Skill #1 - Time Management: Momentum Control
Yes, inside sales is about money. But perhaps more important, it’s about time: how you plan it, and how you use it to your best advantage.
Pre-call research averages 45 minutes for just one contact. It takes from five to seven attempts to reach your contact by phone or email before they actually respond. You have to make enough initial calls and follow-up calls to generate genuine prospects you can confidently put in your pipeline. Meanwhile, the phone keeps ringing, texts and emails are flooding your inbox, your boss needs your forecast by this afternoon, and you’re already eating lunch in your cubicle.
In the sometimes unpredictable Sales 2.0 world, it’s easy to lose time multitasking inefficiently, lose track of time, lose focus, and lose sales in the process. And if your momentum gets tripped up, there’s always procrastination and wrong choices. Using Sales 2.0 technologies effectively means being proactive, not reactive: knowing how to manage your time to get the most out of it.
In this module you’ll learn to easily and efficiently manage your tools, systems, customers, and communications. Time management is the grease that keeps the sales wheels turning and sets you up for success.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Be productive on the phones.
- Work proactively, not reactively
- Multitask with ease
- Work faster and more efficiently
- Skill-shift smoothly from one activity to another
- Set firm calling times and stick to them
- Commit to an ambitious call objective that gets results
Skill #2 - Introducing: Selling in Sound Bites
You average 40 to 75 outbound calls and emails per day, hoping for a connect rate of just 8 to 10 percent. You’ve got four seconds to make a good impression with your email. When you finally get a live contact, you have only 7 to 15 seconds to make an introduction. If your contact likes what you say, you earn more time to make your pitch. If not, you get slammed into purgatory sales prison without anyone to bail you out.
You’re selling in a noisy, crowded, and fast-paced market, calling distracted and busy decision-makers who have short attention spans. The reality is, they hear only sound bites — because while they’re talking to you, they’re also checking news and email on tiny PDA screens. In this environment, you don’t have time to spend making your case: your introduction accounts for over 80% of the importance of the entire call!
In this module, you’ll learn to cut through the noise and make an immediate positive impact on prospects.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Learn to establish trust through effective voice tone, word choice, pacing, and organization
- Learn how Sales 2.0 trends are impacting messaging etiquette
- The Email Hotlist; What’s In and What’s Out
- Combine email and voice mail messaging for a dynamic One-two introduction
- Create powerful messaging that piques curiosity and encourages response
- Learn concise opening statements and probes that work
Skill #3 - Navigating: Avoiding the No-Po’s and Finding the Power Buyers
Ask any inside sales rep if their contact at a company has buying power, and they’ll usually say yes. Then ask them why their forecasted deal has been stagnant for the past few months and you’ll hear every creative and convincing excuse beyond their control. Chances are, they’ve aligned themselves with a No-Po — a friendly, charming, helpful person who doesn’t have the power to close a deal.
It’s hard to leave a No-Po — they’re so nice! And figuring out who has the real power in a company can be confusing. To make it worse, most companies have plenty of gatekeepers whose job it is to keep salespeople like you from finding out.
In this module, you’ll learn that asking a few smart questions can help you separate the No-Po’s from the power buyers before you get stuck. You’ll also learn how to go beyond the obvious power structure and build an org chart that shows the invisible lines of real power in any company.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Build an org chart that works
- Understand the underlying political structures that influence the decision-making process in any organization
- Discern whether particular gatekeepers can help or hurt the sales process
- Determine who makes the buying decisions
Skill #4 - Questioning: Building Trust, One Question at a Time
Questioning takes courage, instinct and tremendous risk. Strong questioning skills can immediately capture control of the call and lead a sale to close. Today’s prospects have lost patience with vendor questions — they are tired of the same questions and annoyed with outdated sales tactics.
Too often, unskilled or poorly trained reps either don’t ask enough questions, waste time asking meaningless questions of the wrong people, or put prospects in a headlock with a barrage of questions that sounds like an interrogation.
In this module, we’ll explore the art of questioning in depth, teaching you to use your questions to gain important information painlessly, probe deeper to uncover hidden needs, and to guide the prospect through the call with a strong plan.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Understand the order, strategy, style, formulation, and criteria of effective questioning
- Differentiate between telling and selling
- Organize your questions using established qualification criteria
- Learn analytical questioning skills and focus on formulating questions that get the answers you need
Skill #5 - Listening: Listening without Assumptions
Most of us listen at about 25% of our potential, yet this skill is critical to our selling efforts. Your deal will not close if the pain or power are missing — and only active listening will uncover both.
Listening begins after we’ve asked some well-formulated questions —but that doesn’t mean listening with “happy ears” and hearing what you want to believe, or just letting them drone on and waiting for your turn to talk. It means actively listening to what your prospects are telling you, and diving deeper into your questioning efforts.
Listen: What is the impact if your prospects don’t implement something this month? What will they lose out on? What will happen each day they don’t have something in place? That is your path to uncovering their pain and selling your solution.
