Be Different or be dead

November 22, 2018

How an amazing sales culture can easily be nurtured

How an amazing sales culture can easily be nurtured.

There’s a significant correlation between culture and success, and many teams know exactly what a positive sales culture is all about.
Transparency, a strong mission statement, and communication are common buzzwords. But it’s tougher to know exactly how to build the culture you envision for your business.

Successfully crafting the ideal sales culture for your business requires teamwork at all levels, from hourly workers to C-level executives and it can seem difficult to keep up with the latest trends in team building.
Whether you decide to focus on better understanding key results methodology or increasing communication, there are many different avenues to consider.

Here are some of the most powerful ways to effect change in your company’s culture and help you stand out from the competition so, in the end, you can improve your bottom line.

Share common goals

If you’re serious about improving your sales culture, you need to ensure that everyone involved is on board with the changes and feels that their voice is heard.

Management needs to make the expectations and goals of each individual member clear so that everyone is on the same page. Rather than rigidly enforcing change from the top down, leaders must be open to input and feedback.

Improve interdepartmental communication

While your main goal is to improve your sales culture, you can help implement those changes by working closely with other departments, especially marketing.

Businesses that closely align marketing and sales see substantially higher retention and win rates. Both sides bring a valuable perspective to the table. They can also offer suggestions for how each department can help the other succeed.

Continually adapt

A team culture can’t be created overnight, and it requires constant improvement and adjustment. Weekly meetings and open communication over other platforms are important. They allow both salespeople and managers to check in and see what aspects of their approaches are successful and which can be improved.

If you allow your sales department to get complacent, your actual sales probably will too. The best sales teams are those that are willing to blow up the current sales model. Instead, they’ll focus on constantly learning and striving to improve with innovative tactics and new strategies.

Promote group interaction

A great sales culture doesn’t see its employees only as workers. Team members are recognized as valuable individuals with unique perspectives. Everyone will perform better, both in and out of the office, if they feel acknowledged.

Getting the sales team together for events outside of work will have a hugely beneficial impact on communication and team-building.

Allow for light competition

In the end, your salespeople are all on the same team – but that doesn’t mean a little competition can’t help maximize results. The goal here is to create a sense of competition that doesn’t lead to a negative or “everyone for themself” dynamic.

One great way to encourage healthy competition is keeping it directed at the right targets. Rather than having salespeople work against each other, challenge them to improve upon their own individual sales histories, or to do better than your competitors. Mix things up by using a variety of incentives and goals.

Maintain a sense of accountability

While this aspect of sales culture isn’t always as pleasant as the others, it’s one of the most important. Everyone on your team should understand their goals and quotas as hard targets rather than simply guidelines or parameters. This involves clearly communicating all expectations.

In the event a member of your team is beginning to fall behind their goals, it’s important to talk rather than simply allowing them to underperform. Ask them what they’re struggling with and work together to find a way to bring them back up to speed. It’s important to remember that you’re all working together, and your job is to help them reach their sales potential.

Decrease turnover

This will hopefully happen simply as a result of the other changes, but keeping turnover as low as possible is vital to a healthy culture in any work environment. It’s always more expensive to bring in a new employee than to retain an existing one; not to mention, turnover can have a detrimental impact on morale.

Two methods of reducing turnover are: Attracting better talent, and having better communication with your team. Give them a way to communicate what they don’t like about the position, and keep your compensation at or above the average rate for each position. Making each employee feel valued as an individual will make them more likely to stay with the company long-term.

Benefits of a thriving sales culture

Following the ideas laid out above is the key to establishing a successful sales culture. In doing so, you can differentiate your business from your competitors. Also, a great sales culture can be a key element in your recruitment approach. It can become one of your main competitive advantages as it not only helps you attract talent, but also enables you to get the best possible performance out of all your employees.

Changing your business’s sales culture is a long-term that requires a time commitment from everyone involved. It can do wonders for your overall productivity and employee engagement levels, which will in turn help employee retention rates.

