Write It Out
If you asked me for the single best tool I've ever used to improve my selling skills, I'd tell you it's the keyboard. Nothing has honed my skills better than typing out my thoughts and positions, seeing them in black and white, and then having to defend them internally before pressing publish.
The self-scrutiny is invaluable, but that's not the writing I'm talking about in this week's piece.
I'll bet most of you can't write out your sales process from start to finish, at least not with a lot of clarity, let alone enough to publish in a training manual.
That's a problem.
As I mentioned last week, it's damn near impossible to ask for next steps if you don't know what those steps should be. The next issue is that many of you think you know but actually don't.
Most sellers would tell you that once a lead comes in, a discovery meeting is conducted. You qualify the opportunity, decide to make some sort of a pitch, handle objections, send everything off to the respective legal teams, and then at some point, you get started.
Okaaaay... but what about all the in-between stuff? How do you know when you've learned enough to move forward? How can you tell if your prospect is actually committed to change or just looking around? Is there going to be some discussion about a bespoke solution, or are you selling something 100% off the shelf? What about cultural alignment between your organizations?
There are all kinds of checkpoints along the way, and I have never once worked in an organization or consulted with one (until recently) that had all of these points documented.
I talked about it on this week's episode of the podcast, and the results have been incredible.
There is no better way to train your team, and here's why:
First and foremost, when you talk about selling with your peers and colleagues, everyone is bound to get better at selling.
Secondly, you're inviting conversations about all the little details and potential happenings throughout the sale process, and you're leaning on real-world experience and situations to lead the discussion.
Third, if you just documented it, you'd have the best company-specific sales training manual ever, and new reps could be onboarded in far less time.
Finally, if this were a consistent conversation in your team meetings, you would have an evergreen resource that would be consistently updated and would cost you $0 in outside training and consulting fees.
Still, hardly anybody does it because the work can be a little tedious, and maybe some of your team members will be a little uncomfortable while you do it (there's the self-scrutiny I mentioned earlier).
Those are silly reasons not to do something so productive and helpful.
