What makes sales management such a tough job? There are many reasons, but a very basic one is that your success as a B2B sales manager depends on the performance of your sales team. If your sales team doesn’t perform well and make quota—despite your best efforts to coach, motivate, support, mentor, and lead—then you can’t succeed.
Your sales team is either your biggest asset or greatest weakness. Although all sales teams and salespeople are unique, there are some basic steps sales managers can take to ensure that salespeople achieve quota consistently. Here are four tips that will yield a big payoff.
Tip #1: Adopt a sales process that matches your customers’ buying process.
You might think this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many sales managers and teams have no real idea how their prospects move through their buying process.
When salespeople have no understanding of the typical buyer’s journey, they are forced to reinvent the wheel with each potential deal. That wastes everyone’s time, impedes their ability to close deals, and keeps them in a frustrated state.
The remedy is simple. Identify the different stages your prospect tends to move through during the buying process. Then, train salespeople how to interact with prospects at each stage. (This includes giving them tools or materials that would optimize those interactions.) This is paramount in a digital age where prospects are self-educating well before they have a first conversation with a salesperson.
Tip #2: Help your sales team overcome objections from prospects by moving conversations from price to value.
Every day, salespeople face tough objections from prospects. Some of those prospects project a “we’re fine with the status quo” mentality. Others pressure salespeople to supply deep discounts. The list can go on and on.
Every B2B sales manager needs to help the team develop bulletproof responses to these objections. Start by teaching them how to inspire the customer to care about how your solution can help them solve their business problems and meet their business objectives.
Tip #3: Enable your sales team to help the customer justify the cost of investing in your solution.
Salespeople who know how to help stakeholders gain budget approval are in a better position to meet or beat quota each month. When the prospect is able to measure the business impact of their investment in your solution, research shows that 65% of such purchases occur in six months or less.
Tip #4: Help your sales team learn to think beyond the demo.
Many salespeople feel perfectly comfortable giving a standard demo or product pitch. However, that doesn’t necessarily prepare them to have successful interactions with high-level decision makers.
It’s important for sales teams to know how to talk with business decision makers. Consider results from a Gartner survey, which showed that CFOs actually have a large impact on the decision-making process for IT investments. It turned out that 41% of CFOs are leaders of a purchasing group; and another 41% were members of such groups. Sixteen percent serve as advisors to a purchasing group, and one percent said they were the decision maker. This shows that engaging the CFO is critical in many cases to closing deals for IT purchases.
Here’s what we know about business decision makers: they are generally not interested in the features and functions of your product. They expect the conversation to address their specific business needs and challenges. If your salespeople understand the basics of business concepts like what’s the business problem and what’s in it for their company (what’s the ROI, payback period, etc.) they’ll fare much better in their meetings with decision makers.
What do you think a B2B sales manager must do to help his or her sales team succeed? Share your ideas in the comments section.
