The average salesperson deals with prospect leads as they come, working all that they can, leveraging their product or service to fit the need and get the order. Absent available leads, they prospect in much the same manner, looking for anyone willing to listen. Asked about their sales funnel, they explain all of the prospects they are working in an aggregate manner, in reality describing a sales “bucket.”

Sales professionals understand the difference between a sales funnel and a bucket of poorly-qualified prospects.

• They know they can’t handle “all that come.” They know how many qualified prospects they can handle effectively and they manage to that number.
• They plan to close at least 75% of the prospects they place in their funnel and they are careful to qualify each opportunity accordingly. They establish qualification criteria that helps them quickly identify optimal prospects: intensity of need, sense of urgency, size of the opportunity, stage in buying process, competition involved, type of buyer, optimal fit for their offering, etc.
• They fill their funnel with diversification and flow in mind. They have a range of deal opportunity sizes and time frames designed to build consistency and stability into their revenue and income generation.
• They manage the flow of their funnel weekly. They know what they need to add, when and how to move prospects from to stage to stage, and they get orders when planned.

Of the scores of sales people I have interviewed or encountered in my career, very few of them understood how to build and manage a quality sales funnel. They fail to understand that selling is a strategic process that demands the satisfaction of the prospect, their own company, and themselves. They fail to understand true prospect needs and their ability to fill those needs. They fail to assess each opportunity for optimal fit and ability to win. And they fail to build and manage a quality process that would allow them to control their sales destiny.

Sales funnels are tools like any other. The ability to perfect the use of the tool in a way that maximizes performance is the key to great success. All professional golfers use quality golf clubs – but every golfer perfects his/her own personal swing to maximize the effect of the club on the ball. You can easily locate many variations of a sales funnel tool. It is up to you to perfect the use of that tool, maximize your selling success and kick the “bucket” goodbye!

Sales training at most companies, if ever offered, consists of sending sales personnel to a one or two day  sales course. Sometimes this happens annually, but typically it occurs far less frequently. Many sales training programs conducted in-house are events where new products are introduced, in nauseating detail, with the thought that product training is sales training, which it is not.

PRODUCT TRAINING IS NOT SALES TRAINING

Sales is the only critical business discipline in which you cannot get a traditional degree. Sales personnel are expected to know how to sell – presumably intuitively. The thought that one-day seminars will improve your revenue generation is misguided optimism. I would estimate that less than ten percent of all sales personnel are truly selling professionals. Unless you already have real selling pros that seek out mentors like Tom Hopkins or Neil Rackham and continually build on their own skills, you have a solid opportunity to improve revenue generation by providing effective and ongoing training.

LESS THAN 10% OF SALES PEOPLE ARE TRUE PROS

Businesses that excel in the sales area know how to find, hire, and retain self-motivated sales professionals and then continue to develop those skills on an ongoing basis. For tips on how to interview for top reps, see my Sales Representative Interview Form. True sales pros thrive on proper training techniques as well as the opportunity to compete with peers. From inside phone sales personnel to field sales representatives, ongoing skills building programs are essential for maximum success.

At a minimum, consider the following ideas:

1. Provide a time on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis where your sales team comes together for skills building:
   • Objections Notebook: Have each of them keep a spiral notebook labeled “Objections.” During the time between meetings ask them to write down at the top of each page an objection they had trouble handling. At the meetings, work thru how this objection could be handled and have them all write, word for word, the solution(s) in their books.
   • Win / loss Notebook: Have each of them keep a similar notebook labeled “Win / Loss.” During the time between meetings, have them write down wins and losses and the true reasons for each. At the meeting, discuss each person’s win or loss stories. Clearly understand why an account was won and well as understand why an account was lost. Have them all write pertinent learning points in their own books to be used going forward.
2. Conduct at least one multi-day sales training program annually for your entire sales team to learn both about new products as well as how to improve product sales.
   • Combine Technical and Skills Training: If you have new product training to conduct, combine the technical education with sales skills training activities so that your people actually apply the knowledge in selling situations. Don’t teach them about a new feature, teach them how to apply a benefit to a problem that will help close a sale. Limit the time your development people spend with your sales team to sporadic windows – too much technology kills the learning process.
   • Keep Them Moving: Good sales people are lousy at sitting for more than 45 minutes without some sort of activity. In my experience, taking regular “game breaks,” where your team is up, moving, and competing works very well.
   • Engage Them With Practice: Mix education of selling skills, competition, and product knowledge with real-life selling scenarios. Roll playing scenarios or knowledge games, pitting one person against the other for fastest correct response, provide stimulation as well as education. If you have sales people who are too intimidated by these activities, ask yourself are they really sales people? I actually had a sales rep freeze in a roll play situation, get up and leave the room, check out of the hotel, go to the airport and fly home. He was not a sales person, he was a customer service person, and we subsequently moved his responsibilities accordingly and he shined in the new role.
   • Create Teamwork and Competition: Divide your group into two or more teams and have them compete for prizes over the entire meeting. Get them team shirts or hats or something and pit them against each other. Sales people love to compete and win – the more you integrate that capability with the learning process, the faster the education will become practice.

