Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Quezon City Branch
Don Fabian St., Commonwealth, Quezon City
Sales Support
(BTLE 30483)
Prepared by:
ASST. PROF. MARY GRACE I. CRUZ
mgracecruz10982@gmail.com
mgircruz@pup.edu.ph
09153627408
SALES SUPPORT (BTLE 30483): 2ND SEMESTER A.Y 2020-2021
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PUP Vision, Mission, Ten Pillars and Shared Values and Principles
4
Guide in Using the Module
6
Course Description
7
Lesson 1: Introduction
8
What is Sales Support?
Types of Sales Support
9
Sales Support Job and Duties
10
Sales and Marketing
12
Lesson 2: Sales Process
15
Sales Types
Common Sales Approaches
17
Outlining Sales Process
20
Sales Stages
22
Evolution of Professional Sales
26
Glossary of Common Sales Terms
28
Lesson 3: Sales Personality
43
Seven Critical Factors for Success
Sales Skills
46
Cold and Warm Calls
48
Types of Warm Call
51
Common Types of Objections
53
Common Sales Objections
55
Lesson 4: Sales Presentation
59
Written Proposals
Doing Presentations
Lesson 5: Sales Management Strategies
62
64
Sales Operation
66
Lesson 6: Data Management
68
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Best Practices foe Effectively Managing Customer Data
Data Management Systems
69
Lesson 7: Customer Experience
Need Analysis
72
PAIN Technique
Sales Probing Questions and Attitude
74
Course Materials
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Vision
PUP: The National Polytechnic University
Mission
Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities
through a re-engineered polytechnic university by committing to:
•
provide democratized access to educational opportunities for the holistic development of
individuals with global perspective
•
offer industry-oriented curricula that produce highly skilled professionals with managerial
and technical capabilities and a strong sense of public service for nation building
•
embed a culture of research and innovation
•
continuously develop faculty and employees with the highest level of professionalism
•
engage public and private institutions and other stakeholders for the attainment of social
development goal
•
establish a strong presence and impact in the international academic community
The PUP Philosophy
As a state university, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines believes that:
•
Education is an instrument for the development of the citizenry and for the enhancement
of nation building; and
•
That meaningful growth and transmission of the country are best achieved in an
atmosphere of brotherhood, peace, freedom, justice and nationalist-oriented education
imbued with the spirit of humanist internationalism.
Ten Pillars
Pillar 1: Dynamic, Transformational, and Responsible Leadership
Pillar 2: Responsive and Innovative Curricula and Instruction
Pillar 3: Enabling and Productive Learning Environment
Pillar 4: Holistic Student Development and Engagement
Pillar 5: Empowered Faculty Members and Employees
Pillar 6: Vigorous Research Production and Utilization
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Pillar 7: Global Academic Standards and Excellence
Pillar 8: Synergistic, Productive, Strategic Networks and Partnerships
Pillar 9: Active and Sustained Stakeholders’ Engagement
Pillar 10: Sustainable Social Development Programs and Projects
Shared Values and Principles
•
Integrity and Accountability
•
Nationalism
•
Spirituality
•
Passion for Learning and Innovation
•
Inclusivity
•
Respect for Human Rights and The Environment
•
Excellence
•
Democracy
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Guide in Using the Module
This Instructional Material is prepared and compiled to reinforce learning in the New Normal. It is
for offline learning or the correspondence mode for students with low or with no total internet
connectivity. For your guidance, this module contains the following parts:
Course Outcomes - Broad statement of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students are
expected to develop as a result of academic experience from the specific course of study
Learning Outcomes - Specific statement of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students are
expected to develop as a result of academic experience, this can be found at the end of each
Module Introduction
Course Materials - These are materials that are provided for students to reinforce learning, links
for reading and watching are provided.
Activities/Assessments - This is the part where the learners get to apply the knowledge and
skills they have acquired from the lesson. At the end of each module/lesson, there are
assessments in the form of quizzes, Learning Paper, Performance Tasks that you must comply.
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Course Description
Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Every business transaction you have from buying
milk at the grocery store to buying your house or investing in new products and services involves
sales. This course is beneficial to all businesses. This course will assist you in identifying the key
traits of a successful sales personality, the critical factors necessary for success in sales, and
how small differences can lead to exponential growth. The objective of this course is to offer
comprehensive information and lay the foundation for mastering sales skills for a person of any
age to apply in any situation for a variety of motives, whether personal or professional in nature.
In this course, you will understand how to sell with purpose, connecting fully to your
customer's desires and wants, while understanding the nuts and bolts of a typical sale. This
includes learning how to assess a sales opportunity; recognizing a buying cycle and creating an
appropriate sales cycle; developing a sales strategy; and navigating competitive and political
forces at play. Through this course, you will be able to recognize and seize new opportunities that
will put you ahead of intensifying competition. You will learn how to leverage your sales skills in
building up a winning team for even more sales. Finally, you will learn about the customer
experience and how customer-centric marketing leads to long-term customer loyalty.
At the end of the semester, the students are expected to:
•
Acquire necessary skills and knowledge for an effective sales force
•
Assess sales opportunity while understanding and connecting fully to customers’ needs
and wants
•
Learn important tools that dwell from theories, principles and concepts
•
Familiarize with customer experience and how customer-centric marketing leads to longterm customer loyalty
•
Gain a certificate to any related course from an online recognized and reputable institution.
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LESSON 1: INTRODUCTION
Overview
Hitting your financial goals in sales means
hitting quotas. And you can’t hit quotas without a
great sales team. How do you create such a
winning team?
If your sales reps are struggling to meet
their quotas, you might think about hiring new
sellers, motivating your current staff, or bringing in
expert consultants. While these tactics can sometimes spur positive results, they are often
expensive and disruptive.
The true leaders of industry are discovering that sales support is where critical gains are
made. Research shows that top-performing companies have a 30 percent higher level of
sales support than other companies. This little-known fact is what separates great companies
from the good.
And this little-known fact makes sense: sales support exists only to help sales reps make
deals. That’s all they do, and they’re cost effective. They perform their role by making
connections: preparing sellers, nurturing leads, and providing training. Sales support perform a
variety of tasks that add up to faster sales cycles, lower costs, and increased revenue. (Thomas,
2019)
What is Sales Support?
Sales support refers to a variety of functions that help your sales representatives focus on
actually selling and closing deals. These functions differ per company, industry and sales team.
And, they can be done by hired associates, outsourcing teams, productivity tools, and – worst
case scenario – by the sales representative themselves. While sales support is not the factor that
closes deals – it is crucial and important to your sales operations.
As your sales rep puts his or her best foot forward and gets in the proverbial door, sales
support has already done the background work. It is the administrative, research and customer
support work that cracked that door open, in the first place.
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Types of Sales Support
There are two major types of sales support that you need to employ: helpers and tools. Simply
put, these are people, tools and documents that you’d want to have available for your sales team
to use.
1. Sales Support: Helpers
Helpers are people or functions best done by people. They require a good level of
expertise and decision-making skills that only trained men and women can provide.
Their sales support functions include:
•
Lead generation
•
Product training
•
Customer services
•
Active market communications
Lead generation: Sales support finds, qualifies and filters leads for the sales representative to
contact. This can be through several channels, such as the company website, social media,
professional networks, email campaigns and online data mining. This already cuts a lot of time off
necessary research work.
Lead generation can be outsourced to qualified service providers or done internally by a sales
associate. It depends on the specificity of your requirements. The more specific and specialized
your target market is, the better it is for you to retain some of your lead generation functions within
your team.
Product training and customer services: By making product materials and customer support
readily available to your prospect, you are helping them make their purchasing decisions.
They can read your product specifications and manuals. If there are questions, they can reach
out to your sales support team. Nothing beats access when it comes to tipping the scales in favor
of your brand.
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Active market communications: This refers to your public outreach, be it in the form of
promotions, paid advertising, PR press releases and other marketing strategies. Market
awareness is requisite to supporting your sales team. The more aware the public is about your
brand, the easier it becomes to sell.
2. Sales Support: Tools
The tools of the trade are documents and software that help sales reps get their job done.
This could be as simple as letter, presentation and video templates that are easy to
personalize, with a few clicks. Or, you might draft help documents on your brand’s benefits, and
answers to common questions and objections.
Software tools include pre-programmed calculators and computer-aided designs (CAD).
You might even have a website, which gives your reps access to secure pages for the private
viewing of their prospects.
You can also invest in printed paraphernalia to leave with your prospective clients. This is
still employed in certain industries, such as real estate. However, it may be redundant in some
cases. If you already have a website with requisite information, product manuals and the like, why
waste your budget on leaving a paper trail. You just need to make your market aware of these
readily accessible online materials.
A comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system, integrated with a
reliable CTI system, is today’s indispensable sales support power tool. CTI makes your team
more accessible and responsive to your prospective clients. While CRM can help you track the
progress of each lead, at each point of contact.
•
Print and digital sales materials
•
Sales web pages
•
Email campaigns
•
CRM
•
Sales automation tools
Sales Support Job Duties:
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•
Generates and processes new sales leads as necessary
•
Answers phone calls from customers and deals with problems as they arise
•
Takes sales information and puts it into an easily readable format
•
Follows up with customers to make sure that they are satisfied with a particular product
•
Makes sure that sales persons are on track with sales goals
•
Meets with other departments to make sure that sales people are doing their job correctly
•
Provides any necessary data or reports to the sales team
•
Exerts attention to detail, as customers may have the same problems; reports the
problems as necessary
•
Arranges appointments with clients and sales team
•
Acknowledges customers by responding to emails, texts, and phone calls
•
Updates all contact information for clients
•
Deals with any customer complaints and resolves the issue as necessary
•
Arranges travel and accommodations for any sales person that is meeting clients outside
of the office
•
Does any necessary administrative work including filing reports or presenting sales team
with necessary documents
As successful enterprises have proven, sales support is a critical ingredient to a successful
sales team.
Sales and Marketing
The difference between sales and marketing is that sales focus on working directly with prospects
to get them to convert, while marketing focuses on sparking interest in your products. Essentially,
marketing is the first step to getting leads interested, while sales take that interest and nurture it.
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SALES
Process
MARKETING
Focus on sales process, how to
Focus on explaining what the product
interact with customers, how to
or service is, how much it costs, who is
answer questions, and provide
most likely to be interested, and where
relevant information
you can reach those users
Promoting your product, company or
Goals
Hitting sales goals or quotas
brand, communicating its value, and
attracting leads or earning sales via
marketing efforts
Strategies
Prospects
Phone
calls,
networking,
promotional events
Working with known prospects
Paid ads, social media, SEO
Obtaining new prospects
Process
The processes of sales and marketing is slightly different. Think of marketing as the
precursor for the sales team.
With the marketing process, you establish basic information like who you are, what you
offer, and how much it costs. You establish your brand and showcase what you have to offer your
audience and you explain how you can solve their problems and the pain points you address.
In the sales process, you focus on taking the information your audience already has and
trying to provide them with additional information, as well as answer any questions. You focus on
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providing strong selling points, personalized solutions, and making pitches to convince leads to
convert.
Goals
When you look at sales vs. marketing, you’ll find the goals are slightly different. With sales,
your focus is on earning conversions. Your sales team works on nurturing prospects towards
becoming customers.
Marketing goals are slightly different.
While marketing can focus on sales, its main goal revolves around promoting your
company, product, service, or brand and communicating its value. Communicating this
value does help you earn sales, but you need to establish brand trust through marketing first.
Strategies
When you look at the difference between marketing and sales, you’ll notice the strategies
are different.
Sales strategies focus on making direct contact and connections with your prospects. You
use strategies like phone calls, promotional events, and networking to try and engage prospects
to get them to convert. These are known as outbound strategies because you reach out to
prospects.
Marketing strategies, on the other hand, focus on getting prospects to reach out to you.
You use strategies like paid ads, social media, and SEO to get prospects to reach out to you
about your products or services.
Prospects
Another difference between marketing and sales are prospects.
With sales, you know your prospects.
