Hiring and Training Sales People That Accelerate Your Growth: Part 1

Some Basic Interview Questions That Will Tell You Everything

Success is a team sport. It takes sales, marketing, and sales channels to work together in a cohesive, strategic way to succeed. Marketing feeds the sales channels fuel they need to create opportunities for sales. Sales is where all the planning, strategy and collaboration can die if you don’t have the right people with the right skillsets.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be discussing what great sales people do. Before I go any further I want to make it clear that everything I present has been time tested by me, my teams and other associate. The concepts are all rooted in practical application and experience.

I am a Miller Heiman fanatic. For me, it’s the best example of what sales strategies targeting complex organizations looks like. So, to be clear my concept of sales is focused on selling complex, high value solutions to complex organizations

Defining a Complex Sale:

A complex sale includes the following elements. The buyer has multiple options; You and your organization have multiple options; Numerous levels of the buyer’s organization are involved; The decision making process is complicated.

By the way, most sales include 2 – 6 influencers and are complex.

Complex Sale: One in which more than one person must give their approval or input before a buying decision can be made.

“THE NEW STRATEGIC SELLING” BY ROBERT MILLER AND STEPHEN HEIMAN

So what does a great sales think and believe. Here’s some questions you should ask any salesperson that may work for you.

Basic Sales 101 Questions:

How would you answer this question? The first step I had to take in my sales career was accepting that sales is a craft that demands practice, constant learning AND a process.

A sales professional believes sales is a profession, has a conscious, planned system of selling (visible, logical, repeatable) and is never satisfied.

“The new strategic selling” by robert miller and stephen Heiman

The feeling that sales is manipulative can be a show stopper. Great sales people change lives and create wins for everyone.

Take some time to think about how you and a salesperson should answer this one. The answer will defines a sales persons goals and will influence how they sell. HINT: closing a deal isn’t the definition of a successful sale. So, if closing deals doesn’t define success, what does? Customer satisfaction, ability to increase revenue with your accounts, and your feelings about the deal all come into play.

This is so important. When a salesperson doesn’t win a deal or something goes south, do they know why? Most sales people don’t. ANOTHER HINT: It’s never the customer’s fault. If you find salesperson saying things like “Buyers are Liars!” or customers are idiots, you may have a problem. That’s not why things have gone wrong. It has something do with a breakdown in the sales process and approach.

Below you’ll find a slide deck for this article. I hope you enjoyed this post and will stick with me. Post 2 is coming soon.

Sales Channels Equal Accelerated Growth and Greater Valuation

So Why Don’t More Startups Use Them?

I was recently reading an article on Tomasz Tunguz’s blog, “How a Merger of Salesforce and Slack Would Change the SaaS Landscape” The article is great and focuses on why Salesforce and Slack fit so well together. Tunguz feels, with the merger with Slack, Salesforce strengthens its position and will drive more users to be on Salesforce more often. On the other hand, Salesforce provides a strong sales channel to Slack that should significantly accelerate sales and revenue.

Tunguz’s evaluation is a great example, for me, of why sales channels are so critical to evaluating future revenue and greater valuation. Sales channels are an essential building block for any startup, yet many don’t spend the time needed to build them.

So, what is a sale channel?

It’s As Much About Processes and Platforms as it’s About People

Let’s start with what a sales channel isn’t. It’s not what I call a “simple direct sales” method. Take a look around at different startups and you’ll realize most don’t have a reliable sales channel generating and accelerating net new revenue. Most have a simple sales outlook which means they’ve hired a bunch of salespeople and have asked them to hunt for new business. This isn’t to say that these companies haven’t built processes that drive sales. It is to say that direct sales don’t accelerate revenue year over year in a predictable way. Please note, I said ACCELERATE. There’s not doubt that companies can grow via direct sales, but typically the growth isn’t predictably exponential.

