04/26/12 by Mark Christie | Using Salesforce.com | No Comments »
Ever walk into an account to pitch an add-on product or discuss a renewal, only to be caught off guard by some outstanding service issue that you weren’t aware of? There are ways around being caught red-faced, like checking with the support department before every sales call to existing customers, but do you really have that kind of time? Let’s face it; it’s always that exception when you didn’t check, that blows up in your face.
The problem with this scenario is that the client may see you as the main contact. They expect you to know everything. When you don’t, it makes the company look bad. When clients see you as the company, it makes you look bad, damaging your relationship with the client and robbing you of your professionalism. This will not help you make sales, especially if the client starts talking to other clients about this disconnect. Fix it. It’s possible. Put Sales and Support on Salesforce.com.
On Client Service Cloud Nine
When your service call center is plugged into SalesForce.com, sales reps can see all service notes and customer service reps can see sales notes.
For Customer Service: Take Service to New Heights
Salesforce.com offers tons of great features to replace traditional call center software with their Service Cloud solution. Your Customer Service team can open and manage cases that come in by phone, email, social media conversations or via live agent web chat, giving your clients a wider range of preferred channels by which to contact the business.
Service Cloud can be integrated to the phone system. This integration will pull the Account up on screen by the incoming phone number and automatically open up a Case. Agents can make notes, use Chatter to consult with other people in the organization, and quickly solve cases.
Do you have a special support process for clients in a selling cycle? You can if you’re using Service Cloud. Now, customer service reps will see which callers are in a sales cycle, with what rep, for which products, with full sales history and can adjust service levels accordingly. Here’s a 15-minute overview video that reviews the benefits of Service Cloud. Service Cloud Overview Video.
For Sales Teams: A Polished, Professional and Knowledgeable Image
Salesforce.com Service Cloud gives you access to all service case information from the Account or Contact records. As customer service reps open and close cases, you’ll be able to see issues, resolutions, number of cases, topics with a few short clicks. You can add comments to any case using Chatter to ask the customer service rep questions, or inform them of details that may not be stored in Salesforce.com.
You’ll have full information before you walk into every single account and service will know when they’re dealing with a client engaged in a selling cycle. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your deal data being accidentally change. You can specify which fields service can edit, have view only access to, or not see at all. Customer Service, you can also lock your fields from edits by Sales.
Service Cloud lets customers access Customer Service a variety of ways – phone, email, social media conversations, via Google Search and Live Chat. This multi-channel support gives you an advantage over competitors offering only traditional customer support and helps to further differentiate your offering.
Service Cloud isn’t free – and is only integrated with Salesforce.com Professional or higher, but it does offer cost savings with its web deployment – no servers are required. It will improve communications between your Sales and Customer Service departments, which would result in better service all around for your clients.
Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of Salesforce.com Training at SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams improve their performance, in front of the computer…and in front of the customer.
04/24/12 by Mark Christie | Sales Techniques | No Comments »
Let’s face it. 100% of your time is not spent in sales presentations. The truth of the matter is that there are many different activities that go into making a sale. You have to prospect to keep your sales funnel full. In complex sales, you need to get to know the players and establish a relationship. You need to log your activities in Saleforce.com or other CRM systems. You need to return phone calls and check the 200 unread emails waiting for you in your inbox. You have weekly sales calls with your team or one-on-one calls with your manager. There’s travel time. There’s mandatory company training. Lunch. And more.
4 Tips for Better Time Management
All these activities can become overwhelming, if you don’t have a plan. Here are tips in 4 areas of Time Management for Salespeople to help your sales team manage their time more effectively.
Outlier sales calls
Sales calls can mess up your whole schedule quickly if they’re not managed. The biggest culprit is the outlier sales call. You know this call, it’s the one visit that is on the fringe of your territory. It’s a 3-4 hours to drive. And doesn’t seem like it’s always a small opportunity? Instead of seeing this call as a 6-8 hour travel investment to make a deal that had better be worth it, see it as an opportunity to visit others. Do you have other clients in the area? Why not stop in, but have a purpose to the visit. Bring a cheat sheet. Drop off info about a new offering. Meet the new owner. Discuss training options.
If you have no clients in the area, then turn it into a prospecting road trip. Check the route to see how many prospects are on the way. Contact them and map them out in advance of your trip. Salesforce.com offers various mapping tools to view your prospects and accounts visually on your Smartphone or iPhone. Even if you don’t secure a sales meeting, you can introduce yourself and set the stage for a future meeting. Now that sales call to one outlier account could multiple into opportunities with 4 of 5.
