Individual Attention Adds Up to Group Success

As you tackle the process of introducing sustainable improvements across your organization, this series of articles is designed to provide a framework that you may wish to explore when looking to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales, service and support teams.

We started by reviewing the benefits of first determining the goals that you have for your learning initiative. This week we'll look at the other side of the coin and highlight one major factor that plays heavily on the ultimate success of any initiative – human nature.

Human nature has been described as 'a complex set of impulses that affect all aspects of our daily lives'. Our individual perspectives on what we deem important, our reaction to being told what to do, our survival instincts and our tolerance in the face of change are but a few elements that filter our daily interactions.

Human nature, being what it is, guarantees that everyone will be motivated by different things, interpret each event in different ways, is receptive to new concepts and information to various degrees and react differently to how they are approached. That all adds up to an environment that requires some thought when attempting to move as many people as possible to an elevated and sustainable skill level.

Not only is human nature at play but the characteristics of 'adult learner' suggests that the success of training in a group environment is best achieved when the individual can personalize the learnings and see direct benefit in their everyday routine. The adult learner requires learning to make sense – they will not perform a learning activity just because the instructor said to do it. And with their wide experience, they bring a lot to any learning situation.

We believe that an initiative is most successful when you have the capability to observe, record, analyze and support how an individual – or a group of individuals – is thinking. With the right data, you can tailor discussions that match the expectations of the group.

To best do that, there are a number of tools that can:

• gauge a participant's perspective and involve them the process
• assess the degree and quality to which an individual is engaged
• provide a way to interpret and choose a behaviour, belief or thinking style that we want to influence
• challenge things that don't support a desired outcome
• reinforce a successful pattern... over and over 

Once you have an array of data points, you then have a foundation to analyze, interpret and guide the progress of each participant and the group as a whole.

At the end of the day, the motivation to embrace new learning must come from within each person. A successful learning environment can be developed with the right combination of new skills, a measurement process that evaluates the quality of the effort being expelled and a coaching mechanism that reinforces desired behaviours.

We invite you to clearly identify the scope of what you need out of your investment in Sales Training and evaluate how the Algario PowerLearn™ Sales Development System can maximize the return you are looking for.

Can Sales Training Be More than Mastering the Sales Process?

It may simply start by one day looking around the organization and determining that the sales team would benefit from Sales Training. 

The impetus might be a desire to rejuvenate and refocus the Sales team, provide a common framework and terminology across a dynamic group of individuals or any number of initiatives that include the need to enhance sales skills to generate additional revenues.

But the scope of introducing a sales training program should extend past a refresher on 'what' the sales process is or 'how' to execute more effectively. It should also consider the types of behaviour that you wish the Sales team – and, in fact, the whole organization – to exhibit once the training is introduced.

Much has been written about developing a culture that introduces beliefs and approaches that encourage the whole team in the effort to generate revenues, profitability and growth. This 'Sales culture' is one that becomes integrated into the fabric of an organization. Getting there involves a common framework of how we think, how we behave and how we communicate.

At Algario, we extend our approach and our tools to not only build upon the skills required to understand how to make sales but we also deliver it in a manner that matches larger brand and corporate objectives.

Over the coming weeks, we will examine a number of areas and topics that our clients have either explored with us or are currently asking themselves.

1. Investing in Customer-facing Sales Teams: A review of a variety of topics designed to determine what type of skills you are looking to improve and the pros and cons of the different methodologies used to deliver them.
2. Building a Sales Culture: A series of discussion items around how to establish and sustain a sales culture, low risk concepts that build early successes and some tools that support the changes required within an organization.
3. Getting the Most out of Sales Training: Combatting the 'Half-life of Learning' is an inherent challenge for sustained change across an organization – but it is possible and different approaches generate different levels of success.
4. Sales – Your Lens to your Customers: Any opportunity to have a two-way communication with your sales force is an opportunity to refine your understanding of what customers are thinking and obtain insights that can lead to fundamental shifts in how you approach them. We'll look at ways to retrieve and use those insights as part of sales learning initiatives.
5. Sales Coaching: Coaching is the key to a sustainable Sales culture. We'll look at how to introduce coaching as a continuous event, differentiating coaching from performance management and providing the measurements required to be an effective coach, just to name a few.
6. Measuring the Impact of Sales Training: And perhaps the one area that has generated the most discussion over the years – determining the ROI of sales training. We'll build on four measures of Sales Training effectiveness – Behaviour Change, Commitment, Skills Development and Business Success – and outline how both tangible and intangible indicators play a role.

As you tackle the process of introducing sustainable improvements across your organization, this series of articles is designed to provide a framework that you may wish to explore further when looking to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales, service and support teams. 

We hope you find them valuable and the Algario team is always available to assist along the way.

To learn more about Algario's PowerLearn™ Sales Development System, visit www.algario.com and discover what distinguishes this program from all others. To explore opportunities, please contact David Batchelor at 416-865-9200 or at dbatchelor@algario.com.

Your Sales Force is Not Your Only Way to Build Sales

There is a much-used saying, "Nothing happens until someone sells something". However, the sales force is only part of the mix when addressing the sales growth needs of the organization. Other teams are involved in building the business – customer service, marketing, support teams, sales assistants are all important to creating a sales and service culture that helps differentiate your company and sales force from everyone else in the marketplace.

Just training the sales force to develop their sales skills only addresses part of the opportunity to improve sales performance. To address this opportunity, Algario has customized a new approach to sales training to bring together all teams involved in not only selling, but also servicing the client, developing and marketing products and services, or contributing to the frontline sales team.

