The era of cold sales is sunsetting, having enriched customers with marketplaces, review services, social networks, and delivery services. The buyer is no longer willing to spend time discussing the product with the sales manager. On the other hand, in the face of the vast amount of information, the buyer is increasingly unable to find the one that will allow him to make a purchasing decision. CMO of Selvery Dennis Golubtsov named 3 main mistakes when developing the skills of a sales manager and told how to reduce the number of customer rejections.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn, said the great futurologist and philosopher Alvin Toffler thirty years ago. Perhaps this is the answer to the question posed in the title. However, even the answer of such a sage requires several clarifications. I will elaborate on them.
Forced for accountability
So, to remain competent in your profession, it is necessary to develop your knowledge and skills all the time. Only in this way can a sales manager sell a lot and with a minimum number of rejections from customers. It would seem that what could be easier: open a search engine, enter “courses for sales managers” into the search box, and then choose the most attractive course by price or location. Here lies the first pitfall, the first mistake.
So many people take every opportunity to turn their workday into a day off. Without the initiative and desire to really learn something from the sales manager himself, courses and trainings often become just as much an opportunity to take a break from the routine of everyday life. Therefore, it is important for the sales manager to be able to control the implementation of the knowledge gained into regular work. For example, after completing training on telephone sales techniques, it is worth carefully assessing how the negotiation process or the average time of a conversation with a client changes. The manager himself should know what his specialists have been taught. Only in this way can control become effective.
In one of the companies where I used to be on a working visit, after each on-site training session, the employees were required to take a special test, to score a certain point. And when the points were accumulated, it was as if the managers immediately forgot the training materials and continued to work the old-fashioned way. That is, the process was organized only “for accountability,” and the specialist went to “training” as if forced. But it is not the grades that are important, but the ability to apply the acquired knowledge in practice.
Checking skills is quite a difficult task. So difficult that if the head of the sales department is not ready to take it on, managers should not be sent to training at all. The problem lies in habits, and they are not known to change immediately.
Popular literature often repeats the idea that it takes 1,000 to 2,000 repetitions to form a new habit. But if a manager has once fulfilled his sales plan, he will repeat what he has already done. The old habits will remain, and the new materials learned from the training will remain unused. If the sales manager can not sit down with his employee, does not analyze audio recordings of his conversations, does not highlight the main parameters in the CRM system to evaluate the use of new knowledge by employees, then everything was in vain. These new knowledge will not be used in work. Only one out of ten employees who have been trained will try to use the new techniques without external control. And even this lucky man will face the next pitfall.
Out of the frying pan into the pit
Imagine this: the best manager in the department attended advanced training from the best sales specialist in the country. Moreover, the manager is eager to use the advice and recommendations he received. The sales manager knows what to control and how to control it. He literally goes behind the manager’s back… And the productivity of the best sales specialist suddenly drops dramatically.
It always takes time to learn a new toolkit. Nothing ever changes for the better the very next day. It’s important to remember that when a salesperson starts trying new things, it doesn’t happen right away. It takes time to practice this new skill and turn it into a more effective one. You could call it the innovation pit.
Changing habitual behavior is one of the most difficult tasks. And learning should be aimed at doing just that. Thus, if a sales manager is sure that training and learning are synonymous, he obviously does not fully understand their essence.
Any learning should be divided into two stages: acquiring new knowledge and practicing the skills to apply it in practice. At the stage of acquiring knowledge the specialist learns something new, allows himself to make mistakes, sees what they can lead to. The learning process itself encourages mistakes. Therefore, if managers are constantly learning, they will constantly make mistakes. This is a normal process, and you have to accept it if you want to increase conversion rates in sales.
To create and consolidate useful skills and hone them to automatism, you need regular practice. But in this mode, when tasks become more complicated, mistakes are no longer acceptable. The cost of a mistake grows, so you shouldn’t go into training mode while you’re working with key and important clients. If you are snowboarding, it is unlikely that you will learn something new on professional slopes. New tricks and techniques need to be learned on a training track. But if you’re always training only on a practice track, you’ll never get to the steep slopes. It’s the same in a sales manager’s job.
Rifle or machine gun
If the first two mistakes — lack of control and expecting instant results — can be called common in the work of any salesman, then the third error concerns the refusal to buy as a result of the combined actions of the buyer and seller.
