How to Train Your Sales Dragons

On the business battlefield, the salespeople are your knights, the force that brings you the victory of signing a client. But first, you have to train them well about how and when to attack.

The manner of selling by following those three steps is applicable to almost 90 percent of the situations. Your salespeople can be taught to follow these steps, how to adapt to different situations and how to be prepared for a meeting with a prospective client.

For a successful sales meeting train them well to:

1. Find out what the client's needs are.

First impression is a weapon that few know how to handle. To be successful, your salespeople need to know how to act, talk and command respect from the person in front of them so the sale will take the path of a trustworthy discussion.

Teach them to hold the product's or sale's details for later and learn about the client's need. They should ask about the internal processes, the methods of organizing the company's activity or any other information that can become a stepping stone for introducing your product.
The representative of the client won't expect for a salesperson to care about the backstage of his business. He will be surprised and intrigued.

He will respond and explain his well-thought processes with the pride of a business owner and your representative will understand what his business needs.

2. Find arguments on how your product meets the needs of the client.

At this point we can agree that the salesperson understands what the client's needs are. Now (s)he has to pick up the client's weapon and show him how to use it better, faster and more productive.
The sales rep should choose several important points in the story, then rewind to the beginning and tell the same story, but this time with the product involved.

This will provide the client a simple approach on the improvements your product or service could bring to his business. The next step is to prove him that your story is as simple as you told it, it's real and it's viable.

3. Exemplify and demonstrate.

The sales representative showed the client what he can do with the weapon, but now (s)he has to let him try it. Explain exactly how the product or service works, show it to the client, create a demonstration based on some internal operations of that business. Let the client enjoy the benefits for a minute before going back to business.

This is the time where the salesperson can prove (s)he did his homework, as well. There are two keywords for this conversation: adapt and become memorable. The sales rep has to emphasize the benefits of the product or service that this client needs most. This is what Victor Antonio calls “provide insight” or “information beyond the obvious” in his video “Sales Tips - Insight, Questions and Use of Language“. The information comes from the previous conversation, which means adapting, and also from a strong background research, which provides the knowledge to be memorable.

This is also the moment to steal his attention and present the whole special business package you sent for him. Be careful! Teach them not to lose themselves in details or bombastic promotional approaches. They do not have to show everything your product or service can do. Too much information can clog the business owner's mind and make the product or service seem complex, but too complicated.

Training your sales dragons to follow these three main steps will benefit their personal approach and your business. You will learn about your clients, you will make them feel listened to, you will intrigue and then surprise them, you will make them feel good about choosing you as a partner and, of course, you will sell.

EQ or How to recruit salespeople

As a business owner, you probably do realize that more and more people pass the technical and psychological test in your recruitment process, but hiring them does not seem to bring more value to your business. There is still the 20% of your sales team that provide the 80% of revenues. The 80-20 is a valid rule, but you should wonder why this is happening and what makes the 20% special. Believing it or not, it’s emotional.

We, at Nexus, started by interviewing salespeople and following our instincts or just trusting them for the job. Turned out that many of the trusted persons left the job shortly after being hired. Then we decided to recruit by testing their logical skills and the results were similar. By trial and error, we found the best way to expand our team: we now test for logical thinking and a high EQ.

EQ or Emotional Quotient got into the spotlights as studies showed that this quotient is most inclined to influence success and business growth than personality or IQ.
The EQ reveals that a person has a set of competencies that prove he or she has the ability to recognize self behavior, moods and catalysts, and to respond best according to the situation.
According to Mike Poskey from Zerorisk HR, Inc., there is a set of five emotional intelligence skills that studies proved to be more important in the workplace than skills achieved by education or personality traits combined. 

In his article, “The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in the workplace: Why it matters more than personality”, he divides the EQ competencies in social competencies which determine how people handle relationships and personal competencies which determine how people handle their own behavior. Social competencies include intuition and empathy, political and social skills and personal competencies include the three Selves: Self awareness, Self regulation and Self expectations & motivation.

The EQ test results portrait the person that will come later to the interview and makes it easier to test the accuracy of his or her answers or if the person fits the needs of your company. And he or she has to fit. One unfit, influencer type employee can harm the productivity of a whole sales department and can decrease the company's incomes. On the contrary, suitable sales people can increase revenues even if they are fewer. So keep this in mind: more employees don't necessarily mean bigger profit. We actually experienced situations about 2 times more salespeople and 40% less sales.

Furthermore, experience taught us that any recruiting tests also need to be verified by personal interaction through an interview after you have in mind the characteristics of the perfect candidate. But you have to know exactly what you need! Start from this and only afterwards focus on finding emotional intelligence tests online, training your HR team to apply and interpret the tests or even externalizing the process.

Also, the beauty of this set of five competencies is that they can be trained and improved. After you get the right sales people, you have to invest continuously in their soft skills by training and coaching them to overcome their limits and develop their emotional intelligence.

If you care for other success stories, have two more great examples:

A Texas-based Fortune 500 Company had utilized personality assessments for candidate selection for a long time with little results in reducing turnover and boosting revenues. After switching to an emotional intelligence-based assessment and EQ training and development program, they increased retention by 67 percent in the first year, which meant $32 million extra from reducing turnover costs and increasing sales revenues.

Also, a large metropolitan hospital reduced their critical care nursing turnover from 65 percent to 15 percent within 18 months of implementing an emotional intelligence screening assessment.

Furthermore, one study conducted by a Dallas corporation measured the productivity of employees with high and low EQ scores. Turns out the ones with high scores were 20 times more productive than the ones with low EQ scores.

So maybe it’s time to change the way you recruit your sales people and hire only persons that can increase that 20% percentage, nurture them, help them grow and be patient at least 3 months to see results. Be sure your business will thrive and your employees will be optimistic, empowered and productive.
Photo source.

Do Your Sales Reps Skip Meetings?

Nexus Locator

Have you ever faced the situation when one of your salesmen keep telling you they go to meetings but you don't really see the results, sometimes you can't even know if they have actually been to the meeting or somewhere else. Sometimes you may just be paranoid, but what if you're not?

Sales management is definitely not about controlling your sales reps 100%, or making them feel uncomfortable, you want them to be relaxed whenever they meet clients, but you can't ignore the fact that some of them might not do their job at all.

At CeBIT 2014 we launched a new product, a mobile application designed for logistics that can also be used by sales managers to have an idea about how active their sales reps are. We launched Nexus Locator, an Android Application for monitoring employees phones so you can always see your sales reps in real-time on the map and generate various reports about their activity, routes and speeding.

One of the most important features Nexus Locator offers for sales management is designing hot spots (Point of Interests) on the map. In this situation, for sales management, you can create a hot spot for each one of your clients office location and generate reports regarding visits in the hot spots you created. This way you will always know if and when your sales reps visit clients and if they actually try to do their job.

Aside from Zimplu CRM, Nexus Electronics Company offers GPS Tracking solutions since 2007, and we do have a lot of customers who use traditional GPS trackers to monitor their sales people vehicles, just so they know if they are doing their job. Nexus Locator App is the new solution for GPS Tracking, making it even better and easier to manage your human resources.

This is not only about control, but it is always useful to know who is available for a job when something comes up. Sometimes you just want to know which one of your clients generate more costs for your company, or you need to have an idea about how many meetings were needed for each customer in order to close the deal.

Nexus Locator can be found on Google Play Store.