The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

What is mankind’s biggest phobia? Hint: It isn’t spiders, heights, or even dying. It’s glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.

Also, on the list of soft skills that people fear most are acting and the public test of career competence. In sales, there’s one awkward activity that happens to combine all three — role playing.

As a sales manager, we often use sales role play exercises as a form of punishment. When salespeople fail to make the progress we expect, we summon a team meeting where we role play. Now, as everyone is working from home, the idea of practicing our craft with role plays seems even more difficult.

How can you improve something that was dreaded even before the pandemic?

In a very short time, the sales process and a large portion of our life went entirely online.

It’s not that every time we contacted a client or prospect it was always in person, but the reliance on shared screen meetings is now the standard and is unlikely to change any time soon. New activities create new buzz words, and the most recent is “Zoom Fatigue.”

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"The most powerful leadership tool you have is your own personal example."

-John Wooden

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“CRMs are just another tracking tool.”

“I’ll spend more time trying to learn how to use it than actually using it.”

You’ve heard the complaints from your sales team about using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. And, chances are if you’ve considered implementing a sales enablement tool like a CRM into your strategic plan to drive revenue, you’ve read a lot of articles that discuss the various reasons why most sales CRM systems fail.

There’s even a strong possibility this is why you’re hesitant to commit purchasing a CRM. No one wants to invest in a tool that statistics show to fail (mostly) because a sales team is reluctant to use it. As a sales manager, what can you do to ensure your sales reps use a CRM to its full potential?

First, you must understand why they’re wary.

Sales coaching isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. Each salesperson on your team offers a special blend of talent. As a leader, your responsibility is to coach based on a clear understanding of all their strengths and weaknesses. 

You know that coaching your team as individuals is essential to their growth and success. But for a remote sales team, coaching takes on a higher level of importance.

While the environment has changed, your rep’s talents have remained the same. Since moving to remote work, we’ve noticed a few talent combinations that are hindering salespeople from performing their best. Have you?

Sales leaders that commit to growing and developing their people through effective feedback boost sales performance, attract and retain top talent, and outperform other organizations that fail to make feedback and coaching a priority.

Recruiting and Selecting highly talented people for your organization is critical - but you can’t stop there. Innate talents cannot develop into strengths until your team members can use them consistently, confidently, and productively.

Providing consistent and specific feedback on performance is key in helping direct reports learn, grow, and maximize their strengths.

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"A goal properly set is halfway reached."

-Zig Ziglar

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From a management perspective, a properly deployed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) allows you to assign and reassign sales goals to your sales team, transfer responsibilities, and enhance the client and sales rep experience.

However, many organizations and sales teams are quick to dismiss CRM software’s effectiveness, and many stop using it for several reasons. Merely investing in a CRM solution will not help your business grow until your sales team effectively uses its functionalities.

Below is an example of a 10-minute strategy that will help put into perspective the effectiveness and value of the right CRM system.

“More than ever, future hires will come from within the company. In an increasingly tight talent market, organizations will rediscover the benefits of internal hiring and work to better understand how their employees want to learn and grow.” — 2020 Talent Magazine

Recruitment is all about finding and attracting the right employee to your company. But sometimes, the individual you need to fill a vacant position already works within your existing business structure.

At The Center for Sales Strategy, we’re firm believers in always searching for talent. However, we’re also advocates for using empathy to better understand how people want to learn and grow. This is why one of the top recruitment trends in the 2020 Talent Magazine is internal recruitment.

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"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right."

-Henry Ford

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Your clients and prospects are on a predictable journey to making a purchase. You have a much better chance at success if you understand their buyer’s journey. The model we present to clients expands on the traditional Awareness-Consideration-Decision stages. This helps us look at things from the mind of your client or prospect.

B2B sales professionals must understand the buyer’s journey. It’s an important framework for strategy, but a common question is, how do I know where my prospect is on the buyer’s journey, and how do I get them from step one to closing?

Employee engagement, collaboration, talent retention, and client satisfaction are all essential elements of company culture. And studies show that each has a significant impact on revenue growth.

When performance numbers aren’t where expected, where do you default your thinking? Most sales managers agree that when sales performance suffers, they think more activity is needed, the right people aren’t on the team, or the processes are broken. Rarely does company culture come to mind.

What happens to revenue when your team lacks clarity and engagement?

Remote selling, virtual selling, more communication via emails, and phone calls — it’s all the new normal. And these new normal tactics require a significant shift in skills to create a more engaging buyer experience.

Conducting business over Zoom is tricky. Rather than shaking hands and reading body language, salespeople must learn how to limit distractions, make virtual sales demos more like traditional presentations, and learn to communicate as effectively online as they do when they’re physically with prospects and clients.

Being a sales professional in 2020 is very different than it was just last year. Buyers, who used to prefer meeting face-to-face prior to making a purchasing decision, have changed too.

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"We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are are, we cannot help but change."

-Sherly Sandbrg

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Before we get into the how to use a Sales Playbook, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to answering what is a Sales Playbook.

In its simplest terms, a Sales Playbook is a key piece to a winning sales enablement strategy that outlines your sales process and aligns it with the buyer’s journey. It provides salespeople with a collection of resources like best practices, insights into their buyers, how to approach specific sales scenarios, talk tracks, email templates, ways to handle objections, competitive intel, and more.