In my work I have encountered many variations in the organization of sales departments. In one company, managers were grasping at any application like a straw. They bombarded the buyer candidate with any known facts and figures, staking not on the quality of the conversation, but on the number of processed applications and the amount of information dumped on the potential buyer. Representatives of another company created a universal script for working with the request. As soon as their CRM system received a new phone number any of the managers, newbie or old-timer of the department ran the potential customer the same way, reading into the phone the same words. A third company, on the other hand, prided itself on its individual approach to each customer. However, when I became more closely acquainted with the internal processes of the sales department, I heard the magic word “crap”. This is how the local managers called any request they did not want to work with. A difficult project? Сrap. Too cheap a project? Сrap. Foreigner? But I don’t speak Spanish! Then it’s crap, too. It doesn’t matter if my office mate speaks Spanish.
The same mistake in different companies: the target audience here is not divided into target segments. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the technique that marketers use for lead generation. I’m talking about the argeting. We used to think that marketers could target communications, that is, direct them to a very precisely aligned segment of the target audience, only within the framework of Internet marketing. Today the situation has changed, and the sales manager’s toolkit should be supplemented with targeted sales systems that work in offline sales.
Let’s remember, targeting sales in marketing is usually called the principle of selling a product to specific microgroups of people, rather than “a portrait of the average customer”.The difficult customer, the easy customer, the Hispanic customer — all of these are micro-segments of the target audience that require a specific approach.
The Targeted Sales Accelerator is a service for automating offline sales. If mass calls using a “universal” script can be compared to a machine gun firing at random, a targeted sales acceleration system is a sniper rifle that hits a clearly visible and well-studied target at the right time. This term is still new to many markets, and acceleration units like Selvery are capable of working with “field sales” in stores, showrooms, trade shows, or CEO offices.
The essence of such an accelerator is ingeniously simple. First, the marketer divides all of the company’s customers into segments and microsegments. There can be as many as the company needs. The way this works is simple. In the first step, we distinguish the role of the buyer. For example, in B2B sales, the roles could be the person who prepares the decision, the person who has an expert influence on the decision, or the person who makes the decision. These could be specific positions in the company: analyst, advisor, CEO. We can then tweak the segment more finely by asking a few additional questions. The unique combination of answer choices for each role will be the micro-segment. Once the segments are defined, the system introduces selling content: presentation materials from a logo to a video from the company’s iconic awards ceremony. Images, phrases, cues, keywords… The service is loaded with everything needed to sell to the customer, but only to the extent necessary and sufficient to make a decision.
It is important that with this approach, each micro-segment of the target audience receives its own special version of product packaging thanks to the service. The same product is presented to buyers from each micro-segment in a terminology that they understand, with phrases, anchors, facts and cues that they themselves understand. After all, the seller must communicate with the buyer in his language. Moreover, the seller must say things that will not bore the buyer and will be accepted.
The buyer sees and hears what he is close to and understands, and makes a decision to buy the product. Targeted sales accelerator leads to the completion of the transaction. The seller and marketer use the accelerator as a working tool.
A manager’s field work, even without training and seminars, was often closed off from sales executives. No one shared their experience, no one created a system out of scattered pieces of successful sales. However, from such pieces it is possible to create separate pictures, such that both the veteran and the beginner, who only chooses a certain segment with which he will work now, will be happy to work. The question of creating such a “picture” is only a matter of combining practices.
The Targeted Sales Accelerator is able to aggregate all of your sales into one source. It collects all the data on every customer micro-segment, creating a base for analysis, testing new hypotheses, identifying and scaling successful cases, even better sales without rejections, force majeure and annoyance from the customer.
With each new season, familiar products become harder to sell. The consumer compares and doubts more and more, and trusts the bright advertising banners, slogans and videos less and less. A person, on the other hand, is beginning to trust more. This is where targeted sales, that is, sales aimed at a specific person, a narrow group of people or, in other words, a micro-segment. And the more complex the product, the more important it is to know the client in person. To know, in order to be able to close deals without refusals.
So let’s get back to the main question: How to reduce the number of refusals? Systematically train your staff in advanced sales techniques and objection handling. Develop competencies. Don’t forget about control. Use advanced sales automation tools. Segment your audience to talk to the customer in his language, offering him only what he needs. And don’t count on an instant effect, because any innovation needs to take root.