You know who’s interested in your products or services, from their name to their phone
number, so you can quickly contact them and provide them with information to sell them further
on your business.
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Marketing, on the other hand, focuses on obtaining new prospects.
You have an idea of who is in your target audience, but you don’t know the specific people.
Marketing focuses on reaching those most interested so that you can turn them into prospects for
your sales team.
The misalignment between sales and marketing is directly caused by a lack of
transparency and communication. Over time, this evolves from small miscommunications to big
issues. At its boiling point, sales and marketing might not even talk to each other anymore.
Tension is a sign of misalignment, and this results in poor close rates, overspending on marketing
materials, and low ROIs.
Slow to Market
When your sales reps can’t quickly follow up with prospects, their close rate will go down.
You may recall that 35-50% of all sales go to the first sales rep to respond. If your sales reps must
wait 2-3 weeks to get the materials they need, then they’re missing opportunities to close sales.
This lag between ordering materials and receiving them is generally due to misalignment between
sales and marketing.
Misalignment with Client Needs
Sales within a distributed sales organization are almost always consultative. Using a
custom pitch is a proven way to increase your close rate. The study mentioned earlier showed
that 77% of buyers want their sales reps to integrate custom data or insights into their pitches.
But, this doesn’t happen when there’s weak sales support. When there’s inadequate sales
support, reps tend to rely on their best pitch instead of taking a truly consultative approach. This
is because custom materials take longer to receive, are more complicated to create, and add
hassle to the process.
"Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days."- Zig Ziglar
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LESSON 2: SALES PROCESS
Overview
A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that
your sales team takes to convert prospects into customers. Building a sales process is absolutely
necessary to your company’s success, and is perhaps the most important thing you can do as
a sales manager to impact your team’s ability to sell.
If your sales team is operating without a sales process, you need to do something about
it—right now. Fortunately, creating a sales process from scratch isn’t as complicated as it seems.
To help give your sales reps a clear and effective path to follow, we’ve created this start-to-finish
guide on how to build a sales process from the ground up.
A sales process consists of a series of stages—usually three to seven, depending on the
sale’s complexity—which cover the major milestones of a sale. Each stage consists of tasks,
which are the key activities your team must perform in order to advance the sale from stage to
stage.
Sales Types
1) Transactional Selling
Using this type of sales technique, the intention of the salesperson is to overtly sell their
product. There doesn’t appear to be much of a sales process. Any process that is in place
normally follows the adage of ‘pile them high, sell them cheap’. This type of selling is reserved for
the one-off sale where there isn’t much chance of repeat business.
2) Product-Oriented Selling
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As you can imagine, this is where the salesperson just talks about the product and very
little else. Salespeople often get roped into this type of sale when a prospect says to them ‘what
do you do and why are you selling this to me?’
It revolves around the features and benefits of the product and tries to blind the prospect
with science Demonstrations and examples of the product in action are the normal way of
proceeding with this particular type.
3) Needs-Oriented Selling
Using this type of sales technique, a salesperson will identify and figure out the needs of
a customer through different questions and then present a solution to those needs as is required
by the customer. This creates a discourse between the salesperson and prospect but doesn’t go
so far as to solve specific problems that the customer may have.
4) Consultative Selling
This type of sale requires an element of trust and relationship between the salesperson
and the prospect.
The whole purpose of consultative selling is not to focus on just the product but to focus
really on the relationship and how that is going to be established between the salesperson’s
company and the prospect’s company. This type of selling is especially effective for solopreneurs
and online coaches.
This requires a constant review of how the prospect’s business can be helped by the
salesperson and turns the salesperson into a form of consultant to their business.
5) Insight Selling
Lots of research has proved that salespeople who have this specific type of salesmanship
do different things to the norm.
It’s based on a simple 3 level model that brings on successful results:
•
Level one is to connect, where salespeople connect the customer needs and their
company solutions to the issues that the buyers have.
•
Level two is the convince stage, where salespeople convince their prospects they
can achieve maximum returns with lower risk and that they are the most effective
company to deal with if you want the results that have been promised.
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•
Level three of insight selling is known as the collaboration stage, where
salespeople bring new ideas to the table and have insights as to the future
operations of the company they will be working with.
It’s important to recognise that each of these types of sales has their place. If you
understand the type of sale that’s absolutely right for your customer, then you will be in a strong
position to use the specific type in the right way at the right time to bring the right results for both
you and your customer.
6) Social Selling
Many sales professionals are moving their prospecting and selling to online methods.
Gone are the days where you’d bang out 100+ cold calls all day long.
With social selling it’s mainly focused around LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook depending
on what social media platform is right for your industry.
With this approach it’s all about profile building, networking, relationships, creating
thought provoking content and then attempting to
move your virtual relationships into the physical
world via a meeting or a call. (Mcpheat, 2019)
Common Sales Approaches
However,
all
sales
approaches
are
essentially step-by-step propositions—developed
to make the act of selling much more effective and
reliable. Quite often, your personality, background, and experience determine the selling
approach that works best for you.
Even if you believe you’ve found your best sales approach, every sales professional
stands to benefit from trying different types of sales approaches from time to time.
In fact, your best sales approach might just result from a combination of several other
sales approaches. So, which sales approach examples should you consider? And how can you
incorporate the best elements of these methods into your own sales process?
No two sales professionals are alike—but everyone can benefit from refining their skills.
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1. Premium sales approach
Everyone appreciates a free gift. Your prospective customers are no different.
With the premium sales approach, sales professionals offer their prospects a giveaway or
promotional item in an effort to build excitement about their product or brand. A key advantage of
this selling approach is its ability to attract otherwise hesitant customers.
This free gift (or premium) can be as simple as a gift card. Other times, it can be an item
with some connection to the product or service you sell for a living (e.g., if you’re in car sales, the
premium you offer could be a year of free gas fill-ups or a set of snow tires.)
The premium sales approach is more common in B2C sales but can be applied to B2B
scenarios, like including 6-months of tech support with an enterprise SaaS purchase.
Once their attention is captured with a premium, your prospects will be more motivated to
listen to your sales presentation or return your phone calls. Remember, this approach is only
meant to initiate contact and shouldn’t become an aspect of every sales pitch.
2. Product sales approach
Making an important buying decision can be exciting. It can also be intimidating. This is
particularly true when you’re considering the purchase of a new product or service,
Selling something new or unproven (at least in the eyes of your prospect) takes more time
and attention. Potential customers conduct research and compare competitors. A recent Harvard
Business Review survey of 500 B2B salespeople across a wide variety of industries—from
technology to financial services to industrial products—revealed:
•
Salespeople selling new products spend 32% more face-to-face time with customers.
•
Objections occur later in the process for new innovations than for established products.
With the product sales approach, you provide prospects with a sample (or free trial) to
evaluate what you have to offer. It’s a great way to show value and establish credibility.
This sales approach can also take the form of a product demonstration. For hands-on or visual
learners, this is especially helpful as it allows them to see your product in action.
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3. Network sales approach
Whether it’s B2B or B2C sales, building a list of
prospects and developing relationships with them are
crucial to the process. This is where you may have a
hidden advantage.
Using the network sales approach lets you strategically rely on your own list of personal
and professional connections. Whatever the size, your network of family, friends, and past coworkers can provide the foundation you need to uncover qualified leads and generate solid
referrals.
Social media
networks
offer a natural environment to build your prospect
list. Research shows 69% of U.S. adults use Facebook and typically have a network of 338
friends. 27% of LinkedIn users have between 500 and 999 1st-level professional connections.
Sales is about building trust. Networking is sales with people who already trust you.
You can also employ this sales approach to help identify the well-connected individuals
within your network who can introduce you to an untapped resource of qualified leads.
Of course, applying the network sales approach isn’t a license to go through your entire
list of contacts to bother people who would otherwise not be a solid sales prospects or qualified
lead. Use good judgment. If your offer can provide value, add them to your list.
4. Prescriptive sales approach
Giving prospective customers all the information and options they need to arrive at the right
decision sounds like a good thing. After all, being flexible to the direction (or whims) of your
customers should make the buying process easier and ultimately increase sales. This impulse to
quickly respond and offer endless support is seen in more common sales tactics, such as:
•
Ensuring customers have every case study, testimonial, and brochure
•
Adjusting your offer to meet the ever-changing demands of the customer
•
Providing customers with more time to consider all possible alternatives
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Logic suggests being customer-centered should result in more sales. But the latest research
shows that providing additional information and multiple options may actually suppress sales.
An HBR survey of 600 B2B buyers reveals it drives an 18% decrease in purchase ease.
Fortunately, the prescriptive sales approach takes the opposite tactic. Within the same buyer
survey, it was shown to increase purchase ease by 86%. With the prescriptive sales approach,
the sales professional offers a clear recommendation for action to customers—backed by a
specific rationale. Any complex aspects of the sale are explained upfront. If added approval is
needed from the purchasing department, invite them into the sale early on.
Customers often appreciate and respect the prescriptive sales approach. It helps them see
the sales representative as being proactive—predicting and eliminating obstacles. Additionally,
customers who undergo a prescriptive sales process experience less sales regret and are more
likely to repurchase, compared to conventional sales methods.
This approach is ideal for leading customers through the three common buying stages:
•
Early buying stage: This is where customers have trouble distinguishing between
meaningful and irrelevant information and deciding if more information is needed.
•
Middle buying stage: This is where customers encounter competing priorities and hidden
concerns about the purchase. They may question their need for change.
•
Late buying stage: This is where customers become overwhelmed by having too many
purchase options and confused by the late introduction of different options.
The prescriptive sales approach is more an organizational aptitude than an individual skill—one
that can be applied to marketing content just as well as sales conversations.
Outlining Sales Process
The first step in building a sales process is gaining a full understanding of what your sales
team is currently doing to turn leads into customers. What is the first thing that your sales reps do
to connect with a potential buyer, and what is the last thing they do to finish the sale? With those
end-points in mind, you can begin to fill in the blanks.
“Too often, sales managers build a sales process that has no relevance or familiarity with
what the team is already doing,” says Nutshell CEO Joe Malcoun. “Not only do you want your
reps to recognize what you are asking of them, but you need them bought in from the beginning.”
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Malcoun suggests sitting down with each member of your sales team to learn the actual
steps that they’re taking to move a lead through your funnel. “Find out how they visualize the
process—even in the absence of one—and build yours so that it’s familiar to your team, using
their language as much as possible.”
To help with this process, take a handful of your recent leads and go through the following
questions with your reps their answers will help you understand the specific activities that your
team is currently performing during the course of a sale.
1. How was the lead acquired?
2. How was the lead distributed or assigned?
3. How did the sales rep make first contact with the lead (i.e., email or phone)?
4. How many attempts did the sales rep make to establish contact with each lead?
5. Did the rep’s contact attempts follow a specific schedule or cadence?
6. After making contact with a lead, what questions did the sales rep or sales development
rep (SDR) ask in the initial conversation?
7. How were the answers to those questions recorded?
8. How did the sales rep coordinate follow-up contact?
9. Which files, documents, or other content were sent to the lead?
10. At what point were those resources delivered?
11. How did the sales rep present your company’s solution? (i.e., on-site visit, webinar, phone
call)
12. What did the rep do to prepare for that presentation?
13. When and how was your company’s proposal delivered?
14. What were the major sticking points during negotiations?
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15. If the lead was lost, why was it lost?
16. If the lead was won and the sale was completed, what did your first post-sale contact with
the customer look like?
If you don’t have answers to all of the above questions at first, don’t worry. By building a sales
process, you’ll define exactly what should happen at each point of the sale, so that all of your reps
are following the same game-plan.
Sales Stages
1.
Prospecting
Also known as lead generation, prospecting
involves identifying potential buyers to add to the
top of your sales funnel. These potential buyers can
be people who have expressed interest in the
product or service that you’re selling, or who might
reasonably
have
interest
based
on
their
demographics, industry, or other factors.
Prospecting is often done through online research, buying lead lists, or inbound marketing
methods. Targeting your prospecting efforts to your ideal buyer persona increases the odds that
the leads you generate will eventually become customers.
