We all want our reps to know exactly what’s going on in the customer organization. Often, this means honing reps’ discovery and questioning skills through periodic skills training. That said, despite clocking a number of training hours, reps continue to remain clueless on what matters most to customers.

Want to know why?

It’s because it’s not about reps’ ability, but rather reps’ willingness, to ask the right questions.

In today’s world of complex solutions selling and the existence of multiple customer stakeholders in the purchase process, reps find it difficult to close deals. They fear that if they ask too many questions, they might end up derailing the already complex purchase decision. As a result, reps tend to rush through the initial stages of the sales process and end up spending considerable time in negotiations while closing the deal. Failing to ask the right questions and uncovering obstacles early in the deal also means that managers don’t have the right information in time to help reps find possible solutions.

So, how do you change a rep’s mindset from “always be closing” to “explore and ask questions”? Read More »

Is your sales force experiencing increasingly stalled business, extended cycle times, and inaccurate forecasts? If so, it’s time to revisit your sales process and take a hard look at how your customers buy.

Traditionally, companies have taken an inward approach to developing their sales processes—they typically only consider internal senior management requirements that make management and forecasting easier (or so they thought…). Unfortunately, the glaring problem with this approach is that it does not take into account where customers actually stand in the sale.

For most reps, following the traditional sale process is all about providing certain tools and information to the customer to quickly move them to the next step in the sales funnel. However, reps miss a key step here–they take for granted that customers are ready to move on and often end up outpacing them in the deal. As a result, many companies find their reps’ books of business bogged down with deals stuck in limbo. Read More »

The Council frequently refers to a new breed of high-performing reps–Challenger Reps–in our blog posts and research. But do you find yourself wondering—how do I actually build Challenger reps? Because the three key Challenger skills (teaching, tailoring, and asserting control) are tacit skills, typical approaches to upskilling often are insufficient.

Classroom training alone fails to deliver impact because tacit skills are difficult to describe in written materials such as job aids or a how-to manual, and manager coaching also can be inadequate because it’s hard to explain intangible concepts.

Instead, to truly internalize these skills, reps need practice. We’ve all heard a lot about experiential training, but does it actually work?

The answer is yes, tacit and intangible skills are best taught through experiential training. But it must be the right kind of experiential learning. You cannot risk reps practicing new skills with a customer and, as a result, we often see companies using role-plays.

But, how ‘real’ are our role-play programs? Read More »

We see this happen all the time—a rep walks into a customer’s office, hands them a company brochure, and spends the next 30-minutes telling the customer all about their product’s features and benefits (many of which are of little significance to the customer’s business).

Not surprisingly, this type of approach often fails to capture the customer’s attention.

In today’s world of increased deal scrutiny and higher consensus requirements, features-based selling no longer works. In fact, SEC analysis reveals that teaching delivered during the sales experience has the largest impact on customer loyalty, more than product, company, brand, and service delivery combined.

The best companies recognize this and reverse the flow of their customer interactions—they adopt a Commercial Teaching approach that ‘leads to’ rather than ‘leads with’ information about their products and services.

One of the companies we spoke to in the course of our research, W.W. Grainger, is doing exactly this— Read More »