Granted, if you arm a driver (who can put two sentences together) with a genuinely effective sales strategy you might have a dangerously successful salesperson on your hands. But I am convinced that the personality pigeonholing we have done in the past doesn’t hold water anymore. Why not? Because there is far better training available today.

The characteristics of the 2.0 Sales Pro require that the salesperson must learn and develop certain skills for managing sales relationships. But they can do this and still live in their own skin. No personality overhaul is required.

The reason is that the skills required to be a 2.0 Sales Pro are teachable and learnable. They’re not tied to the salesperson’s deep-seated and virtually unchangeable personality style. For example, “competitive” and “collaborative” don’t have to be mutually exclusive traits. The same person can have both of these great characteristics. You just change the game a bit. The single-handed gunslinger no longer wins in today’s sales world. The new game is to leverage all your available human capital by involving coworkers and various departments in your existing sales process.

You must become an Orchestrator of resources. Of course, this works best when your sales process is effective and everyone is trained on the same process. When I say “sales process”, I don’t mean a canned sales presentation or data dump given to the prospect as you describe above as an “8 step sales process”. What I mean is a clearly defined road map of how each milestone of the sales cycle will be handled and how and when each key selling skill will be used to follow the decision-makling process of the buyer. And in most cases, this is a fact. Those decisions are always made in the same order – Salesperson, Company, Product, Price and Time to Buy.

Since selling is a team sport today, companies need to arm their service reps, technical nerds, inside sales reps and management team with the same skill sets that 2.0 sales professionals have. When you do this, your salespeople will feel more comfortable bringing these resources to the table. They will trust that people in other parts of the company know and understand how to participate without screwing things up.

Characteristics of 2.0 Sales Pros

1. Follow a well-documented and effective process that can be used consistently by everyone in every sales call.
2. Have training that is focused on the specific selling skills that make the greatest difference in sales performance.
3. Take part in a learning system that effectively transfers the newly learned skills into consistent field success.

To Your Success

Agreed, with the tools available to-day to build your ideal customer profiles/model some potential benefits, no need to do “intro’s”, etc. Reps should have YOUR NEEDS profile at the front of their PPT’s.
(and buyers already know all about your company, products etc. thats why your are being engaged so NO need for reps to do detailed intros).

ie when I presented to Microsoft’s GM Canada, I had slides titled “Our understanding of your ecosystem to-day” (= detailed research that took 3 weeks to collect). 1st slide. No company or product intro- bang right into the “listening” part. Then she asked “where did you get all this info about us”……(gee a small buying clue), which triggered a revealing discussion about Microsoft’s VARs sales reps low productivity and the effect on sales of MSoft etc. AND our possible solution. Result? She said I’ll introduced you to our Marketing Mgrs- no need to call me anymore. (good enough for me!-thanks)

Sales Managers (sales 1.0) tend to forget that buyers are building their “ISP” ideal supplier profiles WAY before the first call.

So IF these Managers are not tuned in to the feedback the rep gave them after they have exhanged info with a potential client- then they pressure the rep to “follow-Up” even though YOU the prospect said DO NOT CALL ME for x weeks, etc.

So even with sophisticated sales reps, solutions and your complex business problems you’ll get reps callling and saying “just checking in”.

Hello McFy!

..just checkin out….

regards,
Stuart Armstrong

Thanks for allowing me to blow my own horn. You can find out more about “Social Calling” from:

1. My ebook: http://tinyurl.com/yl2sl2h
2. My ecourse: http://tinyurl.com/lqa895
3. My blog: http://tinyurl.com/yanoqnm
4. Our website: http://www.sales2.com

Nigel

Nigel, please feel free to be sales like here, I would love to learn more! If there is more info on what you are talking about- feel free to share those links.

Right on. I am championing a prospecting process called “Social Calling”. This process is all about sales people preparing so they know something about the prospect and then customizing their conversation (two-way conversation not one-way!)

“Sales 2.0″ tools out there give sales people the chance to prepare and then customize what they say much more easily than ever before. There are NO excuses for the “show-up and throw-up” approach you mention in this post. Those days are long gone.

Sales people must LISTEN! And there are more-and-more tools to help them do just that. No excuses if you don’t use them.

Nigel

The other day I interviewed 4 vendors with very limited time and left clear and concise next steps with each. The one point I politely stressed is don’t call me until x date, I will call you and even explained the reasons why. I liked two of the four products. Three didn’t listen. One did. Guess who earned the sale? And, he told me that he used the case study as an example to train his reps on how listening to instructions is important and can be the difference at the end of the day.

If you combine a services oriented sales approach with knowledge, I would be willing to bet the sales close % goes up significantly as do WOM referrals – both in person and over the web.

Mark