Scheduled prioritization
Most sales people can honestly say there are “dead days” or “dead times-of-day” when getting in front of a prospect is next to impossible. Use this time to get your other sales related tasks done and remember to assign time limits to these tasks. If your mornings are dead, use this time to cold call and set up appointments – from 6am to 11am. If no one gives you the time of day on Fridays, use it as your office day – check and submit your deals, go through emails, complete expense reports, return all those non-prospect phone calls. There will be exceptions, when you schedule a sales visit on an “office day”, but it’s far easier to manage exceptions than have everything working in disaccord, and taking far longer to complete than it should.
Use your resources
Top reps know they can’t do it all, especially for complex sales, and they lean heavily on their resources. If you have an account manager who takes care of the day-to-day tasks with your clients, then let them do it. If you have various product specialists, leverage their expertise in your sales calls. Bring them along, or join them in by webinar or by phone. Be sure to stay in the loop, so you don’t lose track of your prospect. Use your sales support team to answer any questions you have, instead of trying to find the answers yourself. Listen and take notes during team meetings or kickoff events. Presenters are usually informing you of tools that are out there that can help you in your job. Make note of which ones to use when, and where to find them – or at a minimum, of the person who can get you the tool.
Managers – survey your team
Sometimes a sales person needs outside time management help. Here are some benchmarks from a recent CSO Insights Sales Optimization Survey on time spent on various sales related activities. See how your team measures up. Create your own benchmarks. And don’t forget to share with the whole organization, not just sales as many other departments contribute to the sales process and sales productivity.
Sales Time Management today – where is time spent?
41% Selling by Phone or face-to-face
24% generating leads and researching accounts
19% meetings or administrative tasks
16% on other tasks – service calls, training, etc…
Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of Salesforce.com at SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams get the most from their CRM program…and their prospect/client interactions.
04/23/12 by Mark Christie | Sales Techniques, Sales Training | No Comments »
We’re one of many (thousands I’m sure) sales training firms in the U.S. and Canada. But I’ll bet we’re the only one that leads off our training workshops by telling sales people to stop selling. That’s right. Stop Selling stuff! Because our sales training workshops focus on consultative selling, and so want to demonstrate to our participants on how to become a consultant.
Consultative Selling – What Does it Mean?
So what does a consultant do? Well we know that companies typically bring in consultants when things aren’t working the way they should be. The consultant is hired, first to find the problems, then make recommendations to fix those business problems, and lastly (and ideally) be retained to come back and make improvements to business process.
And when the consultant arrives, do they make recommendations on how to fix these problems on the first day? Of course not. They take their time, and visit the various departments and start investigating. They ask a lot of questions, conduct interviews with people, both senior management, middle management and staff personnel, they observe people in action, and they take a lot of notes. And, oh yeah, they tend to make a lot of people very nervous! But only after days, weeks, and perhaps even months of observation, does the consultant leave, prepare a summary of their findings and recommended solutions, and then come back and deliver their report, with an eye towards also helping implement some of the solutions, which is where the consulting firm really makes their money.
Training on Consultative Selling
Our sales training workshops take this approach. The aim of consultative selling should be focused, first on taking the time, potentially an entire sales call or more, to really understand the nature of the prospect’s business, getting to know the prospect a little more with each question, and try to determine the underlying causes of some of the challenges/problems/issues that the prospect might be facing.
This is called the PROBE step of the sales process, and we recommend that the sales person needs to spend around 60-65% of their time in various phases of probing, in order to truly understand the nature of the prospect’s problems. Only then, can he or she be in a position to make a truly informed decision about how their products or services are uniquely positioned to help solve that prospect’s business problems. The recommendation phase, or what we call the PROVE step, should only have to last between 25-30% of the sales process.
It is said that the sales person that is perceived to best understand the nature of the prospect’s business problems, is also likely to be seen as the sales person that can make the best recommendation to solve those problems. What a wonderful advantage that provides a sales person, before they even begin to make their recommendations. Simply by demonstrating that they understand the prospect’s business problems, ideally better than the prospect themselves.
So this is the profile we’d like our participants to keep in mind throughout our workshops. For as soon as sales people learn to stop selling people “stuff” and start focusing on how to fix their client’s business problems, they’ll start to become consultants, and our bet is, have far more success.
Authored by Mark Christie, owner of SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams get the most from their CRM program…and their prospect/client interactions.