Examples of tasks for this stage:
•
Collect recent customer referrals
•
Attend trade show or networking event
•
Gather recent leads from content offers on your website
•
Search social media for companies/executives in target industry
2. Preparation
The second stage has you in preparation for initial contact with a potential customer,
researching the market and collecting all relevant information regarding your product or
service. At this point, you develop your sales presentation and tailor it to your potential client’s
particular needs.
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Examples of tasks for this stage:
The most important step to take when building a sales process is correctly identifying your
target market. First, define the external criteria that will help you identify companies that are likely
experiencing the pain points your product or service solves. Then, identify the people within those
organizations who are personally suffering from those pain points, and who have the authority to
make buying decisions. Whitney Sales Founder of The Sales Method
3. Approach
In the approach stage, you make first contact with your client. Sometimes this is a face-toface meeting, sometimes it’s over the phone. There are three common approach methods.
•
Premium approach: Presenting your potential client with a gift at the beginning of your
interaction
•
Question approach: Asking a question to get the prospect interested
•
Product approach: Giving the prospect a sample or a free trial to review and evaluate your
service
4. Presentation
Whether
you’re
doing
an
on-site
demonstration for a potential client or using video
conferencing to present a software solution,
presenting is your sales team’s opportunity to lay
out a compelling, personalized case for how your
product or service will fulfil the prospect’s
immediate needs.
In the presentation phase, you actively
demonstrate how your product or service meets
the needs of your potential customer. The word presentation implies using PowerPoint and giving
a salesy spiel, but it doesn’t always have to be that way—you should actively listen to your
customer’s needs and then act and react accordingly.
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Success in the presenting stage depends heavily on research and preparation. Before you
make your presentation, you should have gathered as much information as possible about your
prospect and their specific needs and concerns, so that you can anticipate every follow-up
question and have a good answer ready to go. If you can position yourself as a trusted
advisor instead of someone who’s just trying to make a sale, you’re doing it right.
Examples of tasks for this stage:
•
Schedule presentation
•
Conduct further research on company/stakeholders to prepare
•
Develop specific recommendations to present
5. Handling objections
There are plenty of reasons why a prospect
would be hesitant to commit, even if they’re
interested in your product—price, timing, and fear of
change are some of the common ones. In the
objections stage, a sales rep attempts to address all
of the outstanding concerns that a prospect still has
after hearing your pitch.
No matter what a prospect’s objection may
be, knocking it down generally comes down to two
things: Demonstrating the value of your solution, and demonstrating the cost or risk that comes
from not buying.
Examples of tasks for this stage:
•
Follow-up call with prospect after presentation
•
Identify remaining concerns
•
Demonstrate value above other solution(s) they’re considering
6. Closing
Closing is everything you need to do in the late stages of a sale to get your prospect to
sign a contract and become a customer. This could include delivering a proposal based on
verbally agreed-upon terms, getting buy-in from all the decision-makers, and making final
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negotiations on the price. With every roadblock out of the way, you’re ready to ask for their
signature—and begin the hard work of retaining them as a customer.
Depending on your business, you might try one of these three closing techniques.
•
Alternative choice close: Assuming the sale and offering the prospect a choice, where
both options close the sale—for example, “Will you be paying the whole fee up front or in
instalments?” or “Will that be cash or charge?”
•
Extra inducement close: Offering something extra to get the prospect to close, such as
a free month of service or a discount
•
Standing room only close: Creating urgency by expressing that time is of the essence—
for example, “The price will be going up after this month” or “We only have six spots left”
Examples of tasks for this stage:
•
Deliver proposal
•
Final negotiations
•
Acquire signed contracts
7.
Nurturing/Follow-up
This is the sales process stage that you
want to last the longest. Nurturing a customer
means 1) providing them with the proper post-sale
support so that they’re excited to continue buying
from you, and 2) finding opportunities to increase
the value of the business relationship through
upselling. Well-nurtured
customers
can
also
provide a significant source of referrals, making them a priceless lead source in themselves.
Examples of tasks for this stage:
•
Follow up with customer immediately after delivery of product/service
•
Subscribe buyer to customer newsletter
•
Ask for positive reviews and referrals
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Evolutions of Professional Sales
In the mid-90s, much of the selling was still
based on products. Here are the features and
benefits of my product, here’s how it fits your
situation, please buy it – and as you’re buying the
product, and you’ll buy it from us. This was
reinforced by our company’s emphasis on product
training (I once went to a 3-day school on ball
bearings), and on the emphasis on vendor ridealong to sell their products. Very little time was
spent on our service model, and the relationships
that were built were specifically between the salesperson and particular contacts at the customer.
Not surprisingly, most customers split their business between us and competitors, depending on
who had the “best” products. We were selling mostly to mid-level or low-level managers like
stockroom or maintenance managers.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, smart salespeople evolved to a service selling model.
Salespeople (including me) approached customers saying, “Look, we have great products. I’ll be
frank; so do our competitors. You should buy from me because my company has the service
either and expertise to better take care of your needs. When you’re in doubt, we’ll pick the
products ourselves, and when you know what you want, we’ll make sure you get it, on time, when
you need it.” This model worked better because instead of competing for transactions, we were
competing for customers. And once you won that sale, you typically got a majority (although not
necessarily a full share) of your customer’s spend in your product category. Since the company’s
processes and people were so integral to the sale, the key relationship was between companies.
Most of the time, the contacts remained the same, although sometimes we ended up in an
assistant plant manager’s office.
Also in the late 90s came a concept called “Integrated Supply.” In the integrated supply
concept, a salesperson approached the corner office and said, “Let’s agree that great service and
great products are expectations, not bonuses. What we bring to the table is the ability to handle
the entire procurement process for everything you consume in your plant. You’ll still get the great
products. You’ll still get the great service. But, you can focus on your core business because you
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will no longer have to make mundane buying decisions about everything from conveyor rollers to
toilet paper.” The concept of integrated supply was sold to the ultimate decision maker (Plant
Manager, President, CEO, etc.), and all the supplies came along with it.
In the industrial environment, integrated supply took hold in the mid-2000s, and most large
accounts buy this way now. This means, of course, that salespeople who are selling product or
service to those same mid-level managers as before are left on the side-lines.
The same phenomenon is happening in multiple industries. For instance, the copier and office
technology industry is evolving from product (buy our copier because it’s the best) to service
(managed print services where we handle everything from copiers to toner to paper and charge
you per-click) to conceptual (let us install software that manages your entire document process,
from creation to duplication to archiving). It’s probably happening in your industry – and if you’re
not working, or getting ready to work, at a conceptual level, you’re going to get left behind.
Today’s evolution is tougher, because now relationship salespeople are getting left behind.
They’re finding that their relationships aren’t with the right people to keep them alive in their
customers. A great relationship at mid-level does no good when someone sells the concept of a
different process to the mid-level person’s boss.
•
Highly polished and professional: The successful salesperson of the future will be able to
meet, and win sales, with the top officer in the company. He or she will be able to speak
to the CEO as an equal, not as a supplicant. This means more than looking good in a
suit.
•
Great businessperson: The salesperson of the future will need more than expertise in
products and services; they will need to understand how to read a P&L, how to help build
and grow their customers’ businesses, and understand instinctively how to address
issues like opportunity costs, hidden costs, and other high-level and big-picture issues
that officers face.
•
Versatile: That said, the salesperson of the future will still need to shift gears and work
with the downstream implementers and influencers that will put their concepts to work.
Yes, you’re going over the head of the midlevel managers when you approach the CEO
– but if you do it right, they never feel like they’ve been disrespected.
•
Well trained: Finally, that salesperson will need to be incredibly well trained in all three
sales models – transactional, relationship, and conceptual – and know when to use each.
(Harrison, 2021)
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Glossary of Common Sales Terms
ABC
"Always Be Closing." An antiquated sales strategy that basically says everything a sales
rep does throughout the sales process is in pursuit toward the singular goal of closing a deal. The
implication is that, if a sales rep doesn't close the deal, then everything they did regarding that
opportunity was a failure. In the inbound methodology, the preferred ABCs of selling are: Always
Be Connecting. Even better, "Always Be Helping."
Adoption process
Another way of saying "the buying process." The
stages a potential buyer goes through, from learning about
a new product or service to either becoming a loyal
customer or rejecting it. The potential buyer may or may
not end up purchasing/adopting that product or service.
AIDA
An acronym used in Sales that stands for Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. They are
the four steps of the now somewhat-outdated Purchase Funnel (although most agree the funnel
is much more complex than what is represented in this traditional model), wherein customers
travel from awareness to purchase.
ARR
Annual Recurring Revenue. For recurring revenue companies, ARR provides a high-level
look at how recurring revenue or subscription business is growing over time. It's a good metric for
models that have longer term subscription durations. It's also great for long-term planning. See
also MRR.
B2B
Business 2 Business. B2B is a term
that describes the transactional relationship
between provider and client where the
provider is a business and the client is another
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business. e.g. "Our B2B marketing strategy targets organizations in the manufacturing niche."
See also: B2C.
B2C
Business 2 Consumer. B2C is a term describes the transactional relationship between
provider and client where the provider is a business and the client is an individual consumer. e.g.
"Our B2C marketing strategy targets new moms." See also: B2B.
Benefit
The value of a product or service that a consumer of that product or service experiences.
Benefits are distinct from features, and sales reps should sell based on benefits that are supported
by features.
Bad Leads
Leads that are unlikely to become
paying customers -- and a sales rep's worst
nightmare, because they are a waste of time.
A tough challenge for most marketers is how
you separate good, high-quality leads from the
people who are just poking around your site.
Learn more about lead scoring here.
BANT
An acronym used in sales for lead qualification that stands for Budget, Authority, Need,
Timeline. It's a famous tool for sales reps and sales leaders to help them determine whether their
prospects have the budget, authority, need, and right timeline to buy what they sell.
B = Budget: Determines whether your prospect has a budget for what you're selling.
A = Authority: Determines whether your prospect has the authority to make a purchasing
decision.
N = Need: Determines whether there's a business need for what you're selling.
T = Timeline: Determines the time frame for implementation.
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The BANT formula was originally developed by IBM several decades ago. We don't think
BANT is good enough anymore, though: Learn more here about the better qualifying formula,
GPCTBA/C&I.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
A stage of the buying process leads reach when they're just about to close into new
customers. They've identified a problem, have shopped around for possible solutions, and are
very close to buying.
Buyer Behavior
The ways a consumer identifies, considers, and chooses products and services. Buyer
behavior is often influenced by the consumer's needs, desires, aspirations, inhibitions, and role,
social and cultural environment.
Buyer Persona
A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real
data about your existing customers. While it helps inbound marketers like you define their target
audience, it can also help sales reps qualify leads. Learn more about developing buyer personas
here.
Buying Criteria
All the information a consumer needs to make a buying decision. It can be written or
unwritten, and often answers questions like, "what is it?; "why should I buy it?"; "what is the
price?"; "why do I need it?" and so on.
Buying Process/Cycle
The process potential buyers go through before deciding whether to make a purchase.
Although it's been broken it down into many sub-stages to align with different business models, it
can universally be boiled down to these three lifecycle stages:
Awareness: Leads have either become aware of your product or service, or they have become
aware that they have a need that must be fulfilled.
Evaluation: Leads are aware that your product or service could fulfill their need, and they are
trying to determine whether you are the best fit.
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Purchase: Leads are ready to make a purchase.
Buying Signal
A communication from a prospect indicating they are
ready to make a purchase, either verbal or non-verbal. An
example would be them asking the sales rep, "When can it
be delivered?"
Churn Rate
A metric that measures how many customers you retain and at what value. To calculate
churn rate, take the number of customers you lost during a certain time frame, and divide that by
the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of that time frame. (Don't include
any new sales from that time frame.)
For example, if a company had 500 customers at the beginning of October and only 450
customers at the end of October (discounting any customers that were closed in October), their
customer churn rate would be: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%.
Churn rate is a significant metric primarily for recurring revenue companies. Regardless
of your monthly revenue, if your average customer does not stick around long enough for you to
at least break even on your customer acquisition costs, you’re in trouble.
