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.

For Most Startups, Revenue Isn’t Optional

Your logo is badass, your product or service sounds really innovative and those business cards seem to be made out of some kind of cheetah fur.

I’m interested in hearing about how you plan to scale your user base and grow your adoption rates. I’m also interested in hearing about what conferences you are going to attend, the panels you plan to participate in and how you will attract that rock star CTO.

But I’m more interested in how you’re going to make money, how much you’re going to generate and when you’ll be at breakeven.

At some point in the not so distant past, there was a slide in a pitch deck that showed a potential revenue number against some trillion-dollar market opportunity that may or may not actually exist. Investors got excited about that logo, those sick business cards and that recruiting plan for the Michael Jordan of CTOs and stroked some funding checks.

Seven months later, you’re planning your four-month-long schedule for raising a second round because your expenses have outpaced your revenue faster than expected.

You had to re-design your UX, improve your security back-end and launch an expansive social media campaign. You gained thousands of users, received a few accolades for your startup and generated some revenue. You didn’t hire that sales guy you knew you needed or re-price the product to improve margins and instead spent that time, money and energy on making a better product and gaining users. Unfortunately, that sagging revenue is shortening your runway.

In a startup, you’re constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing work. The tension between product development, creating scale and maintaining positive numbers on your balance sheet can be a daily struggle. There are always more things to do than you have the resources to complete.

Generating revenue should be your top priority.

Like it or not, generating sales revenue is the path for success for most startups. Venture capital passes on all but a few of the deals they are pitched and less than half the tech startups will even attempt to pitch VCs. There may be no investor cash available.

We see the Techcrunch headlines and Medium articles about the startups that sold for $50 million even though they never actually created an operational profit for themselves or their investors. Behind that small selection of successes lie the other 90% of startups that folded. Running out of money is usually cited in most of these collapses as a primary cause.

Think about the optionality sales revenue provides.

  • The option of pivoting your offering.
  • The option of going after your competitors more aggressively.
  • The option of taking a risk on a new set of features or an additional product line.
  • The option of reinvesting the profits back into the growth of the company.
  • The option of upgrading your human capital.
  • The option of taking on additional investors or bootstrapping your growth.

Sales revenue also provides a wider margin for failure. Your financial projections, budgets and planning are mostly works of fiction so when something doesn’t go the way you need, that extra cash will certainly help you smooth out that rough spot.

Lastly, generating positive cash flow is a signal to future investors, employees, vendors, and other stakeholders that the product is viable and worth their participation.

Sales isn’t as fun or sexy to talk about as UX or branding. You usually can’t do it at 2am or between rounds at the shuffleboard table. But if the rest of you want to eat, you need a solid sales program staffed with competent, motivated people. If you’re not sure where to start, give me a call.

Sales is Not a Dirty Word

Over the last 10 years “Sales” has been renamed “Marketing” or “Business Development.” I recently heard about an organization calling their salespeople “Revenue Engineers.”

Baloney…

It is true that “sales” as a function has changed and some organizations have not recognized that yet. They are still sending their salespeople on what I call “Pitch and Prays” where the sales process is still just a numbers game and anything that moves gets pitched. Or even worse, they are asking their sales folks to makes hundreds of contacts through email or phone calls which is the equivalent of driving at night without lights. That leaves sales pros and customers describing those experiences in dirty words that would make George Carlin blush.

While we spend significant mental energy renaming sales functions, we aren’t supporting or developing sales leadership like we should. According the Harvard Business Review:

“To put a finer point on it, of the 479 U.S. business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, only 101 have a sales curriculum, and a mere 15 offer either an MBA in sales or some sort of sales-oriented graduate curriculum. Sales may be vital to businesses, but of the 350,000 students a year who earn bachelor’s degrees in business from American universities, and the 170,000 who earn MBAs, only a tiny fraction have been taught anything about it.”

But, there are organizations that are starting to realign the value of salespeople with their customers. This is demonstrated when sales people focus on facilitating the purchase for a customer. Every organization has a different process for purchasing products or services and many of those processes can be difficult or time intensive. Successful salespeople are realizing this and creating value by navigating those processes with or even for potential customers by preparing documentation, gathering required information or even writing RFPs for prospective clients.

If you want to see this practice in action, visit an Ethan Allen retail location. Those folks are tremendous at facilitating customers’ purchases.

Most customers already have the relevant information about your product, your competitors’ products, pricing differences and has probably called a colleague or two before you get to actually engage them. You need to add real value to your sales process by thinking about how you can facilitate purchases more than selling something.

The difference in winning new business can be as much about “how” the sales process works and the customer’s experience buying from your salespeople. This is especially true in highly competitive markets or in commoditized products.

When an organization does not recognize and act on this shift in a sales function’s value to their customers, there may be a very dirty word used to describe their performance- failing.

Teaching SalesHarvard Business Review

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