Many forward-thinking companies have started to prioritize a strong company culture at all levels, and they have typically seen extraordinary results.

—  Rae Steinbach is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing, of course. You can find her on Twitter here.

• Posted 11.22.18 at 04:59 am by Roy Osing
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July 23, 2018

The traditional sales model is dead for these 6 simple reasons

Source: Unsplash

The traditional sales model is dead for these 6 simple reasons.

Adapt or die —we have seen this consequence play out for centuries.

Particularly now, in this post COVID-19 era, it’s a matter of survival for sales to pay attention to the changes in the environment that demand a change in the way sales has been practiced prior to the pandemic; many of current sales fundamentals are not sustainable in the new normal.

If sales is to maintain relevance in today’s world, a transformation of the way it is practiced is required. Not just incremental change, but a completely new approach. Blowing up the old model; building a new discipline.

This is why traditional sales practices are no longer relevant:

1. Customer choice

People have virtually unlimited choice today from a variety of suppliers whose numbers that grow daily. In particular, COVID-19 has caused a completely unexpected increase in the online business.

During lockdowns and in an effort to maintain physical distancing, consumers are turning to the internet to buy what they need. And businesses have literally stopped buying as their customer base is drying up while everyone is forced or stay as close to home as possible and governments try to figure out how to open up the economy safely.

The expansion of the selling market to include more players — including DIY — increases the competitive pressures on traditional sales to attract and keep customers.

Customers wield much more power now than they did mere months ago and traditional sales will have to discover how to successfully play in this much different world.

And with the proliferation of competitors comes the need for sales to be much clearer on why people should buy from their organization as opposed to the competition; unique selling propositions in the old sales world have been woefully inadequate and confusing to potential customers.

And they need to talk to value and not continue to flog the “buy from me because our prices are cheaper than anyone else” message which is tiring and quite frankly untrue in the majority of instances.

Reasons to buy must be much clearer and specific otherwise sales will falter and die.

2. Individuals not crowds

Personal markets where the wants and desires of the individual are taking a dominant place in the demand for goods and services, replacing products which are positioned for mass markets based on the average common needs of people in a crowded market segment.

People want their cravings taken care of; they are turned off by the assumption that they are like the crowd in any way.

Crowd-based mass market messaging is therefore becoming less effective and is returning less as a communications investment. Targeted personalized sales communication to individuals is required to ensure customers get the precise value they want.

3. Switching suppliers

Customers are becoming more fickle and are able to switch suppliers with ease. Barriers that once existed are disappearing as switching costs approach zero.
Customers use this opportunity to hop from one organization to another much more frequently than in the past.

The only defence against this is for sales to create strong barriers to customer exit, an imperative that has never been given a high sales priority in the past. This involves paying more attention to loyalty considerations in the sales process than simply trying to push product.

And because of high market churn, acquiring new customers relies more than ever on obtaining referrals from the existing customer base, again stressing the need to build strong customer relationships.

4. Teamwork

Sales is less of an island in the organization. It is only one element an organization has to deliver as part of the organization’s value proposition. The sales identity is rapidly blending with marketing and customer service to respond to the holistic needs of a customer.
Customers are forcing sales itself to provide better customer service.

Customer loyalty has to be earned at every touch point be it personal contact, an organization’s web site, communications media and social media.
All customer interfaces must work together seamlessly and synergistically and must carry the same message and engage the customer in the same way.

Sales will be challenged to give up their traditional narcissistic view and adopt more of a team view of what they must contribute.
Sales gunslingers which were saluted in the past will be admonished in the future.

5. Customer ideals

People are buying more and more from organizations that align with their values and belief system — social responsibilities, environmental-friendliness, philanthropic intent and so on.

If sales can’t (or won’t) take the time to discover the ideals held by each and every one of their clients, they will seriously damage the relationships they have with their customers and jeopardize future sales opportunities.

