You know your commercial teams need additional sales/influencing skills – but how do you bring the rest of the business along with you?
Sometimes, recognising that your sales and customer-facing teams need to work differently can leave you in a lonely place. Being a voice in the wilderness is not only personally frustrating, it can undermine the potential impact of any solution you introduce.
Having spent five decades investigating what successful customer-facing teams and individuals do when they are being successful, we are aware that some of the behaviours we advocate can seem a little counter-intuitive. To the uninitiated, Huthwaite International’s focus on the Psychology of Decision Making and the customer-centric investigation of problems and needs which can be addressed, can be perceived as complex.
What’s more, Huthwaite International’s obsession with behaviour change – and the proven mechanisms by which learning and skill development actually results in improved performance – can appear to take too much time.
There is good news at hand. Our research into effective sales behaviours – based on customer-centricity, persuasion and influence – can be easily adapted when you need to sell an idea to your colleagues. Getting people on board to support the adoption of SPIN® Selling is often achieved by using the same skills and behaviours which underpin SPIN®.
You will need to outline the issues – the challenges you face and the potential gains to be made. You will need to understand any resistance from your colleagues and, most importantly, perhaps, how adopting and supporting a common set of commercial behaviours will help them to achieve their goals. You will also want them to take action to support the initiative – reinforcing key behaviours and the tools, skills and language that enables their use.
You may come across some predictable attitudes and sources of antipathy. Here are a few ‘personas’ which encompass the challenges those seeking to gain organisational buy-in have faced in the past:
This character believes sales is a separate entity – a silo inhabited by ne’er do wells and chancers who are quick to claim the kudos and equally quick to blame everyone else when things don’t go well.
Of course, sales is everyone’s job in a commercial organisation and you may need a little support from your C-suite to reinforce that message. Taking a whole organisation approach might not come naturally to this individual, so how do they benefit? Can you paint a picture that their frustrations will be lessened? Can you identify key gains that will make their life a little easier?
If Norman is an Ops Manager under pressure from last minute orders, disgruntled customers or ridiculous discounts – you can empathise and propose a solution. We found successful SPIN® sellers discounting less (because they build value for the customer) and achieving more predictable revenue pipelines. Their customers are more likely to be satisfied, because there is greater clarity about their expectations and how they can be met. Might that help Norman?
Pierre believes that if the sales people just understood the product (or services) better – and told more potential buyers about it – then the product or service will sell itself. It is after all, superior in all ways to the alternatives!
This is a simplistic perspective. New products are being introduced all the time. Customer needs evolve. How the product adds value to the customer – and how they gain a return on their investment in it – may not be obvious, either to the customer or the person controlling the purse strings.
Involving Pierre in describing not just what the product or service is, but how it satisfies different customer needs, will greatly boost your chances of success. What does Pierre want? He wants more people to buy the product he so clearly believes in. He may also want market insights to help him in his quest to continuously improve the product he produces or the service he supplies.
You can help Pierre by showing how uncovering customer needs and building value for your solutions is integral to the SPIN® model. Because of this, gaining insight into new and evolving unmet customer needs is a potential driver for innovation.
It is not uncommon for folk in other functions to think that the sales team are a bit shy of a hard day’s work. They are constantly asking for data from sales managers and think that any delay to their requests being met is simply evidence in support of these beliefs.
When asked if they’d like to be a sales manager – interestingly - most of them look horrified. They know it can be a hard and often thankless task.
Dolly thinks that if salespeople worked harder, had more meetings, met more clients, things would improve.
Of course, we have always known that doing the same things and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. It doesn’t stop it being a prevalent position. Of course, Dolly is not advocating doing the same things – she is advocating doing more of the same things. This is not a zero sum game.
By putting pressure on sellers to attend more appointments, speak to more people and pack their schedule with teams calls and travel, we don’t just replicate what we’re doing now. We do it less well.
We found successful salespeople plan every call. If your average sellers plan a few of their more important calls, how frequently are they going to plan them when they have more to conduct? Being unprepared often means approaching everyone with the standard sales pitch. If that means the seller comes across as a talking brochure, uninterested in the client and their issues, the likelihood of achieving a sale reduces. The satisfaction of the customer with the interaction drops through the floor and the reputation of your organisation suffers.
Dolly needs help to realise that working smarter, not harder, is the key to gaining the kinds of results she clearly craves. Our research found that customers would be prepared to pay for the insights they gain from an effective consultative sales call. Is that the reputation that Dolly wants for your organisation and its representatives? Showing Dolly how she gets this with SPIN® may bring her on board.
One of the issues with Kevin is that he often inhabits a leadership role within the wider sales community. Training is something that happens in a classroom. The time required for the classroom should be as short as possible. Initial knowledge acquisition – squeezed to the last possible moment. Follow up in the workplace – someone else’s job. Reinforcing behaviour change, coaching and monitoring the change required? Kevin is way too busy.
Kevin is scared! Most often we find that Kevin has been promoted to a job for which he is ill-equipped. He was probably a good salesperson, but removed from frontline sales, he is floundering under the weight of data requests. Norman, Pierre and Dolly are weekly giving him a hard time and any change he is expected to introduce potentially adds tasks rather than removes them.
When discussing with Kevin you need to understand his reality. What’s causing him stress? Where are his frustrations? What would he like to be different? When we roll out SPIN® Selling to a large audience, we often start by training the managers. We can remove some of the fear Kevin has, and by working with the other functions, ensure he has some space and time to support his team and build their persuasive capability.
Final thoughts
Sometimes, you can’t make the whole case yourself. That’s why our clients trust our cadre of experienced consultants to help plan the implementation and build the environment in which it can succeed. We can help you enthuse Norman, persuade Pierre, deal with Dolly and even question Kevin.
Because although we have a world-beating, research-backed product, we know it won’t sell itself.