… Continued from Part II
RD> Do you envision that salespeople have to be trained and coached differently to meet the needs of today's crazy-busy buyer?
JK> Look at the current buyer: The amount of information they're exposed to daily through all their "devices" impacts their ability to think and pay attention. They are easily distracted. They clearly have a “net it out” mentality. And, they get quickly overwhelmed with what’s on their plate to do.
A salesperson has to change their message and how they communicate with these people. Buyers listen to voice-mails with a finger on the Delete button. If a salesperson cannot sustain their interest, they'll get deleted immediately. With email, ExactTarget stated that the average person makes a decision to delete/read/forward the message in 2.7 seconds.
These facts force a rethinking of what it means to be successful to sell. In last year, a recent survey 49% of salespersons did not meet their sales quota. What do sales leaders to react to the decline last year? They raise the quota, so now 2010 will be even worse. They don't invest in the salespeople so they can learn to work differently. Instead they just cut the training budget to save money.
RD> Do you think the lack of investment in skills training is due to spending more in technology?
JK> They cut training when they get scared. Instead of figuring out what they can do differently, sales leaders go to an activity-driven work habit. Let’s do more of these sales calls and increase the pipeline instead of targeting more their efforts. They don't spend enough on appropriate technology and training to enable the best results.
The truth of the matter is that I think the training providers themselves are part of the issue for less spend. Budgets allocation is based on real ROI measures. Most training companies provide event-based training and convince sales leaders every few years to do the customer-centric selling or solutions-based selling or some such acronym based training methods.
The sales leaders in turn forget to focus in what helps them manage sales end-to-end from lead generation to contracts to up-selling. And worse, both providers and sales leaders never link the training investment to actual sales. There is little to no learning community to extract the tribal knowledge within an organization. There is very little tracking of sales coaching that is linked to again sales effectiveness.
Having said this, I think companies are realizing this and are forming sales enablement teams where they are determining a framework on that best helps the salesperson integrate their sales conversations and manage the tribal knowledge. Bottom-line is that sales leaders have to stop treating all issues as special causes and stop reverting back to activity based life (checking the box) whenever crisis hits.
RD>Well! [Chuckles] Thank you for endorsing our differentiator. I seldom plug our company in these interviews, but that’s what our software platform does i.e. give on-demand real time linkage and ROI to sales leaders, so they can effectively manage the entire buyer cycle and skills sets of salespeople that meet the buyer’s needs. We care about performance goals and not just learning goals.
RD> What do you think about the using social media tools and its current utilization?
JK> Right now, I am seeing a great seduction of the tools. There are many tools that capture all information about the buyer and that information can be very useful. There is good stuff available and the tools are a very cool aid to prepare for the sales calls.
However, the most important thing is the relevance of the information and how we use it on sales calls. On my website, I have information about my cat. So many people call me and say, “I saw on your website that you have a cat named Cali.” How is that relevant to our conversation?
This comes down to the critical thinking skills – or lack of them. They're not thinking about how to best use all the information that's available. I think this needs to be taught, or else the tools itself becomes ineffective in delivering results. For example, if I see on your website, that you are Lean Six Sigma person, then as a person selling to you, if I can integrate that information while selling to you, you will be more likely to listen to me. The value of the information needs to be appropriately leveraged.
RD> We are actually considering building some games that teach sales and service professional how to filter and use social media information that is relevant to the buyer or customer.
JK> Great idea.
RD> Not to switch the conversation, before we end, I wanted to ask you about your SalesShebang.com website. Tell me more about it and how it got started.
JK> Sales SheBang started when media folks contacted me and would always express “Oh! It is so nice to find a woman sales expert who can talk about sales strategy – and not just the soft stuff like networking and communications.” And I would always respond, there are tons of women sales experts out there that you should talk too – and I'd give them names.
Then I decided that I should bring these experts together and share our wisdom via a website and conference. The best part was having the extraordinary talented people like Anneke Seley , Anne Miller come together and send our message to more talented women salespeople whose ideas are under-leveraged.
RD> One last question, what do you see as trends in B2B sales process?
JK> I think that buyers will be harder and harder to reach. They will have more expectations from salespeople than ever before – and will choose to work with the ones who have good solid creative and critical thinking skills. Sellers who are proficient in this area will excel. I also see the increase use of technology to learn more about customers more quickly. And, I think you'll see companies doing much more online to attract prospects into "their world," then educating them as they're trying to make good decisions for their firm.
RD> Thank you Jill. This was a fabulous learning time for me.
JK> Truly my pleasure. Let's keep in touch so we can continue conversation.
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