If your company has only one product to sell, and only one decision maker type to sell to, read no further”¦
Many Sales VPs are frustrated by the slow start of their new-hire salespeople – the time it takes a new-hire to learn enough to arrive at sales proficiency, and achieve quota.
Your new-hires are “drinking from the fire-hose,” overwhelmed by varied topics they need to learn: product knowledge, sales support tools such as CRM, and your company’s policies and procedures. It’s an endless amount of information. And then, into the mix, you throw a new-hire sales training program at them, and now their eye balls really start to spin.
Effective salesmanship requires salespeople to apply different sales behaviors at different steps of the buying process. And since the value of what you sell changes depending on the problems you solve for each decision-maker type (a VP of Marketing’s problems/needs are different than a CFO’s problems/needs) your new-hires must also become experts in selling to each decision-maker type.
If ramping your new-hires to success faster is a goal, your company may very well need an eSales Playbook, where sales best practices are first “captured” during delivery of a sales training seminar to experienced sellers. Content is customized by your company’s needs, sorted by decision-maker type and product/solution type. Then, the captured content is made available to your new-hires at the click of a mouse as needed, at different stages of a sales process.
The-Sales Play book should answer the following questions, at the click of a mouse:
- Which of our success stories should we use to begin a meeting with that type of decision-maker?
- What problems does that decision-maker type have that our matching product, let’s refer to it here as “Product D”, can solve?
- What questions should we ask to develop those problems into explicit customer needs?
- What will each decision-maker’s buying criteria likely be?
- What will our competitors’ offer this decision-maker, and what are their strengths and weaknesses against us?
- Where can I see our company’s most effective sales proposals and written sales correspondence?
- What doubts and concerns will we need to overcome in order to win?
No professional sports team would even consider taking the field without their players having studied and mastered their team’s Playbook! By providing your sales team with a custom eSales Playbook, you can more rapidly develop the professionalism of your sales new-hires.
