business builder sales management
How to turn over
sales reins, so reps
can do their job
“Hey, it’s a customer!” exclaims Dilbert’s pointy-hair boss as he sticks his head into a conference room to interrupt a sales call. By the time he’s finished hyping the features of the company’s future product — while proudly revealing that it will leapfrog the competition — the customer decides to hold off on buying the current version. The manager’s last words to Dilbert: “I have to run. Try not to blow the sale.”
Unfortunately for Dilbert, the new version will not be ready for a year and his boss will probably blame him for the lost sale. It is painfully evident that the pointy-hair boss does not understand (among many things) the sales process. He was not invited nor prepared to speak with this customer, yet grabbed control of the sales call without considering his employee’s credibility nor the customer’s needs.
This scenario could happen in any small company as sales people are hired to generate revenue. Far too often, business owners are wearing so many hats that they fail to adequately switch gears when it comes to managing employees. After all, they may have spent years inventing the product or months setting up its financing. Either way, they can easily tell the company’s story at the drop of a hat. But their role must change when owners turn over the sales reins. They need to relinquish their hold on information and customer relationships to allow others to represent the company’s products or services.
Design training
Before bringing that first sales person into the company, consider the amount of time, energy, training and sales tools needed to ensure success. A training program, spread over several months, is critical for getting a “newbie” up to speed. Sales training is more than sending someone new out with a demo to make as many cold calls as possible.
Talking about the product or service comes quite naturally to most owners as they have been eating, sleeping and breathing it for some time. Now that expertise and passion must be transferred to someone else. What has been intuitive must be translated into a series of sequential actions. The sales process typically includes: planning the sales call, identifying customer priorities, presenting the benefits of your recommendation, responding to customer feedback and questions, and asking for the order.
Design a program to integrate knowledge, experience and clear market vision into this sales process. There are four main categories of sales knowledge development to include:
• Industry knowledge, including customers, competition, industry trends and economy factors.
• Product knowledge, such as manufacturing, applications, price lists, sales literature, differentiators, answers to frequently asked questions.
• Sales role, tasks and responsibilities based on range of customer and customer needs; including all selling and non-selling activities
• Time and territory management, which covers goal setting, account strategy and planning process.
Owners and their sales reps need to work at their relationship. Behavioral style and generational differences can produce tension. Good managers will ask their sales reps what they need from them to be successful. This provides insight into how to effectively work together.
Skills and metrics
Managing sales reps who are not working to their potential can be frustrating, especially for owners who know the product inside-out and believe selling the product is easy. It takes time and patience to develop sales talent. That’s why it is important to develop an ongoing plan for skill development with benchmarks.
Skill development can begin with helping a person to ask good, provocative questions to engage a customer during the sales call. This allows customers to think about their business and the product’s possible effect. Will it increase sales and productivity? Will it save or drive down costs? No one buys unless at least one of these three areas is impacted. Reps need to ask high-level questions to get at the customer’s business issues. What’s more, help them to identify the right buyer who is at a high-enough level to make a financial commitment for the product or service.
Another way to encourage higher sales potential is to define and agree on sales steps with measurable actions to define accountability for outcomes. Performance metrics helps the sales rep to understand how many calls are needed to get X number of face-to-face appointments. From there, determine how many appointments are needed to generate X number of qualified prospects to make one sale. As an owner, it is critical to support the rep in benchmarking conversion goals to drive revenue.
Clarifying roles
Relinquishing the care and feeding of their most valuable customers to employees is difficult for most business owners. They wonder: Is it possible to stay current with customers without stepping on my salespeoples’ toes? Communication is the key to clarifying the roles between the owner and rep.
If a customer calls the owner with a problem, for example, the issue should be acknowledged with a promise to discuss it with the sales rep and the expectation of a future call with a suitable solution. In this way, the customer feels that the owner is involved but the relationship is “driven” by the sales rep and no credibility or influence is lost with that customer.
Passing the baton to the sales rep is important whether the owner is meeting customers at a trade show, professional meeting or golf course. On the flip side, owners should ask salespeople to keep them informed about their customers so as not to be surprised at the golf course without a critical piece of customer information. Remember, many customers assume that information is shared inside your organization. All it takes is an e-mail or other documentation that may also, if appropriate, copy the customer to close the loop.
Although it can be painful to turn over the sales reins, a well-thought out training program with skill development and role clarification will ultimately affect how fast a business can grow.
lfschleeter@stkate.edu; www.stkate.edu