The other part of listening is documenting the information from that discussion. This is an investment in trust and building a relationship. Information earns you time on your call. The more information you can bring, the more time you will earn. Inside sales warriors are becoming data hounds—they must be comfortable gathering data, synthesizing it, and integrating it into their next call.
This module takes an aggressive and active approach to listening, encouraging salespeople to think intuitively and listen strategically for new opportunities
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Use data integrity and online and off-line note-taking and documentation techniques that can be integrated into your needs discovery strategy
- Develop effective pain/impact questioning skills
- Actively listen through precision questioning and paraphrasing.
- Gain the confidence of difficult telephone personalities
Skill #6 - Power Linking: Selling to Power Buyers
Sales reps are often uncomfortable with calling high — talking to the real decision makers rather than the No-Po’s. It’s ironic, but it’s also no surprise: these busy execs can be unforgiving if they’re not approached in the right way. Reps who fail to capture their attention are shown the virtual door pretty quickly. But what do you say, how do you say it, and what do they want to hear?
This module is not just about calling high and getting to the C-level decision-maker. It’s about believing you deserve to be talking with them, and then learning how to move the mountains that get in your way. You’ll also learn how to speak their special dialect and entering into a “members only” club where you are no longer seen as a vendor but as a solutions provider, a valued consultant they rely on when defining their short- and long-term business strategies.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Determine the pros and cons of calling high, and get comfortable with the altitude
- Adjust your language and message to different titles within the corporate hierarchy
- Have the courage to call high at all stages of the sales cycle—beginning, middle, and end
Skill #7 - Presenting: Perfect Pitch
Wait, stop, today’s decision-makers are busy. They don’t take the time to read the attachments you send them or sit through the long webinars, and they fall asleep in a dimly lit room listening to yet another “death by PowerPoint” presentation. How can you present to them in a way that makes them sit up and pay attention? That’s what you’ll learn in this module.
The numbers of people using web conferencing within their organizations is increasing exponentially. Making web presentations is becoming the most essential part of the sales cycle, yet very few take this skill seriously.
This module explores various presentation vehicles and teaches the essentials of web/video conferencing and other online tools. It guides you through the ins and outs of executing and pitching perfectly, whether you get a five-minute phone meeting or a 30-minute web conference.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Design and deliver effective phone, online, web, and video demos and presentations
- Select PowerPoint slides that help you sell
- Articulate the competitive advantages of your product/service
- Understand the competitive influences that may arise throughout the selling cycle
- Succinctly educate, motivate and influence others on your product or service
Skill #8 - Handling Objections: Bring It On!
Selling in an uncertain economy means handling more objections. They come in the same flavors they always have, but now they’re delivered via email, text, phone, and chat. However you get them, objections are never easy. But when you can be ready for them, with responses that make sense to prospects, you can say, “Bring it on!”
This module explores fears that can actually create objections, and how to break through your own resistance. You’ll learn to identify five major categories of customer objections, and learn how to effectively rebound, gain confidence, and overcome them. Finally, you’ll takeaway the Comeback Pack — a set of rebuttal questions, phrases, and comebacks to build up your flex power and keep you agile
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Understand common reasons that customers resist.
- Listen to what’s behind the objection so you can respond
- Differentiate between spoken and silent objections
- Identify standard objections and learn how to rebound.
- Develop proactive rebuttal strategies for specific objections
- Overcome objections through effective questioning
- Understand email objections and how to rebut them
Skill #9 - Closing and Gaining Commitment: Cha-ching!
Closing is where the rubber meets the road. It’s about using all of your skills, believing you really deserve the business, and the complete inability to imagine losing the sale to your competitor or “no decision.” It’s also about building and managing a healthy sales funnel that doesn’t have you resorting to desperate discounting measures at the end of the month just to bring your numbers in.
In this module we’ll start with forecasting — because the way you forecast influences your closing process. We’ll review forecasted opportunities using a game called “Does This Deal Belong in My Forecast?” It’s a great tool, and a quick way to determine if you are delusional, overly ambitious, or spot on with your forecasting efforts.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Create momentum via compelling events throughout the sales cycle
- Understand the difference between funnel and forecasting
- Funnel analysis — building the perfect funnel
- Forecast at a glance
- Determine whether a deal really belongs in your forecast
- Learn secrets of convincing buyers to close
Skill #10 - Partnering: We’re All in This Together
It’s show time! In the past, customers wanted more feet on the street. Today, they want more knowledge online and by phone. That’s why inside sales is part of a larger integrated team of sales specialists all supporting the customer. You’re in the driver’s seat, perhaps partnering with your field rep and a dedicated systems engineer or another solution specialist to create opportunities.
When sales teams fail to unite for the common good, it becomes a drain on the productivity and revenue for the entire territory. This module focuses on creating and managing strong and productive partnerships, and offers solutions for setting agreements. It coaches reps to articulate the value they bring to a partnership and puts them in control of managing the virtual team throughout the sales process.
You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:
- Articulate the value of a team-selling approach
- Build your virtual team
- Determine your partner readiness criteria
- Quantify the trust factor you bring to a partnership
- Identify strong and weak partnerships
- Design contracts and agreements for strong partnering
