Remember when you started playing your first instrument or organized sport or dance class? Remember the warm ups, stretching, and odd “drills” where your coach or teacher made you do the same exercises over and over? Ever stop to think why they made you do all of that?
Your coach was breaking down the physical movements of your activity into the smallest possible parts to teach you and your body how to do them well. It’s the concept of creating “muscle memory” – preparing your mind and body to perform.
Selling is a skill. In fact, selling requires mastery of a whole series of skills: communication, persuasion, presentation, negotiation, not to mention political navigation. In addition to these skills, our sales reps need LOTS of information: product knowledge, competitor positioning, industry concepts, sales methodology terminology, operational tools, internal processes and people resources.
When it comes to training, and specifically onboarding new sellers, why do organizations spend 80%+ of our time on “information” and little to no time on “skills?”
Maybe it’s because reps hate being “taught” how to sell by sales trainers with limited selling experience. Maybe it’s because we hire people with an “assumption” that they have these skills already – even though they’ve never applied them to your solutions specifically. Or, maybe it’s because there are lots of teams responsible for “information,” but no one’s really responsible for their “skills” (managers are just responsible for performance, not how they got there).
There are three potential levels of “skills drills” that you can create for your new hires:
In the beginning, you want your reps to practice communicating your “core” messages; in other words, you want them to begin to align their verbal muscle memory with your foundational value.
- Beginner level – make reps “execute” mock steps in your sales process
- Prospecting – write a value message for a prospect (review with coach)
- Discovery – after teaching them product or solution information, play “White House Press Briefing.” The facilitator should act like a customer while the entire group of new hires asks discovery questions. Have them then use the facilitators responses as their prospect’s “requirements” and write up a positioning/messaging strategy for the opportunity
- Proposals Case Study – review pricing and develop a negotiation plan based on a case study
- Contracts – create a case study with challenging, real-world issues and then have your new hire document/update a contract to support the case study.
Next, combine their fundamental solution knowledge with different selling processes: prospecting, qualifying, discovery, requirements-to-solution determination, and finally value-to-solution presentations.
- Advanced Level – walk your reps through the process by using both a skill AND information
- Prospecting – read/study “Selling to VITO”* now write a “VITO letter” using your earlier value message. If you are not familiar with “VITO” selling, click here.
- Customer Story – have your new hire interview someone with intimate knowledge around a successful customer win. Then ask them to write another prospecting email, outlining that customer story as succinctly as possible.
- Respond to a Real RFP – provide your new hire an existing RFP that has already been responded to as practice. Compare his response and the one submitted to help him better understand how to present the company and its solutions.
- Present Internally – find friends, mentors, managers, and then executives for mock presentations. Do this multiple times. Once they’ve graduated to presenting to a customer (ensure that their manager and potentially a senior salesperson can attend), hold a post-presentation coaching session.
The expert level is where you help them think through the processes of preparation, differentiation, competitive positioning and ultimately closing the deal.
- Expert level – Before your prospect meeting is set to begin, as a sales manager, sit down with the rep who will be presenting and do a mock run through. It is your duty to make this run through as real as possible and challenge them to prepare in the right way. “Over-preparing” at this stage is expected.
- Pre-call Scoping – before a customer call, have your new hire pre-determine potential business issues/challenges that your solutions can solve or questions that may arise.
- This helps demonstrate that you’re prepared to answer competitive questions, while also demonstrating the strength of your solution.
- Document – prior to the call, document critical qualification AND discovery questions, separately. Do a post-call review to see if you were successful in navigating the conversation, and/or how the customer’s responses differed from your expectations.
- Negotiation Planning – have your new hire participate in a negotiation plan for another sales rep.
There’s a reason why professional athletes, dancers and musicians continue to re-visit drills, stretches and scales. These exercises keep their mind and body aligned and focused to execute at an elite level. And when you bring your sellers on board as new hires, these exercises will improve their ability to align their emerging solution knowledge with their “physical ability” (which is essentially their verbal communication).
If professional athletes, dancers and musicians practice like this, why should your new hires expect anything less?
* Selling to Vito, written by Anthony Parinello, is an absolute must read for any salesperson. The book teaches you how to communicate with the Very Important Top Officer of any company and explains how executives expect sellers to communicate.
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