Closed Opportunities
An umbrella term that includes both closed-won and closed-lost opportunities, although
some people use it to mean only closed-won opportunities.
Closed-Won
When a sales rep closes a deal in which the buyer purchases the product or service.
Closed-Lost
When a sales rep closes a deal in which the buyer does not purchase the product or
service.
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Closing Ratio
The percentage of prospects that a sales rep successfully close-wins. This ratio is usually
used to assess individual sales reps on their short-term performance, but it can also be used to
evaluate profits, forecast sales, and so on. Improving a closing ratio usually requires efforts to
bring better-qualified leads into the funnel.
Cold Calling
Making unsolicited calls in an attempt to sell products or
services. It's also a very inefficient way to find potential
customers.
Commission
The payment a sales rep gets when they successfully
sell something; usually a percentage of sales revenue. If you want more info on sales
compensation, check out this article.
Consumer
A person who uses a product or service.
They may not be the actual buyer of that product;
for example, if I buy my brother a pair of basketball
shoes, then my brother is the consumer of those
shoes, not me.
Conversion Path
The "events" on a company's website that help companies capture leads. In its most basic
form, it'll consist of a call-to-action (typically a button that describes an offer) that leads to a landing
page with a lead capture form, which redirects to a thank-you page where a content offer resides.
In exchange for his or her contact information, a website visitor obtains a content offer to better
help them through the buying process.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as
filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low
conversion rates are performing poorly.
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Cross-Selling
When a sales rep has more than one type of product to offer consumers that could be
beneficial, and s/he successfully sells a consumer more than one item either at the time of
purchase or later on. An example is when Apple sells you an iPhone and then successfully sells
you an Apple iPhone case or a pair of Apple headphones. In this case, a sales rep identifies a
need the customer has, and fulfils that need by recommending an additional product. (Crossselling differs from up-selling; see up-selling.)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
This is your total Sales and Marketing cost.
To calculate, follow these steps for a given time
period (month, quarter, or year):
Add up program or advertising spend + salaries +
commissions + bonuses + overhead.
Divide by the number of new customers in that time
period.
For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50
customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that month. (Learn more here.)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Software that let companies keep track of
everything they do with their existing and potential
customers. At the simplest level, CRM software lets
you keep track of all the contact information for
these customers. But CRM systems can do lots of
other things, too, like track email, phone calls,
faxes, and deals; send personalized emails;
schedule appointments; and log every instance of
customer service and support. Some systems also
incorporate feeds from social media such as
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. The goal is to create a system in which sales reps have
a lot of information at their fingertips and can quickly pull up everything about a prospect or
existing customer.
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Data Entry/Processing
The process of obtaining, recording, and maintaining information you can retrieve and use
later. In Sales, this usually mean inputting potential buyers' information into a Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) tool to track activity, correspondence, and progress on open
opportunities.
Discovery Call
The first call a sales rep makes to a prospect, with the goal of asking them questions and
qualifying them for the next step.
Feature
A function of a product that can solve for a potential buyer's need or pain point; usually a
distinguishing characteristic that helps boost appeal.
Flywheel
The flywheel is a new way of conceptualizing the sales process, replacing the funnel w
here customers are thought of as an output. The flywheel demonstrates that awareness,
engagement, and delight can happen at any point during the customer journey and that the best
way to achieve growth is to apply force and remove friction in each stage.
Forecasting
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Estimating future sales performance for a forecast period based on historical data.
Forecasted performance can vary widely from actual sales results, but helps sales reps plan their
upcoming days, weeks, and months, and helps high-level employees set standards for expenses,
profit, and growth. Learn more about sales forecasting here.
Gatekeeper
A person who, or role that, enables or prevents information from getting to another
person(s) in a company. For example, a receptionist or personal assistant.
GPCTBA/C&I
Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences, Positive
Implications. The lead qualification criteria sales reps should use to qualify prospects -- it's a better
tool than BANT to help sales reps and sales leaders to determine whether their prospects have
the goals, plans, challenges, and right timeline to buy what they sell.
G = Goals: Determines the quantifiable goals your prospect wants or needs to hit. An opportunity
for sales reps to establish themselves as an advisor by beginning to help prospects reset or
quantify their goals.
P = Plans: Determines the prospect's current plans that they'll implement in order to achieve
those goals.
C = Challenges: Determines whether the sales rep can help a prospect overcome their and their
company's challenges; ones they're dealing with and ones they (or the sales rep) anticipate.
T = Timeline: Determines the time frame for implementation of their goals and plans, and when
they need to eliminate their challenges.
B = Budget: Determines how much money a prospect has to spend.
A = Authority: Determines who in the organization will help champion and/or decide to make a
purchase.
C = Negative Consequences: Discusses the negative things that'll happen if a prospect doesn't
meet their goal.
I = Positive Implications: Discusses the positive outcomes that'll happen if a prospect meets
their goal.
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Lead
A person or company whose shown interest in a product or service in some way, shape,
or form. Perhaps they filled out a form, subscribed to a blog, or shared their contact information
in exchange for a coupon.
Generating leads is a critical part of a prospect's journey to becoming a customer, and it
falls in between the second and third stages of the larger inbound marketing methodology, which
you can see below.
Lead Qualification
The process of determining whether a potential buyer has certain characteristics that
qualify him or her as a lead. These characteristics could be budget, authority, timeline, and so on.
Popular lead qualification criteria acronyms are GPCTBA/C&I and BANT.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. To
calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time period:
Take the revenue the customer paid you in that time period.
Subtract from that number the gross margin.
Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue
is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the customer's LTV
is $437,500. (Learn more here.)
Loss Leader
Used in retail to refer to a product sold at a low price (either at break-even or at a loss) for
the purpose of attracting customers into the store. The goal is for customers who go into the store
to buy other items that are priced to make a profit.
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LTV:CAC
The ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. Once you have the LTV and the
CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of
$437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
Margin
The difference between a product or service's selling price and the cost of production.
Mark-Up
The amount added to the cost price of goods to cover overhead and profit.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
The stage that a lead enters after identifying a problem. Now they’re looking to conduct
further research to find a solution to the problem. Typical middle of the funnel offers include case
studies, product brochures, or anything that brings your business into the equation as a solution
to the problem the lead is looking to solve.
MRR
Monthly Recurring Revenue. For recurring revenue companies, MRR provides a monthto-month look at how recurring revenue or subscription business is growing. Includes MRR gained
by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from up-sells (net positive), MRR lost from down-sells
(net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss). MRR may not be ideal for longer term
subscription models since there will be natural fluctuation over shorter time periods, but it can be
a better metric for recurring revenue companies that aren't ideal for long-term subscriptions. It's
also great for short-term planning. See also: ARR.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree to which
people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey
designed to help you determine how loyal your customers are to your business. To calculate NPS,
subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from
the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10).
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Regularly determining your company’s NPS allows you to identify ways to improve your
products and services so you can increase the loyalty of your customers. Learn more about how
to use NPS surveys for marketing here.
Objection
A prospect's challenge to or rejection of a product or service's benefits, and a natural part
of the sales process. Common objections often have to do with budget, authority, need, and timing
(see BANT). How sales reps handle objections plays a big role in determining whether a prospect
will buy. Learn how to tackle common B2B sales objections here.
Opportunity
Though every company has different processes for defining what criteria make someone
an opportunity, it's basically when a qualified lead is being worked by Sales. See Qualified Lead
for more information.
Pain Point
A prospect's pain point, or need, is the most important thing for a sales rep to identify in
the selling process. Without knowing a prospect's pain points, they can't possibly offer benefits to
help resolve those pain points.
Performance Plan
Also "Performance Improvement Plan" or "PIP." A sales rep is put on a performance plan
if s/he doesn't make a certain percentage of quota over a certain period of time. Performance
plans vary from company to company, but it usually starts with a written warning and further
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disciplinary action, including termination if necessary. The purpose of performance plans is to set
clear and specific performance goals, provide a means for feedback, and develop sales skills.
Pipeline
The step-by-step process sales reps go through to convert a prospect into a customer.
The sales pipeline is often divided into stages for each step in the sales process, and the sales
rep is responsible for moving opportunities through the stages. It can also refer to a visual
representation of the sales process, where every open opportunity is arranged based on the sales
stage they're in.
Positioning Statement
Statements and questions that sales reps use when opening a sales call to engage the
prospect in conversation around their pain points. Many sales reps are trained to start off every
sales call with these statements. Here's an example of positioning statements on a sales call from
Advanced Marketing Concepts:
Sales Rep: I help marketing leaders who are frustrated with the inability of the sales team to
differentiate their products in a crowded market.
Buyer: Yes, that's always been a problem. (If you've done your job well and targeted the buyer
effectively with that first positioning statement, then you'll get an engaging signal like this one.)
Sales Rep: I talk to a lot of marketing leaders, and lately I'm hearing the two biggest problems
are weak sales pipeline and an inability to differentiate from competitors. Do these problems
sound familiar?
Profit Margin
A ratio of profitability that measures how much money a company actually keeps in
earnings. It's calculated either as a) net income divided by revenues, or b) net profits divided by
sales.
Prospecting
The process of searching for and finding potential buyers. Sales reps (or "prospectors")
seek out qualified prospects and move them through the sales cycle.
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Qualified Lead
A contact that opted in to receive communication from your company, became educated
about your product or service, and is interested in learning more. Marketing and Sales often have
two different versions of qualified leads (MQLs for Marketing, and SQLs for Sales), so be sure to
have conversations with your sales team to set expectations for the types of leads you plan to
hand over.
Quota
A sales goal; a set amount of selling a sales rep is expect to meet over a given time frame,
usually a month and/or quarter. It's very, very common for sales reps to have quotas, also the
form they take can vary from company to company and from role to role.
Sales Methodology
"The 'how' of selling as a skill set," according to John Kenney of Sales Benchmark Index.
There are many sales methodologies out there, a few of which are particularly popular, and sales
leaders often choose one and use it to teach and motivate his or her team. Popular sales
methodologies include SPIN selling, Conceptual Selling, SNAP Selling, The Challenger Sale,
Sandler Sales, and Customer Centric Selling. Read more about these sales methodologies here.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
For salespeople, an SLA is an agreement between a company's sales and marketing
teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Sales SLA
defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue
each qualified lead, while the Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with
regards to lead quantity and lead quality.
SLAs exist to align Sales and Marketing. For companies to achieve growth and become leaders
in their industries, it is critical that these two groups be properly integrated. Learn how to create
an SLA here.
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Smarketing
Used to refer to the practice of aligning
Sales and Marketing efforts. In a perfect world,
marketing would pass off tons of fully qualified
leads to the sales team, who would then
subsequently work every one of those leads
enough times to close them 100% of the time.
But since this isn't always how the cookie
crumbles, it’s important for Marketing and Sales
to align efforts to impact the bottom line the best
they can through coordinated communication.
Social Selling
When sales reps use social media to interact directly with their prospects. They provide value by
answering prospects' questions and offering thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy.
Sound Bite
A series of words or phrases sales
reps use to respond to and overcome
a customer objection.
Stage
Parts of the sales pipeline representing each step in the sales process. It's the sales rep's
responsibility for moving opportunities from stage to stage. Different companies define their sales
stages differently, but each one has behind it a set of requirements that need to be completed in
order for an opportunity to move from one stage to the next. Names for sales stages are usually
things like "Prospect," "Qualified Lead," "Demo," "Proposal," "Closed."
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Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
The very first stage of the buying process. Leads at this stage are identifying a problem
they have and are looking for more information. At this point, marketers create helpful content
that aids leads in identifying this problem and providing next steps toward a solution.
Up-Selling
When a sales rep sells an existing
customer a higher-end version of the product
that customer originally bought. For example, if
you bought a cell phone plan and a sales rep
successfully persuaded you to upgrade to a
plan with more minutes or data, then that's an
up-sell.
Value Proposition
"Value prop" for short. A benefit of a product or company intended to make it more
attractive to potential buyers and differentiates it from competitors.