For all of the ideas above, it is essential that the person driving your training activities is a sales professional. If this is not your sales leader, contract the right talent. I have provided only a few ideas above, and I have employed all of them and many more in the development of successful global selling teams. Like all disciplines, continual training and stimulation is required to gain maximum performance. Invest in your sales team and reap the rewards.

Different sales techniques, based upon the product or service and the prospective “user,” are required to maximize selling success. Selling commodity, easily-purchased products is significantly different than selling expensive, considered-purchase products. But in all cases, sales occur when the benefits received equals or exceeds the price required to obtain it – when “value” is created.

When value is not created, the purchase does not take place, or if it does, “buyer’s remorse” sets in. Value decisions are made daily by real people on a personal basis, at every level of every organization. Making the assumption that business buyers do not make personal decisions is a mistake. All purchase decisions have personal components that must be understood and accommodated as part of the value-building process.

Typically the higher the value (cost/benefit) of the purchase, the more “considered” the purchase will become, because the risk of making a bad decision – for the company or the purchaser themselves – increases. With this increased need for value, the amount of “selling” required to cause the decision to be made in your favor will also increase. As the investment becomes more expensive, more technical, and more competitive;

• The higher in the organization the decision is likely to be made / approved
• The longer the sales cycle is likely to be
• The greater the value required to cause a purchase to take place
• The larger the number of players involved is likely to be
• The more important it is to build relationships early in the process with the right people

Early relationship building allows both seller and buyer to clearly establish reasons to move forward. The seller quickly validates that there is an opportunity to make a sale over time and identifies the needs and person(s) involved. The buyer validates that the seller can meet their needs. Relationships built correctly, at the right time with the right people create the highest mutually satisfactory outcomes – where both purchaser and seller get what they want.

Most high-value RFPs, for example, are awarded to the firm that built the relationship ahead of the RFP being generated – wisely ensuring that the RFP itself was written around their offering. Rarely does an RFP get generated for high-value products or services without such an end-offering in mind. And businesses that simply answer RFP’s as their first contact with prospective buyers close a very small portion of what could be attained.

If your product or service requires value to be built over time, start early in the process, work at all the right levels, and help prospective users make quality investments. Don’t wait for prospects to send you an RFP written around someone else’s specifications. Don’t make the assumption that the person that contacted you is the decision maker. Don’t mistake continued communications as a sign that you are likely to get the sale. And don’t assume that “presenting” your offering is “selling.”

Showing up and throwing up

“Showing up and throwing up” is a selling technique used by rookie sales personnel daily. In this process, it is assumed that if you “tell” a prospect everything about your product, the sheer brilliance of the product itself will cause the decision to made in your favor. Great “presenters” are not by themselves great sales people, they are simply great showmen.

Most technical product or service businesses build technical sales presentation teams as their sales force. These presenters work exclusively at the technical decision-maker level because that is the level that engaged with them to start. The only way to win at this level is to convince the “technical” decision makers that they have the best widget and cause them to sell upward or laterally in their organizations to other unknown decision makers. This process tends to be a “show up and throw up” agenda – whereby the technical selling team inundates the technical buying team with all the data they believe is needed to win the order – without understanding any unique customer needs around which to build required value.

Successful high-value sales people spend their professional life learning to build great relationships with the right people and the right value – at the right time – to win the greatest percent of deals. They know how to employ valued company resources and how to choreograph the use of those resources at the right times.

If you need to build a great value to maximize sales, you need to build high-value selling teams – not just presentation teams.