With the advent of the Covid crisis, companies are rethinking how to scale their sales teams to adapt to the hyper-conservative mindset of not wanting to spend during tough times.
Salespeople often complain that customers are not willing to spend. At the crux of every sale is this: Price is not the only reason an organization would not buy – it is the perception of the value you offer as a seller to the client.
Consultative Sales:
Salespeople have to now shift from being product-pushers to highly skilled consultants that probe and add value in each conversation to help clients understand the value they bring to the table. They also have to make sure they differentiate in a relevant way to show they are better than the competition in some advantageous way.
For sales leaders, the pressure can be intense. Not only must you do this with a few superstars on your team, but you need to scale these to all salespeople on your team to keep cash flowing into the organization while meeting your overall sales targets.
So, how can you start doing this with your team?
There are three main components to consider
- Team Culture
- Team Processes
- Team Technology
Team Culture
Leaders should act like leaders and not individual contributors. Sometimes leaders fall into the trap of wanting to outshine their staff, which is a big mistake. Team leaders set the culture by defining what success looks like by measuring, rewarding, and recognizing success.
They create a psychologically-safe environment and, more importantly, coach their people to reach their targets. They should function more like an athletic coach, paying attention to the coachee for the right behaviors, mindset, and influencing emotions powerfully to motivate for success.
Team Processes
To do this, leaders, like athletic coaches, need playbooks-sales methodology, tactics, processes, and techniques that help sales team members. Sales leaders need to provide their team members with a clear step-by-step process on how to open the conversation, and how to close the sale based on pre-defined ideal customer profiles.
This ensures consistency and scalability of knowledge and skills across their teams.
You should not have a single superstar functioning with an idiosyncratic way of selling to a preferred segment of customers. Instead, all team members should follow a clear path and method of selling to the planned customer segments.
Another key element a sales leader needs is to coach according to the playbook. This involves technical skills, conversational questions, mindset, attitudes, and the ability to influence – on an emotional level – in order to motivate coachees for success.
Team Technology
Sales leaders should leverage technology to scale their efforts. No leader can be coaching all team players when they need coaching. There are sales simulations powered by artificial intelligence that can help you to scale your sales coaching for medium and large teams.
Companies use these services where coachees practice their various scripts in a fail-safe environment, answering objections with computer-based avatars powered by A.I. This helps team members get certified, that they truly understand the product and services they are selling, as well as practice in a real life-like scenario.
These simulations have proven to be a powerful tool for behavioral change that leaders can leverage for scaling their sales coaching.
In summary, to compete and increase profits, sales leaders need to scale their sales teams.
They need to focus on shaping the right sales culture and processes whilst leveraging technology to ensure success and compete to survive and thrive in the next normal.
Thriving Talents is committed to bringing learning technologies to life. If you are interested to know more on how to scale your sales team and leverage on simulations for sales teams powered by A.I, do reach out to us at whatsup@thrivingtalents.com