04/20/12 by Mark Christie | General Business, Sales Techniques | No Comments »
The sales pitch is when you get to sparkle. It’s when you (ideally) dazzle the client with the benefits of your solution, when you demonstrate your understanding of their problems/wants/needs, and when you overcome the final objection to get a signature on your contract. While you may have many sales support tools at your disposal - flyers, sell sheets, PowerPoint presentations and calculators, the sales pitch is really about you and the prospect. Today’s technology enables that 1-to-1 engagement with an iPad or tablet PC without a tangle of cords, external wi-fi cards, scattered paper forms, or bulky carrying bags. In fact, tablet PCs can be seen as a revolutionary tool to help drive productivity and increase sales.
A tablet PC provides a fluid and interactive way to share a variety of content with your prospects. The iPad and tablet PCs were built for people who need to do multiple tasks fast. Plus the touch screen technology removes the need to be a typing wizard. You can use 1 – 2 fingers to do it all, you can quickly zoom content to a size preferred by your audience, and it’s fast and easy to skip from PDF to presentation to video to pictures.
Instead of your presentation tool separating you from your audience, a tablet makes it easy to maintain conversation. It’s not intrusive, obscuring view, the keyboard isn’t hidden, making it easier for prospects to trust what you’re doing and the customer can get involved as touch screens are very easy to use.
Business Usage of tablets*
73% use tablet for browsing
69% use tables for email
67% use tablets to work remotely
46% use tablets for sales support
45% use tablets for customer presentations
*Source – Venture Beat tablet adoption infographic 10/2011
Benefits:
- Lightweight – you can stick them in a portfolio or purse
- Fast – access files and folders while in the field
- Easier to use than a Smartphone – for accessing your Salesforce.com Touch in early 2012 or other CRM software
- The WOW! factor – a sleek, modern image of your company and your solutions
- Adaptable – can be used in various presentations modes – lying flat, hand held or on a kickstand
- Easily involve the prospect in the presentation – easy-to-understand touch navigation
- They’re GPS enabled, making it easier to find local prospects
- Easy to flip though and search product inventories
If your company isn’t distributing tablet PCs on their tab, you could still invest in one to increase your personal productivity, but unless it’s formally adopted, your company may not provide technical assistance. The increase in output may be worth the investment. Here’s some recent research around deployment timelines for corporate tablets in the U.S.
Image Source: Dimensional Research
The big question is whether a tablet can replace a PC. At the lower price point, deploying tablets to your Salesforce could save your company significant costs, provided all functionality you need is available on a tablet.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams develop and use the right tools for the job at hand.
04/19/12 by Mark Christie | Sales Management | No Comments »
Most sales managers I know are responsible for bringing sales revenue to their companies and they do this by remote control through salespeople. I say remote control because most sales managers don’t have much direct control over their salespeople (don’t we wish!).
The problems start when the sales and revenue aren’t coming in. There are a number of potential reasons for this drop in sales. One reason might be general market conditions. Certainly in the past couple of years, as we slowly recover from 2009, many industries have seen a downturn in sales that has nothing to do with their products, services, or the selling abilities of their salespeople.
If there are no real market reasons for your let-up in sales, the next thing to do is to look inside the company at your people. If selling in a tight market is a challenge for them, you may have a skills problem and perhaps they need some advanced sales training. Or maybe they’ve gotten complacent and need a refresher to bring them back up to speed. If training is the issue, it’s a good idea to conduct a pre-training readiness test to assess whether or not your environment will support a training program.
If, on the other hand, they already do know how to sell but aren’t doing it, you may have an attitude or management problem and you need to spend more time providing hands-on management to the team. Attitude problems can often be helped with team building and other motivational events. The old adage that the beatings will continue until the morale improves rarely works, unless you’ve hired a group of masochists.
This leaves managing them more effectively. Managing salespeople is a bit like pushing a string, difficult but not impossible to do. It’s sort of like herding cats. If you don’t keep an eye on them, they get into trouble.
Start by determining if your people are making enough sales calls, either by telephone or face-to-face. If a salesperson is making enough calls but the sales just aren’t there, then it’s time to see and hear what’s actually going on during the calls.
This may be the time to get out from behind your desk and start riding with your people (if you’re not already doing it). See what they’re doing right and uncover those areas where they might need help or a bit of fine-tuning.
If your people are making the required number of calls to make the sales but no sales are coming, check to see that they are calling on the right people. Some salespeople like to make what are called comfort calls. They will call on people they like and who like them. This can be particularly prevalent when they have their sales manager tagging along. They’re trying to impress you with what a great rapport they have with their customers. I’m all for a great rapport but it’s sales that we’re really looking for. People don’t have to like someone in order to buy from him or her, although being liked can really help, particularly in a tough competitive situation.
