Improve Solution Selling Capabilities to Grow Revenue

No matter how good offering, you must improve solution selling capabilities to keep pace and reach your full sales potential.  Unless your sales team knows how, when, and where to sell – the fundamental tenets of a successful solution selling training program – their sales results will languish. To truly improve solution selling capabilities , sales leaders need to build a sales-driven culture that aligns with their go-to-market sales strategy.

5 Ways to Improve Solution Selling Capabilities

Based upon sales leadership simulation assessment data and more than 30 years of working with sales leaders and their sales teams to achieve a high performing sales culture, here are five ways to drive higher sales performance:

1.  Listen, watch and create a profile for sales success
It’s true that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” That’s why we tell sales leaders to not only formally assess sales capabilities but also to spend time with their sales reps in customer-facing situations. It shouldn’t take long before you observe gaps in the process and in the approach between high and low performing sales reps.

And it shouldn’t take long before you can create a profile of the sales attributes and sales scenarios that matter most for your unique sales strategy and marketplace.

2.  Set clear expectations
Once you know how success is achieved, establish clear metrics for those sales activities that matter most. How much pre-call sales planning should you do?  How many calls need to be made before setting up a meeting with an ideal target client prospect? How often do sales reps need to reach out to current clients to keep up to date on customer needs? How much time do they need to spend on developing a referral network to go to for “warm” intros?

Figure out which are the critical few revenue producing activities that pay off in your unique sales situation and see that they are carried out.

3.  Provide solution selling training and reinforcement
Make sure that your sales team has the consultative selling skills they need to add value to their target clients. Where there are gaps, provide targeted business sales training and follow-up sales performance coaching. Provide your sales teams with persuasive client case studies, research tools, customer contact technology, and your support…all they need to improve their understanding of their customers and how to approach them with value-added insights and support.

4.  Hold the sales team accountable
Monitor, track, and provide proportionate rewards and consequences. When you have a sales rep who exceeds expectations, recognize them. You owe them your appreciation for hard work well done.

It’s also an opportunity to encourage others to follow the desired behaviors. On the other hand, when you have a sales rep whose results are consistently below par, you need to act. After you have tried to find the root cause and to provide the support required for them to improve, you must let them go in a compassionate way that aligns with your values. The longer you allow substandard performers to stay, the more it costs your company and negatively infects those around them.

5.  Create some connection and pride
Sales reps will work hard for a company whose values they believe in and commit to. Give them reasons to be enthusiastic about what they do and to feel a sense of purpose and connection. The most successful and fulfilled sales reps are those who are dedicated to helping their customers and truly believe they and their offering can do so.

The Bottom Line
If you want to improve solution selling capabilities, start by conducting a disciplined activity analysis, provide targeted sales development opportunities and sales coaching based upon the results, manage performance, and add a dose of sales conviction to ensure that what they are doing matters.

To learn more about improving solution selling capabilities, download The 6 Top Reasons Business Sales Training Initiatives Fail