Some salespeople when they feel they are not going to get the sale can get into the habit of offering discounts.

The client was sold. You gave a price. They asked for a discount. You gave it. No reason given.

Why? Why would we discount our solution?

It comes down to the value you hold – not your client – on your solution. And whether you think it should be cheaper.

The first time price and discounts come up is before you have even spoken with a client. That’s right, you have made the decision to discount or not discount based on your value of your offering.

You have made this decision in your office. It may have been impacted by:

• A colleague saying ‘This is a bit pricy, people often want it discounted’.(The price is too high, we need to bring it down to what it should be) .
• Your boss saying ‘Offer a discount, just get in the business’. (Discount is a word that’s important. Value of our offer isn’t).
• A client saying ‘I can buy it cheaper elsewhere.’ (You believe that, and don’t question whether the solution is apples for apples).
• Marketing/Brand saying ‘This is expensive but …’ (‘Expensive’ is never a word you want used in your business)
• Colleagues always discounting to get in the business. (This normalises discounts).

The reality is the subtle message you picked up is  ‘the value of what we have isn’t as high as the price we are charging’, or, simply ‘we are charging too much’.

And … you believe it.

You are not sold on that price. And next thing you know, you too are thinking the price is too high, you too have taken your eye from value and onto price.

You are driving the price down. If you sold it at full rate, you might occasionally feel guilty as you know you would have given a discount.

What can you do to counter this as a sales person and as a leader?

 Solution/product training on the value of your offer—what the client is getting, and what the value is to the client.

 Internal language—always about value, rather than about discounts.

 Success stories—share case studies about what the client gains through this solution.

 Reward success based on keeping the price at a premium not on getting the business in.

When you are sold on the value, you won’t be discounting. Instead you will be investigating the clients’ issues and educating them on the value of your solution.

As the trusted provider, when you have such certainty than they are sold on it too. They will trust you and believe your offer is worth the price.

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In a situation like this, many a salesperson starts to feel pressure and loses faith in their pricing. They take their eye from the value of their offering and get consumed by price. Sometimes they become demoralised and demotivated. The kneejerk reaction is to discount the price to get the sale.

The issue for the salesperson is they are focused on closing the sale instead of helping the prospect.

Because the real issue with ‘I don’t have the money’ has little to do with the price. It’s because the client with the money doesn’t have trust in the salesperson.

When the client does have trust in the salesperson, the relationship shifts to something like a doctor/patient scenario where the client is waiting to be advised what solution will fix their problem.

They are expecting the ‘expert’ to give them the most suitable solution. In turn, the salesperson feels an obligation to provide a solution that aligns best.

Often this solution is substantially more money than what that client was originally going to spend … and (insert drum roll) the client buys (cue crescendo) because it’s the right solution for them (release the doves!).

When we are engaging with a prospect, they are looking for someone to understand them. Someone who gets what they need. The client wants to feel confident the seller is 100% aligned with them and will only present a solution that fits what they are actually looking for.

As a salesperson – ask yourself these two questions:

1. Are you 100% sold on your solution? If you are not 100% sold you can’t expect your client to be. 

• Do you know your solution, inside and out?
• Do you know the alternatives the client could buy instead from competitors?
• Do you know the value of your solution to the client?

2. Do you seek to understand? Your intent is to be a partner, the solution provider, the trusted advisor

• When you are with a potential client, are you mentally and physically beside them and seeking to understand?
• Are you 100% present and focused on them?
• Do you ask relevant, meaningful questions to really assess the situation?
• Are you are listening and absorbing everything the client is saying and how they are saying it?

Often a salesperson is selling at the buyer. We call this ‘spray and pray’—spraying all the features and benefits of their solution with repetitive banter without adapting to this client. They are not making it clear what’s in it for them. They are not linking the benefit and value to how it will help that person’s situation. And they can’t know as they haven’t asked enough insightful questions. ­­­­­

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Building a great sales team and culture is not an easy task. For starters, everyone is selling themselves when they go into a job interview and salespeople are no exception. And with terms like “tenacious”, “a way with people”, “a drive to exceed goals” as standard buzzwords in sales recruitment ads, you’re likely to be interviewing similar candidates. So how do you identify the good from the great?

Everyone is time-poor, but sales managers and leaders cannot afford to skimp on hiring great talent when it comes to sales. That’s why we put together 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020, an ebook full of valuable advice from sales culture to self-improvement and working with others, to lead generation and negotiation skills. Because it’s time to look past the buzzwords and down into what skills are really behind the best sales reps. And the very best way to understand that is from the experience and expertise of other sales professionals.

