Tag: lockdown marketing

Ultimately, the goal is to develop a team of master virtual sellers, but in order to do that, we have to overcome some hurdles. 

New Skills & Coaching

• Coaching is the key to supporting skill mastery. Training alone vs. Training with Coaching has a four-fold impact on one’s ability to master a skill. So if you’ve done a ton of training with no coaching, the majority of your efforts have gone to waste.
• Coaching delivers results. Studies show that sales reps with highly effective coaches delivered a higher percentage of sales; similarly, sales reps with coaches who follow a formal coaching process and spend more time being coached significantly out-perfomed those who spent minimal time being coached.

The most powerful form of coaching is Observational Coaching, which can be done through the virtual ride-along; this involves sitting in on the call with the sales rep.

The best form to help someone develop their virtual selling skills is combining training with coaching.

Success in sales is a combination of the quantity of calls you make, and the effectiveness of each call. The reason we hire more reps is because we want to get a higher quantity of calls. The reason we train with coaches is because we want to get better quality of calls. 

Surprisingly, although sales people have more time now to do more calls, the quantity of calls has gone down. This is likely due to “call avoidance.” Sales reps are reluctant to make those calls for a number of reasons – they have to shift from actually dropping in and seeing people, to interacting with people over the phone; they also now have a greater amount of customer frustration to face when making the call, which can be hard to deal with. 

Being a sales leader means having to make difficult decisions and managing sales force changes.

Proactively Managing Performance: Points to ponder

1. Have you consciously held back on managing performance in the first 6 months of COVID?
2. Are your sales reps exceeding their Key Performance Indicators? How do you know?

Steven’s 5-point approach to Proactively Managing Performance:

It is important to review results and activities. 

ACTIVITY drives RESULT. 

That’s why management is critical in making sure the right activities are being done. Then, looking forward, set some time to look at your Key Performance Indicators and sales results to see if your reps are on track, and how you can help them.

Performance management is the act of inspecting what you expect. And if you don’t do that, then people don’t respect it.

Even with the progress of a possible vaccine on the horizon, we need to face the reality that this may be the new normal for a while. With that, we need to plan for a full year of COVID in 2021. Instead of setting your budgets based on 2019, base it on 2020, assuming that Covid is going to be around for the rest of next year.

With that in mind, here are some tips:

• Set realistic objectives
• Align your strategies and tactics with selling virtually
• Be clear on which activities your team needs to execute and how you are going to measure them
• Have a look at your resources
• Consider putting a change management plan in place to help your team evolve if they continue to struggle

What will the post COVID world look like?

Even after this pandemic passes, it’s clear that we are not going back to 2019. 

Here are the things that Steven predicts will change in the following year:

• You will be challenged on your sales structure and the size of your sales force. Be prepared to answer questions on what your sales reps are doing.
• Adapting to a blended approach to selling. This means there will be a lesser amount of face-to-face interaction and more virtual selling. This involves using email systems like SalesNexus, conducting virtual calls, attending online events, making phone calls, and looking at our interactions with customers as a series of events – not just one-offs.
• Digital marketing will become a more important part of our communication and engagement of customers because it is more challenging to engage online.

The Sales Leadership Blueprint 

Focus: Nurturing a Winning Mindset

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right” – Henry Ford 
The mind is a very powerful force. In sales, the majority of the battle comes down to mindset. Research shows that our brains are wired to hate uncertainty. This year in itself has been filled with uncertainty, and we’re going into the next year with those same uncertainties. Our brain also overestimates the threat, and underestimates our ability to solve the problem or to do it.

leadership

So what we need to do is REBOOT. 

As a leader, you need to make sure you have a winning mindset. You also have to help your team develop their own winning mindset.  

The Power of Mindset: The Tale of Two Reps 

As a leader, your role is to have that winning mindset and make sure that your team has it too. In this changed world filled with uncertainty, those who carry a winning mindset are making more effective calls, are more capable of helping their customers, and are ultimately finding ways to succeed in a new selling environment.

Transforming your sales reps’ mindset from an Eeyore mindset to a Tigger Mindset will lead to success. 

Get into the Tigger mindset with small practices that reinforce positivity. Examples of  this are smiling when you dial, raising your arms up in victory, celebrating your wins (no matter how small), resetting or recharging when necessary, and putting your wins on your board. These are all implementable things you can teach to your reps, you want your team engaged and thinking: “I can do this!”

As a leader, your role is to have that winning mindset and make sure that your team has it too. In this changed world filled with uncertainty, those who carry a winning mindset are making more effective calls, are more capable of helping their customers, and are ultimately finding ways to succeed in a new selling environment.