What does a healthy sales channel look like? Here are some factors to consider:

Utilizing a PaaS Strategy Can Be a Key Factor to Sales Channel Success
  1. It generates predictable and accelerated revenue growth.
  2. Contractural relationships should make a sales channel sustainable over long periods of time.
  3. Leadership has committed substantial resources to ensure the success of the channel
  4. It includes partners, resellers or affiliates that have contracted to achieve established goals year over year.
  5. There’s an important “element” in place that makes the connection between a channel, partner, reseller or affiliate natural and exponentially valuable to both parties.
  6. It’s supported by a robust marketing plan.
  7. It has a partner management or affiliate management team in place that understands that they are the glue between marketing and sales that ensures high levels of execution.
  8. It has sales teams that support unique channels that fully understand the strategy that’s being executed.
  9. Bonus: A sales channel driven by a Platform as a Service (PaaS) strategy will typically accelerate faster.

What does a health sales channel do?

During Covid we’ve seen sales channels continue to perform and grow.
  1. It should show durability during down turns in the market.
  2. It should accelerate revenue growth exponentially faster than other revenue segments of the business.
  3. It should create stickier customers.
  4. It should deliver greater value to the customer.

What does Tunguz have to say about all this? Let’s go back to “How a Merger of Salesforce and Slack Would Change the SaaS Landscape” and take a look. What are the upsides to the merger that can be informative for startups?

  1. “Combining with Salesforce would enable Slack to sell through Salesforce account executives and the Salesforce channel…”: Thousands of Salesforce AE’s, customer support and solutions engineers could bring Slack to market via a sales machine Slack could never duplicate. Startups and emerging should be looking for similar opportunities.
  2. “Slack + Salesforce enables superior integration of instant messaging workflows …”: For me, the key word here is integration. That’s one of the “elements” I mentioned above that brings greater value to the customer. Any startup that has a platform or portal should be looking for similar opportunities. Tunguz drives this point home by writing “imagine if Slack integrated natively into the entirety of the Salesforce ecosystem…”.
  3. “AEs use Salesforce a few times per day at most – and then begrudgingly. Slack is a perpetual background process used many times per hour. “: This is perhaps, for me the most important point. Sales Channels should increase the use of the product. Imagine what increased use means to a startup’s predictable growth.

Due to all the reasons above, plus one more, sales channels multiply the value of any organization when being evaluated. What’s the plus one? Sales Channels provide the canvas that potential investors can work on top of as they evaluate additional strategies to increase output over and above what’s already been achieved.

The last question is, if all this is true, why don’t more companies have robust sales channels? In my experience there are several factors getting in the way.

The first and, maybe, the most prominent is a feeling that simple direct sales give you more control over your success than alternative sales channels. This belief is rampant among entrepreneurs and very difficult to prove false, especially in the short term.

This brings me to the second point; time. Sales channels take time to develop. It takes time to recruit good partners, solidify the relationship, train them, and activate them before revenue is generated, but it’s worth the effort. Direct sales may perform better in the short term, but not the long run.

Third, channel sales are complex. Financial resources along with supporting software, portals and platforms are vital components to the success of any channel. The effort to launch them is serious and challenging.

All of this adds up to the need for patient commitment. However, with the right strategic plan Channel Sales pay off in big way.

What Does Innovation Look Like?

Millions of people have billions of great ideas every day. Ideas are easy. Or at least seem easy. How do you know if your idea is innovative? Entrepreneurs fall in love with their ideas only to find out that they don’t resonate.

Have you lived this scenario? I have. You have a great idea, put gigawatts of energy into it, spend hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars on it, go live and… nobody cares. It’s a crushing and depressing experience. After all, this is something you’ve put your life, blood, sweat and tears into, right? Your spouse has asked for over a year when you’re coming home again, your children have forgotten what you look like and you quit a cushy job to pursue your dream.

As an entrepreneur, the hardest thing for you to do is remove yourself from the equation. Your idea is like one of your children, it’s very difficult not to be biased. So what do you do? How do you understand if you’re actually solving a customer problem in a truly innovative way?

Did you catch that? A problem that’s solved in a truly innovative way. If you’re not being innovative you’re not going anywhere. So what does innovation look like?

What Does Innovation Look Like

Let’s take Apple as an example. What’s innovative about their iPhone, iPad and Laptop? This is actually an extremely important question. After all, pads, cell phones and laptops weren’t new when Apple came out with their version of those products. Was the innovation the technology and functionality Apple brought to those products? Well, not so much. They’re really gimmicks that temporarily grab the attention of the market. All that great technology has been duplicated, but they still command a large share of the market. So, why?

