At SalesGym, we interview dozens of leading sales executives every year to find out new thinking and trends on top performers, coaching, and building better sales teams. In a recent interview with Mari Glass-Clarke, Senior Director, Global Commercial Effectiveness & Global Sales Excellence at QIAGEN, shared a complete roadmap of what it takes to be a top performer in today’s competitive marketplace.
Early in the interview, Mari summed up a variety of strengths top performers develop …
“Top sales performers generally have 1% or more product knowledge than their competitors. C-Suite conversations are delivered by top performers with ease and they influence at all levels of the sales process. Top performers understand that listening to the customer is the most important part of relationship building and effective communication. Top sales performers complete the research needed in the Pre-call Planning Process before engaging with their customers. These top sales reps are also outstanding users of technology and business tools and can interpret information to identify trends and achieve territory goals.”
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at what Mari has found are the real keys to their success:
- Collaborate and master team selling
- Prepare, practice, and rehearse to avoid rookie mistakes
- Become an expert at using insight-driven questions
- Sell the bigger picture solution, not just shorter term transactions
- Focus training on the specific needs of different sales team members
- Develop a core foundation of fundamental sales skills
Pre-call planning has a significant impact on results
Mari emphasized that success on many sales calls is often determined before the meeting with the prospect or salesperson even happens. Top performers spend more time preparing and rehearsing before the call. This is especially true in team selling situations …
An agreed upon agenda, with role clarification and clear goals need to be well understood by all sales members prior to the customer visit. -Mari Glass-Clarke, Senior Director, Global Commercial Effectiveness & Global Sales Excellence at QIAGEN Click To Tweet“A poor team sales call can often be attributed to a lack of communication before the customer meeting. That’s where higher skills are needed in terms of understanding the social intelligence of the deal. An agreed upon agenda, with role clarification and clear goals need to be well understood by all sales members prior to the customer visit.”
Sales Managers need to build the expectation and clear understanding of what must happen before each sales call and especially before the bigger, more important calls. For example:
- Prepare a written agenda you can email to the prospect and rehearse prior to the meeting
- Call and conduct a pre-call rehearsal when bringing other team members on sales calls
- Know the questions you’re going to ask and be able to effectively summarize the progress since previous meetings if needed
- Knowing exactly what the objectives are and having a few options ready on how to close for next steps or commitment
Collaborative, team selling is different from solo selling…
What we find in working with sales teams all over the world is that team selling is a big challenge for higher ego, solo performing salespeople. Coordinating a team before a call, establishing an agenda, and focusing the prospect on different experts on the team requires a more collaborative mindset as Mari points out…
Gone are the days of the ‘individual sales star’; today’s successful reps are very collaborative and understand team selling. -Mari Glass-Clarke, Senior Director, Global Commercial Effectiveness & Global Sales Excellence at QIAGEN Click To Tweet“So often commercial leaders recruit ‘super sales reps’ and believe that this particular profile is needed to bring in the revenue number. However, when there is a team selling situation, super salespeople may flounder when they are placed in a support role. Effective sales reps should be nimble to any team sales situation. Gone are the days of the ‘individual sales star’; today’s successful reps are very collaborative and understand team selling. They are influencers both inside and outside of their organizations. Top sales professionals see the big picture and will engage the customer in a way that delivers a win for the organization vs. focusing only on a quick win for themselves.”
Top performers are more patient and look for bigger opportunities…
Another key strength top performers tend to have is the ability to focus on bigger, more holistic solutions rather than going after smaller, more transactional deals that feel, at least in the moment, easier to get. One of the biggest mistakes we find when observing and testing salespeople is the tendency, when presented with an opportunity requiring a response; to shift from a questioning-listening mode into a presenting-selling mode.
It’s the ability to question, listen, take notes and identify as many opportunities as possible that leads to bigger solutions and, in many cases, less pressure on pricing. Mari explains what can drive this mistake so many salespeople make…
“Salespeople have a number to achieve at the end of the month, so a typical sales mistake is to fail to listen to the customer and attempt to sell a product before fully understanding the customer’s needs. Sales reps can no longer ‘show up and throw up’ in a pitch to their customers. A higher skill is needed that focuses on the customer’s needs and being able to ask insightful questions that get the customer thinking about his or her business and/or pain points.”
We’ve found, through many practice sessions with sales teams an important insight: being able to verbally deliver a compact, concise and persuasive set of insight driven competitive advantages that lead naturally to relevant open ended questions, is a key skill that opens doors for salespeople. Throwing out features and testing with “are you interested” questions is what limits a surprisingly high number of salespeople. Mari explains how her organization addresses this problem…
“A training best practice that we have used recently, is to ensure that our sales team deliver a consistent elevator pitch and company presentation (4 to 5 slides) to our customers. This approach improves collaboration within the sales cohort and eliminates variation in our branding.”
One size fits all isn’t as effective anymore with sales training…
“There is a multi-generational shift that’s happening in sales,” Mari explains. “The sales skills that worked 10-15 years ago are different today. Sales managers need to think about the multi-generational customer and coach their sales reps to recognize these differences and tailor their conversations to meet that need.”
What we find in a lot of sales organizations, in an effort to get training done in splashy, yearly sales conferences, often present strategic topics for the entire team when, in reality, half the team should be focusing on sales messaging, asking better questions and listening.
“Where I see the need for more improvement from salespeople is in crafting a compelling message of value to the Customer. The message should be consistent and straight to the point so that the sales rep can focus on listening to the customer’s needs and asking quality questions.”
Regardless of how motivated and ambitious the sales manager is, the inescapable reality is we have to crawl before we walk and walk before we run. Salespeople MUST master the skills of communicating core differentiating factors, asking insight driven questions and following up with relevant, conversation driven questions before they can apply more complex account development strategy so common in today’s sales training. Mari approaches it this way…
“Millennials now comprise greater than one-third of the workforce and trainers must deliver learning technologies that meet their social needs, technological savvy while keeping them engaged. In my opinion, some of the most popular training methodologies used today, are a great starting point for experienced sales reps, but often lose less experienced reps who need a more basic sales introduction to build skills.”
Master the fundamentals first …
From extensive testing, trial and error and observing how salespeople learn, we’ve found that these five core selling skills are where more focus is needed with a high percentage of sales teams in order to get better results:
- Master basic sales messaging first … communicating compelling differentiating factors
- How to start a call with a customer-focused agenda that projects credibility, professionalism and real desire to help the prospect
- Learn how to ask insight driven questions, relevant follow up questions and use short summaries to focus the conversation
- Develop the patience to shift from one area of questioning to the next without overreacting to small opportunities that surface along the way
- Become effective at sharing insights from other customers that can be helpful to the prospect in terms of expanding their thinking and considering new options and choices
Mari sums up the challenge of getting a better return on training investments…
“Our training programs are much more customized to the sales role. We have moved from general sales learning (same learning path for all) to a learning path more focused on the application of product or sales knowledge. Product testing and sales certification are also ways we can zero in on determining a sales rep’s gaps in learning.”
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.