Use these insights as you develop your job description, hire and coach the reps on your team.

Know your customer inside out

All good sales reps know their product, but the best ones know their customer even better. They put themselves in the shoes of their target market to build trust and ongoing loyalty.

According to Aaron Tobone, Chief Information Officer at Provider Assist, a good sales rep understands the importance of timing and context to build a customer relationship.

“Be proactive in understanding what is happening in your customer’s business so you can have contextual conversations and provide valuable advice. This is how you build continued trust,” says Aaron.

Building on the facts

Just like you can’t build a home with weak foundations, you shouldn’t build a relationship with flimsy data.

A lot of sales reps will talk about opportunities and forecasting deals without a lot of hard facts to support them. The best salespeople, however, start with the facts and develop a strategy from there.

“When selling, customers want to see results you have achieved for relevant businesses. Always start with the facts, make sure you backup your stories with hard data,” says Nick Hultink, Sales Director, Commercial at Salesforce.

These reps usually input lots of data into a CRM like Sales Cloud, they don’t just look narrowly within the data, either, but try to find patterns across multiple accounts.

Not confined to silos

With 78% of customers expecting consistent interactions across departments, a good sales rep will break down silos between teams. They will also take the time to initiate a constructive discussion about lead scoring and qualification to improve the entire sales process. After all these, teams are working towards the same goal.

“If your marketing and sales teams are not aligned it can impact your ability to find prospects and convert them into customers. If you have a marketing team that is feeding leads from campaigns to your sales team, you have ‘warm’ leads ready to be nurtured,” says Josh Harding, Head of Client Sales, Criterion Conferences.

This kind of cross-functional thinking applies to other areas of the business too. Sales reps that see the benefits of communicating with marketing, service and even finance teams, to find mutually beneficial outcomes are the sales reps you want to invest in.

Technologically literate

Salespeople like to move at pace, so most don’t want to be bogged down by unoptimised spreadsheets and administration. When interviewing your next sales rep, get a sense of the tools and technologies they use to get a deeper understanding of their customer.

A sales rep that embraces and understands the benefits of artificial intelligence technologies is an empowered sales rep. AI can streamline work and help reps make smarter decisions, particularly around customer behaviour predictions.

Can work on the fly

Recent events have shown the positives of staff being able to work from anywhere. And while sales reps may be virtual sellers for now, when they return to face-to-face selling you want a sales rep who can optimise their time when they’re out and about.

There are an abundance of apps available for sales teams to turn their phones into an indispensable sales tool. Good use of business apps can help reps act with urgency to whatever their customers and employers need.

Look for someone who loves learning

“A rut is a coffin with both ends kicked out”, says Marcus Cauchi Fism, Channel/Enterprise Sales Expert at Sandler Training UK.

Great salespeople will take the lead on their professional development by looking for insights from anyone. Be that from their managers, peers, and even their customers.

“What worked 10 years ago might not be what works today. Read, watch, listen every day. Study sales like any other profession to stay current,” says Marcus.

On top of learning, a good sales rep will constantly evaluate themselves to ensure they’re improving and moving forward. There should be a sense of fulfilment from learning something new just as there is from crushing a sales quota.

While not every sales rep you hire will have all the skills listed, recognising their ability to build these skills is what will set a good sales rep and an eventual great sales rep apart in an interview. And they’re the sales rep you should aim to hire for your team.

Find more ways to build the best sales team with our 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020 ebook.

Read more from Salesforce:

It’s time for sales leaders to rethink how they lead

Introducing the 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020 eBook

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The best salespeople make it seem like an art form. Today, more than ever, it’s an art that flourishes with a disciplined approach, when backed by science and engaged with by a team empowered by the best digital and cultural tools.

Great works include a comprehensive CRM, a refined sales funnel, aligned departments, diverse teams, great culture and a strategic approach to AI-powered tools. And the artist’s handbook? Our new ebook of 50 pro sales tips from the best in the business across Australia and New Zealand.

Death of a salesman? Not so fast.

Customers can now buy whatever they want, whenever they want, from whatever device they prefer. What’s more, thanks to the internet, they can do their own research into a product or service or just check social media to see what’s being said.

Many feared the internet would see the end of the need for salespeople. What could they possibly say or do if customers were already as informed as them?

Instead, successful sales teams have discovered that rather than being shut down by the digital revolution, it’s given them a million new colours to paint with.

