How Global Teams Can Improve Sales Performance

This sales leadership article looks at how global teams can improve sales performance. An article on Harvard Business Review stated that to circumvent poor revenue performance, sales forces have to collaborate with each other and pursue new customer opportunities. One thing to note at the moment is how sales have been negatively impacted by digitally-savvy consumers and shrinking markets.

A report on successful global teams posted on LHH reveals that in 8 out of 10 sectors, global companies observed how aggregate sales are growing slower than their domestic peers.

Source: How Global Teams Can Improve Sales Performance – The Digital Sales Institute

Global teams are struggling amidst complex supply chains and larger and more diverse work forces. As such, a critical examination of your company becomes imperative. To start, ask yourself if the right workers are in the right jobs. If not, determine whether a talent or skills gap exists across your employees. This information will help you address the issues within your global team.

By evaluating your workforce regularly and understanding the changes that have to be implemented, competing globally becomes possible. In this article, we’ve provided three ways your global team can improve their sales performance:

1. Nurture current salespeople and high performers

This first point is related to protecting the existing strengths of your organization, which can be seen in your current salespeople. The referenced Harvard Business Review article showed that while incentives can boost your global teams productivity, they can lead to unfair situations. Take, for example, when your current salespeople have to give up accounts to make way for new employees. Losing sales opportunities and, subsequently, familiar relationships can lessen the morale of your more experienced workers. As such, you should offer quota-based incentive compensation plans. This allows quotas to be adjusted based on account reassignments. You can even offer your salespeople half the commissions on lost accounts for six months. This way, older employees can actively assist with the transition of the accounts they’re losing. With better mentoring opportunities, new workers can generate more informed sales proposals that can increase profits for your business.

2. Connect expansion plans to customer coverage needs

To compete globally — especially in the age of e-commerce platforms — your business naturally has to scale its sales presence and sales training capabilities. However, expansion plans should correspond to your sales results and customer coverage needs. This helps you avoid profit loss when your labor force is much larger than the demand for your goods and services. You’ll need to base expansion plans according to your customer needs, channel preference, and self-sufficiency. As a global sales team, you should also monitor the results of your product and customer segment. By doing so, you can apply these insights to make the necessary adjustments. For instance, if your product is performing roughly in a new market, you can task several salespeople to mitigate customer concerns. As it stands, 30% of the products sold through online channels get returned, which can prove detrimental to your sales performance.

3. Collect experience from across the whole global team

The LHH feature above stressed the importance of over-communicating. Each sales employee should be transparent about the obstacles they encounter. They should also recount the strategies they found effective while conducting market research. When your team shares feedback amongst themselves, they can avoid similar mistakes in the future. This practice is undeniably valuable to global teams when navigating through new software or sales tools. In our previous post ‘Sales Tools To Help Your Business Boost Sales’, we explained how sales tools can help your team cut back on time for repetitive tasks. However, new technologies always require a learning curve. A bid proposal software, for instance, prevents your employees from entering the same data into multiple systems. If one person is unfamiliar with the software, it can cause them to create a double entry, thus reducing efficiency. As such, your team should meet often and revisit their everyday sales processes. This opens up their time for other important matters (like focusing on existing sales accounts or creating strategies to increase customer satisfaction levels).

For more business insights, do read our posts on The Digital Sales Institute.

Sales Training Course Criteria – The Digital Sales Institute

A review of a sales training course from the perspective of a salesperson wishing to improve their sales skills. In many companies new salespeople begin their role with just some company centric basic training. This approach to sales training creates the impression that a salesperson should first prove themselves before any more investment in their training. Yes, we all know that selling is a producers role, and we are measured by the revenue we bring in. Like all professions the skills needed to sell successfully can be learned and mastered with training.

A Sales Training Course Should Include The Following

We emailed over 1000 salespeople and asked them questions on their sales training course criteria. Here is a summary of their answers in terms of popularity. The one thing to note is that no one single sales training course can cover all the skills you need to sell today. The reality is that you are the only one who can decide where gaps in your sales skills exist. So, explore different themes and course options to find the sales training courses that work best for your own unique situation.

Sales Skills 101

The top reply from our survey was that a Sales Skills 101 is the entry point of sales training courses. Sales skills 101 type course is ideal for any level of salesperson, from those starting out, to those who want to refresh their sales knowledge. It should cover all the major sales steps and sales tactics that you will need in the sales process. Topics worth noting that you should look out for would include defining selling, the buyer whys, how to start a sales conversation, the steps in a typical sales process, understand the difference between roadblocks and objections, plus all the insight needed to close a sale.