As soon as you catch on that you’re being taken to selected accounts, put a stop to it. Ask in advance what the salesperson wants to accomplish on the next call. Who is being called on and why? What’s the purpose of the call? What does the salesperson want to happen, or what does the salesperson want the prospect to do as a result of the call? If you’re not getting good answers, you’ve got a problem and just asking these questions will help you solve it by getting the salesperson to put his mind in gear before he opens the door. You’ll also want to consider introducing a formal call planner to your team. We have one called PAIN DOC and its bullet proof. You can ensure that your reps are prepared for each call they make by asking to see a copy of this planner before you head into the call.
Address any problems as soon as possible. I suggest you do it in the quiet of your vehicle just as soon as you’re finished the call and before you turn on the ignition. Review the situation pointing out any positive aspects of the call and then focus on those things that need attention. If possible, use the very next call as an opportunity to see if your correction has taken hold. Now you’re managing your people.
You’re the seasoned pro, the coach, the person responsible for helping the people who work with you get the sales you need to keep the others off your back. This is one of the keys that separates leaders from managers.
Authored by Brian Jeffrey, co-founder of SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams develop and use the right tools for the job at hand.
04/18/12 by Mark Christie | Salesforce.com Training | No Comments »
Is your sales team reluctant to adopt Salesforce? Here are some best practices employed by companies leading the way in Salesforce.com utilization.
Creating reports and dashboards that reflect opportunity information may help. Sales people are driven by numbers and they want to be on top! Creating a dashboard that shows the “leaders” based on opportunity numbers may drive them to update their records so they can be on top.
We’ve always been an advocate with getting connected with your team if you can. Send out a quick survey to your users and ask if there is anything they think you can do to make their life easier. Maybe a simple workflow rule to automatically update a field will help! Making them feel like they have a say in the process, and knowing that you care about their opinion may encourage them to make accurate updates.
Finally, it is very helpful when the CEO and/or department VP is on board. If they use the information in Salesforce to do performance reviews it will surely encourage the team to make the proper updates. “If it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen!”
This is common with new implementations and we’ve experienced the same adoption issues with many clients. To solve the problem, we encourage them to implement two things. First, you need to create a value proposition for the user — what motivates the user to update information in your SFDC – show them the “What’s In It For Me”. And secondly and closely tied to the first, leadership buy-in – does the VP of Sales require input for incentive tracking or other reporting. If you have both of these areas covered, you may have a training issue. In any case, we would recommend a meeting with the users, or at least a survey, to better understand what’s impeding adoption.
Another thing we’ve done is to review the information we are asking our sales people to capture and narrow down to what we really need for our reporting purposes. Let’s face it, sales people don’t want to do data entry, so the easier you make it for them the more adoption you will have.
We also strongly encourage you to have all the commission data in sfdc. It should only be available in sfdc and the data framed in an sfdc window.
Putting everything that they need in sfdc really generally works very well. Quotes, contracts, contract cover sheets. If they cannot quote the job or close the job then they have to use sfdc.
Attack the problem on different and multiple levels:
1. Who is delinquent? Make the CRM tell you.
Make sure that you are checking this vital metric…everyday. If your reps aren’t using Salesforce, you’ll know pretty fast.
2. Make it easy and take away excuses
Reducing the number of fields, and especially MANDATORY fields. Don’t make it a PITA (pain-in-the-…) to enter information. Sales managers don’t require a thesis. They want to know the critical pillars of a deal: i.e. Close date? Probability? Amount? and Sales Stage? Each sales organization has a set of stages that becomes part of their “language” especially in sales meetings. Placing each deal within these stages is critical. Only make mandatory the 4 critical fields that build the forecast in the CRM. The rest is gravy.
3. Have the Manager shift the one-on-one sales meeting from “info gathering” to “next steps” strategy.
This is key reason we implement SFA. Managers can’t help reps if they are constantly asking where things are in deals. If they can see everything in a reps pipeline BEFORE THE MEETING, then the meeting changes to “here is what we can do next to help you hit that quota”. If the pipeline is empty then that is a very different meeting isn’t it? If I can tell you now that you are going to miss July wouldn’t you want to know that? I’m your manager and together we now have 60 days to make a difference – together! Make sure the reps understand this. The CRM can help me help you. If you leave it empty, then we both are blind to our future.
4. COMPARE and Measure.
Sales is a competitive field. Reps want to be #1. They want to be ranked. If they don’t – you have mis-hired. Use the CRM to rank and compare reps in real time. Publish daily ranking on the activities your value, like closed deals, cold calls made, meetings booked, service up-sold etc. Even better, connect the data to digital signage and hang the monitor on the sales bullpen and publish the rankings in real time. Watch how reps enter data instantly to make the results change on-screen (especially the ones near the bottom). (bad reps avoid their dashboards because they don’t like what they see) make the results unavoidable. Does your services department know who the best rep is? They should.
