Do You Want Your Team to Reach the Solution Selling Summit?

Solution selling training is mostly taught through the crucible of carefully designed workshops in order to help sells reps to better sell complex solutions to buyers who expect meaningful value from what you have to offer.  If only it was that easy.  To reach the solution selling summit, the context for business sales training needs to be aligned with your sales strategy, and the customer-focused selling skills need to be frequently and consistently practiced, reinforced, and coached to.

How to Reach the Solution Selling Summit

When you are looking to create a high performing sales culture and want your sales reps to reach the solution selling summit, you need to give your sales and support teams every opportunity to learn in an environment that supports them. Set up your business to recognize and promote the following characteristics of selling success:

 1.  A clear sales strategy
Our organizational alignment research found that strategic sales clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing sales organizations. Each and every member of your team should make the focus of their sales activities and decisions based upon your specific go-to-market sales strategy. Your entire team needs to understand and be able to articulate your unique value proposition and the ideal target client profile that represents your best opportunities to win new business.

Sales reps need to be clear about who needs what they sell and where they can offer differentiated value to their target customers.

2.  An understanding of how to build client-centric value
The tougher the competition, the more critical it is to build meaningful value at each and every step in the sales process. Value in the sales process can come in different shapes and sizes. It can be through helping a client identify opportunities they had not seen or by evaluating the unanticipated consequences of a decision.

It can be linking your client up with a resource that adds to the service you bring. It can be providing a meeting with a subject matter expert who can shed light on a problem they are struggling to solve. Or it can simply be sending a white paper that expands on a topic that interests them.

3.  Skilled sales coaching
The best way to boost and accelerate learning about how to sell well is through consistent on-the-job sales coaching. In fact, sales reps who receive consistent coaching outperform their peers 4-to-1 in terms of revenue and margin.  Sales managers who carve out time to accompany their reps on sales calls and then help them debrief the experience reap the benefits in their reps’ more rapid learning of how to do it right.

When managers can observe and then provide on-the-spot feedback, sales reps are more inclined to make behavioral course corrections. Sales managers can also help reps plan major account strategies and overcome obstacles in the sales process. The time spent coaching for sales success pays off very quickly in increased revenue, margin, and client satisfaction.

4.  Tracking and measurement
High performing sales teams operate not by “gut feel” but by actual data. However, you can easily go overboard by paying attention to too many sales metrics. The key is to measure what really matters most. Analyze which sales activities actually produce sales results and then keep track of them.

Look at sales metrics like opportunity management, sales call management, territory management, and account management. Determine which matters most to your sales outcomes, then measure and coach them to improve overall sales results.

5.  Sales as a process
Look at how your top solution sellers sell and then identify which client-initiated pivot points in the sales process are most likely to end up in a deal. When you have a short list, design key milestones for each stage. Then design a road map to boost the sales productivity of the less successful and new sales hires so people know what works to be successful.

The Bottom Line
Every sales leader wants a high performing sales team. Before you invest in sales training to reach teh solution selling summit of success, make sure that you create the environment required for the new sales skills to take hold and thrive.

To learn more about improving sales training outcomes, download The 6 Top Reasons Business Sales Training Initiatives Fail