Did you know that according to Forbes magazine, 55% of salespeople lack basic sales skills. Many salespeople tend to forget about serving their customer’s needs first. Learning to handle rejection, identifying target customer profiles and mastering sales negotiations are vital skills you need to possess.

Soft Sales Skills

A good sales training course will also cover the soft skills. These are the sales skills for the way you think, the way you interact with others, how you manage yourself and how you communicate. The modern buyer is savvy and expect s more than the value that comes with the product. They want more than the value your company adds in. They want unique, relevant, personalized value. The only place they can get that is from you, the seller, human-to-human. They expect you to create value in every interaction with them. Your hard sales skills probably haven’t equipped you for value creation.

Digital Selling

Remote selling is here to stay. So digital selling has become an important aspect in the sales process. Sales is being fundamentally impacted as people and businesses change the way they buy. It’s time for a new approach to sales: to blend in digital selling to address this rapid and dramatic change in buying behavior. All of us will need to upskill in how we sell to attract and bring value to buyers across multiple channels including social media, video, etc. Broadly speaking, this means embracing the concept of digital selling. At its essence, digital selling empowers you to broaden your net, allowing you to gain appropriate insight on and relevance to customers — winning their trust and, ultimately, increasing revenue and reducing sales stress.

According to an EY study, salespeople that utilize digital selling techniques are 5.7 times more likely to secure prospect meetings and hit 150 percent of their quotas on average.

Customer Target Selection

If you are to maximize your return on sales effort (ROSE), we need to understand your ideal customer profile and then which customer set you will target. Every sales training course should go into detail on this topic. Customer target selection solves who is your target customer(s), which will serve as a focus for your sales activities, decision making, and other sales tactics.  Sales success is more likely to come from figuring out which businesses would understand your product or service and recognize the most value in using it.

The typical output of a customer target selection is a customer persona, which outlines salient descriptors of your target customer, which are relevant and helpful in deciding where to spend your time. Rather than identifying the unique needs of one individual, you’ll need to identify the unique needs of multiple people along the purchase decision making line.

Deciding on the right target customer is both art and science. The art is defining the target customer in a way that gives your value proposition a listening ear and allows you to differentiate versus competitors.

Learn To Build Compelling Value Propositions

Your value proposition, is the “what” and the core of your business activity, composed of your products, services, promises and pricing of the business. If customers believe they will get more value out of your value proposition than your competitors, over time you will win.  Ultimately, every buyer opts to purchase products and services to improve their lives in some way, to extract value. Value equals the rational and emotional benefits customers get from selecting your product or service minus the price they pay.

Learn to craft value propositions with clear statement that encapsulates three key criteria:
Relevancy: Explains how your product improves a specific customers’ life or solves their problems
Value: Deliver quantifiable concrete benefits
Differentiation: Shows your ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition.
To get buyers to listen to your sales conversations, you need to ensure that you have a value proposition(s) for your product or service that has both sufficient points-of-parity (POP) and points-of-difference (POD).

Undertaking A Sales Training Course Online

When it comes to selecting from the range of sales training courses you can find via online search, the considerations should be sales training course content and pricing. Your decision to upskill is an investment in your time and success, so it is important for your to choose a training course that works for your unique needs. If like many salespeople today, you are working remotely or in a hybrid model, then you should consider sales training courses online.  Here are some reasons why this is one of the best sales training methods for you.

Sales Training That Provides You With Flexibility

No matter how keen you are to learn new sales skills, it won’t matter if you can’t easily access your training content when you want. By considering online sales training you should have more flexibility when or where to do your training plus what topics you want to cover.

Many salespeople and organizations now choose sales training courses online due to 24/ 7 accessibility and reducing travelling or classroom time. One big advantage is you can access your training course whenever and wherever you need to. Another bonus is that you do not have to take time out of your workday to access tips, insights, or answers to questions as they arise in your daily sales activity.

Sales Training Unique To You

To be really effective, sales training should cover the topics an individual salesperson wants to cover or brush up on. The traditional classroom training is often inconvenient and inconsistent plus designed for a more general audience. Also, it can be difficult for a sales trainer to constantly research and update the sales training courses material to reflect the latest insights.

Competing voices and inconsistent approaches can lead to time wasting, low retention rates and a jumbled learning pathway that does not address the needs of the individual salesperson. However, sales training courses online can deliver a smooth, always on and available resource to be used as needed. Constantly updated material with a library of videos, cheat sheets and guides. This can decrease the time for a salesperson to upskill or acquire new sales skills.