5. Find a champion.
CRM, especially Salesforce is the lazy (or the more politically correct “busy”) rep’s friend. It makes their life easier, allows them do to more, faster with less effort. Show a rep how he can email contacts faster.., build quotes quicker, assemble presentations faster using your CRM. Find a successful rep that is using the system and have them discuss a recent win and how using the CRM helped. This helps make usage contagious.
6. Embrace Non-Opportunity usage! (and get out of email!!!)
Force (OK, strongly encourage) your other departments (usually more tolerant then those pesky reps) - HR, Marketing, Admin into using the CRM to do their jobs. STOP SENDING EMAIL FOR EVERYTHING. Use CHATTER to talk about to collaborate and update. Make HR forms available in the CRM, in a workspace, or an HR application. Make expense submission happen in the CRM, etc. If most of what I need to do on a daily basis is in the CRM, and therefore I have to be in the CRM for other reasons, clicking over to an Opportunity and entering an update is simple because I’m already there. If I have to log on, navigate to the Opportunity, then enter it, then maybe I won’t.
7. Engage Salesforce MOBILE.
Reps love their devices. Salesforce mobile is free. Sound like a match? Show your reps how to log on from their iPhone, Androids or Blackberries to update that Opportunity from the customer lobby, the car, the dock, etc. (OK, maybe not the dock!)
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams develop and use the right tools for the job at hand.
04/17/12 by Mark Christie | Sales Management | No Comments »
Have you ever hired someone who looked good, smelled good, and sounded good, only to later find that the only thing the person could sell was themselves? You’re not alone. Join the club.
As a sales manager, one of your responsibilities is to hire people who will get the job done properly. That means finding the right person for the job — hiring REAL salespeople! And therein lies the challenge. Finding competent salespeople is easier said than done.
What is a competent salesperson? It’s someone who knows what he/she must do, how to do it, and has the drive and desire to do it.
If only there was a simple way of assessing this. Auto mechanics, for instance, must go through a four-year apprenticeship to join their trade with a certificate of competency. Unfortunately, when it comes to selling, there is no universally accepted process in place to certify that a person is capable of performing as a salesperson. Anyone can claim to be a salesperson whether or not they know how to sell, and in fact, too many do just that.
Most salespeople get into sales by accident. How a person gets into sales, however, isn’t as important as what they do after they’re in it. If they are serious about the profession, they will either get some sales training or do a lot of reading about the nuts and bolts of selling.
While there is no single secret to finding competent salespeople, here is an idea that will help you separate the wheat from the chaff during the hiring process and come up with potential winners.
If I was hiring an auto mechanic, I’d want to be sure that he knew what the timing chain was for, the firing order of the engine, how to adjust the brakes, etc. In other words, the extent to which he knows the basics of his trade. The same applies when hiring a salesperson. I want to be sure that he or she knows the basics of selling.
Here are 10 questions you can ask to determine if you have someone who knows something about selling. Some salespeople will claim to know the answers to these questions but when push comes to shove, they don’t. That’s why they often screw up more sales opportunities than they close.
I’ve listed the questions in order of difficulty. If you don’t get reasonable answers to the first four easy questions, I wouldn’t bother to ask the rest. Why prolong the pain and agony?
Here is my Mini-competency Test for Salespeople.
1. What three things do you HAVE to know to qualify a prospect?
The three things a salesperson absolutely needs to know in order to qualify a prospect are need (or want), ability to pay, and the authority to buy.
Note: I find that people either haven’t a clue and give some very creative answers, or get two out of the three. Of the three factors, most people will usually miss “authority.”
2. Give an example of two popular closing techniques.
The four most popular closes are the Assumptive close, Alternate Choice close, Minor Point close and the Direct Question close.
Note: Don’t worry if the person can’t give the actual names. They get points for describing how a particular close is executed and even more points if they describe a favorite closing technique that they use. If they can’t, they may not be attempting to close very often. If a person doesn’t know what or how to do something, chances are they aren’t doing it.
3. Define a trial close.
A trial close is an opinion‑asking question, the answer to which indicates where you are in the sale or how responsive the prospect is to your proposal.
4. What is the fastest way to get a prospect’s favorable attention?
Talk about something that is of interest to the prospect. The best way to do this is to ask questions pertaining to the prospect’s wants, needs, or interests. Ask about the prospect.