Weighted Pipeline
A more detailed version of a sales pipeline, in which each opportunity is given a specific
value based on which stage they're in in the sales process. For example, potential buyers in the
prospecting stage could be assigned a 10% chance of closing the deal, demo stage buyers 60%,
closed-won 100%, and so on. A sales rep could say that, instead of having 10 prospects in her
pipeline, she has 10 opportunities at 50% or greater likelihood of closing with a weighted pipeline
value of $50,000.
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LESSON 3: SALES PERSONALITY
Overview
A sales person has characteristics
vital to sales success. She/he is driven by
challenges with a mission to close. People
may see a person with a sales personality as
friendly and outgoing but what they may not
recognize is that he is friendly and a peopleperson with a purpose. He speaks to people,
assessing if this person may be a target
customer. A person with a sales personality focuses on one thing -- making the sale happen.
A person with a sales personality tends to embody all of the traits that lead to
superior sales performance: inspiring genuine trust, building strong relationships, finding the right
solutions to the right problems, consistently following up, showing grace under pressure, and
closing higher-value deals faster
Seven Critical Factors for Success
If you want to be a consistently successful sales professional, you can learn a lot from
those who continually experience sustained success in their careers.
▪
A sense of urgency
▪
▪
Persistence
Self-discipline and control
▪
▪
Planning
Never assuming anything
▪
Activity-Activity-Activity
▪
Follow-up
All 7 are all equally important. One doesn’t take priority over the other.
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Instead, they interact as a circle of things that you never stop doing as long as you want to
experience sustained success.
Here’s how each of them work.
A Sense of Urgency
A sense of urgency means you don’t put things off. Anything that needs to be done today
is done today, no matter how big or small.
The really successful sales people will even tell you that, at the end of their business day,
when they look at what has to be done tomorrow, they usually don’t wait, choosing instead to
proactively do some of tomorrow’s tasks today.
Persistence
Many of the most successful people in history agree that persistence is a cornerstone of
success.
They simply don’t stop until they get what they want, until the goal they have focused on
is achieved.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common
than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are
omnipotent.” President Calvin Coolidge
Self-Discipline and Control
This factor is part of the broader topic of Self-Management but in this context it simply
means that consistently successful sales professionals won’t allow themselves to be seduced into
making non-productive choices.
They temporarily, mentally compartmentalize the things that are not important, which
allows them to focus solely on the activities that will contribute to achieving their daily goals.
Planning
They plan and think about everything in detail before they actually do it.
This includes planning for all sales related meetings as well as conversations (using any
medium) they will have with other people, before they actually have them.
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A very important part of this planning is to consistently behave out of empathy to make
sure their “intent” will not potentially be misinterpreted by anybody.
Never Assume Anything
This success factor covers all assumptions you might make around a sales situation.
It means not assuming that the person on the receiving end of any information you give
them knows what to do with it – just because you know what to do with it.
And, it means that you mustn’t assume that you know what to do with the information that
someone is giving you, until you’ve checked the appropriate way to context what they are sharing
with you.
It also cascades to not having any expectations of anyone without first, clearly and
appropriately, negotiating what is specifically expected.
If you “never assume”, you are much less likely to have your intent misinterpreted.
Activity-Activity-Activity
They know the value of limited time. They know that they have at most 2000 hours a year
(8 hrs. a day x 5 days per week x 50 weeks) to achieve their annual performance goals.
Any hour that is squandered is lost and can’t be recovered. That’s why activity is so
important to them.
In some cases, the minimum activity (such as maintaining new business or getting new
business) might be 15 face-to-face meetings in any given business week. This becomes their
minimum non-negotiable norm with themselves.
They do not end their business week until this weekly activity goal has been achieved.
Follow-Up
This ties directly to the other 6 factors. Simply applied, it means they consistently followup on everything that is expected to be done or committed to. They don’t stop until this is
achieved.
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Sales Skills
According to Brainshark, 2019, to hit their numbers, salespeople need to know a lot, from
product
and
expertise
to
and
value
market
messaging
propositions.
That means they need to
develop the
right
sales
skills to have meaningful
conversations with every
buyer.
But all of this begs
a key question: which skills
are most
important for
your sellers to master?
Hard skills are learned abilities acquired and enhanced through practice, repetition, and
education. Hard skills are important because they increase employee productivity and efficiency
and subsequently improve employee satisfaction.
Soft skills are broadly classified as a combination of personality traits, behaviors, and
social attitudes that allow people to communicate effectively, collaborate, and successfully
manage conflict. People with good soft skills tend to have strong situational awareness and
emotional intelligence to navigate difficult working environments while still producing positive
results. This is especially important for leadership positions because good leadership is more
about managing people and directing their efforts toward the desired outcome rather than bringing
any specific technical skills to bear.
The 7 Soft Skills You need in today’s Workforce
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employees (NACE), when participating
employers were asked to name the attributes they seek in candidates, they gave their highest
scores to the following three traits:
•
Written Communication Skills (82%)
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•
Problem Solving Skills (80.9%)
•
Ability to Work in a Team (78.7%)
Interestingly, technical skills (59.6%) and computer skills (55.1%), often considered among
the most important skills an applicant can possess in today’s high-tech job market, ranked quite
low by comparison.
1. Leadership Skills
Companies want employees who can supervise and direct other workers. They want
employees who can cultivate relationships up, down, and across the organizational chain.
Leaders must assess, motivate, encourage, and discipline workers and build teams, resolve
conflicts, and cultivate the organization’s desired culture. Understanding how to influence people
and accommodate their needs is an essential element of leadership. All too many companies
overlook when they place someone with the most technical expertise in a position of
authority. Soft skills development is often a key component of leadership training.
2. Teamwork
Most employees are part of a team/department/division, and even those who are not on
an official team need to collaborate with other employees. You may prefer to work alone, but it’s
important to demonstrate that you understand and appreciate the value of joining forces and
working in partnership with others to accomplish the company’s goals. This shows that you
possess the soft skills necessary to engage in productive collaboration.
3. Communication Skills
Successful communication involves five components. Verbal communication refers to
your ability to speak clearly and concisely. Nonverbal communication includes the capacity to
project positive body language and facial expressions. Written communication refers to your
skilfulness in composing text messages, reports, and other types of documents. Visual
communication involves your ability to relay information using pictures and other visual
aids. Active listening should also be considered a key communication soft skill because it helps
you listen to and actually hear what others say. You need to be able to listen to understand how
to best communicate with someone. Without strong listening skills, any communication efforts will
be one-way and probably ineffective.
4. Problem-Solving Skills
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Many applicants try to minimize problems because they don’t understand that companies
hire employees to solve problems. Glitches, bumps in the road, and stumbling blocks are all part
of the job and represent learning opportunities. The ability to use your knowledge to find answers
to pressing problems and formulate workable solutions will demonstrate that you can handle –
and excel in – your job. Discussing mistakes and what you learned from them is an important part
of building a soft skills resume.
5. Work Ethic
While you may have a manager, companies don’t like to spend time micromanaging
employees. They expect you to be responsible and do the job you’re getting paid to do, which
includes being punctual when you arrive at work, meeting deadlines, and making sure that your
work is error-free. And going the extra mile shows that you’re committed to performing your work
with excellence.
6. Flexibility/Adaptability
In the 21st century, companies need to make rapid (and sometimes drastic) changes to
remain competitive. So they want workers who can also shift gears or change direction as needed.
As organizations have become less hierarchical and agile over the last decade, it’s more
important than ever for employees to be able to handle many different tasks and demonstrate a
willingness to take on responsibilities that might lay outside their area of expertise.
7. Interpersonal Skills
This is a broad category of “people skills” and includes building and maintaining relationships,
developing rapport, and using diplomacy. It also includes giving and receiving constructive
criticism, being tolerant and respectful regarding others' opinions, empathizing with them. This is
among the most important of all the soft skills
examples because it is central to building teams
with
a
strong
foundation
of
trust
and
accountability. (Snyder, 2021)
Cold Calls and Warm Calls
Cold calling is a technique in which a
salesperson contacts individuals who have not
previously expressed interest in the offered
products or services.
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•
Cold calling typically refers to solicitation by phone or
telemarketing, but can also involve in-person visits, such
as with door-to-door salespeople.
Successful cold-call salespersons should be persistent and willing to endure repeated rejection.
To be successful, they should adequately prepare by researching the demographics of their
prospects and the market. So-called robo-dialing (robocalling) is the latest innovation in cold
calling whereby algorithms automatically dial and produce pre-recorded messages. Government
regulations, such as the National Do Not Call Registry, have negatively impacted cold callers'
efforts to reach potential clients en masse.
•
Cold calling is a sales practice in which individuals are contacted who have not previously
expressed interest in a product or service.
•
Cold calling is commonly used in telemarketing, and only produces maybe a 2% success
rate for the most skilled professionals.
•
Consumers tend to dislike cold calling
Sample Cold Call Script
1. Introduce yourself.
First, say your name and which company you work for. You need to sound confident and
energetic. I can't tell you how many cold calls I listen to that begin with, "This is mlkjdkfj from
mnxcmvn."
The prospect goes, "What? Who??" Right from the start, the call is going poorly.
You don't need to yell your greeting, but you do need to articulate.
After you say, "This is [name] from [company]," pause.
This is hard for cold callers. They want to jump straight into their pitch. But I want you to take a
deep breath and say nothing for eight whole seconds.
While you're pausing, your prospect is searching their brain for who you could be. It sounds like
you know them -- are you a client? A former coworker? A current one?
2. Establish rapport.
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The call is already deviating from the standard cold call. Then you ask them a question to
establish some rapport. Your goal: Get ‘em talking and prove you're familiar with them and their
company.
Here are some sample questions:
•
So, [prospect name], I see you went to [university]. How did you like it?
•
Wow, you've been at [company] for [X years]. How did you get started there?
•
Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?
A good question is topical and makes someone smile. If they seem receptive to chatting, ask them
a follow-up question.
For instance, if they say, "I loved going to Cal Poly; the English department was fantastic," you
can respond, "That's great, should I recommend it to my niece who wants to be a writer?"
Eventually, they'll say, "Alright, why are you calling?"
I cackle. Seriously.
They'll laugh because you're clearly having fun.
Answer, "Sometimes I forget." Laugh again.
Trust me, this always lightens the mood. (Unless your prospect is in a major hurry, in which case,
you should get the point.)
3. Use a positioning statement.
A positioning statement shows your prospect that you work with similar companies and
understand their challenges. You're not talking about yourself, which is what most cold callers do.
Here's a hypothetical positioning statement: "I work with sales managers in hospitality with five to
eight reps on their team. My customers are typically looking to increase rep productivity. Does
that sound like you?"
Since you've pre-qualified them, they'll always say "yes."
Simply say, "Tell me more about that."
Now, it's all about them! They'll explain their pain points and objectives which is valuable
information to start building your pitch.
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Warm Calling
Warm
calling
you're
means
calling
prospect
a
with
whom you've had
some
prior
contact. The stronger the connection between yourself and the prospect, the warmer the call is.
For example, if you meet a prospect at an industry event and they ask you to give them a call
so that you can set up an appointment that would be an extremely warm call. On the other hand,
if you send a letter or an email to a prospect and then follow up with a phone call, that would be
more of a lukewarm call.
Types of Warm Calling
There are a few types of warm calls. For example, a prospect who's been referred to you is a
warm call even though you haven't directly been in contact with that prospect. The fact that the
referrer is recommending you to the prospect creates an indirect connection.
Another type of warm call occurs when a prospect has reached out to you for more
information. For example, a prospect might fill out a form on your website requesting a call back
or call a general number in response to a TV commercial. These prospects are usually intrigued
enough to go to the effort of reaching out to you, but they don't actually know anything about you
personally. These warm leads are certainly easier to work with than cold leads, but will still need
some rapport building on your part.
Warm calling means you're calling a prospect with whom you've had some prior contact.
To make warm calls, you need to have systems in place for establishing a connection with
potential customers.
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Warm calls can be referrals, prospects who have reached out to you for information, or direct
contacts you make through networking.
