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salespeople

Our mission: To meet or exceed

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The difference between meeting expectations and exceeding them is huge. Meeting them is easy…we’ve already conditioned our customers on what to expect: Status quo = mission accomplished.

What do our customers expect when our salespeople call on them? A recitation of the same old features and benefits? Maybe a few new bullets added to the list?

Exceeding customer expectations means telling stories that show how deeply we understand their industry and their problems. Exceeding expectations means listening.  Exceeding expectations means being the first to show up with modern tools that illustrate and educate and engage.

What do your customers expect from you? Make it your mission to meet andexceed.

How credible are you?

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Your offering is rock solid. You’ve done a really nice job of designing and executing your product or service. Seriously. Well done.

Once I establish that you’re in the running for my business, on what other criteria do I make my decision? To some degree I make it on the credibility of the salesperson sitting across the table and the company she represents. Is she able to persuade me that she knows what she’s talking about? Do I agree that her company stands behind everything said so far?

We’d like to think that our product accounts for the majority of our credibility, but if our sales force turns over often or if we’re headquartered in the east and selling in the west, there may be many non-product obstacles making us less credible.

Picture your newest, most remote salesperson. Is he equipped with the right stories and mobile tools to build credibility?

Thankful for the salesperson

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Customers no longer need you to point out their problems.  They barely need you to identify a solution.  With all of the information you’ve posted about your products and services online, your phone may never ring again with a call from a new customer.

What they do need is for you to show them what they don’t already know: The disruptive trend not yet fully in focus.  The new technology that is both a threat and an opportunity.  Are your salespeople equipped to explain the risks of not acting and to tell the story of how together you can be pioneers instead of laggards?

Your customers should be thankful to see your salespeople.  Prospects want sales interactions to be efficient and for your people to clearly explain the issues and the options.  Are your sales tools and stories making your customer thankful that you visited?

It’s on the website

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Jim, a client, told me that it’s a running joke in his company: ‘If you want something to disappear forever, put it on our website.’

We let ourselves get away with it and we shouldn’t. Simply posting something to a website is not good enough. Do we really expect our customers to find our content among more than 150 billion web pages?

A customer that knows exactly what to search for can find what they need, but if they’re uncertain or are not yet aware that their industry is about to be disrupted, putting our solution on the web is a longshot at best.

Reaching customers will forever be a challenge, but if you have salespeople that call on prospects, mobile tools can provide a proactive way to use your content to consult and collaborate.

Unless we like odds of 150 billion to one, it’s not enough that it’s on the website.

Selling ice to Eskimos and your return policy

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It’s a familiar compliment, but it benefits no one. The Eskimo ends up with buyer’s remorse and we get our ice back while earning a bad reputation among Eskimos.

If the first step is determining if there’s a fit, let’s figure it out as quickly as possible. Why take three conversations when it can be done in one? If it’s not a good match, we can move on to more promising opportunities and our customer will be more inclined to see us the next time we call.

Most of our tools are designed to help our salespeople sell, but consider adding some that first assess fit. Simple checklists, case study comparisons, and interactive surveys can qualify a prospect and inform both parties about how to best work together.

Spend a little more time assessing fit and you’ll spend less time explaining your return policy.

Apples to apples, actually

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It may be an exaggeration to say that our offering is so different from our competitor’s that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. If we concede that we’re both selling apples, then winning the sale often depends on our ability to communicate specific differences. Highlight the subtleties and tell the story with tools that lead customers through a close comparison:

+ Show a video of a customer that tried both and liked yours better

+ Contrast images of product construction. Point out which features are related to your patented technology

+ Present an explanation of how you’ll support the purchase. The products may seem similar, but it’s your service that will make them happy they chose you

We can win the sale by embracing an apples to apples comparison. If asserting that your competitors are picking from the wrong orchard is unrealistic, make sure your people are equipped and willing to compare your apples to any other apples out there.

Capturing the stories that customers tell

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It’s obvious that if we make our salespeople into better storytellers, it can only mean good things for sales, profits and our brand.

Less obvious is that the stories our customers tell us can have a huge impact, too, as long as not too much gets lost in translation. Do your customers ask questions that only a subject matter expert can answer? How certain are you that both the question and its context are being conveyed from customer to salesperson to company?

Use mobile technology to capture customer sentiment at the source. Video, audio, or an annotation made on a drawing can accurately convey the stories that our customers are desperately trying to tell us, with all of the subtleties needed to serve them better and fine tune our approach to the market.

Putting it on slides doesn’t make it a presentation

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Take a look at the slide decks you use most often. If you can email them to someone without explanation, it’s not a presentation. It may be a brilliant, beautiful document, but it’s not a presentation.

A client recently created several new decks to include in their StorySlab sales app. Each presentation was a dozen images, two or three words on each. At the deployment meeting, a salesperson was asked to present the slides with virtually no advance preparation. A wonderful (and rare) thing happened: the salesperson made them interesting. Of course he knew the product well and knew the customer problems and pain that he could solve, but he wove in personal experience and style and enthusiasm. He was selling, not just delivering someone else’s message.

Experiment with putting less on your slides. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with how much more your salespeople can do with them.

Genuine industrial stories

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How our company evolved to be what it is wasn’t pretty.  We had some setbacks, learned things the hard way. But we overcame all of that to become the market leader we are today.

Corporate jargon and stock photos are a smokescreen that make it hard for our customers to know us. Why make them filter and dig to assess if they want to engage us? Let’s just tell them (proudly) and get on with business.

A little straight shooting goes a long way. Genuine stories and images on the web and in our salespeople’s hands explain who we are and why we’re better. Tell an honest story about our past and customers will know to expect great things if they work with us in the future.

I never heard that story

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I didn’t know we had those 3 patents, that our founder was in the Peace Corps, or that our facility was built using reclaimed materials.

When describing what makes our company tick, what use is a story if our own people don’t even know it? Capturing it and making it interesting is only half the battle. It needs to be easy to access and easy to spread – especially for the people that work for us. Then we can tackle engaging our customer.

Mobile tools facilitate both internal and external storytelling. We can agree that there are benefits to having our customer hear more of our story, but that only happens when our own people know it first.