For example, AI-powered tools allow sales reps to offload time-consuming, manual tasks and focus on what they’re really good at – being trusted, insightful advisors to their customers. AI is transforming the way sales teams identify, nurture and convert leads and is bringing predictive power to play so that sales reps can anticipate customer needs.

And Cloud-based CRM is now a priority for high performing businesses who want the power to make sales anytime, any place with up-to-date data that is fully integrated into their other platforms.

Are you ready for the sales renaissance?

The digital revolution has driven a renaissance in the way sales are conducted. There’s never been a more exciting time to be building sales strategies and developing the teams to execute them.

The 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020 ebook brings together unmissable insights from the best in their fields to give you a head start on the new decade’s challenges and opportunities. Balancing guidance on how to get the most out of new technologies with advice on how to nurture high-performance mindsets and successful cultures, the eBook gives you the tools you need to become a master of the art of sales in 2020.

Here’s a preview of what you can look forward to.

Five insights from the ebook

Tip #04 on building a great sales culture

In this one, CXC’s Corporate Solutions Director, Paul Chiswick, says their high performing sales team are involved every step of the way in developing and optimising client solutions. Rather than separating the sales team from that process, they’ve become integral to creating the customised models and tailored solutions they know their client needs. Expanding your picture of what your sales team is capable of might be the best move you make in 2020.

Tip #13 on lead prioritisation and growth

Sally Fallow, General Manager at Para Mobility, encourages you to match the passion of your sales team with the insight of your data. All the data in the world is no good if it can’t support the particular needs of each client. Using AI-powered tools to strategically mine your data is just one way data can boost sales revenue. Think lead prioritisation, forecasting and personalisation.

Tip #27 on social selling

Daniel Jurczyszyn, National Sales Director at Destined, cautions businesses to be authentic, or else. Customers won’t stand for inconsistency or perceived hypocrisy from a brand. By showing you believe in your brand and owning mistakes when they happen, you’ll be rewarded with customer loyalty online and off.

Tip #37 on negotiation

If you want to connect with your audience then you need to have empathy, says Kathy Rhodes, Chief Alchemist at the Thought Alchemist. Instead of communicating your value and making it about your brand, understand what your audience needs to hear and communicate that. A great sales pitch is one that offers understanding and solutions.

Tip #47 on building customer relationships

Phil Cleary, Senior Director of Sales Enablement here at Salesforce reminds us that we must know our customer better than they know themselves. Just when you think you’ve got all your personas down pat, drill deeper. With AI-powered tools, sales teams can further refine the customer journey and access personas they didn’t know existed. Step into your customers’ shoes: it’s one piece of sales advice that’s never gone out of fashion.

And what’s my sales tip for 2020? Find out by downloading your copy of the 50 Pro Sales Tips ebook and make 2020 your best sales year yet.

The post Introducing the 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020 eBook appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The average client spent $175,000 annually. Some spent more in some years and less in others, but the number was relatively stable over time. I soon found, however, that our lowest-billing client averaged so little that there was no reason to call them a client. A reasonably-priced hotel would charge more for a two-night stay. At the other extreme, our number one company spent just over $1,000,000 in a typical year, making it the most exciting and vital client in our portfolio—and we definitely wanted a killer portfolio.

With those figures, there was no way I could meet my goals by simply doubling the number of clients we won in a year. Instead of winning more deals, I decided we would pursue much larger contracts, something that would produce greater revenue even if we won fewer opportunities in a year. To execute this strategy, we would have to forego spending time with small potential clients, many of which took as much time and energy as the larger clients that could actually help us reach our revenue goals. Instead, we had to target clients that spent many times our average per-client revenue.

Since we had a million-dollar client, I set the target at a million dollars, calling these clients “anchor accounts” because they could sustain an operation. In our first year pursuing companies that needed to spend more, our average billing climbed from $175,000 to $475,000. The next year, it reached $775,000.

The Leader’s First Mistake

One of the first mistakes a sales leader might make is not setting the parameters for which clients they want and why they are essential. If you don’t build territory, establish account plans, and target the clients you want in your portfolio, your salespeople are on their own to decide whom they pursue. This laissez-faire approach can waste time on insignificant deals that distract an entire sales force from pursuing meaningful clients. As a result, many clients end up in the pipeline only because they were willing to engage with the salesperson.

When your job is to create opportunities, you need prospects. But not all opportunities are equal, and many are not worth your time or effort. Once you determine what kind of clients will help you meet your goals, you must ensure your team focuses their time and effort on acquiring them.