Note: The real sales pro will get this one. Others will say that the best way to get the prospect’s attention is to tell the prospect about the product/service. These are the people who think telling is selling.
5. When you are describing your product or service to a prospect, what is the prospect listening for?
Benefits! More specifically, benefits to the prospect, a reason to buy.
6. What is a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or “elevator pitch?”
The USP is a short statement that clearly and simply expresses an obvious reason for the prospect to do business with you. It often answers the question. “Why should I buy from you?” A good USP differentiates you from your competition.
7. What is the main reason for the price objection?
The prospect doesn’t see the value. There are three reasons why the price objection usually comes up. They are:
1 ‑ Your price is too high.
2 ‑ The prospect can’t afford it.
3 ‑ The prospect doesn’t want to afford it.
8. What is the first thing you should do when you get an objection?
Acknowledge it. Too many salespeople start to answer the objection without first cushioning it with an empathetic statement. A simple, “I understand how you feel,” or, “That’s a good point,” will go a long way towards smoothing out the objection‑answering process.
Note: This is a simple question so look for a simple answer. Many people turn this question into a disaster just like they turn simple objections into a disaster.
9. When are the four times you can handle an objection?
• Now – when the objection arises if the objection is a potential sales-stopper.
• Later in the sale if it’s trivial or a put-off.
• Never for trivial objections. (Acknowledge but don’t answer.)
• Before it even arises for those objections that you know are going to come up.
10. When is an objection NOT an objection?
Objections are often confused with rejection or requests for more information. If an “objection” appears very early in the sale, it might be rejection on the part of the prospect. An “I’m not interested” at the early stages usually indicates a failure to get the prospect’s favorable attention and is rejection, not an objection.
If the prospect says, “I don’t see how this would fit into my operation,” he might be requesting more information, not raising an objection. In this case the prospect is requesting clarification, not confrontation.
If a sales candidate can’t answer at least half of these questions to your satisfaction, beware! You may be hiring a problem, not a solution — a wannabe salesperson, not a REAL salesperson.
Authored by Brian Jeffrey, co-founder of SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams develop and use the right tools for the job at hand.
04/16/12 by Mark Christie | Using Salesforce.com | No Comments »
Has your company implemented Salesforce Chatter? You may be wondering what it is. If you cross Facebook with Twitter, and make it accessible only to people with whom you work, you get Chatter. Basically, you setup a profile, complete with picture, which includes your location; contact info and can include interests and hobbies. It shows hierarchy – your boss and on what team you belong. You can “follow” other profiles to get updates from that user, and people can follow you. You can #hashtag content to be able to quickly search and find topical info and send comments directly to a specific user with @mentions – just like Twitter. You can also join specific online groups to have private conversations, discuss projects or use it for topical updates. Messages can come to you in two forms:
(i) As a summary in a nightly email; or
(ii) In an instant chat, SMS-type format.
Chatter is available on your PC and your mobile phone (yes, there’s an app). It’s free and can be pretty handy for busy sales teams. Here are 5 ways Chatter helps to improve sales productivity:
1. Build a Connection with Key Players in the Business
Have you ever found that internal employees are more likely to help you out after you’ve met face to face? Chatter is a way to keep your face in front of co-workers you don’t see on a regular basis. You won’t be confused for other people since your picture is tied to the profile. You’re also tied to the account in Salesforce, so any Salesforce user can click on your profile to post a message on your profile page.
2. Have Team Specific Conversations.
You can setup specific groups for sales conversations. Don’t worry; you can keep the contents private by restricting group membership to a chosen few. A team group would be a great spot to post team agendas, to-do’s, best practices, regional testimonials and more.
3. It Can Cut Down the Email You Receive.
Company updates, hiring and promotion changes and other administrative communications could be posted in a Corporate group. Instead of getting tons of emails each week, users could simply check in with the group for the latest corporate updates. Instead of an email about the latest product update, sales staff could check the latest updates of the specific product group.
4. It’s Fast and Easy to Use On Your Cell Phone.
Chatter has an easy-to-use mobile app, making it easy to Chat, browse groups and read the latest updates. The mobile format means you don’t have to zoom in on tiny text and that buttons are easily accessed without having to click all over the entire screen trying to get at them.
