Over the last two years we at Level Five Selling have spent a fair amount of time isolating the skills and best practices of those salespeople that are excellent at creating value. We also took the next step and created some new training methodologies for developing those skills. The journey has been both fun and rewarding because we had a chance to work with some great folks.
We learned two lessons we thought were worth sharing:
Lesson 1. There are numerous salespeople who say their whole approach to selling is all about creating value for the customer when in fact they are just doing a superior job in selling the value of their product.
Lesson 2. Given the transformational forces in today’s market, companies need to put in place a new and innovative approach to training. Simply doing more of the same, a little bit better, will likely fail to achieve a sustainable skill development result.
Let’s take a quick look inside each of these lessons.
Lesson 1. Sellers that are effective at creating value recognize the process begins with the customer not the product. Creating value requires an in depth knowledge of the customer across a wide variety of dimensions ranging from trends in the industry to their strategies for achieving differentiation in their market.
Selling value is about helping the customer understand how you can help them achieve their desired business outcomes. When it comes time to talk about your solution, you need to make the connection between your solution and the desired outcomes. Don’t leave it to the customer to make that connection and don’t present product features that don’t directly address the customer’s issues.
When we observed sellers that were doing a superior job in getting this right, three overarching principles emerged. These principles represent the Triple Crown for creating value.
The first jewel in the Triple Crown is the fact that products have no inherent value. Products possess features; they do not possess value. If a product feature does not address a need that matters to the customer than that product feature has no value for that particular customer.
The second jewel of the Triple Crown is Value Migration. Whether you analyze it from the perspective of the individual, organization, or an entire industry, what constitutes value tends to shift over time.
Jewel three – value is positional and situational. What value means to a CEO of company is different than what it means to the VP of Operations and individuals holding the same position in different organizations have different views on value.
Lesson 2. If the ideas explored in Lesson 1 sound right, the question becomes: How can a company move the skill profile of their sales team from doing a good job doing product pitches – to being able to sell in a way that creates value for the customer?
Here we think there are some lessons to learn and some changes to be made. If you were to look back at the sales training for B2B companies over the last twenty years, what would that landscape look like? Having travel that road, here’s one person’s memories:
Most sales training was conducted during 2 to 3 day training programs. Often the design of the training and sometimes the delivery was outsourced to an external training firm. An expert trainer using workbook exercises and PowerPoints delivered the training.
The sales managers were usually made aware of the content of the program and in some cases they actually attend the session with their teams or attended a shorten version of the program. Sometimes there were directions from the sales leadership that the sales managers should work with their teams to reinforce the skills when everyone returned to their districts.
So what did we learn over the last couple of years as to a better way to run the railroad? Here are three walkaways we discovered for creating that better way:
Walkaway 1 – Skill development cannot be an event; it must be a process. Parachuting into a 2-day training session and expecting salespeople to learn and integrate the complex skills required to create value in today’s transformational markets is unrealistic. It simply will not happen regardless of how good the program and how talented the trainer. The sales training effort needs to be designed as a project not an event. Best suggestion is for an initial 180-day project followed by a refined continuous process for developing and coaching the salespeople to adapt the learned skills to an ever-changing marketplace.
Walkaway 2 – Sales manager coaching is not just a nice to do – it is the pivotal requirement if any skill development effort is to be sustained over time. We have all been there. You go to a sales training program and the results are pretty good. Most of the salespeople take the first steps in improving their selling skills. You go back in 3 months and visit some of the salespeople in the field and to your displeasure you find most, say 83%, of the skill development has disappeared.
So what’s the causal problem? Answer – lack of any systematic coaching reinforcement by the front-line sales managers. The front-line sales manager is the pivotal job for creating and sustaining skill development. The sales managers need to be engaged in every phase of the skill development training effort. Clearly their most important role is providing the coaching required to help the salespeople to integrate and refine the skills they learned during training.
Walkaway 3 – Failure to leverage recent advances in learning technologies is a grievous mistake. The days when the classroom is the dominant format for delivering sales training is fast coming to an end. Today the training needs to be available anytime, anyplace.
Fortunately over the last couple of years the advances in avatar-based video production have made that requirement economically and instructional possible.
The second area to explore is the work being done related to Learning Management Systems (LMS). One significant use relates back to the previous discussion concerning coaching. In most companies everyone agrees coaching is a good idea. But it’s not happening because managers are jammed and they run out of time to coach.
Properly used, a LMS can provide sales managers an approach to augment their field-based coaching with on-line video coaching. We have used this online coaching with numerous clients over the last two years with very positive feedback for both managers and salespeople.
When it comes to creating value everyone agrees, it’s a great idea. The problem is far fewer are actually doing it. Suggestion: go out in the field and take a second look. Observe when salespeople are planning and executing their sales calls – are they creating value or just doing a great job talking about their product?