Building an all-start sales team starts with your judgment. Because you’re hiring for sales reps, it can be difficult to distinguish true talent from sales talk. Therefore, having a well-define profile that outlines key characteristics you’re looking for, and corresponding questions to test for those skills, will help avoid poor judgment calls. 

Can every member of your sales team deliver strong value propositions and elevator pitches that address a prospect’s needs while building credibility and peaking interest? Is your team consistent and effective in their approach strategies, both individually and collectively?

As we all know and probably experienced in our career, there is a lot of sales training programs out there in the market place. We typically sit in a room for hours or sometimes days listening to an instructor tell you how to close more deals or improve a certain skillset. . 

One of my early experiences was with a company called Lanier. At the time we were selling a new concept for the B2B marketplace. The training was rigorous, why. They demanded that each of us trainees, could do an effective cold call, effective 1st meeting, effective discovery meeting, demo, solution presentation and close. It was "intense" to say the least. But it worked and I was very successful because of that rigor of sales certification that I implemented into my daily work life. 

While you likely already follow a sales process, we highly recommend all our clients to regularly revisit their sales process to make sure it aligns with constantly changing buyer expectations and how your team functions. If your sales process is not already aligned to your prospects buyer’s journey we highly recommend holding a brainstorming session with your team using our free B2B buyer’s journey alignment template.

If you google “sales enablement” likely you’ll be bombarded with various CRM and sales process vendors, metric platforms, and consumption and training software. And all those things are great things if the strategy, content, and tools being used in via these platforms is right. In this blog, we outline key components you should consider prior to picking the right software and digital platforms for your company.

Many B2B sales leaders still don’t recognize B2B purchase decisions as emotional. Even if business leaders, say they believe there’s an emotional element in the decision-making process, little importance is actually placed on marketing and sales initiatives that strive to create an emotional connection between the prospect or customer and the company brand.

From our experience, it’s not uncommon for sales leaders to emphasize the sales process template or internal organizational structure when trying to improve their sales process. But a sales process is only a framework.

We can’t count the number of times new clients have told us they have a sales process in place, only to find that each rep has their own understanding of what that actually is (and believes their way is the RIGHT way!).

Business-to-business selling is a whole different beast than selling direct to consumers. Different needs, personas, sales processes, and statements of value only scrape the surface of the variances between the two.

Everyone makes mistakes. And sometimes that’s the best way to learn. Reflecting on my own experience, I’ve made a huge oversight once with one of our clients. I’d like to take today’s blog to tell you that story, and hopefully, help you avoid making the same slip I made.