Hustle U is Now In Session

The only thing better than failing fast is not failing at all. There’s definitely a non-negotiable learning curve to becoming an entrepreneur, but the right tools can make that curve flatter and cheaper. That’s why we’re building Hustle U—essential classes for startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs.

Three classes are available now: Creating Your Performance Evaluation Process ($19), Building an Effective Sales Team (free) and Strategic Planning for Entrepreneurs ($49). We’ll be adding more classes soon. Let us know what you’d most like to learn by leaving a comment or talking to us on social. Or just call us at 205-530-3722.

Event: How to Build an Effective Sales Team

As part of Hallux Training, Redhawk will be hosting a free event that explores how selling has changed and what companies need to do to build competitive sales teams. Part presentation and part discussion, this event will provide an excellent opportunity to engage with sales experts who have built multi-million dollar teams and sold into some of the largest companies in the world.

During this event, we will discuss the following topics:

  • What happens when your sales efforts go wrong…
  • Relationship selling is overrated.
  • How to build and scale a successful sales team on a budget.
  • How to hire salespeople.
  • Discounting is not a sales strategy.
  • Companies that rely on tricks and shortcuts will, ultimately, fail to reach their goals.

This event is perfect for people looking to build a sales team for the first time as well as those who are looking at ways to improve their sales effectiveness. This will be an engaging and fun event open to anyone interested in learning how to boost revenue and build competitive sales teams.

Cost: FREE
Location: Redhawk Entrepreneur Development Company, 3027 6th Avenue South 35233

Click to RSVP on Facebook or Meetup. To receive notice of future events, like us on Facebook, join our Meetup group, or request more info on Hallux Training.

How to Survive the Zombie Client Apocalypse

If you’ve spent any time in sales, you have had a Zombie Prospect. You spent time preparing a great sales presentation. You navigated the organizational hierarchy, made the requisite small talk, and assuaged the fears of a skeptical purchasing department to deliver your proposal. You handed it over with a smile and your prospect said they would have an answer for you “in a few days.”

That was six months ago.

You’re not even sure if your contact still works there because she stopped returning your phone calls four months ago. But still it sits in your pipeline, and you ritualistically review its painful existence in weekly sales meetings.

You don’t get it. Your product seemed to be a good fit. The specs were right. The price was discounted below market rates. Your child even goes to the same elementary school as your buyer’s kid. This is the third time this has happened in the last two quarters.

Why do these prospects go full-on Walking Dead?

Most likely, they were never qualified in the first place. There are three things that need to exist in every opportunity to justify going through the pain and anguish of a modern sales process.

  1. Ability to Buy — I know this seems obvious but there are several reasons why a buyer may not have the ability to buy.
    • There may be no budget for the purchase or that allocation hasn’t been approved prior to your sales engagement of the buyer. In many cases, you called them—so they could be taking a meeting with you without the financial means to purchase anything.
    • They may be contractually obligated to a competing solution and breaking that agreement would be costly.
    • Buyers can window-shop for products and vendors just to see what’s out there. When you offer them a proposal, they would be silly not to take it.
  1. State of Flux — Something in their market, industry, or organization is changing and it’s forcing them to reconsider their ability to cope with that change. Starbucks started as a place to buy espresso machines and coffee equipment. Imagine if you were the commercial paper manufacturer that pitched Howard Schultz on your coffee cup line right after he returned from Italy and decided to open European style coffee houses all over the world.
  1. Urgency — There’s a penalty to the buyer if they don’t act. These penalties can range from financial penalties, increased risk, or loss of some competitive advantage.

Without these, you end up with prospects that never make a decision, or keep asking for additional information or changes to the original proposal. You get delegated to an assistant. There is some new “boss” that is reviewing it. The final approval is just a “week away.”

After about 30 days of being increasingly placated, you can’t even get your prospects to answer the phone or return an email.

You officially have a Zombie.

Salespeople are notorious for chasing bad deals. Once we admit that an opportunity is terrorizing a small village and eating brains for breakfast, we have to take it out of our pipeline, justify why the sale went south to our management, and accept that all of that effort was wasted.

The best treatment is prevention. This requires both the salespeople and their management to allow them to justify walking away from opportunities that aren’t qualified. Trust me—this takes a level of discipline and trust in your salespeople many managers aren’t capable of deploying.

Adding this kind of qualification demands some longer-range perspective. The amount of time spent wasted on deals that were never going to close is time that could have been spent building more reliable pipelines and closing credible opportunities.

If you’re a manager, let your salespeople walk away from unqualified leads. If you’re the salesperson, your sales skills are best spent on opportunities that aren’t half-dead already.

Survive the zombie apocalypse with Engagement Selling System. Learn more or enroll.

Stop Inflicting your Salespeople on your Customers

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and your account manager just pulled up to their third sales appointment of the day. They whip out their iPhone and feverishly search Google for any information about the company they’re about to see. They find something about the last company picnic and skim the first three sentences of a blog from their former president before they run out of time.