Referral Strategy
It is a marketing tactic that makes use of recommendations and word of mouth to grow a
business's customer base through the networks of its existing customers. Referral marketing can
take many forms, but at its heart, it's a way to get your biggest fans to help spread the word about
your brand. In other words, referral marketing turns your current customers into brand advocates.
Why does referral marketing work?
Before we get into how to create your referral marketing strategy, let’s talk about why
you need to. How much of a difference do referrals make? Consider this:
•
A word-of-mouth impression drives at least 5x more sales than a paid impression.
•
Customers acquired through word-of-mouth spend 2x more and make 2x as many
referrals themselves.
•
Referred leads convert 30% better and have a 16% higher lifetime value than
leads acquired via other channels.
•
Half of Americans would pick
word-of-mouth if they could only select
one source for information on potential
purchases.
Word-of-mouth
and referral
marketing are cost-effective, powerful,
and trusted. When we have a good
experience with a brand, product, or
service, we’re happy to—and frequently
do—share it with others.
In
his
bestseller Contagious,
marketing professor and author Jonah
Berger identified six principles of sharing and word-of-mouth:
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1. Social currency: We share what makes us look good.
2. Triggers: We share what’s at the top of our minds.
3. Emotion: We share what we care about.
4. Public: We imitate what we see people around us are doing.
5. Practical value: We share things that have value to others.
6. Stories: We share stories, not information.
Common Types of Objections
Sales
objections
are
issues
that
prospects communicate to sales professionals
as reasons why they can't buy a product or
service from them. Objections aren't always
hard "no’s, and they can sometimes represent
opportunities for sales reps to clarify any
misconceptions about the product or service to
try to qualify the prospect and close the sale.
Types of Objections
1. Lack of Budget
2. Lack of Trust
3. Lack of Need
4. Lack of Urgency
This phenomenon is commonly referred to as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing).
Determining BANT should be part of your routine qualification process.
1. Lack of Budget
"It's too expensive."
Objections based on price are the ones you'll come across most frequently. That's
because purchases come with some level of financial risk.
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As a sales rep, you'll want to consider the positioning of your product/service and how to
demonstrate that value. This turns the conversation into one about risk vs. reward.
By providing value and painting a picture of where your solution will take them, they can
be convinced that it's enough reward to justify the risk.
2. Lack of Trust
"I've never heard of your company."
People do business with those them like, know, and trust.
In an inbound sales conversation, the prospect will have likely interacted with your content
or be familiar with your organization in some way. This objection could be overcome by jogging
their memory, or you might consider your sales cycle and whether it's feasible to nurture them.
However, not all conversations are inbound conversations, and they may have genuinely
never heard of you. It's at this point that you double down on the value you provide with
your elevator pitch. Be sure to emphasize the authority your organization has in the market.
3. Lack of Need
"I don't see how this can help me."
This may seem like an objection on the surface, but it's actually an opportunity to give
information to the prospect (and get information from them). Use open-ended questions to qualify
the prospect and evaluate their need. If you find a fit, leverage it to demonstrate value.
4. Lack of Urgency
"[X problem] isn't important for me right
now."
The goal here is to identify if timing
actually is an issue or if the prospect is trying
to brush you off. One way to do that is by
asking them to elaborate on why it's not
important or what competing priorities
currently have their attention.
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Listen closely to determine if their response involves concrete timing issues or vague
excuses. If they're doing back flips to justify inaction on a real pain point, you may have an
opening.
When all else fails, schedule an appointment with them at a later date.
Common Sales Objections
Here are the most common objections prospectors might face, along with some very
simple approaches to responding to them.
1. "Just send me some information."
We call this objection style "the brush-off." This objection varies in intent depending on
when it comes up in your call with a prospect. If it comes up before you have had the chance to
deliver your value proposition and explain who you are and what you do, it's very clearly a brushoff. If it comes afterward, but before you've had the chance to ask qualification questions, there
may be interest, but the prospect isn't yet willing to talk about it further.
If it comes at the end of your call, after you've gone through both your value prop and
qualification, the prospect may have decided this isn't valuable somewhere along the way. No
matter where it comes up in the call, it's the SDR's duty to uncover what is really going on: Do
they not yet understand the value, or are they not ready for a buying conversation? Why not?
Responses: There are a few potential responses to this one, depending on what stage the call
is in.
•
Before you've delivered the value proposition: "Can we take 30 seconds now for me to
explain what we do, and you can then decide if it's worth a follow-up?"
•
Before qualification: "Can I ask you a couple questions now to better understand how we
might help?"
•
After qualification: "Typically, people find it more valuable to see how this works in a
demo."
2. "We already work with [Competitor]."
This is where it's important to know why you are unique, and be able to explain that value
clearly. Your prospect just heard, “Hi, we do X” and thought, “Oh, we have a vendor for that, we're
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good.” Your prospects are busy -- they don't want to fix things that aren't broken. It is your duty to
change their mind set, and explain why they need the specific value you provide.
Response: "At this point, we aren't asking you to rip anything out. A lot of our customers used to
or still use Competitor X. We'd just like the opportunity to show you how we are different and how
we have provided additional value to our customers. We can present some use cases of other
companies like yours who work with us and with Competitor X. When is a good time to schedule
a follow-up call?"
3. "Call me back next quarter."
Prospects are busy. They will push anything
off to tomorrow because today is swamped. Don't let
them! You have a solution they needed yesterday.
Reassure them that this is not a buying conversation.
You just want to show them what you do, and see if
there's value for them.
Response: "Of course. If it really is bad timing, I'm
happy to do that. However, I would still like to set up
a five-minute call to show you what we are doing and
how we might help. That way, if it's not interesting, we
don't have to worry about me chasing you next quarter, but if it is, we'll have more to talk about
then. When is a good day/time for us to chat?"
4. "We don't have the budget."
If budget is an important part of your qualified lead definition (e.g. traditional BANT) this
may be a stopping point. Even with BANT, however, it is important to dig a bit further to understand
what not having budget means. Can they not afford it? Has your buyer burned through her
personal budget for the year? Could your buyer find the money elsewhere if you show enough
value? In most cases, the prospect doesn't need to have a budget at this stage of the process,
and SDRs should leverage this fact to overcome this objection.
Response: "That's okay. We don't expect you to buy anything right now. We'd just like the
opportunity to share what we are doing and see if it's valuable to your company. Can we schedule
a follow-up call over the next couple days?”
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5. "Does your product do X, Y, and Z?"
This isn't so much an objection as an obstacle to closing a call with a prospect and getting
them to the next appointment, (e.g., a demo, or a discovery call with the sales rep). However, it
is one of the most common obstacles that prevent an SDR from converting the lead to an SQL.
Not only does getting in the weeds waste time, but you also run the potential of devolving into a
features/benefits conversation. The good news is this generally means the prospect is interested.
Use this fact to end the conversation and set up the next appointment.
Response: "I am glad you asked that. I think it will be helpful to set up a time where we can
answer this question and others with a specialist. When is a good day/time for us to talk?”
6. "Sorry, I have to cancel. I'll get back to you with a better time."
People don't like to say "No" -- and that includes your prospects. This manifests in
ghosting, procrastination (as mentioned above), and asking for more time.
Sales pro Mike Rogewitz swears by Sandler's Negative Reverse Selling strategy to
overcome tricky non-objection objections like these. "You want to call out your prospect's lack of
interest and get them to admit the answer is 'No' without going too negative," says Rogewitz.
"Essentially, you're getting them to realize they're bullshitting you." Here's the formula:
Prospect: “XYZ fluffy response.”
Salesperson: “Typically when I hear someone say XYZ, it really means ABC. Is it fair for me to
assume that's the case?”
By using this simple script, you'll nudge your prospect into giving you the final answer you need
to move on.
Response: "Typically, when someone cancels and says they'll get back to me, it means they're
just not interested in what I have to offer right now. Is it fair for me to assume that's the case?"
7. "Hello, you've reached [Prospect's Name] ...”
Does your prospect avoid your phone calls like the plague? Do they take a while to get
back to you and always need approval? Do they give vague answers when you ask about budget
and priorities for the year?
If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, you might be talking with an individual
contributor. They're usually not as comfortable talking on the phone as managers or decision
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makers, they need a lot of internal approval, and they aren't privy to important budgetary
information or company-wide priorities.
It's important to gain the gatekeeper's trust and learn as much as you can from them -- but
then you need to move on and build relationships with the people in the company who can actually
choose your product/service.
Response: "Have you ever purchased this type of product/service before?" "Who will be in
charge of this buying process?" "Would you be able to connect me with that person?" (Gonzales,
2020)
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LESSON 4: SALES PRESENTATIONS
Overview
A sales presentation (although it’s still
a sales pitch) is a bigger deal, figuratively and
probably literally. It’s a more complicated
version of a sales pitch, and usually, it
happens when your sales team is trying to
close a more lucrative deal, and it’s not a
simple phone call—it often involves a meeting
and a demo.
You’ll need to budget more time for a presentation, not just for the presentation itself—
which can run as long as an hour—but also for prep time and testing. There may be a PowerPoint
presentation involved. You might think of a sales presentation as a simple pitch, a demo, or a
list of facts and figures, but a while a good presentation does incorporate all of those elements,
it’s more than the sum of its parts. Done well, at the right time in your sales process, it gets your
prospects’ attention, gets them excited and makes them want to move forward with you and your
product and make a buying decision.
Written Proposals
It is a document a person or a business uses to pitch their services or products to potential
clients and customers.
Sales proposals can be used by sales teams, consultants, agencies and anyone looking
to show how they can serve their target market with their offerings.
An excellent sales proposal will help you achieve the following outcomes:
•
It shows that you fully understand the needs of your prospect. It proves that you’ve deeply
understood their needs based on your previous conversations or their request for proposal
(RFP).
•
It convinces your prospect you’re the best solution available to them. A great proposal will
link the challenges your prospect faces with the benefits of your offer. As a result, your
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prospect can see a future version of themselves that successfully solved their pain points
thanks to your product or service.
•
It inspires them to take action. It gives your prospect the confidence that they have all the
information they need to make their decision. This includes clarity around budget,
deliverables and the steps they must take to kick off the process.
Ultimately, a winning sales proposal clearly conveys the value of working with you. It’s authentic,
clear and tailored to your prospect’s needs and expectations.
How to Write Your Sales Proposals
1. Analyze your prospects
Without deeply understanding what your prospect needs, your sales proposal will be a
guessing game.
The key action here is research. Try to uncover:
•
Their objectives. What are the tangible problems and challenges they want to solve?
•
Their budget. Is there any room for negotiation or is it a fixed amount?
•
Stakeholders and decision-makers. Who do you have to tailor your wording to?
•
Their urgency. Is this a burning issue or something they’re taking slowly?
As you gather these answers, take note of the exact words and phrases your potential
customers are already using to describe their situation. Use these in your proposal to make them
feel truly heard.
2. Do the same analysis on your most successful customers
You’ll gain the best insights by combining the above research with the data about your existing
customers or clients. Even better—use data about your best customers.
Your best, most successful customers are typically those that have:
•
Been with you the longest
•
Spent the most money with you
•
Made the most repeat purchases
•
Referred the most business to you
They usually have a mix of these traits or even all of them. Once you’ve identified them,
analyze their experience as your customer—their communication with you in that process—as
well as your conversations with them when they were still a prospect.
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Recall their process as they evaluated, and ultimately picked, your solution as the best one. Look
through customer service logs, sales calls notes in your CRM and any other indicators of their
objectives, budget, urgency and main pain points.
3. Include your unique selling proposition (USP)
A unique selling proposition (USP for short) is the one thing that separates your business
from the competition. It’s a statement that differentiates the products you sell from all the other
options on the market.
It’s not just a tagline on your website; it’s the backbone of all the communications you do,
including branding, marketing, PR, customer service and, of course, sales conversations.
4. Use copywriting best practices
Websites, social media ads, billboards and any other form of marketing you can think of
all rely on great copywriting. Without it, the marketing message could be unclear.
