Stop Killing Deals: How to avoid deadly assumptions and achieve sales excellence by George Brontén
A new vision for sales
You can find that resource center at https://stop.killing.deals/resources
Salespeople are born, not made, right?
- The three bad assumptions are these:
- Salespeople are born, not made.
- Salespeople are disciplined.
- Buyers and sellers are logical.
- Even if your new salesperson was highly successful at a former company, you can’t assume they will automatically perform well in your organization.
- The higher the perceived risk and intrusiveness of the offering, the more complex the sale will be.
Salespeople are disciplined (no, they aren’t)
- Instead of blaming salespeople, you can begin supporting them. Some of the actions you can take include:
- Reducing the amount of willpower required to complete daily tasks
- Reducing the number of unimportant decisions salespeople need to make on a daily basis
- Reducing the difficulty of decisions that are necessary
- Systematically reinforcing activities that steadily strengthen willpower over time
- Encouraging a mindset of willpower strength and non-depletion
Buyers and sellers are logical (not really)
(The chapter title says it all)
How technology undermines sales
- Salesforce is the many-headed Hydra of our industry. Each layer costs money and time as new plug-ins and custom code are required to fix problems. Instead of enabling salespeople, the program takes time away from actual selling.
Stop the bleeding
- Establishing a formal process, with checklists and reinforcement, is the key to harnessing their human strengths while managing their human weaknesses.
- The sales process is not just a drop-down menu in your CRM.
- In most b2b sales organizations, the sales team engages in at least three primary workflows, each with their own activities and contexts, plus a final process, to analyze and optimize:
- 1. Prospecting and qualifying (Earn the right)
- 2. Opportunity management (Achieve consensus)
- 3. Account planning (Proactive growth)
- 4. Analyzing and optimizing (Continuously improving)
- Associate checklists with each stage, step, and milestone of the process and embed them into the workflows
Heal the organization with enablement
- Intelligently integrate context-based sales collateral into the workflows
Strengthen the team with effective coaching
- Sales coaching is not management, it is not training, it is not performing, and it is not mentoring.
- The best coaches don’t get into the game and play, they provide the resources, guidance, accountability, and help bring out the motivation for their team members to perform at their best.
- Teach managers that coaching is one of their highest priorities and free them of excessive reporting and other duties that get in the way of time for coaching.
- The following six segments demonstrate how you can begin to address multiple areas and levels of coaching:
- Strategy At the strategic level, the coach focuses on the salesperson’s goals and aspirations.
- Planning In the planning area, coaches help salespeople understand the process they must follow
- Skills and attitude
- Pipeline At this level, coaches have their eyes on the size, quality, and velocity of each salesperson’s pipeline.
- Accounts and opportunities: During deal review meetings, smart coaches guide the salesperson to identify potential barriers, slowdowns, and other gaps in each account or opportunity and to develop approaches and next steps for each.
- Activity
- A salesperson who has limiting beliefs around their identity as a salesperson will never perform to the height of their capabilities.
- Coaching questions by practice area
- Strategy: Which clients do you find most valuable & why?Skills & Attitude: Would your customers pay to access your knowledge? Why or why not?
- Pipeline: If we look at your win rate, deal size, and sales cycle, what can you improve?
- Opportunity & Account: Who are you talking to? Who should you be talking to? How will they make decisions?
- Call Planning: What is your next action to get progress toward ___?
- Coaching questions by logical levels of change
- Environment: What else can I do to support you?
- Behavior: What actions can you take to improve this part of your performance?
- Capabilities: What skills do you need to meet your next set of goals?
- Beliefs and Values: What beliefs about yourself may be holding you back?
- Identity: How do you describe yourself?
- Purpose: How does your purpose align with what you are doing now?
- To enable self-coaching, build training materials, content, goal progression, and feedback into the salesperson’s daily workflow.
- Deal reviews offer the opportunity for everyone on the team to act as a coach,
Use technology to gain a competitive advantage
- Complex sales is the wrong place for AI-powered automation.
- When AI is badly implemented (which it usually is), it undermines trust and works against the sales team.