Armed with this information, they walk into the appointment and proceed to conduct the exact same presentation they conducted in the previous 50 appointments. They ask rhetorical questions like “If I showed you how to make a million more dollars, would you be interested?” and “What keeps you up at night?” They regale the buyer with stories about other “customers just like them” they have “partnered with” and for whom they “delivered incredible solutions.” At some point, there’s a glossy piece of marketing material pushed across the buyer’s desk. Next, they awkwardly work in some inane comment about the picnic picture of the three-legged race in an unwelcomed attempt to build a “relationship.” Just to complete the tragedy this appointment represents, they proceed to offer a discount on the “standard price” before the buyer even requests it.

Our salespeople, who should represent themselves as professionals, have the most product knowledge, and display the highest levels of communication abilities are running around like a bunch of dilettantes.

They walk into meetings unprepared and proceed to deploy some atrocious combination of 80s era rhetorical sales questions and “hacks” designed to trick buyers into behaving a certain way. They use an identical approach and ask the same questions regardless of who the person sitting across the table may be. Regardless of the answers they get from those formulaic questions, the offered solution is always—like magic—the same.

Over the course of that 20-minute sales meeting, you inflicted your salesperson on that poor buyer.

You should be cringing right now—not because this scenario is disturbing—but because this is probably being done in your name as you read this.

Just in case you think I’m being dramatic, consider the following questions:

When was the last time you went on an actual sales meeting with one of your salespeople? What sales training have you provided? What resources have you given them since you onboarded them, authorized their email account, threw some leads across the company’s automated CRM, and wished them happy hunting?

Meanwhile, you demand increasingly difficult sales goals in tightening markets without providing support that will help them continue any measure of success. Salespeople tend to be fairly creative. They’ll find a solution in the absence of you providing one for them. Unfortunately, you may not like the solution they employ.

This is not their fault—it’s yours.

We regularly require our accountants to be CPAs, insist our programmers are certified, and expect our HR team members to hold SHRM memberships. Why don’t we support that same level of professional rigor for our salespeople?

In today’s shrinking world, competitors spring up daily, prices are being squeezed hard enough to be considered commoditized, and products are outmoded quickly. What you sell and how it is differentiated has become increasingly marginalized.

For every buyer, there could be four or five sellers.

Professional sales training is something you owe your salespeople, company, and brand. Most importantly, you owe it to your customers.

Effective sales training doesn’t necessarily cost that much when compared to what’s at stake. If the average salesperson were to improve their conversion percentage by 10% on a $500k annual sales goal, that translates into $25k in additional sales. Using our sales training program, Engagement Selling System as an example, we charge $950 per seat for our class. Most of the salespeople attending our training are responsible for generating more than that in sales revenue every day.

How you sell is as important as what you sell. If you have untrained and unprepared salespeople, the competitor who has invested in their own sales training is going to eat your lunch. According to Daniel Goleman in Working with Emotional Intelligence, the top 10% of salespeople produce double the revenue as an average salesperson with similar products or services.

It matters to your buyers that the salesperson you send them is professional and capable. If the peak of their powers is represented in the panicked efficiency they demonstrate when using a smartphone to dig up useless information about their buyer in the parking lot minutes before the scheduled appointment, you need to reinvest in your sales team’s training.

Learn about Engagement Selling System or enroll.

Why We Created Our New Sales Training Program

I’ve seen it time after time—small business owners who aren’t happy with their sales team or their results. They call me with a single goal in mind—help me hire better salespeople.

That’s rarely the solution. If you aren’t training your current team, you haven’t set them up for success. Adding more untrained bodies will only subtract from your bottom line, demotivate your existing salespeople, and increase competition for the same meager sales. Firing and replacing your underperforming salespeople doesn’t address the problems in your program, like poor sales management, a lack of performance measurement, poorly designed incentive structures, and misalignment between sales and marketing.

I’ve been looking for sales training to recommend to these clients, but the few programs we’ve found are woefully out of date for the current marketplace, and none address entrepreneurial businesses.

That’s why we’ve launched our new sales training program. It’s called the Engagement Selling System, and it directly addresses the chronic struggle entrepreneurs face building and growing successful sales teams. Entrepreneurs’ business development is different in almost every way from large corporations, but no one has designed an approach specifically with them in mind.

For entrepreneurs, cash flow is a continuous stressor as revenue peaks and valleys are part of the business landscape—29% of businesses fail due to a lack of positive cash flow. All businesses need revenue to survive, and they need to increase that revenue every year to grow without taking on debt or selling equity.

According to trainingmag.com, training is largely deprioritized by SMBs. The average amount spent on training per individual in small- to medium-sized companies has been as low as $554—or less than .02% of their annual operating budget.

When companies spend $5,000 or more for things like a great website, but spend virtually nothing on improving the capabilities of the people responsible for generating their revenue lifeblood, the writing’s on the wall.

We designed ESS to improve conversion rates and create sales professionals who are prepared to outperform their competitors. It’s not enough to have a great sales system, it has to be easy to use and applicable across the wide variety of circumstances salespeople face. The goal of our sales training program is to move the needle by giving your team an approach they can apply immediately and affordably.

Learn more and register.

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