Cold Should Be Hot

This approach can be challenging, as I document in Eat Their Lunch. To start with, large clients already have a partner, likely one of many years’ standing. Their partners, your competitors, have built deep relationships with the contacts, and even though they may have some weaknesses, they are difficult to displace. These targets are the very opposite of a warm lead: they are as cold as ice at the start unless you get very lucky with timing. Larger clients also tend to be more complex, so they require salespeople who have the chops (sales effectiveness) to create a higher level of value than their competition.

It takes time to develop relationships and become known as someone with real insights and a provocative perspective. It also takes time for your dream client to suffer some setback that prompts them to consider buying from you. The fact that it takes time to develop these prospective clients should not dissuade you from pursuing them; instead, it should motivate you to start now. The sooner you begin to use a prospecting and nurture sequence to develop the relationship, the faster you’ll have an opportunity. The sooner you start Year 0—the year you become known to your contacts as someone who can help them produce better results—the sooner you will have an opportunity.

In my experience, for any set of prospective clients, some are compelled to change, others are immune to any attempt to talk about changing partners, and some might be persuaded. Sometimes it takes years pursuing a large client before you create an opportunity and win their business, and sometimes you happen upon them at the right time, winning their business in short order.

You Can’t Quadruple Your Activity

As you pursue your targeted clients, you will naturally find singles, doubles, and triples. Acquiring and serving a small client might cost more than you can make from their business. If that is true, you might avoid calling on them at all. Doubles and triples often grow up to be large clients, so you can pick them up along the way.

Much of the time, companies assume that their sales force can always do more—creating and winning more deals—even when they didn’t hit their prior year’s goals. Increasing your average deal size is one meaningful way to increase your revenue, and it prevents you from needing to triple or quadruple the number of deals you need to reach your goals.

The post Why You Need to Increase Your Average Deal Size appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The following list of mistakes includes the root cause, providing you with the beliefs that encourage the error. Here are nine enormous mistakes salespeople make and their root causes.

Leading with Your Company: There are two reasons we teach salespeople to open a sales call by talking about their company. The first, and perhaps the original purpose, is that people think it establishes credibility. If the salesperson isn’t credible, the company’s credibility should be a strong enough substitute to convince the prospect to buy. The second reason is that marketers believe the company story is compelling and that prospects care. While these approaches may have worked in the past, you must establish your credibility by demonstrating your subject matter expertise, your business acumen, and your situational knowledge.

Allowing Your Client to Determine the Process: When your client has total control of the process, the result is a Request for Proposal, a process that isn’t likely to serve you well. It may also prevent your prospective client from making the right decision, often based on a one-hour presentation. Because you sell what you sell, you should have a better understanding of the conversations and commitments your dream clients need to make a good decision. In many cases (maybe most), you increase your chances of winning and your client’s making the right decision when you sell the process before selling your solution.

Speaking Poorly of Your Competition: Some people believe you should never mention your competition. More, however, wait to address their competition only when their contact tells them that their price is higher than the competition. At this point, the salesperson tries to differentiate themselves by describing all the ways their competitor is terrible. The result of this conversation inverts the outcome, causing the client to believe the salesperson throwing their competitor under the bus is terrible, as evidenced by their defensiveness. When you don’t know how to defend the investment you are asking your client to make, you might believe it is easier to tear down your competitor, in which case, you are wrong. There is nothing inherently wrong with speaking about your competitors, as long as you say nice things about them as a way to differentiate yourself early in the sales conversation.

Going Faster Than Your Client: You don’t want to take longer than you have to win a deal, and you don’t want your client to have to wait longer than is necessary to produce better results and reap the benefits of your solution. However, going faster than your dream client can cause you to become disconnected, with you far ahead of them in the process. You may know all you need to know to provide them with the right solution, but your prospective client may need more conversations to move forward. When this is true, you bring the process to a halt. The desire to go fast cause things to go slow. If you want to go fast, you go slow enough that your prospect can keep up with you.

Choosing a Poor Prospecting Medium: All the mediums available to you have value, even if that value is contextual. Meaningful conversations are best held in person. Email works for following up meetings. For all the wonders of the information age and the ubiquity of computers, we have borrowed ideas from computers that don’t translate well to human interactions. Ideas like multi-tasking pretend human attention works like a chip. It doesn’t. The notion that efficiency is more important than effectiveness is to believe that the ease of effort outweighs the outcome. If there is no outcome, you are inefficient. The reason some salespeople use email for prospecting is that they believe it is efficient, while others believe it allows them to avoid conflict. The best medium for prospecting is still the phone, even if you use all the others as part of a campaign.

