If you are managing a sales team, the chances are that you are responsible for developing the dealership’s sales force, a territory, or even several countries worldwide. Thus, without considering Consultative Selling as an option to improve performance your initial thinking maybe to make sure that your sales team fully understand your products. They need “sales training”! So, you get in touch with your company’s training department, and they agree to help you by conducting product training.
It is important to remember that when this is done, a training session can last from one day to several days, the training will cover several product families, and the emphasis will be on the product’s features, advantages, and benefits. It is done this way to justify the training investment, especially if your training department needs to travel overseas.
The Reality: Product Knowledge is Only Part of the Sales Training Puzzle
Research has shown that 70% of a customer’s decision to buy is based on a favorable interaction with a sales representative and the organization they represent. Only 30% of the decision to buy is based on product attributes in some situations. Yet, recent research shows that businesses spend 90% of their time training their sales force on product information, while only 10% of their time is devoted to educating their sales force on how to develop meaningful relationships with their customers. This approach fundamentally misses 70% of what is truly important to customers — the human factor.
The Short-term Outcome: Practice Improves Sales Performance
Research has also shown that when training is conducted, and participants don’t get involved in intensive role-playing or teaching others, almost 95% of what they learned will be forgotten after seven days.
If training is delivered using the typical approach, your training department will have provided one more training session going towards their training delivery goals. But your sales force is back to square one like nothing really happened if the material was focused only on product knowledge and opportunities were not provided to practice the skills as a part of the training. If they were away for several days taking the training, now they may have lost crucial selling opportunities and likely using a limited amount of the information from the training to improve their sales performance.
The Solution: Consultative Sales Training
We need to realize that the selling process has changed. In the past, we just handed out quotes, and orders were placed. In today’s landscape, there is more competition, and the expectations are different. Customers are more informed about your and the competitors’ products. So, customers are looking for a trusted partner, someone that is more of an industry expert and consultant than just a salesperson. So, after understanding that your sales force knows the attributes of your product, you must train them on Consultative Selling.
Consultative Sales Training can significantly enhance the performance of a sales team. Consultative Selling skills provides a process map, which teaches your sales force how to build trust with your customers and to better understand the complicated world they face. Your sales force needs to understand the importance of relationships within the selling process. Customer insight is critical to gain a greater awareness of how to build trust with your customers. Start by identifying their personal needs and behaviors. Learn how to best interact with the customer within the selling environment.
The chances are that your company does not provide Consultative Sales Training as a type of soft skill training. If this is the case, I recommend that you or someone that likes teaching and couching gets trained on consultative selling skills and then train your sales force. Your consultative selling skills training needs to have at least 70 to 80% role-playing so that your participants hone their skills. Something that I do is that I conduct my training for two days (Monday and Tuesday), then the rest of the week, I go with my sales professional to visit NEW customers. I let the salesperson be in charge of the visit. Once we are finished, we find a place where we can discuss how the meeting went. My first question to the salesperson is, “How do you think the meeting went?”.
The idea behind this coaching and practice is to see if the sales professional is getting out of his or her comfort zone and applying what was learned. Changing their selling behavior is the desired outcome. During that initial visit, you want to make sure that the customer is talking at least 80% of the time. You accomplish this by asking open and close-ended questions to learn about the customer’s operation, needs, and pressing issues. Once you have gathered all that information, you ask for a second visit to present options and recommendations to solve the customer’s problems and issues.
To Sum It All Up: Consultative Selling Delivers Results
We all want to increase our sales, gain market share, and provide exceptional customer service. To do that, we must realize that the playing field has changed, and so should we. Below is how I have been able to achieve exceptional change and developed my salesforce:
- I took several consultative selling skills training courses.
- I applied the 80/20 rule to my sales force, training 20% of the dealers, which had 80% of the selling opportunity. The rest of the salesforce gets trained later on.
- Make sure to include between 70% to 80% role-playing to get your sales force out of their comfort zone.
- Schedule and visit new customers with your sales force to see them in action.
- Regroup right after the visit to provide positive feedback and coaching to the salesperson.
- Set specific goals for gaining new customers each month. Make sure to monitor the progress of the sales force.
- Work with your dealership to develop and implement sales force incentive programs, like “Salesperson of the Month,” or similar recognition that is a fit for your organization. You want to keep them motivated and enthusiastic about their progress.
NOTE:
As you can see, this salesperson development approach requires a hands-on effort to be successful. I can tell you that there is nothing more rewarding than visiting your salesperson later on and hearing from them that they are making progress, that they feel more confident, and that their closure rate has improved. I have seen this from my salesforce over and over again. I just love that feeling. Happy selling!
Ideate Consulting Group partners & consults with small and medium-sized enterprises and utilizes NO-cost and low-cost business growth methods that are proven and time tested to grow sales and revenue long term.
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