Increases Retention

As online sales training courses are available 24/7, the learner can fir in their training at a time that works for them. Research into learning shows that people improve learning and retention of information better when they can choose their own schedule. Sales training online are accessible for salespeople at any time. They can watch and rewatch sales videos, read or download the sales training course materials and brush up on their skills whenever they want or need to. They can complete or revisit the training courses materials at their own time or pace, which has been proven to increase engagement and retention of information.

Invest in continuous learning

Because the training courses are easily accessible, they act as an “on demand” sales coach especially when so many salespeople are working remotely or have demanding roles. Online training in any discipline is the digital route to sharpen skills and stay abreast of the latest trends and sales insights to win more customers. Buying (and indeed selling) has changed and will continue to evolve with the influence of social media, access to information and buyer control of the sales process. The salespeople who will thrive in this new reality are the ones who can add value to the buyer, bring something different to the sale and are seen as credible. This points to some level of ongoing training to stay sharp.

Guide for creating a sales training course

As the shift to remote and digital continues apace, the requirement for sales training has never been stronger. As a profession which is results focused it is important to develop great sales training experiences. Here is a quick guide on how to create sales training courses.

Microlearning

Microlearning via short impactful videos offers a focused method to help salespeople acquire specific, actionable sales skills. Microlearning modules enables the learner to quickly grasp the knowledge on any specific sales skill. Selling is a producers role, with targets and other metrics to hit so they need to have the latest information on selling techniques at the click of a button. Microlearning can provide on demand sales training quickly and effectively.

Focus on one sales skill or topic at a time.

As an example, you can use five to fifteen minute sales training videos that cover the essential sales skill, such as:
What is selling and how to define it
The psychology of selling
The steps in the sales process
How to measure sales progress
Understanding and overcoming buyer roadblocks
The buyer whys to getting their attention
How to create value propositions
How to use discovery and uncovering techniques
How to create and present real value
Emotional intelligence in sales
Sales communication skills
Listening skills
Soft V Hard sales skills

How to maximize sales training courses

Sales training needs to be accessible, impactful, and based on the real-life scenarios any salesperson will encounter. Keeping training topics short and concise is the best way to help salespeople learn the crucial skills they need to succeed. Training that works to their schedule, where they can dip in and out of sales lessons as needed. A sales training course that does not take up too much of their time yet upskills them across a whole range of selling skills that the modern buyer expects.

Categories: Sales Training

Tags: sales training, sales training course, sales training course content, sales training course criteria, sales training courses

 

Source: Sales Training Course Criteria – The Digital Sales Institute

7 Ways to Improve the Sales Experience

Here we introduce 7 ways to improve the sales experience on your website. The sales experience on your website is critical to gathering leads or even to get your visitors converting to paid customers .

Source: 7 Ways to Improve the Sales Experience on Your Website – The Digital Sales Institute

Only focusing on the features, services, and items is not enough if you want to outpace your rivals in online sales. You should provide a seamless customer experience. Only focusing on the features, services, and items is not enough if you want to outpace your rivals in online sales. You should provide a seamless customer experience. Online shopping has become a trillion-dollar industry, with many preferring the convenience of at-home purchasing rather than making the trip to a retail establishment. But that does not mean that customers do not miss certain aspects of the traditional shopping experience from time to time.

The personalized attention from a store assistant, and quick and easy information about products, are some aspects of the retail shopping experience that online marketers are trying to bring back into their websites. Some tricky problems characteristics of online shopping platforms are also being paid close attention to improve the overall customer experience. Brands are working hard to make the sales process as simple, easy, and quick as possible.

In today’s day and age, when the e-commerce market has become highly competitive, subtle improvements in sales experience for the customers can go a long way in building customer loyalty and increasing lead conversions.

7 ways to improve the customer experience on your website

1. Engage the customers in the R&D process

Customers nowadays have thousands of options in every product category and price range. Competition in the online shopping sector is intense. So, customers have become very picky about what they like, and they will only buy products with certain specifications. Brands often struggle to meet these extremely particular requirements and deliver an engaging sales experience.

Still, an easy solution to the problem involves customers during the product development process, where customers can share their feedback about what features they want to add or remove. This can be done by inviting customers to join seminars, workshops, and other online events through the website. Brands can look online for registration form inspiration for these events. These online seminars can also be good for brands launching new products that must explain and demonstrate their usage to the public.

