Sales teams who are the most successful sell differently, not just more effectively. Largely, according to George, this is being spurred by global competition and the internet. Makes sense that salespeople need to be able to differentiate themselves from the competition. You can do that by helping your salespeople become skilled at consultative selling, which is married together with a solid sales process that is consistently followed. Avoid the common temptation to simply measure activity, because the right activities should be progressing the sales opportunity forward. 

During the conversation, we talked about: 

-Why sales organizations need to institute a solid on-boarding learning and development process for their people. Get beyond teaching product features and don’t assume your salespeople really know how to sell. 

-Setting salespeople up for success by starting with a clear set of expectations. Don’t assume salespeople know. 

-Key reasons why salespeople need to follow a process and stop killing deals by skipping important steps in that process. Did you know it can take 60% longer to lose a deal and that’s the result of not following a process consistently. Your salespeople need an actionable checklist that they can follow. 

-Sales coaching and why that’s critical to ensuring that salespeople not only follow the process, but that you keep reinforcing the skills and behaviors that will help them achieve their sales objectives. 

Finally, learn how the Membrain platform drives the right sales actions with a solid sales process. I’ve started to use the platform myself and love it! 

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In my latest podcast conversation, I talked with Stu Perlmeter about why sales organizations should conduct a thorough win/loss analysis to understand why deals either closed or did not. 

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Salespeople always seem to be looking for that quick fix, as if one actually exists. Rather than taking a targeted and focused approach, salespeople often resort to a “spray and pray” approach by broadcasting the same message to everyone. 

Now with social media, spamcasting has taken on a whole new level of “please don’t do that”. Broadcasting over social channels is a quick way to created a less than positive brand impression – for you and for your company.

In this episode, Barb Giamanco and Doug Lehman talk about the common misuses of social channels and why you should avoid them.

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Most sales messaging is overly “me” centric and are focused on what companies and their sales people want to sell versus actually caring about what buyers want and need. 

“According to sales management, the salesperson’s ability or inability to communicate value messages is the biggest inhibitor keeping salespeople from achieving quota.” –SiriusDecisions

Can you really blame buyer’s resistance to dealing with salespeople? Their experience is, more often than not, a waste of their precious time. The inability to create a value message is at the heart of this problem. Feature dumps don’t cut it, and simply making more phone calls, sending more spam emails, or broadcasting your pitch to more people on social channels aren’t helping you. Your sales messaging has to change!

Barb Giamanco and Doug Lehman talk about why your message matters and what yours is probably saying about you! 

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In this episode, Barb Giamanco and Doug Lehman chat about strategies for generating higher quality leads, in less time.

• 10.5% of phone calls
•  9% of emails from new vendors

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In this episode, Barb Giamanco and Doug Lehman break it down for you in Lehman’s terms. There is no easy button called social selling. Like all aspects of being good in sales, how you utilize social channels as part of your sales process takes work.  

Patience, planning, the right mindset and sales and technology skills all factor into the success equation too. In response to a different kind of buyer, salespeople and their leaders need to change their mindset and selling behavior.  

With 2016 right around the corner, now is the perfect time to put your strategy in place, or to adjust the one you already have. 

Remember, you cannot slap new technology – social channels – onto outdated sales approaches and expect to win. Cheesy selling, or is that sleazy selling, is still cheesy and buyers hate it. Adopting a new type of selling mindset means change. It means doing things differently, regardless of what worked back in the day. 

It all starts with a sound strategy, backed up with great sales skills and consistent execution of your strategy.

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In my recent Razor’s Edge podcast, I talked with Robin Saitz, CMO at Brainshark. The focus of our conversation was sales productivity and specifically, we talked about what is behind the sales productivity gap and what companies can do about it. 

Though we’ve heard through the years from CSO Insights that roughly 52% of salespeople do not achieve quota each year (and that’s in a good economy!), Robin told me that the TAS Group reported that the number is as much as 67%. If that doesn’t keep a sales leader up at night, I don’t know what does! 

As with all my guests, I learned a lot in talking with Robin.

Sales Productivity Defined

She defined sales productivity as the yield per sales rep. In other words, hitting quota in the most efficient way possible. As I came to learn and as the TAS Group numbers suggest, productivity in sales is way off the mark.

What Causes the Gap

In particular, I was struck with Robin’s point of view regarding why we have such a problem with sales productivity at all. She told me that it comes down to several things, like: 

Lack of an onboarding process and specifically, a lack of focus on training selling skills. Some 38% of companies lack any kind of formal process or program for preparing new reps. 

Salespeople cannot find the content/information they need when they need it. Up to 40% of their time is spent searching or trying to create the content that they need. Breaking it down that equates to 2 out of 5 sales days each week. 

Sales conversations are not effective enough and there is a lack of visibility – on management’s part – in terms of understanding the behavior and knowledge of their salespeople.

What Companies Can Do

During the interview, Robin shared her suggestions for what companies need to do to close the productivity gap, who needs to be involved in addressing the issues and what to measure to ensure that you are closing the gap. 

With C-Suite and corporate Board members extremely concerned about sales productivity, this interview is certainly worth 35 minutes of your time.

Learn more about how Brainshark can help your organization close the sales productivity gap.

Follow Robin on Twitter.

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