5. Competitive intelligence, account information and more.
Chatter gives you the ability to subscribe to any content on Salesforce.com, including accounts, and documents. You’ll get an alert when a document is updated and posted into the Salesforce, so that you always have the latest and greatest document. You can subscribe to Account alerts. Waiting for internal approval? Once the account is updated, you’ll get an alert. At a closing meeting and receive a question about the competition? No problem, simply browse the competition group for the answer, or put out a post for a quick answer by any Salesforce user with access to the group. Subscribe to the product pricing group and get an alert with every new post. Have an industry updates group for the latest and greatest industry trends, changes, facts and news, so that you stay up-to-date on what’s affecting your prospects and clients.
Did we mention that basic access to Chatter is free? It’s even available to businesses that are not using Salesforce.com. It’s a great tool to increase your team’s productivity. For more information, check out http://www.chatter.com/.
Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of at Salesforce.com Training at SFTC.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a Salesforce.com training and Salesforce Management consulting firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams get the most out of Salesforce.com.
04/13/12 by Mark Christie | Myths of Selling | No Comments »
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being told by people who have never sold anything in their lives that selling is easy.
These people seem to think there’s very little to selling. Apparently, all we do is go around all day talking to people. What could be simpler?
The Gift of Gab
I always mentally cringe when someone tells me they feel they should be in sales because they really like talking to people. While the gift of gab is certainly helpful, it’s a salesperson’s superior listening skills that really make the difference. That, and an ability to get in front of as many prospects as possible in any given day.
If selling is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it… or at least doing it well? It’s been said that selling is the hardest high-paying job in the world and the easiest low-paying one. To that point, while commission salespeople are the highest paid people in North America, the average sales income is much less than $40,000. What’s wrong with this picture?
Everybody Sells Something
Every now and again, I run across people who delight in telling me that “Everyone sells, even if it’s just ideas.” After I agree with them, I ask if they’ve ever had to make their living by selling — where if they didn’t sell, they didn’t eat? Well “that’s different” of course!
It’s different all right. It’s as different as being a spectator at the Indy 500 versus being one of the drivers. What could possibly be hard about driving a racing car? All you have to do is step on the accelerator and steer! Yeah, sure!
Whether you’re a salesperson or a racecar driver, it takes skill, drive, dedication, and determination in order to succeed. It’s easy to discount all that when you’re just sitting in the stands.
I’ll be one of the first people to admit that selling looks easy. In fact, most jobs, when done by a skilled practitioner, look easy. There’s a tendency to discount the many hours of training, blood, sweat, and tears that are involved in becoming proficient at any occupation including selling.
Emotional Roller Coaster
Another thing people who aren’t in sales never see is the emotional roller coaster that many salespeople ride day after day. We probably go up and down more times in a day than the average person does in a week. I mean, if you have a 30 percent closing ratio, which is reasonably respectable by the way, it means that you get approximately two to three “Nos” for every “Yes.” Who wants to go around getting rejected all day long? Well, want to or not, that’s what happens to most of us in sales. We’re in a business of failure!
Born Salesperson
The “born salesperson” is another of the myths that plagues our profession. A lot of people seem to feel that salespeople are born, not made. Well I certainly haven’t read any birth announcements for an 8 lb. 7 oz. sales baby lately. How about you? Not too likely, right?
There’s no doubt in my mind that some people are better suited for sales than others, but I don’t believe in the concept of the “born salesperson.” Our research has identified 18 different types of sales temperaments or selling styles. Not all these styles are well suited to every type of selling environment, and in fact two shouldn’t really be in sales at all. It’s easy to have a mismatch between the individual and the job. I call this trying to put a square peg into a round hole. You can do it but there’s usually some damage to both the peg and the hole.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Yet another selling myth is that if you can sell one thing you can sell another. It’s sort of a one-size-fits-all universal salesperson concept. It would be nice if this were true. All we’d need to do is train a person to sell and then they could sell anything and everything to anybody.
There is a certain amount of truth in the concept of the universal salesperson in that if someone truly understands how to sell professionally, they can probably sell anything if they want to. Just as the basic laws of aerodynamics apply to a light plane like a Cessna 150 as well as its big (huge) brother the double decker Airbus A-380, the basic laws of selling apply to products and services, tangibles and intangibles, big and small sales.
What differs is the selling environment. The person who enjoys the relative safety of the retail sales environment where customers come to them, may not be comfortable going out to visit customers, or worse, having to make cold calls to drum up business. Similarly, the “hunter” type salesperson who enjoys the thrill of the chase can get bored in a sales environment where he is expected to provide long-term care and feeding of the customer. Finding new customers is his specialty; it’s not providing customer service.
Improving the Odds
When a person who has a natural talent for selling, and is already very good at it, takes sales training, something interesting happens. He or she becomes even more skilled and has more control over the selling process. Before the training the person tends to do things more by instinct than on purpose. After the training it’s the reverse. They start doing things on purpose rather than operating solely by instinct. This doesn’t mean they get every sale, but it sure improves their odds.
