We’ve all heard the phrase that, “You learn more when you fail than when you succeed.” Well, that may not be exactly true when it comes to selling, especially inside of research agencies. Maybe your salespeople can learn to be better at selling when they model their sales behavior after the most successful performer(s) on your team.
For example, suppose you’re responsible for managing sales and have four seller-doers on your team. Here are a couple examples where you could do this modeling:
- Let’s say that three of your seller-doers have a proposal acceptance rate of 30%… and the other is at 50%! Maybe the best way to ‘fix’ the other three is to learn from that top performer. Are they using a different proposal template? A different pricing model? Are they qualifying their prospects differently? Or doing a different kind of capabilities presentation that results in the RFPs?
- Or what about lead generation? Let’s say your top seller-doer is generating twice as many sales leads as the others. What is he or she doing differently? Different messaging? Different channels? Targeting different company types or titles? Or maybe just achieving a higher level of activity?
So, how do you go abut doing this for your firm? Here’s a simple framework:
- See who’s having the most success at each stage of the selling process (prospecting, qualifying, discovery, presentations, RFPs, expansion).
- Then interview the top performer or observe them in action to understand their approach at that stage.
- Extract the 2-3 behaviors (not personality traits) of the process that are driving their success, making sure they are proven successful over time – not just a one-time thing.
- Make sure those activities become part of an ongoing development/training program for your entire team.
- Finally, have the new ideas implemented by the “underperformers” and track their results and compare them to their old numbers. They may never get to the level of your top performers, but any improvement in the right direction is a good thing.
Bottom Line
If you have sales management responsibility, your job is to get the most out of every member of your team. And maybe the best way to go about that is to show them a path or process that’s been proven to work… in real time… right alongside them… using the same available resources… and selling the same products and services as they do.
You don’t need a new sales methodology. You just need to uncover where it’s already working inside your firm.
Good luck and good selling.