.
Nothing moves a deal forward like a sales conversation that’s focused on the fundamentals. If you want to command your message, you need to practice and zero-in on the basics , consistently. Moving opportunities forward and closing them at high-value — are two critical areas even veteran sellers are struggling with right now.
Remote selling is no longer just a tactic used in part of the sales process. It's becoming the way companies do business. Previously, salespeople may have had to conduct some conversations remotely throughout the sales process. Now, it’s becoming increasingly more likely that the entire enterprise sales process will be a remote endeavor for the foreseeable future.
Mitigate the risk of deal stalls once and for all. Understand why stalls occur and three ways to avoid them. You’ve got numbers to hit, and your buyers still have problems they need to solve. With the pandemic, you may find that stalled deals are “unavoidable”. Buyers may seem unable to move forward — fortunately, there are strategic ways you can compel them to action.
Towards the end of the fiscal year it’s not uncommon for many sales reps to consider new opportunities. Whether it seems like you’ve exhausted your territory or the current economic environment has left you to reevaluate your company’s growth potential – you need to feel confident you’re in the right spot. Is your sales organization primed for success?
Even veteran sellers can struggle with cracking into new accounts, warming up cold opportunities and turning LinkedIn connections into active deals. In one way or another, today’s current business landscape presents new challenges for salespeople to overcome as they work to capture new accounts. Regardless, good selling is good selling. Fundamentals still apply in a murky sales environment.
Matt Payne is a seasoned sales enablement executive, with extensive experience in software. A certified Command of the Message Facilitator, Force Management worked with Matt at Jama Software helping the company align the sales strategy with the organization’s growth goals. After leaving Jama, Matt continued his sales enablement experience for a customer data platform company.
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