All companies want to be in the sales generation business – but on National Salesperson Day, it’s an opportune time to ask yourself: are you actually and unwittingly in the sales prevention business?
Forget the competition for a moment. Misguided processes, onerous policies and lack of coordination can make organizations their own worst enemy when it comes to enabling sales. So can the wrong focus (such as fostering a product-centric, inside-out view) or lack of support (e.g., providing little or poor coaching, uninspired content or ineffective training).
National Salesperson Day (today, March 4) is a great time for all of us to reflect internally on how we can better support – not impede – sales, and create a more effective selling environment within our organizations.
Eliminate Sales Prevention Pitfalls
What does sales prevention look like? It takes a lot of forms but generally, it’s anything you do that gets in the way of frontline reps and managers selling effectively, or makes it challenging for potential clients to buy from you. Here are some do’s and don’ts:
- It makes sense to have a process for sales reps to seek assistance from your sales engineers, your executive team or other key sales support resources. It doesn’t make sense for an approval process to happen via email and require three levels of sign-off from people who don’t check email frequently.
- It makes sense to collect certain information from potential buyers on your website or during webinar registrations before sharing very valuable content or research. Depending on your business, it doesn’t usually make sense to lock down every piece of your content behind logins or contact forms.
- It makes sense to contact interested potential buyers who downloaded your content and to do it relatively quickly. It doesn’t make sense (and isn’t “sales acceleration”) to contact them before the asset is done downloading, or before you have done any research on the contact or their company (especially quick and easy research such as reviewing their LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn company page and website).
- It makes sense to tap into the knowledge and experience of your frontline sales managers for various company projects. It doesn’t make sense to rely on them so heavily that it impacts their ability to conduct team and individual pipeline reviews, conduct forecast meetings, observe and coach their reps, or generally manage and lead their sales teams.
- It makes sense to require approval of rep-created or customized sales collateral/content/materials, especially in regulated industries. It doesn’t make sense to have a tiered, four-person review process that takes one-to-two weeks.
Just in case you’re wondering, I’ve seen each and every one of these examples.
Want to know if you’re in the sales prevention business? It’s easy to find out. Ask your reps and managers. Then listen. We work in a complex business environment with rules, regulations, laws and policies. You won’t be able to address, remove or minimize every annoyance. You will – and should – be able to make it as easy as possible for your reps and managers to sell, and for your buyers to buy.
Other things you can do to stay out of the sales prevention business include:
1. Foster the right focus – Do everything you can to support buyer-centric conversations and develop a culture where people believe that selling is problem-solving and providing value. There are still far too many product-centric companies and sales reps with an inside-out view of the world. The focus should be on your buyers and their problems, opportunities and desired outcomes, and how you can support them in solving problems and achieving goals.
The inability of sales reps to create and articulate value for buyers – and to do so well enough to overcome inertia and compel action – is still an issue in many sales forces. Along with a buyer-centric approach, a strong focus on value creation can radically improve sales.
2. Provide the right support – Here are a few ideas that can make a big impact:
- Develop a coaching culture where you train and support managers to master sales coaching, and remove the barriers that prevent managers from coaching your reps more often. Results will follow.
- Enable your sales force with the right sales/marketing content that satisfies the buying process exit criteria in each stage of the buyer’s journey for your primary buyer personas.
- Enable your sales force with the right training content, and implement training using effective learning systems to ensure adoption and get the post-training results you want. During training, teach reps to engage in business dialogue with buyers, using the content they‘ve shared to deliver value.
3. Provide the right environment – There’s been a lot written on this topic, and I’m not a fan of “motivating” reps, per se. I think you should hire motivated people. But if you do, and then ask them to check their brains at the door or create a sales prevention mentality, you won’t keep them engaged for long.
So in honor of National Salesperson Day, take a moment to show appreciation for your sales reps – for example, celebrating and sharing their wins and successes today and throughout the year. And if you do the things in this post – along with creating a fair/equitable, positive, supportive, goal-driven and accomplishment-oriented culture – it will go a long way toward getting out of the sales prevention business and creating the right environment for sales success!
Mike Kunkle is senior director of sales enablement at Brainshark, Inc., which provides sales enablement solutions for faster training, better coaching and more successful sales conversations.
