How are you helping increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team? One of the most effective ways to improve a team today is to provide them with more steps, structures, and processes of selling. Join me as I share how adapting a more “paint by numbers” approach to selling can help you increase the selling success of your team!
Hi. Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. One of the ways that you can become a more effective and stronger leader of your sales team, is to understand how selling has changed just in the last few years.
If we go back and look at the baby boomer model of what worked for maybe 15 or 20 years, was most salespeople were very intuitive. They had no structure, and they approached each customer as if it was a unique situation. Like a painter, every time they would have a new account or new prospect or a new opportunity, they'd put a new blank canvas on their easel. And then just for that customer, paint them a unique picture. Each customer got a different picture, because, after all, all customers are different and unique. What's the philosophy it was happening. That was very effective. A lot of customized solutions are brought to companies. It was very difficult to support those, because everybody was buying for a different reason, but things were going well.
The problem today is selling has changed. One of the biggest changes we have as much more of the millennial impact has impacted and affected sales teams today. Millennials didn't grow up with much creativity. They didn't go outside to play like baby boomers did and have to figure it out on their own. They were driven the practice. They were taught stuff. When they come to a sales team, they expect to be told what to do. So, there's this major shift that's happened in selling of effective sales training, and sales coaching. Where it used to be one of just intuitive, helping them be inspired, to be more creative, bring more solutions to customers, and ask more questions. Those are the major things being taught. Where today, it's much more become paint by numbers.
Salespeople are coming to their managers saying, "Tell me what to do. What works? What should I be saying?" Especially in these unique times that COVID has now created for us. Selling has changed, and it's become much more structured, and much more process-focused. You see, one of the negatives of this painting philosophy of making something up unique for each customer is it took a lot of time. A lot of false starts, a lot of just searching for something and then landing on it and selling that point.
We have a higher efficiency that's required today, because of the sales dollars that we have to generate. I bet in a lot of cases that from 20 years ago, you're expecting your sales teams to sell over twice what they did 10 or even 20 years ago. So because of that, we need to be bringing in more efficient and more effective solution or process to our sales team. And the best way to do that is by paint by numbers. Paint by numbers just means we have steps, we have structures, we have processes.
How we ask our questions is still customized to fit the customer. But when we need to ask the questions, and what the next steps are after that, and then what do you do? What are your closing questions? All of these things, they need to be more consistent. So, there's less thought put into them, so they'd done faster. We have to compress the selling time to be more effective today. We can't afford painters anymore. There's just too high a sales volume is expected from our teams.
What are you doing to shift to being more structured, working on more of the steps and processes of selling with your team. Experience doesn't equal trained anymore. We've got to reteach selling to all of our people under these tighter timeframes, where customers are demanding more. The best way to do that is we've got to walk them through the steps. We've got to walk them through the structures, and we have to guide them through the best practices that we know works consistently for our company.
We'd love to know how you've made this shift, love to know how it's working for you. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage. I hope you check them out.