Take Financial Services as an industry example: PowerLearn™ provides a foundation for sales, service and support for key functional roles such as:

• Financial Advisors
• Mutual Funds Sales
• Marketing
• Inside/Outside Wholesalers
• Lending Specialists
• Inbound/Outbound Call Centres
• Customer Service Reps
• Mobile Sales Forces
• Mortgage Specialists
• Sales/Service Managers at all levels, in all business areas

In the Algario PowerLearn™ model, functional groups are integrated into the training and development to culturalize and habitualize the sales and service methodology to ensure members are aligned and supporting each other.

The result: A significantly enhanced outcome for the sales group and resulting sales performance of the organization.

The Algario PowerLearn™ Sales Development System not only helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales, service and support teams... it can be delivered anytime, anywhere.

How Are you Building your Credibility?

From my last post, the best option for establishing credibility is for the salesperson (or any business person for that matter) to earn it. Prospective clients or colleagues form impressions early and often and sellers have only a small window of time in which to pique their curiosity and establish credibility. 

Fortunately, the best option for earning credibility might also be the easiest and most consistent, where you can use a simple questioning technique we call Diagnostic Questions to significantly increase your probability of success.

When a salesperson asks probing questions without first establishing their credibility, prospects tend to become standoffish, cautious and/or hesitant. None of this can be good, right?

Scope is the first of three attributes that characterize what we call “strategic questions” and refers to a question’s broadness or narrowness. For example, open-ended questions tend to be broader in scope, while closed-ended questions are narrower in scope.

You'll notice we will talk about broadening and narrowing the scope of your questions as opposed to using the terms open and closed-ended. That’s because those terms (open-ended and closed-ended) carry too much old-school baggage to have constructive value.

By narrowing the scope of your sales questions, you can accomplish four very strategic objectives for kicking off the needs development conversation:

1. Kick Off the Conversation in a Non-threatening Manner
2. Gather Valuable Information About the Customer
3. Establish Credibility by Asking Relevant Questions
4. Earn the Right to Expand the Conversation

I made the point that asking for too much too soon is problematic for a salesperson. Therefore, with a “walk before you run” mentality, what if we take a few baby steps on the way to accomplishing the larger objective.

Closed-ended questions tend to be narrow in scope. They probe for very specific pieces of information and they are intended to solicit specific short-answer responses. In fact, the only time we recommend exact words in our sales methodology training is for your very first needs development question.

Here is something to try the next few times you start to engage in a sales conversation. Try it and let me know the difference you experience.

At the appropriate time when you are kicking off the conversation, you simply say, “Can I ask you a couple specifics about ___________?” And fill in the blank with some topic of information that you want to explore.

  EXAMPLE     “Can I ask you a couple specifics about your (pick one of the following) – current sales training methodology/product development/planned move/current mortgage/credit card rewards/renovation plans/competitor situation?"

Put it this way, if a customer is going to give you any information at all, they will surely say “Yes” to this initial request.

Now, we ask that you follow with a series of Diagnostic Questions. The objective here is to gather 5-7 quick pieces of information that can be easily and quickly answered, each furthering to earn, not claim, your credibility. Notice in the dialogue below that the salesperson asks a series of short-answer diagnostic questions to kick off the needs development conversation. If you timed this exchange with a stopwatch, you will see that it takes less than 60 seconds – which has huge significance for a salesperson.

Salesperson: “How many file servers do you currently have installed?” 
Prospect: “We have twenty-two servers downtown and seven in the annex.” 
Salesperson: “Is your network topology Ethernet or Token Ring?” 
Prospect: “Ethernet.” 
Salesperson: “Are you using Microsoft NT or Novell?” 
Prospect: “Microsoft.” 
Salesperson: “Version 5.0 or 6.0?” 
Prospect: “We just upgraded to release 6.0.” 
Salesperson: “How many network segments do you currently support?” 
Prospect: “Two per server for a total of 58.” 
Salesperson: “And how many users?” 
Prospect: “We currently have 550 users... but we’re growing rapidly.” 

By demonstrating that you know how to ask intelligent and relevant diagnostic questions, you can communicate higher levels of competence, credibility and value.

If you want to learn more about developing Diagnostic Questions as a strategy for differentiating yourself from all the other salespeople you encounter, contact me anytime at 416-865-9200 or at dbatchelor@algario.com.

Can You Differentiate Yourself in a Highly Competitive Market?

Have you ever thought about how you can differentiate yourself in a highly competitive market?

I’ve watched thousands of sales people over the past 30 years working hard to “tell their story”. That is typically referred to as the Elevator Pitch. It really troubles me at times to see how hard they work on creating that ‘perfect’ 30-second pitch on how great they are, how great their products or services are, how great their company is and on and on.

Honestly, I have to confess that that was me several years ago. We would sit around the boardroom and work on the next greatest elevator pitch, arming our sales people and ourselves, with the “latest and best version”.

So what’s the problem with this?

When you step back and understand that every company is trying to claim that they are the best, have the best products, service, 24/7 support, are #1 and on and on, they all tend to sound the same. In other words, they are commoditizing their value proposition because they sound the same as every other company they compete against. 

These attempts to claim credibility often fall on deaf ears. That’s because in a competitive marketplace, everyone claims to be a leader and your competitors will all claim to be better than you! Rather than trying to “claim” credibility, an innovative approach is to “earn” Credibility. If we re-engineer your elevator pitch using a positioning strategy, this will give you a significant competitive advantage and exponentially increase the number of opportunities you'll have to provide valuable solutions. 

The traditional elevator pitch puts sellers in an extremely weak position. If you sound the same as everyone else, then you will forfeit your competitive position in the marketplace.

I’ll have more for you on our next blog about how you can earn Credibility which differentiates you from your competition and puts you in a much stronger competitive position.