At SalesGym, we’re constantly on the alert for sales executives that have interesting and unique perspectives into selling, top performers, coaching, and building better sales teams. In a recent interview with Kevin Leffew, Vice President of Field Sales in the Educational Software Industry, he shared some fresh perspectives into how sales teams can generate better results. His insights included:
- Top Performers Prepare Better
- Top Performers Master The Team Selling Approach
- Top Performers Have Flexibility To Adjust
- Listen To And Learn From Other Top Performers
- Kevin's Advice To Sales Leaders
Early in the interview, Kevin shared with us what he’s observed in terms of what truly separates top performers from the rest,
The top performers consider all options and take the time to prepare for those variables. - Kevin Leffew, Vice President of Field Sales in the Educational Software Industry Click To Tweet“Top performers prepare more for sales calls and visits. Preparation is key to selling effectively. Whether it’s doing research on the company, competition or verbally practicing your presentation, what preparation goes into the meeting is what you’ll get out of it. Top performers prepare so they know what questions to ask and identify the leading questions ahead of the meeting so when they have that discussion, they can preempt some of the things that come up from a competitor. Competition today is everywhere, we’re all competing for the same dollars. The top performers consider all options and take the time to prepare for those variables.”
Top Performers Prepare Better
In today’s world, buyers know more about your company, products and services than ever before. They enter even the initial meeting far more prepared than in the past. Salespeople that start at square one with a predictable overview of their company, history, current clients and some really basic questions are going to annoy a lot of decision makers. Kevin explains,
“You always want to qualify and ask questions, but if you do the preparation ahead of time, you’re only doing that to make the prospect feel comfortable and you likely already know the answers. In today’s selling climate, there is less discovery. Questions are really to get the conversation going to then present the answers and information you’ve already prepared for.”
The easy way to prepare for a sales call is to focus on what you’ll say about yourself, your company and your products and, according to over 200 sales executives we interviewed last year, this is the #1 most common mistake salespeople make. Kevin has noticed the same thing,
“If you “show up and throw up,” just talk about your yourself, products, and services, your not going to be as successful as a salesperson. For the most part, our customers and prospects know about what we’re selling by the information and marketing available online or word of mouth. As sales people, if we do our research ahead of time and can connect our prospects needs to what we are offering, then we’ll have a much more likely chance to close that sale. Be consultative in our approach, not just repeat the marketing that’s already available.”
Top Performers Master The Team Selling Approach
Many of our SalesGym clients sell products that require a relatively long sales cycle, multiple meetings with different decision influencers and different strategies to show their deeper capabilities. Organizing all this influence strategy is a challenge and the best salespeople, as Kevin explains, get good at it,
“The best salespeople utilize their resources well, meaning the other talented people in the company, the other people internally throughout the organization, whether it is other sales engineers and product experts, product management, or technical support. The best salespeople go to them as part of that preparation and ask questions or at times bring them out on the sales visit. Bringing those other people along actually creates the best sales situation most likely to close. Those are truly the team players who are not necessarily worried about who gets credit and just want to make the sale.”
Six keys to better team calls
- Schedule a rehearsal a few days before the actual sales call and:
- Determine who kicks off the meeting and rehearse the agenda
- Have everyone rehearse their introductions … keep them to under 60-seconds each
- Remind everyone their role is to be helpful and to bring knowledge and expertise to the table that will be useful to the decision makers
- Be sure to give each team member time limits for their segments
- Be sure to prepare examples of how you’ve helped other clients
Flexibility To Adjust
When we work with salespeople, one of the first things we focus on is starting every meeting with a clear and simple agenda and ending it with something like, “what else would you like to add to our agenda to make our time together today even more helpful for you?” More often than not, the prospect or customer will add something that is even more important to them than your agenda items. This is great news because now you know what’s front and center for them, but we need to be nimble and adjust, as Kevin explains,
“Great salespeople have the flexibility to adjust. Salespeople that struggle, have three or five things they want to talk about but as they ask their questions, and engage with the customer or prospect they find nothing is registering because all they’re thinking about are those three things they want to tell them. We’ve all run into that customer or prospect that is just having a bad day. They’re going to say whatever they’re going to say and being able to adjust and be flexible to that and understand that you may not always get to every item on your list is critical. The best salespeople know there’s always an opportunity to sell, even if it’s only selling yourself for just a future meeting because some days it’s just a bad day.”
Listen To And Learn From Other Top Performers
Chances are, in most sales organizations, there are top performers that have learned how to lead a successful sales interaction, know what elements to emphasize about their products and which questions are essential to ask. If we approach these people with a real curiosity and desire to learn, they can be extremely helpful and accelerate our results as Kevin points out,
“The best salespeople aren’t always developing their own material from scratch. They’re reworking or stealing a little bit from all these other people and resources, molding it to make it their own. Imitation is a great way to do that and following the lead of other successful people, even if it’s one or two things that you see catches someone’s attention. Take that and mold it for yourself and within your style.”
When we find those golden nuggets of advice and approaches that work better, then we need to get serious about practicing and mastering them. Knowing what to do is not enough, we need to develop what we call verbal sales mastery as Kevin explains,
“The most important part of sales is putting it into practice with continued repetition and selling and learning what works. Continue to connect with people who act as mentors and people who are peers. Pick up the phone to a peer and have that conversation going through your different sales calls and discuss what happened and where the conversation went. Replaying the sales conversation with a peer, venting, talking about successes or a failure will only help you in sales. You will need to open up and be a bit vulnerable, but it will help you be a better salesperson. Hearing the language that others are using not only will help you as a salesperson, but it also helps the other salesperson and then the whole team grows as a part of it.”
Kevin’s Advice For Sales Leaders:
- The best sales leaders lead by example. They're going out on the road, leading small account sales meetings and putting themselves into the sales reps position, doing the preparation themselves to really show them how it's done. Sometimes it's going through the process with their salespeople in terms of the preparation and not always leading but helping them do the prep-work. This allows the sales team to see up close how the process should look.
- Sales leaders need to find the balance of when to push from the back or when to pull from the front, although neither is easy, but both are necessary in leading a team.
SalesGym is a research, consulting, and training company that works with and learns from sales teams all over the world and has refined a coaching and training process that trains sales teams the way elite athletes are trained. More insights and articles from us can be found on our RESOURCES PAGE.
