As a leader, imagine you have invested in business development training for your sales staff and now you want to stop by the training area to show your support. You listen as the facilitator talks about the importance of building rapport, making more calls, and asking powerful questions. As first, you feel satisfied that your team is learning the basic hallmarks of business development that helped make you successful years ago.
Eventually you leave the training area and on to the rest of your day. You then start thinking how your customer interaction and their expectations for your organization have changed over the years. You may start to wonder if the business development techniques that your teams are currently learning have adapted to this new change, and its ability to give your teams the tools to onboard potential dream clients.
If you are uncertain, the place to start is by asking yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your investment. If the primary focus is to teach your team to simply turn over more rocks looking for business then basic sales training will be somewhat effective. If the goal is to truly be more effective at bringing in larger and more meaningful deals then advanced training should be your focus. Different training is required for each of these scenarios. The latter is done by learning HOW to create differentiated value that addresses what customers and prospects now want from sales professionals that call on them.
If you are not sure which one your training truly addresses then an easy way is to ask your sales professionals about the training they received and what they learned beyond what they already knew. If you are not impressed, you have not moved your team’s ability to secure meaningful dream clients in today’s changing business development landscape. Most business development training is still centered on age-old principles which can be helpful to a new sales professional, but do not address what experienced sales professionals need to win complex and meaningful deals.
Basic training still leaves sales professionals with inconsistent pipelines that are filled more with hope of something closing rather than strong deals with logical next steps. Request for last minute concessions start to be the norm in order to get the deal across the finish line.
When you stop by your next training session to observe your team, look for these three pillars and how they stand against the changing business development landscape. Ask yourself if what your team is currently learning will meet the needs of the new decision-makers, take back control over the selling process, and provide the much-needed value to more complex meaningful relationships.
The first training pillar establishes a process to create intense differentiated value for your customers and prospects at every step of the process.
For years we have been training sales professionals to get an appointment at all cost. After your next sales professional comes back from a sales call, sit them down and ask then what differentiated value they created during the time they had with a prospect. In the back of your mind, I want you to discount when they talk of rapport, the questions they asked, and how they relayed your firm’s ability to provide a product or service to that relationship. These things are all important to learn how to create but, your competitors are out singing the same tune. The key words are to find what differentiated value they created. Does your current training teach your team HOW to do this or just turn over more rocks?
Training that teaches sales professional HOW to have a meaningful collaborative conversation about trends in their customers industries will separate your team from your competitors. Your sales professionals have to learn how to effectively move away from the products they sell as a primary focus, and the creation of value. They must be trained to effectively conduct more client-centered conversations. Products and services will follow secondarily, when sales professionals can find the intersection between customer issues and the products and services they offer. This creates pipelines filled with real moveable deals.
The second training pillar teaches how to prove your value.
This is the most overlooked part of the business development process and the key word is PROVE. Most sales professionals will spend time in a sales meeting asking consultative type questions, discussing their firm reputation, and their ability to deliver solutions that help the potential customer to be successful. Reality check: Your competition, whether inferior or not, are asking the same questions and making claims of their ability to deliver great service without any proof. Decision-makers can find themselves sitting in meetings with sales professionals hearing roughly the same pitch and in their mind, no value is being created.
Therein lies a massive opportunity for success. Advanced business development training should teach sales professionals how to build in a process that can add credibility to their claims so they can differentiate from their competitors. When sales professionals can learn how to articulate factual performance that they can deliver to a potential business relationship, it can have a massive impact to their ability to add meaningful deals to their pipelines.
The third pillar is to be able to turn your provable value into an advantage that is used against your competitors.
Being able to articulate one’s value and how this affects your prospective customers’ key performance metrics will allow you to steal your competitors dream clients. Business development training should have advanced storytelling and business acumen techniques that teach how to turn your firms’ advantage against your competitors.
Sales professionals must learn how to move from a ‘consultative pitch mode’ to board room level thinking. They must learn how to conduct a collaborative conversation with potential clients. This process alone, if done effective, will bring more meaningful deals into pipelines. This allows them to fill their pipelines with deals that their competitors did not even know about.
The basics of sales training are important for us all to hear time and time again. What one should ask is if these age-old concepts meet today’s changing climate and does it really create a differentiated value. In the world today, there is a lot of noise from inferior competition that leads to a great opportunity for organizations to show superior value and win meaningful deals. Just ask yourself when making the investment in your team if this training helps customers and prospects see that value. Then you will know if your investment will translate into powerful revenue in 2020.