The same goes for your sales proposal. Use these copywriting principles to strengthen your
proposal:
•
Use headings, bullet points and short paragraphs
•
Use storytelling principles in your sales pitch, making each part lead naturally into the next
•
Only make it as long as it needs to be (avoid unnecessary words and filler text)
•
Use active voice to make your copy more engaging and immediate (e.g. ‘see the results’
instead of ‘the results can be seen here’)
•
Use high-quality graphics if they can add to your key messages
5. Build a sales proposal template
Instead of working from scratch every time you’re pitching a potential customer, build
a sales proposal template you can customize to each new prospect.
This way, you’ll save time in the pitching process while also making sure you’re not forgetting any
of the key elements of your proposal.
6. Make it easy to accept and move the deal forward
How does your prospect move forward and buy from you or hire you? Have you made it
difficult for them to do so?
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Remove as much friction from this crucial step as possible. This friction is one of the main
reasons your clients aren’t signing your sales proposals. For example, if they need to select one
option and sign it, there are two very different ways they could do it:
1. They email or call you to pick an option, receive a contract from you, print it, sign it, scan
it, and wait for your confirmation
2. They click on their preferred option and e-sign your contract within minutes
Smart Docs helps you make the proposal signing phase completely frictionless. Here are
some of the key benefits:
•
You can set up sales document templates to include any Pipedrive fields, including custom
fields, enabling you to send quotes faster with less effort and reducing the need for manual
work, edits and the chance of errors being made
•
Create quote tables within documents that will automatically pull in information related to
the deal
•
Store quotes, proposals and contracts in Google Drive so they’re easy to find later
•
Share new links with recipients when you update documents so you’re always on the same
page
•
Get notified about document views so you know when prospects are keen and can strike
when the deal is hot
Doing Presentations
1. Practice confident body language
Presentations usually happen in person, which is why you need to practice strong body
language. You want to look relaxed, confident and like you know you’re going to land this deal.
(Even if you’re shaking in your shoes.)
Here are some ways you can improve your body language:
a. Eye contact: Make and maintain eye contact. This shows people you’re interested in them
and invested in what they have to say.
b. Stand up straight: Pull your shoulders back and straighten your spine; fixing your posture
is an easy way to convey confidence. You’ll also feel better if you’re not hunched over.
c. Chin up: It’s hard when you’re in front of people, but don’t look at the floor or your shoes.
Face straight ahead and make eye contact (or look at the back wall rather than the floor.)
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d. Have a good, firm handshake: People judge others by their handshakes. Offer a firm
handshake to make a good first impression.
2. Understand your audience’s attention span: These are the two important parts of every
presentation: the beginning and the end. They are the most memorable, so that’s where you want
to use your strongest material. Rather than leading with your product’s features, use the first few
minutes of a presentation to briefly introduce yourself, and then lead off the presentation with the
compelling story we mentioned earlier, or if your demo itself is compelling, lead with that. Then
talk about product features. This is important information, but it’s also information your prospects
might have already researched or can look up, so it’s fine that it’s occupying real estate in the
middle of the presentation, where not as many people will remember it. Lastly, finish strong.
Return to your story, sharing how your product solved an important problem. Then say something
like “I’m confident this product can solve your problem.”
3. Be funny: Humor can be tricky, so if you’re not comfortable making jokes or it feels forced,
don’t make yourself be funny. If, however, you’re comfortable with it, humor is part of your brand
voice and you think it will be well-received by your buyer personas, go for it. Humor can be a good
way to connect with prospects, make your presentation memorable and relax everyone in the
room.
4. Use a little showmanship: The best thing about a sales presentation is that it lets you show
off your product. Unlike a pitch, a presentation lets you pull out the stops, make a splash and
showcase your solution. Use this to your advantage, and be as memorable as you possibly can.
“Get public speaking coaching, even if you are a competent speaker,” recommends
Sophie Cameron, Business Development Representative at CAKE. “I once took an eight-week
course, and it’s immensely helped my communication skills during a pitch.
5. Taking questions
Sometimes your prospects will sit through your whole presentation and then ask
questions. Other times, prospects may want a question answered right in the middle of a
presentation. That’s fine. It means they’re engaged.
6. Following up
By the end of your sales pitch, your prospect should be ready to come along with you and
start the next step of your business relationship.
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Outline the next steps of the process. The first could be offering a trial of your product,
scheduling a follow-up meeting, or sending over a proposal.
LESSON 5: SALES MANAGEMENT
STRATEGIES
Overview
The art of meeting the sales targets effectively through meticulous planning and budgeting
refers to sales management. Sales Management helps to extract the best out of employees and
achieve the sales goals of the organization in the most effective ways.
Sales Management Strategies
▪
Identify goals and objectives of the sales team. Be clear on your sales targets. Make
sure the targets are realistic and achievable. Also assign a fixed timeline to achieve the
targets.
▪
Know your product well. Understand what benefits end-users would get from your
brand. The marketers must interact with customers to find out more about their
expectations from the product as well as the organization. One would not be able to
convince the customers unless and until he himself is
clear with the benefits of the products.
▪
Identify your target market. Selling techniques and
strategies can’t be same for all individuals. Each
audience
has
different
needs,
interests
and
requirements.
▪
Hire the right individual for the sales team.
Remember the sales professionals have a major role
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in the success and failure of organizations. Recruit individuals who are aggressive, out of
the box thinkers and nurture the dream of making it big in the corporate world. Make the
sales representatives very clear about their roles and responsibilities in the team. Develop
a lucrative incentive plan for them. Incentives and monetary benefits go a long way in
motivating the sales team.
▪
Don’t lie to your customers. It is important to maintain transparency. Communicate what
all your product actually offers. It is unethical to make false promises. Only commit to what
you actually can deliver to customers.
▪
Know what your competitors are offering. It is essential to do a SWOT analysis of your
organization to know its strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. A marketer
must know how his product is better than his competitors.
▪
Sales representatives must do their homework before going for a sales call. One
should never go unprepared. Remember the customer can ask you anything and you have
to be ready with your answers. The management must promote training sessions at the
workplace to upgrade the skills of the sales professionals and expect them to deliver their
level best.
▪
Devise strategies as per the target audience. Know your market well. The individuals
must be able to relate to your products. The strategies must be formulated in the presence
of all. Each one should have a say in the same. Let everyone come out with his
suggestions. Be ready with alternate plans if one plan fails.
▪
The management must conduct frequent meetings with the sales team to review
their performances. Keep a track on their daily activities. The sales team must prepare
Daily Sales Reports (DSR) for the superiors to know what they are up to.
▪
One must assess his own performance. Recall your interactions with the clients and
analyze where you went wrong and where things could have been a little better.
▪
Treat your customers well for higher customer satisfaction and retention. Don’t
oversell. Once you are through with your sales presentation, don’t be after your client’s
life. Give him time to think and decide.
▪
The sales pitch must be impressive for the desired impact.
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Sales Operation
Sales Operation refers to various activities which
help in the timely achievement of sales targets for the
successful functioning of an organization.
Sales Operation includes various strategies and techniques employed by an individual to
achieve sales goals within the stipulated time frame.
Importance of Sales Operation
▪
Sales Operation activities help the sales professionals to meet the sales targets in a
systematic and the best possible way.
▪
Sales Operation activities help to devise relevant strategies and plans (both long term as
well as short term) to achieve the sales goals.
▪
In simpler words sales operation activities help in generating revenues for the organization
through meticulous planning, better budgeting and adopting a methodical approach.
Steps in Sales Operation
1. Sales representatives should prepare their own database. Make sure you have a long
list of potential customers. Mere sitting at office doesn’t help in sales. Go out in the field,
meet people and gather as much information as you can. Put canopies at strategic
locations. Networking helps in sales.
2. The next step is to segregate the data according to age, sex, income and so on.
Classify the data under various sub heads like working/non-working, middle class/upper
class, employed/unemployed etc. Such classifications help you to understand the
customers better and identify your target audience.
3. Sales strategies ought to be different for every segment. The needs and interests of
a female would be different as compared to a male. Similar products would not excite a
youngster and an individual who is 50 years old. Create relevant strategies for different
segments as per their needs, interests and demands. The promotional plans must excite
the customers and attract them towards the organization.
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4. Speak to the customers and seek for appointment. Fix up a time as per their
convenience. One should never call a customer more than twice in a single day. It irritates
him and he tends to avoid you in future. Give him time to think and decide. Avoid being
pushy. One can also send a soft reminder through email to the customer.
5. Once you get an appointment, make sure you reach the venue on time. Don’t expect
the customer to wait for you. Remember the customer can ask you anything related to the
product. Make sure you know everything about the product and its offerings.
6. Understand the needs and expectations
of the customers. Try to make him
understand how your product would benefit
him? Make him realize how your product is
better than the competitor’s. Don’t oversell.
7. Attend sales deal with an open mind. Don’t
be too rigid on price and other terms and
conditions. Give the best deal to the
customers for them to come back again to your organization.
8. Sign a written agreement with the buyer. The agreement should have the description
of the product, model no, date of purchase, warranty details and other necessary terms
and conditions. Some organizations also give bills to the customers. Bills are required
when the customer comes for an exchange.
9. Make sure products are delivered in good and working condition to the customers.
It is the duty of the sales representatives to assist the customers in installing, using or
maintaining the products.
10. Make sure you are in touch with the clients even after the deal for higher customer
satisfaction, higher customer retention and eventually higher revenues.
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LESSON 6: DATA MANAGEMENT
Overview
In every single thing that we do, data
influences us. This is especially true for
businesses, to which, data is sacred. The right
set of data can help any business accomplish
business goals, gain more customers and
increase their revenue. Businesses should
have a data management process in place to
optimize their marketing efforts, make data-driven business decisions, reduce operational costs,
and more importantly, improve their sales team’s productivity to increase their revenue.
Managing customer data is a hot topic. According to one report, consumer data is now the
world’s most valuable resource—“the oil of the digital era”—and needs to be treated and
safeguarded as such. Failing to do so can result in serious damage.
Consider the ride-hailing service Uber. The company experienced a data breach in 2016
when hackers accessed the private data of around 57 million people, including 600,000 driver’s
license numbers. The incident cost Uber $148 million in the settlement alone. It also caused major
damage to Uber’s reputation, particularly after the company attempted to hide the breach from
the public.
This is not an isolated incident. Other companies such as Yahoo, Under Armour, Equifax,
and eBay have been affected by data breaches in recent years. Like most people, you’re probably
wondering, how could something like this happen? Simply put, poor customer data management.
Proper data collection and management are absolutely essential for ensuring that your
company avoids data breach issues and the resulting loss of customer trust. Furthermore,
effective customer data management is beneficial for your business, period.
Eight best practices for effectively managing your customer data:
1. Take security seriously.
2. Gather information ethically.
3. Decide what you really need.
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4. Invest in customer database software.
5. Back up your data.
6. Clean up your customer data.
7. Train your team.
8. Think about access.
4 Data Management Systems
The first and foremost thing is to take into consideration the current data status. Marketers
need to assess the current data status of the database to set a realistic business goal for present,
future, and the overall business roadmap. Most businesses maintain more than 10 data
management platforms to store data on customers as well as their business processes and these
may include –
1. Customer Relationship Management System or CRM
A Customer Relationship Management System refers to the database that usually holds
all customer data sources including personal data, sales opportunities, sales conversion data,
revenue data, new offers and subscription renewals and many others. This platform is used as
the main interface wherein the sales team reps keep all the accounts, leads, contacts, cases and
all other customer focused data. Additionally, a CRM system will also hold data on several sales
and marketing activities such as sales calls and event participation data which reveal more indepth data on customers’ interests and behavior.
2. Marketing technology systems
A marketing technology systems can be of different types such as, email service providers,
marketing automation platforms, various advertising technologies and many others, which help
marketers running marketing operations and campaigns. Usually, these marketing technologies
are used in sync with CRM systems as they support CRM integration to run campaigns based on
the CRM data and also updates the CRM data automatically as customer data changes.