When Apple came out with their first smartphone what did they do? Up until that point mobile phone manufacturers designed phones for the telecom carriers like Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile; Not the consumer. Apple said forget that. They sent a message to all the mobile carriers that shocked the market. Apple said that none of the carriers would have any say in the design of their phone. No changes. It was a take it or leave it deal. Only ATT agreed. Sprint, T-Mobile and all the others were out.

At the time the market thought they were crazy and doomed to failure. The carriers all wanted to design cell phones to their specs. They wanted to improve their brand. What was the result? Apple’s smartphone has developed a strong consumer brand that dominates the market. It may be the only cell phone with a brand. Apple’s innovation isn’t their tech. It’s how they engage with their customers, the market and create strong brands.

So, what is innovation? It’s taking existing technology and products and applying a new way of market engagement that other companies will find difficult to duplicate. It’s worth repeating: it’s not the bells and whistles. It’s the consumer engagement that must be innovative.

Getting Comfortable With Your Sales Process

I’ve been doing sales training of one kind or another over the last 20 years. I’ve always been perplexed and uncomfortable by most of the sales methods I’ve been taught.

I’ve encountered advice like:

  1. Make the buyer feel the pain.
  2. Try to get your buyer to cry (I’m not kidding).
  3. Close hard and ask questions like “Do you really need your husband here to make a decision?”
  4. Overcome objections by asking questions like “what else do you spend your money on today? What can you cut from your budget?”

Manipulation Vs. Value

The problem with these outlooks on selling is that they are manipulative. The focus is often on price and they lack any discussion about building value or trust. It’s this kind of stuff that made me want to run away from sales and do something else. Anything else! And, I did try to run for years. I didn’t want to feel unethical or manipulative.

Sales Is A Craft

This changed for me when a mentor taught me that sales can be a craft. One that, when done right, doesn’t have to be manipulative or feel negative. I could finally sleep at night! The sales profession has probably lost millions of talented people because they’ve been taught methods that don’t feel honest. I’d like to help change that.

There are four bedrock questions that everyone has to answer before moving forward with a sales career:

  1. How do you define success? – Selling success is not making a sale at all cost. It has to be defined by the idea that everyone feels positive about the outcome. In other words, both the buyer and seller have a win. By the way wins can be both defined by business goals or personal goals (hopefully both). Is that how you define success?
  2. Do you have a selling process? – Every good salesperson should be able to define their selling process. They should be able to describe it in detail and that process should should not have a goal to manipulate the customer. Can you define your process?
  3. Do you consider sales a craft? – This is a big one. You have to see yourself as being part of a legitimate profession. With that should come a desire to constantly learn more and get better. Do you consider sales a craft that leads to a legitimate career?
  4. Do you know why things go wrong? – Do you know why you don’t make a sale all the time? Most salespeople, if they are honest, will say no. They have these head scratching moments when they are downright confused about what went wrong. Have you experienced that? This goes to constantly trying to get better at what you do. You should always know what went wrong.

Get Comfortable

If you can say yes or would like to say yes to all four questions you’re ready to get comfortable. Selling shouldn’t feel like, well… selling. When you can answer yes to all four of these questions you’ll realize you’re a resource. You’ll understand you’re helping your prospects achieve their business and personal goals. You’ll KNOW that you’re a positive force in the world.

Under the Sales category in the Real Deal Strategy blog I’ll be breaking down the sales process that I’ve taught they will allow you to answer yes to these important questions. Stay tuned.

Business Brokers – Increase Valuations

Business Brokers help to buy and sell businesses and live of the quality and value of the deal. Higher the valuation the better. The quality of the sales strategy and the number of established sales channels in any business has a significant impact on that valuation.

Heres’ How I Can Help…
Earn More Over Time
  1. Get a business listing you wouldn’t otherwise
  2. Help talking to a client about the subject of sales if it’s not your strong suit
  3. Defend your valuation to the acquiring party
  4. Grow your valuation with some time and resources
  5. Discover things that should be fixed before you enter due diligence

Contact me to find out more how I can help evaluate your clients sales strategy, establish sales channels and increase company valuations.