6. Flogging is passé

No longer is it acceptable for the salesperson to flog products and services at people; people hate the process and simply won’t buy.
Sales must move from this approach and rely on creating an engagement approach that people actually enjoy and not feel pressured into a purchase.

People are buying experiences now rather than product functionality and technology. They take for granted that the technology is state of the art and that the product will deliver what it says it will. What makes someone buy from one salesperson and not another is how they feel about the sales individual as a person — are they likeable? — and the sales process they are being put through.

The product flogger is obsolete as will be the organization that continues to try and use it as the sales role.

The insightful ones are quickly moving to a world flogging fan relationships and customer intimacy is the new normal for sales.

New sales muscle is required to address these new realities.

Are you re-inventing your sales machine?

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 7.23.18 at 04:33 am by Roy Osing
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May 7, 2018

How to turn a service nightmare into a sales win

My assistant burst into my office with a horrified look on her face!

The General Manager of one of our premier hotel clients in Vancouver was on the line and wanted to speak with me IMMEDIATELY.

My EA warned me that he was going ballistic.

Apparently we had somehow put his entire communications network out of service earlier that morning and he had been “in the dark” for at least 3 hours.

I was the executive leader for business services at the time, and he chose to escalate the service breakdown to my office.

I took the call of course and listened to his concerns. He “wailed” on me with wild abandon. He couldn’t contain his anger; he screamed and let it flow.

He wanted my head!

His demands were quite simple. He wanted to be compensated for the lost business he suffered by virtue of having no communications service and he wanted it taken care of fast.

I told him that I was extremely sorry for our screwup (exact words) and that I would take care of this right away.

I called my sales director who was going apoplectic over the situation and asked him if there was a secret desire the GM had that we could satisfy and perhaps turn things around.

The sales guys had done their job and discovered through the GM’s assistant that he had been coveting an antique telephone for his office credenza for quite some time but had never make the decision to buy it. For some reason this particular type of phone was almost a fetish of his; an itch he had never scratched.

Armed with this information, we executed our recovery plan.

Our recovery plan

First, I got a cheque cut for him as my way of responding to the business he had lost during the service outage. There was no way I wanted to get into a negotiation of exactly how much business he thought he lost.

My strategy was to preempt that whole process. (Important side note: I didn’t tell our lawyers what I was up to as they would only tell me that I SHOULDN’T do it because it would be tantamount to admitting that we were in the wrong. REALLY?)

Next, I contacted our installation folks and asked that they get the specialty phone the client wanted and join me at his office within the hour.

Finally, cheque in hand, I headed to his office with my sales director riding shotgun.

About an hour and a half after his call to me our team arrived at his office.

This is how it played out.

At his office

I apologized (again) for our shabby treatment and handed him the cheque as restitution for our sins. Right away I could see him come down from his emotional peak. “It’s ok” he said. “Mistakes happen”.

I then asked the installation team into his office (with his permission of course) with the object of his affection and asked where it could be installed. He could not contain himself when he saw the phone.

Suddenly our meeting was not about the egregious way we screwed over his business that morning. And it wasn’t about whether the cheque actually was sufficient to recover his lost business (which by the way we were not obligated to do by law in any event).

The conversation and energy in the room was channeled to the actions we took to recover from our blunder rather than the blunder itself.

The meeting ended with our sincere apology (once again) and an offer to do more to atone for our sins if he thought more should be done.

He was quite frankly delighted with where we ended up; we could do no more for him.

This sales tale ended miraculously; it couldn’t have been better.

A fan forever

After the service incident and our recovery, I heard stories from other clients who recounted how this GM told the story of our service OOPS! and how amazed he was at how far we were prepared to go to make amends.

This client never left us in spite of what we did to him.

In fact his loyalty to our organization intensified over the ensuing years.

The morals of the story

✔️ Always apologize (endlessly but earnestly) regardless of the circumstances. And NEVER quote company policy or “it was beyond our control” reasons that caused the service disaster.