These systems also enable marketers to cross-reference their audience and customer
data with a comprehensive view on customer details. These marketing systems are also used as
a tool to monitor customer responses and engagement on their ongoing marketing campaigns
which may or may not be related to sales offers.
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Types of customer engagement data accessible from dashboards of the marketing
systems help marketers with a wide spectrum of customer insights such as, website browsing
activity, email clicks, email bounce, sign ups, content download, event registration, email
unsubscribe, overall campaign engagement, and many others in real-time.
3. Data Warehouse systems
The product satisfaction and usage data is usually sent to and maintained in data
warehouse systems that serve as the primary customer data repository. These customer data
sources aid in different data requirements for various systems such as operations platforms,
financial applications, marketing and sales systems, purchase systems and many others, since
these data warehouses present cleansed, standardized and usable versions for all these
different systems.
These data warehouses benefit marketers in discovering how their customers are
purchasing (whether for themselves or someone in their family, friends or work), how customers
are using products or services, satisfaction or issues they face, problems that products solves,
and many other relevant details on usage.
4. Analytics tools
There are gamut of analytics tools are used by marketers and sales professionals; the
major types of them are reporting, data visualization, business intelligence or BI among many
others. As data warehouse systems act in storing customer data diverse data sources and
processes, marketers use analytics and reporting systems to process those data accumulated,
visualize and format data to get insights for campaigns.
These analytics tools serve in a plethora of purposes e.g., getting generic customer trends,
minute and specific insights, get data presented in visual-rich diagrams to measure and extract
actionable business intelligence. That’s why these analytics tools are favorites for all marketing,
advertising and sales professionals for all types of data requirements whether to source overall
campaign performance insights, to delve into ad campaign data minutely based on specific
metrics, to get detailed breakdown data of marketing attribution and many others.
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LESSON 7: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Overview
Customer experience encompasses every
aspect of a company’s offering—the quality of
customer care, of course, but also advertising,
packaging, product and service features, ease of use,
and reliability. Yet few of the people responsible for
those things have given sustained thought to how
their separate decisions shape customer experience.
To the extent they do think about it, they all have different ideas of what customer experience
means, and no one more senior oversees everyone’s efforts.
Within product businesses, for example, product development defers to marketing when
it comes to customer experience issues, and both usually focus on features and specifications.
Operations concerns itself mainly with quality, timeliness, and cost. And customer service
personnel tend to concentrate on the unfolding transaction but not its connection to those
preceding or following it. Even then, much service is rote: Otherwise, why would service reps ask,
as they so often do, “Is there anything else I can help you with?” when they haven’t even dealt
with the original reason for the call or visit?
Some companies don’t understand why they should worry about customer experience.
Others collect and quantify data on it but don’t circulate the findings. Still others do the measuring
and distributing but fail to make anyone responsible for putting the information to use. The extent
of the problem has been documented in Bain & Company’s recent survey of the customers of 362
companies. Only 8% of them described their experience as “superior,” yet 80% of the companies
surveyed believe that the experience they have been providing is indeed superior. With such a
disparity, prospects for improvement are small. But the need is urgent: Consumers have a greater
number of choices today than ever before, more complex choices, and more channels through
which to pursue them. In such an environment, simple, integrated solutions to problems—not
fragmented, burdensome ones—will win the allegiance of the time-pressed consumer. (For more
on making the buying process simpler, see James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, “Lean
Consumption,” HBR March 2005.) Moreover, in markets that are increasingly global, it is
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dangerous to assume that a given offering, communication, or other contact will affect faraway
consumers the same way it does those at home.
Although few companies have zeroed in on customer experience, many have been trying
to measure customer satisfaction and have plenty of data as a result. The problem is that
measuring customer satisfaction does not tell anyone how to achieve it. Customer satisfaction is
essentially the culmination of a series of customer experiences or, one could say, the net result
of the good ones minus the bad ones. It occurs when the gap between customers’ expectations
and their subsequent experiences has been closed. To understand how to achieve satisfaction,
a company must deconstruct it into its component experiences. Because a great many customer
experiences aren’t the direct consequence of the brand’s messages or the company’s actual
offerings, a company’s re-examination of its initiatives and choices will not suffice. The customers
themselves—that is, the full range and unvarnished reality of their prior experiences, and then the
expectations, warm or harsh, those have conjured up—must be monitored and probed.
Need Analysis
Needs analysis is the part of the sales process in which you learn in detail what your
prospective client needs that your company might be able to provide. Needs analysis is a central
and critical part of making the sale. If you are working with a qualified candidate, with needs
analysis, you will be able to determine your potential to secure the deal. If you ask the right
questions, you may be able to help your clients find better solutions to their problems. If you do,
chances are they will buy from you. In this case, you are no longer a salesperson but a problem
solver, a consultant, a real asset for the client. You are not only offering a product or a service but
you are helping the client understand how to apply your product or service to meet a pressing
need and to relieve the pain that may not have been fully understood before you came along to
help.
The P.A.I.N. Technique
•
Pinpoint the PAIN
•
Amplify the PAIN
•
Invite them to sit in the PAIN
•
Nudge them toward a solution
Let’s look at this step-by-step process.
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P: Pinpoint the PAIN
After you’ve found a customer’s pain point, ask follow-up questions and make sure you
understand specifically what’s causing the pain; don’t let them be vague. If your prospect tells you
that they’re not getting the level of service they’re looking for from their current provider, ask them
for more details. “Does your system go offline a lot? Is it slow? Both?”
Once you’ve drilled down and pinpointed the specific pain/need, don’t jump to offering an
immediate solution. The prospect needs to truly see the level of pain they’d be in by staying in
their current situation. Which brings us to step two.
A: Amplify the PAIN
Rather than quickly moving on once the pain point is identified, work to amplify it by asking
“why” and “how” questions, like “How much production time are you losing when your system is
down?” or “How is that affecting your reputation?”. Get your prospect to describe the pain vividly
and in detail. If possible, make them quantify it using time or dollars.
If they’ve been living with this problem for a while, they’ve probably become somewhat
numb to it. Amplifying it is the best way to shake them out of that fog and help them see a more
accurate picture of their current situation.
I: Invite them to sit in it!
This is the secret in the sauce. Invite them to sit in their pain by asking additional questions
and by utilizing silence to give them space to really stew in it. A well-placed “Wow!” from you can
serve to remind them that this pain is not a normal part of business.
“Wow! So you don’t really know how many customers this has cost you?” Some awkward
silence can drive that point home.
Just let them simmer in that reality for a moment before giving them a gentle push.
N: Nudge them towards the solution
It’s easy at this point to pretend that you’re the prince riding in on the white horse. But
you’re still in the needs analysis and this is not the time to solve their problem. For now, just drop
some hints about the correct solution – a solution that you have, of course. If your solution has
superior uptime, you’d say, “It sounds like your team members and your customers would be a
lot happier if you had a system you could rely on.”
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You’re only nudging, not closing. You are just hinting that you can solve their problem.
This gets them curious or even excited to hear what you have to offer. Then continue your normal
needs analysis to make sure you’ve found all of their pain points, using the P.A.I.N. technique
after each one.
After you’ve found all their pain points, the next steps would typically be setting an
appointment to present a proposal. (Dew Tinnin, 2021)
Sales Probing Questions and Attitudes
1. Listen Actively and Deeply
Good questioning does not mean firing off a rapid series of questions to pry as much
information out of the prospect as possible. Teach your reps to ask and then to listen without
talking until the prospect has a chance to fully answer the question.
This allows the prospect to reveal information about their challenges in their own words. It also
sets up the relationship on the right foot as the prospect feels heard.
2. Know When to Ask Which Questions
Prospects will be more willing to answer probing questions for sales when the questions
are timed well within the conversation.
Rapport-Building Questions
The most effective salespeople know how to read a buyer’s personality style within the
first minute or two of meeting them. This information allows them to know what type of
communication the buyer prefers, and whether they should open the conversation with rapportbuilding questions, or get straight to the intent of the meeting.
•
How would you describe the problem you’re trying to solve?
•
What about this situation keeps you up at night?
•
What challenges have you encountered in the past while trying to solve this problem?
•
How much is this problem costing you personally?
•
How much is it costing the company?
•
Is there anything else about the situation that worries or frustrates you?
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•
If there is a current supplier, what are your reasons for considering an alternative?
Solution Questions
Solution questions aim to guide the customer in designing an appropriate solution to their
problem, and to understand how your offerings fit into that solution. These questions are best
saved until after the problem has been clearly established.
Examples include:
•
What would an ideal solution look like for you?
•
What does a realistic solution look like to you?
•
What are the must-have criteria for a solution to work for you?
•
What is your timeline for developing a solution?
•
What are the qualities you need in a solution provider?
•
Would any of these additional products/services/criteria be helpful in your solution?
Buying Process Questions
Buying process questions help the sales rep understand the steps they must take in order
to secure the sale. These questions work best after the problem and desired solution are
established.
Examples include:
•
Who, besides yourself of course, will be involved in the buying decision?
•
Can you let me know about your decision-making process?
•
What is your timeline for making a decision?
•
What additional information will you need in order to make your decision?
•
Have you had problems in the past when making similar purchases?
•
What has worked/not worked for you in the past?
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Budget Questions
Budget questions aim to understand the budget, and also to discover potential additional
sources of funding. These sales probing questions may be asked while uncovering the desired
solution or during the buying process discussion, and always before presenting a solution.
Examples include:
•
Do you have a budget in mind for this?
•
Where will the funds come from to pay for the solution?
•
What will happen if the available budget isn’t enough to fully implement the desired solution?
•
Are there other sources of funding that could be explored if necessary?
Deep Probing Sales Questions
Great questioning helps your reps uncover critical information even from reluctant
prospects. Once rapport is established, deep probing questions can be asked at any point in the
process.
Examples include:
•
Can you tell me more about that?
•
Why does that matter to your/your business?
•
Can you be more specific about that?
•
How did that impact you?
•
How did you feel about that?
3. Have the Right Attitude
Remind your salespeople to approach a virtual sales meeting as a conversation aimed at
establishing trust and uncovering buyer wants and needs. In general, open-ended questions work
better than close-ended questions, as they urge the customer to reveal helpful information and to
take ownership of the proposed solution. In all cases, having a positive and helpful attitude will
result in a more productive outcome.
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Course Materials
https://www.triptych.com/blog/what-is-sales-support
https://www.monster.co.uk/advertise-a-job/hr-resources/hr-strategies/job-descriptions/salessupport-job-description/
https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/whats-the-difference-between-marketing-andsales/#:~:text=The%20difference%20between%20sales%20and%20marketing%20is%20that%
20sales%20focus,that%20interest%20and%20nurture%20it.
http://www.draketraining.com.au/Courses/Professional-Development/Sales-and-CustomerService/Sales-Training-PDT0023
https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/what-is-the-7-step-sales-process
https://www.mtdsalestraining.com/sales-courses/what-are-the-different-types-of-selling.html
https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/4-effective-sales-approaches
https://www.troyharrison.com/the-navigator-news-blog/the-evolution-of-selling/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/sales-terms-glossary
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/sales-terms-glossary
https://btmgmt.net/7-critical-factors-for-sustained-sales-success/
https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2019/april/key-sales-skills
https://www.skillsyouneed.com/rhubarb/sales-career-skills.html
https://www.omniagroup.com/the-7-soft-skills-you-need-to-be-successful/
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/cold-call-script
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-warm-calling-2917380
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/05/06/referral-marketing
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/the-5-most-common-objections-during-prospecting-and-how-toovercome-them
https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/sales-presentation
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SALES SUPPORT (BTLE 30483): 2ND SEMESTER A.Y 2020-2021
https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/salesproposal#:~:text=A%20sales%20proposal%20is%20a,target%20market%20with%20their%20of
ferings.
https://www.managementstudyguide.com/sales-management-strategies.htm
https://marrinadecisions.com/4-types-of-data-management-systems-for-data-first-marketingstrategies-success/
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/8-ways-effectively-manage-customer-data/
https://www.salescoachdew.com/better-needs-analysis-pain-technique/
https://revenuegrid.com/blog/types-of-selling/
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