If outsiders really want to find out how easy selling is, let them walk in our shoes for a few months. It might change their perception. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to happen.
So, the next time some non-salesperson tells you that selling is easy or that you have a soft job, simply smile and nod in agreement. You know the real truth and that’s what really matters. That’s what it means to be a professional.
Authored by Brian Jeffrey, co-founder of SalesForce Training.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams develop and use the right tools for the job at hand.
04/12/12 by Mark Christie | Using Salesforce.com | No Comments »
Email is a very effective communication tool during the sales cycle. Once introductions have been made, email serves as a great tool to keep prospects engaged for a few reasons. Emails are non-intrusive. The recipient chooses when they read it. They’re easily accessible at work, home or by mobile device. They make it easier to convey information and add credibility when designed properly. Email templates are also huge time savers for those standard messages that you send to prospects and clients. In fact, image-based business emails received 50% higher clicks through rates than text based business emails. Source: Silverpop
How Email Design Affects Your Pitch
The design is more important than you may realize. How info is broken up and formatted determines how effectively your message is relayed. The look and feel is especially important in this age of spam and phishing. Your company brand needs to be properly represented in emails to ensure they’re taken seriously. Imagine getting a plain text email from Nike with no swoosh, no athletes and no gear from a sales rep. Now imagine getting that email while getting other marketing communications with those elements. Now imagine that marketing email looking just like the website…but the unformatted sales email looking different from both. Inconsistent branding makes the sales email look like a sham, even if it’s legitimately from their sales team.
So how do we line up sales communications to look like all other branded corporate communications? Easy. Email templates in Salesforce.com.
Get sexy, attention-grabbing emails.
Salesforce lets businesses create beautiful email templates for use by sales for pretty much any contact:
- Prospecting
- Follow-Up
- Contracting
- Congratulations after signing
- Birthdays and signing anniversaries,
and more.
The best part about these templates is that they’re flexible.
- Your prospect or customer details can be automatically merged in for personalization.
- Individual sales and support contact info can be merged in.
- You can edit and add text to customize each email before sending.
- You can send individual emails, for example, for follow up or mass emails for events like new reps introductions or promotions.
- They can be used to send emails to any kind of contact record – prospect or customer, by title, geography, products used, sales rep or individual account.
- You control when the email is sent.
- Salesforce keeps a record of the email activity, including open rates by your customers.
The email templates can be created to include text by marketing so that you don’t have to become a writer, proof reader and lawyer. But this text can be modified by each sales user. Blank templates can also be created with all the branding elements – logos, colors and images – where you write all the text, for those exception events for which no pre-written template exists.
The Salesforce.com Email Setup
Typically access to the email template section of Salesforce is controlled by Marketing, so you’ll have to work with them to get your templates created. The best ways to get the ball rolling would be:
- Start small to keep the templates manageable. As a group, create a “top 5″ list of emails sent with 2-3 examples of really effective ones from the field. For example, the top 3 appointment confirmation emails; the top 3 post-signing emails; top 3 intro to product “X”.
- Assign 1-2 representatives from Sales to review emails as they’re being created and to work with Marketing before they’re finalized.
- Request that the entire field be trained on how to use templates before rolling them out. Salesforce seems easy, but is filled with functionality that you can’t guess at and get right. Check with your Salesforce administrator for access to Salesforce Success Plan training, where you can access 20-45 minute training tutorials on sending emails and other Salesforce functions.
- Periodically, discuss as a team how the templates are working, what adjustments are needed and what additional templates should be added. Send back group feedback to Marketing. They’re be more responsive to group feedback validated by all, instead of one-off feedback with which all reps may or may not agree.
Creating powerful, branded emails is a feature that is included at no extra charge with almost every level of Salesforce.com licensing (available free to all except Contact Manager only licenses) so why not turn it on today to add power to your sales communications and credibility to your pitch.
Taking Your Pitch Digital
Ever have to email a PowerPoint presentation or PDF collateral to a prospect or customer? You probably do it dozens of times a month. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing that you’re presentation is a couple years out of date or that a mistake on that PDF collateral was finally fixed…but you didn’t get the latest version of the documents. Out dated and inaccurate information makes you look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Here’s how you can fix this annoyance – Salesforce.com libraries.
Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of at Salesforce.com Training at SFTC.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a Salesforce.com training and Salesforce Management consulting firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams get the most out of Salesforce.com.
Page 1 of 1112345»10...Last »
