At SalesGym, we’re always on the lookout for sales executives that have interesting and timeless insights into top performers, coaching, and building better sales teams. In a recent interview with Chris Bevacqua, Senior VP Sales at General Electric, he shared how technology and customer needs are changing dramatically and what sellers need to do to earn their business. His insights included:
- Sellers Need To Understand Customers At A Deeper Level
- The Agenda Needs To Change
- Many Customers Are Looking For Partners, Not Just Suppliers
- Salespeople Need More Sports-Like Training And Development
- Leveraging Technology To Accelerate Training Results
Early in the interview, Chris said something that really framed the rest of our conversation,
“The technology backbones, open marketplace, free access to information and the intelligence of today’s customers have changed how salespeople need to sell.”
We’ve noticed the same thing with many of our clients in that decision makers and influencers expect more from sellers than just product information or somewhat tailored solutions.
The technology backbones, open marketplace, free access to information and the intelligence of today’s customers have changed how salespeople need to sell. - Chris Bevacqua, Senior VP Sales at General Electric Click To TweetSellers Need To Understand Customers At A Deeper Level
“Big companies have started looking at their own inefficiencies,” Chris explains, “and started saying, ‘How can I become more efficient across my value chain?’ It’s that wing to wing analysis that everybody is talking about now. Salespeople today are going into their sales interactions hearing customers talk about their costs and their productivity and efficiency. Customers are now saying, ‘How are you going to help me improve my efficiency?’ And your product salesperson is thinking, ‘Hey, I came in here to sell you on why my mobile scanner is the best one so that you can do ultrasounds and here you’re talking about patient efficiency.”
One of the real challenges for sellers in our ultra connected, fast paced world is slowing down to listen to what’s really happening in the head of the decision maker and influencers right now. What are they thinking about? What is the issue they’re wrestling with? Often, it’s not all that related to the features of one product vs. another, and has more to do with how that solution fits into a bigger picture problem they’re trying to solve and will that decision serve them well into the future. Chris explains,
“That product salesperson now has to understand the way the hospital works and how the hospital generates costs and makes money. If your product salesperson is going in and talking about the specs, you only get so far, vs. going in and saying, ‘Hey, my product is the best because it has GPS tracking and mobile tagging and I can show you in real time, in your hospital, where every piece of equipment is and therefore it can feed into your scheduling system and make it the most efficient use because you’re not having patients wait.’ That’s a different conversation because now you’re attacking their wing to wing efficiency problems.”
The Agenda Needs To Change
What we’ve found is that many sellers need to re-think completely the agenda they start their sales conversations with and it’s not just about asking good questions. It’s about what the purpose of the questions are. Notice the contrast in these two different agendas:
| Product-Solution Focused Meeting Agenda | Business Partner Focused Meeting Agenda |
|---|---|
| Ask you some questions about your current needs | Understand the broader business issues this purchasing decision will impact |
| Understand your buying cycle and decision making process | How this decision fits in with your mid and long term objectives |
| Explain to you the product solutions and features we feel will address those needs | Your current thinking on the capabilities your Partner needs to have |
| Explain our core differentiating factors | Share some examples of how we're helping our Partners transform their XYZ processes |
| Determine next steps to move the process forward | Determine what other people we need to listen to before making some specific recommendations |
As you can imagine, these are going to be two completely different conversations and it takes a higher level of skill to conduct a “partner focused meeting” because it’s not about the product, which is often what sellers are most comfortable talking about.
Many Customers Are Looking For Partners, Not Just Suppliers
Chris explains what decision makers are really looking for in today’s world,
Customers are looking for relationships that can help to grow their top-line and be sustainable or be in the top of their industry. - Chris Bevacqua, Senior VP Sales at General Electric Click To Tweet“Customers are looking for relationships that can help to grow their top-line and be sustainable or be in the top of their industry. They are also looking for someone who can help combat emerging movements in the industry as technologies change. Customers today are looking for partners, for people that are going to help them grow their revenue base and enter new markets and launch new business lines.”
In order to provide these customers with the buying experience they want, Chris explains the shift sellers need to make,
“The best salespeople today are more strategic in the way they consider their customer relationships. They are thinking, ‘Where is this company going? Where’s their industry going? What do we do? What are the product lines and where are there synergies?’ There’s this evolution and mixture of what a customer/supplier relationship is today.”
Salespeople Need More Sports-Like Training And Development
What we’ve found in working with thousands of salespeople, is traditional training approaches simply don’t work for the kind of skills they need today. They need more practice and the kind of repetition and reinforcement that sports teams provide their athletes with. Chris has noticed the same thing,
“It’s a combination of the long sale and relationship management. How does a sales rep build something small to something a little bigger to something medium-sized to the multi-billion dollar partnership? We have people that do this well but there is an overall need to develop this better. Practice, for the most part, isn’t thought of the same way as a sports team thinks about it. You see it in pockets with those great leaders and sales managers, but it’s by no means in the architecture across most organizations.”
We’ve found there are 5 distinct hats a good sales coach needs to be able to wear and it’s often that role of “practice coach” that gets neglected because of time constraints and the urgency of responding to the needs up and down the organization.
- Build a winnable game plan or strategy
- Advisor / Counselor
- Metrics-Goals Coach
- Deal Mechanic
- Practice Coach
Leveraging Technology To Accelerate Training Results
Chris has seen his organization leverage technology to train sales teams in new ways and points to the future for all of us that want our sales teams to improve at a faster pace,
“Simulation technology has come a really long way. You can actually have an immersive customer call experience, online, simulated very very well. The simulation is attractive because we can gather a lot of data on the back end and see at the individual level and analyze that data to learn where they made decisions that are not the decisions we’d like them to make, and see the decisions they did make and kind of where they’re strong. With this insight, we can customize a plan for them.”
It’s really about coaching salespeople how to use technology to be better prepared and how to shift the agenda and conversation to topics that will engage the customer more and truly differentiate your depth of understanding in a way that drives a more potent value proposition. Chris explains,
“Where technology and the coaching model help sales reps is how to approach a prospect, how to listen better and what to listen for. We have so much technology now, like LinkedIn and other tools that sales reps can use to research before they even walk into the first meeting with a prospect. This is allowing reps to have more insightful led conversations because they are not having to rehash what is publicly available and should already know walking in. The ability to leverage these different channels of technology is separating the level 1 and 2 salespeople from the advanced salespeople.”
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.