Emailing Pricing and Proposals: Your client asked you to send them a proposal and pricing, something you believe to be a keen interest in buying what you sell. So you submitted it to them weeks ago, and now, radio silence. Because you didn’t believe it was worth the time or effort to meet with the client to review your proposal and resolve their concerns, they flipped the pricing component, and decide to hold off. You disconnected the value of the solution from the investment by not presenting the outcomes. You know your prospect didn’t read your proposal, and you allowed them to say no without having to speak to you. Because you wanted to make it easy for you and your client, you ended up losing the deal—or causing a stall. The right answer is not to take yourself out of the deal.

Avoiding Difficult Conversations: Interminable. The difficult conversations you may have to engage in as you pursue and serve your dream clients are as many as there are stars in the sky. Asking your clients to change can be an awkward conversation, just as telling them the problem they have requires them to make internal changes can be, meaning it’s not you or their past partners. Discussions about the investment also offer a potential place for conflict or a complicated dialogue. You avoid these conversations when you believe they will cause you to lose a deal, but what makes you a trusted advisor is your willingness to engage in the challenging, messy, and complicated conversations necessary to better results.

Single-Threaded: Maybe you work on deals where there is only a single contact. If this is true, it is unlikely you work in business-to-business sales, and it is certain you are not engaged in a complex sale. In larger, complex deals, there is almost no chance that you are going to win without consensus. When you are working with a single stakeholder, you may believe you shouldn’t ask to bring other people on their team, especially an executive sponsor, assuming you will offend them and lose the deal. How you lose is by not gaining consensus.

Treating a Complex Deal as Transactional: If what you sell is transactional in nature, you should transact. What makes a sale complex is that it requires a decision your client doesn’t often have to make while also being significant or strategic in nature. When you treat the client’s decision as if it should be easy or avoid addressing the significance, your approach doesn’t match your prospective client’s needs. The approach makes it impossibly difficult for your client to move forward when they need information, insight, and help to ensure the decision is sound. Because the solution makes sense to you and you know it will work doesn’t mean these things are true for your client.

Avoid these mistakes by understanding the root causes. You are always better addressing things that are difficult and giving your chance to win than avoiding them and losing.

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Do you know why they make recruits in the ARMY crawl under barbed wire on obstacle courses?

I was in the ARMY, and I loved it, tank driver & assault trooper (M113), it was enormous fun. The reason they do the barbed wire trick is, so you learn to stay low when moving around the battlefield. BECAUSE if you stay low, you’re much less likely to get shot. The number one thing a soldier needs to do is …. stay alive….. if you get shot, you can’t do much else. Therefore, a critical skill you need to master is moving around the battlefield without being killed. – Make sense? Stay low and go, go, go.

The way they trained us in this skill has some merit in today’s business world. The ARMY leaders (SGTs, CPLs) made us do this repeatedly and slowly increased the level of difficulty of the skill.

And as a result, we got better and better at this critical skill.

My point is. If you need to be good at something, to do your job well, practise it.

Objections are a pretty good example of where this works well.

Objection training (Basic drill).

Step 1 – Figure out what the top 4 objections are you, and the rest of the team are getting every week.

Step 2 – Find who, in your team, is doing the best job right now at handling these objections and get them to tell everyone else what they are saying or doing to get past these objections.

Step 3 – Practise it, then increase the difficulty to secure the learning.

If your objection response strategy is sound and you’ve practised it. Then you and your team should be able to handle ‘standard’ objections with ease in your everyday selling situations whenever they come up.

Most sellers say they’re handling objections correctly, but I’d argue they’re not really. My observations indicate most are easily ‘baulked’ by the very simplest of objections. No time, No need, No budget, We use someone else. Stammer, stammer, stutter, pause… crickets. Ask a team member today what their objection strategy is for “we’ve already got one”?

Does this all sound too hard? Well, chances are you’ve already done it.

Remember the McDonalds, 2 All Beef patties competition from the late ’80s? – I do. They said if you could say the entire ingredients of a Big Mac in 4 seconds or less, you ‘won’ a free coke. This was an example of marketing genius. To this very day, I can easily rattle off the recipe for a Big Mac in well under the 4secs. Just as most of us could back then.’

I’d argue if you can force yourself to remember, practise and regurgitate a burger recipe for the equivalent reward of about .90cents of Coke. Do you think you should practise your objection response strategies so you can sell more, make more commission and have a better week/ day/ life? So why haven’t you?

I don’t know why you haven’t either, but you really should.

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