The 3 "R's" for the Successful Sales Executives

As we enter September and the seasons begin to change, many of us have been focused on back-to-school activities. Conventional education has always been directed toward the three R’s: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. In the business world with the economy in a bit of turmoil the implications for sales executives are tremendous. So what are the three R’s for sales?

Just this week I spoke with a very successful sales executive regarding the challenges he was facing. He was very clear that his biggest challenge was creating urgency to act. He believed that he had great prospects in his pipeline and plenty of them for that matter. Yet, in his own words, “no one seems to be pulling the trigger” and actually buying. What can he do?

Sales professionals should be asking themselves the question: Am I working harder or smarter? Working harder at the wrong things will ultimately yield poor results. Working smarter is a combination of knowing not only what activities we should be doing, but also how to execute those activities effectively. So just like my children begin to focus on their 3 R’s back in elementary school, as sales professionals, let’s focus on three R’s which will help us be smarter in our approach to sales.

Resource Management: The single largest challenge facing many sales professionals is resource management. We are all bound by resource constraints, the single largest constraint being our time. The foundation for effective resource management begins with an effective filter to determine the fundamental difference between a buyer and a shopper. The result is effective prospect qualification. This qualification process will enable you to spend your time moving toward a purchase rather than chasing your tail with the time wasters who will never buy from you.

Effectively qualifying prospects is not an event driven activity. Rather, it is a process driven approach which will yield the largest results. In the ValueSelling Framework™, focus on the potential customer’s buying process in order to achieve qualification. At a very high level, every customer must answer four questions in order to buy from you:

• Should I buy this?
• Can I buy this?
• Is it worth it?
• Am I convinced?

Sales executives who can effectively facilitate the customer answering these questions and understand those answers will manage their time more effectively than sales executives who focus on only one of those aspects of a customer’s decision-making process.

Relevant Solutions: For many of us, the economy is difficult. However, companies still exist, purchase orders are still being issued, and some sales executives are still over-achieving their quotas. When our customers and prospects tighten their belts in terms of spending, relevancy becomes more important than ever.

Relevant solutions are positioned in the context of the customer’s needs – whether those needs are identified or not. To become relevant, it is critical that our sales approach is a business approach rather than a technical or tactical approach. Today’s successful sales executives understand that to provide solutions to prospects, the issues and problems that those solutions will resolve must be acknowledged and apparent in our prospect’s mind.

The key to relevancy is found in our ability to understand the context of our prospects. We must not only do our homework on our prospect’s business, but also be able to facilitate the conversation that will connect their business issues to our solutions. When this connection is effectively made, we move up in priority and it is apparent that our solution is no longer a nice-to-have capability but a need to have element of improving business performance.

Real Value: Every one of your prospects will have a different process for determining the value or impact of your solutions. Value is customer specific – how disciplined are you at uncovering your prospect’s value criteria and how they will determine the real value they can realize from your products and solutions?

Value always has both tangible and intangible aspects. In today’s economy, many prospects are extremely focused on the tangible aspects. There are a number of questions that we should all be asking ourselves as we drive toward effectively uncovering our prospect’s view of value.

• Can the impact of your solutions be quantified and is it realistic?
• Have you been able to quantify the impact of your solutions?
• What is the prospect’s expectation of the time to realize that value and do you understand how to effectively position in the context of their value measurements?
• Has this value/impact been confirmed with your prospect?
• What is the personal value or risk to the ultimate buyer for your solutions?

In other words, do they believe the value or do only you think that value is achievable. Selling value is always about the customer’s articulation of value not yours. The most successful sales executives are able to discover the prospect’s perspective on value and leverage that throughout the sales cycle.

Discipline is the key to the 3 R’s of sales. Doing our homework and effectively managing each and every interactive with our prospects will enable us to effectively differentiate the shoppers from the buyers. Shoppers will merely waste our time and create a lot of activity with no return on that investment of time