2. Make sure to check website speed

Online shoppers generally make purchases primarily to save money traveling to a store. So quick response time from online shopping is one of their main concerns. Business experts have found that 53% of smartphone users leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This leads to a decline in their traffic volume. Customers have no time to wait half a minute for an elaborately designed web page while shopping. Similarly, the transaction page should load, respond, and process payments quickly to give customers the most satisfactory experience.

3. Assess mobile responsiveness

An essential element of online shopping is the ability to make purchases from your smartphone. Most online retailers have a mobile application, or their website can also operate on mobile. But some sites do not open properly on mobile, the page view gets distorted, speeds are slower, and the page responsiveness declines. These problems will discourage many visitors from repeating your site’s purchases. A vast majority of online shopping happens via smartphones, so ensuring the mobile responsiveness of your e-commerce website should be a top priority for all brands.

4. Introduce live chat

One of the biggest factors customers miss from traditional physical stores is the ability to instantly communicate with a real human employee about any questions or concerns. Online brands are now trying to replicate this interaction with the help of a live chat option on their site. This chat option allows the customer to speak directly to support service personnel. Customers can ask questions about specific products, payment methods or delivery estimations. The support employee will immediately answer the customer’s queries so they do not have to wait and can make their purchase immediately. Live chat is a great way to quicken conversion at the final stages of the sales funnel and boost the sales experience for your visitors.

5. Allow customers to share product photos

Most online stores have options for customers to rate their products and share their reviews. Online stores also, of course, provide multiple pictures of their products. But these pictures are primarily clicked in a studio setting, and customers remain skeptical about how exactly the product will look in their own home setting. So, some brands have now started allowing customers to share pictures of the products after receiving them.

These pictures can be posted along with their reviews and will give other prospective buyers an idea about what the products look like in a real-life setting. These pictures often push buyers to be convinced about certain products finally. But of course, this strategy works only for certain categories of products.

The online store should also have a monitoring system to ensure that customers do not post anything inappropriate with their product photos. Brands can also pay social media influencers to make real reviews of their products and share them with their customers for more real-life proof.

6. Good landing pages

Many online brands are now driving traffic to their websites with the help of social media posts and PPC advertising. The customers can click on the links shared in these posts and ads and take them to the brand’s official website. But instead of just taking customers to a generic product search or a product category page, it can be more effective to make the landing pages more specific.

When customers click on an ad for a particular product, they should be brought to the landing page to purchase it. There can be options to search for similar products, but the basic landing page should be hyper-specific. This will encourage customers to make quick and immediate purchase decisions because it is convenient to buy from your brand.

7. Personalized sales recommendations

Finally, introducing personalized sales recommendations is one of the most important improvements any brand can make in the online sales experience. Online stores have the ability to store customer information very easily. They have plenty of data on what customers made what purchases on what date. So, the next time a customer visits the online store, this prior data can be processed through data analytics systems to create personalized product recommendations for the customer. These new soft sales skills recommendations will be in the product categories and the specific customer’s preferred price ranges. This customized sales experience makes customers feel more connected and loyal to the brand.

They also save a lot of time and will most likely return to the same online store for future purchases. In case new customers for whom the brand does not have any existing data, they can recommend their newest launches and best sellers.

How to build the perfect online sales experience?

The perfect online sales experience is all about the right mix of ease of usage and element of interest. An excellent online store must have an intuitive user interface and a simple navigation system. But the website design cannot be too generic and simplified. It should look sophisticated and well-planned to the user to gain confidence about the brand’s authenticity. Most brands use social media and traditional advertising to build customer trust. Still, no amount of marketing will be able to convince customers to make purchases if they feel that the website is not well-protected and is casually designed. For the vast majority of customers, the website design is a good indicator of the trustworthiness of any brand.

Of course, functional elements like device compatibility, speed and responsiveness are also important elements of the customer experience. Data analytics is another background process that can greatly impact how a site’s sales experience is designed. Data analytics will identify which stages of the sales funnel are experiencing the most attrition. Then those web pages can be worked on specifically to make improvements. Analytics is also beneficial in devising personalization strategies for the sales process. The more a brand can personalize its sales experience, the more customers will feel wanted by the brand and return to the same online store.

Many software solutions are now available online to automate different parts of the sales process. Data collection, data analytics, recommendation engines, and landing page generators can now be fully automated. Business owners with a small technical team can introduce complex technologies in their online store. All that is needed is a vision to build the ultimate sales experience for the customer. So, if you are trying to out-pace your competitors in the online sales sphere, remember that it is not enough to just focus on features, services, and products that your brand can offer. The focus has to be on building a complete experience for the customer from start to finish. Also don’t forget to provide sales training on your web and social media strategy.