✔️ Don’t consult lawyers or anyone else; don’t ask for permission; do the right thing to serve the customer’s best interests;

✔️ Act quickly to remedy the offence. You don’t have much time before the customer leaves screaming how crummy your service is to one and all.

✔️ Charge sales with the role of discovering customer secrets which contain the power to recover from the inevitable client screw over;

✔️ If done correctly, a mind blowing recovery actually build loyalty and turns the victim of the offence into a raving fan who tells everyone they touch how great you are.

P.S. This is not an isolated story illustrating the power of service recovery on customer retention and ongoing sales. Over my 33+ year career I have used the strategy to build remarkably successful sales organizations.

Brilliant recovery when you screw a customer over always works.

Try it and see.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.7.18 at 02:30 am by Roy Osing
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March 26, 2018

6 easy ways to improve marketing and sales working together

In every organization there is a degree of conflict between marketing and sales

Marketing complains that sales don’t move products or services effectively; sales claims they don’t get the support from marketing they need to do the job.

Marketing says that certain sales activity is off strategy; sales responds by criticizing that marketing doesn’t provide clear enough direction.

Around and around it goes.

A certain amount of this dance is healthy; too much, however, and it’s dysfunctional and can adversely impact organizational performance.

These 6 actions will help link marketing and sales in harmony.

Clarify the roles of each party

Marketing sets strategy; sales executes it. Sales is a channel to market; setting the channel strategy — i.e. what channel sells what product — is the responsibility of marketing.

Sales has no formal role in setting overall market direction other than providing input as the frontline customer facing team.
It’s critical that all align with these roles otherwise dysfunction occurs as groups trip over each other and little constructive gets done.
If there are issues about who does what, escalate to the highest level in the organization to get resolution.

Develop a detailed marketing plan

The marketing plan must have sufficient granularity for sales to create their sales plan incorporating the strategy focus and priorities they must carry out.
This is often a major issue where the marketing plan lacks the clarity required to define the specific actions sales must take to execute successfully.

Without absolute clear translation for sales they will be forced to make their own interpretation of what marketing expects. This puts sales in a quasi-planning role for which they are not responsible nor ill equipped to play.

Engage sales in setting the overall revenue target

This does not mean sales has a decision making role in setting the target; this is the responsibility of marketing.
Sales, however, should be looked to provide critical input on the available revenue potential and decide how it should be allocated at the customer level.

In addition, should there be any shortfall between the tops down marketing driven revenue target and bottoms up sales driven quota — and there always is — sales should decide how the difference will be allocated among customer groups and specific customers.

Implement an internal report card

The report card is a vehicle that allows marketing and sales to review and rate one another in terms of how well each function supports and meets the needs of the other.

The process is simple: marketing defines their 6 critical needs of sales who, in turn, outline what they expect of marketing. Every 6 months report cards are exchanged and each side rates the other — ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘F’ rating — on each support item. Results are analyzed and actions taken by both sides to address where performance has fallen short of expectations.

Jointly review revenue results monthly

Joint action planning based on results against monthly revenue objectives will solidify and direct the relationship to enhance performance.
Name calling is reduced and energy directed to resolving issues rather than blaming the other side for any performance glitch.

I mandated that these sessions be formally planned and would drop in unannounced to witness the proceedings and ask questions that challenged how well the team was working together. It became an integral part of “how things were done around here”.

Celebrate achievements together — good or bad

You either make it together or you fail together. There is no finger pointing, only sharing. Remarkable teams are created by jointly owning performance results.

As president of the organization I hosted quarterly performance celebrations between the two groups. We reviewed the successes — and recognized the heroes — and shortcomings — and what was learned through the process.
We tried to recognize groups of individuals with a mix of marketing and sales to further the notion of teamwork.

Aligning marketing and sales is not good enough. They need to be joined at the hip in order to deliver the high level of performance every organization expects.

Leadership needs to be engaged to make it happen otherwise nothing will change and mutual distrust will continue.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.26.18 at 03:55 am by Roy Osing
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