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The need of Sales Training in Academic Institutions Part 2

The need of Sales Training in Academic Institutions Part 2

by | Aug 20, 2019 | Aarambh, Sales

In my last blog, I shared about sales being given a back seat in B-Schools compared to marketing and the rising need for sales education programs in academic institutions.

If you haven’t read that blog yet, I request you to pause and read that one first here, it will make more sense. 

How can Sales Training Programmes help?

As we look across the landscape of sales education now, it seems that universities are beginning to see the opportunity. High-quality sales education serves students well, serves universities well, and serves our economy well. Why, then, do we not see more of it?

Bringing senior sales professionals into the classroom gives students an authentic glimpse of what it is like to work in the field and the different kinds of people who can excel in it.

It is time to change the general attitude of college students toward a career in sales. These attitudinal barriers can be overcome. As it happens, sales positions offer qualities that appeal to Millennial: autonomy, rewards linked to personal effort, and the opportunity to interact with a variety of people. When we communicate the reality of sales, we see those who value such qualities approach it with real enthusiasm.

How will the student benefit from Sales Training Program?

To prepare a new generation of sales professionals, sales education programmes would talk to students and prepare them in fundamental sales (basic, one-to-one methodologies), advanced sales (complex, multi-buyer methodologies), advanced valuations (analytic processes for customer development), sales management (channels and individuals), business communication (personal and group skills), and sales technology (sales-effectiveness tools).

All aspiring B-school students have the drive to learn and be the best. A good sales training will help them and contribute its bit to get them there.

How will the institution benefit by facilitating Sales Training For Students?

Your institution gets a cutting edge over other institutions.

Students develop a broad understanding of all the functional areas of business, not just sales, and often study live cases.

Students are exposed to multiple techniques and skills required for a successful career in sales.

Students are better equipped with selling techniques, attributes, and traits required for better placements. If students are better prepared, companies will have a better supply of talent to choose from.

Students attain degrees in business, marketing, finance, and management, but sales is rarely a major or minor offered. The sales industry as a whole appears elusive to many students until they graduate, entering “the real world” to find that sales is a major industry and profession. A trained student in sales would be a better fit in the sales industry.

I have spent 30 years pursuing sales as my career and in the process, sales has given me a lot. I am privileged to have the opportunity now to contribute my bit in giving something back to sales. As a sales trainer and coach, I help students develop and grow to build a successful sales career. 

 

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The need of Sales Training in Academic Institutions

The need of Sales Training in Academic Institutions

by | Aug 13, 2019 | Aarambh, Sales

For decades, Sales and Academia remained worlds apart and the business world did fine. But Sales is changing, Academia is out of touch, and this is bad for business and the academy. We all know that a well-staffed sales function is vital to business success. Studies reveal that 39% of B2B buyers select a vendor according to the skills of the salesperson rather than price, quality, or service features. So business schools must spend a lot of time teaching sales skills, right?

WRONG!

Take a look at the curricula of the world’s top-ranked business schools, and you might come away with the impression that sales is unimportant. Most BBA/MBA programs offer no sales-related courses at all, and those that do offer only a single course in sales management. Even at the undergraduate level of business instruction, sales courses are sparse. There is an increasing awareness among universities that they should invest in sales education. There is a growing consensus that professional sales have entered a new era, requiring skills that are scarce but teachable—and best taught in a collegiate setting.

Sounds familiar?

If you answered it as a yes in your mind, I humbly encourage you and if I may, even insist you on asking yourself and probably your core team members this question?

Have Sales taken a back seat in B-Schools compared to marketing?

Until quite recently, business education might have been perfectly justified in skipping over sales. Time was, the model salesperson was two parts personality and one part of product knowledge. The job was to carry a bag, get a foot in the door, and talk up your offering’s features and benefits. Perhaps a formal sales education couldn’t add much to that. Product knowledge was unique to a company and therefore handled by internal training. People skills weren’t considered teachable in any conventional sense. Selling was something to be learned by doing. As with riding a bicycle, you could read about it, but real knowledge came from trying, failing, and trying again.

The boom in BBA/MBA programs coincided with the rise of marketing as a discipline. Sales, in contrast, got little respect.  Selling and sales management have come a long way since the days when most business school curricula were designed. There is plenty of substantial material to be taught. And we know that when it is taught in a university setting, it affects performance.

Perhaps the strongest argument for increasing the number of sales education programs is that our economy is suffering in the absence of them. In regions desperate for jobs, good sales positions go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. Many more jobs are filled by people who are unprepared to excel at them. To acquire new talent, companies will need strong college recruiting programs, but those can take several years to build. And right now only a few thousand graduates each year have been exposed to some sales education.

As sales careers have moved beyond the days of glad-handing and door-opening, a whole realm of knowledge has come to separate the best-performing professionals from their peers.

What is needed?

A great salesperson today can assess multiple customer needs and motivations, analyze and forecast market trends, use sophisticated automation tools, and develop value-driven solutions in partnership with clients. Critical thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to negotiate have become more important than an outgoing personality.

All this suggests the outlines of a robust undergraduate program. As this subject is of great concern, it also needs to talk about how would sales training help and how would it mutually benefit the students as well as the institution. I shall continue the blog next week and cover this in details.

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Create Your Sales Funnel

Create Your Sales Funnel

by | Jul 10, 2019 | Aarambh, Prachand, Sales, Uncategorized

In 30 years of my selling career, I have come across many sales people who would be celebrating their sales victories for three months and appear to be desperate and shaky in the next few months. The consistency seems to be missing, and why is that?

It is the result of not giving attention to their sales funnel and not keeping their pipeline full. Sold, unsold, lost to competition, not ready to buy until the next quarter, referrals, leads, enquiries, second sales, and many more of such suspects and prospects must always be added up to keep filling  your pipeline. 

A sales funnel is the visual representation of the customer’s journey, depicting the sales process from awareness to action.

This funnel illustrates the idea that every sale begins with a large number of potential customers, and ends with a much smaller number of people who actually make a purchase.

Sales funnel stages vary from industry to industry and company to company, but they are generally divided into 5 stages from initial contact to closing.

Creating a sales funnel is one of the most important things you need to do as a sales person. Here’s how to go about creating a sales funnel to drive sales:

Identify your prospects

The goal is to drive interested prospects into the wide end of your sales funnel so that they can be qualified as good or potential prospects by identifying their needs and concerns.

Qualify your prospects

Qualifying prospects is not difficult. You can take surveys, start conversations and get people talking so that they reveal their actual needs and desires.

Apply sales funnel fundamentals

Your sales funnel consists of the means you use to drive prospects and potential customers to your business and close the sale.

Establish your sales funnel

Once you have identified and qualified your prospects and have applied the funnel fundamentals, now you would want to know where you are going in order to get there. Before you start building your funnel, you need to know what the final objective is. Where do you want the prospect to end up at the conclusion of the sales funnel and what action do you want them to take?

So, start at the end.

The goal of your sales funnel should have the following outcomes:

  • Build a deeper relationship with your consumer
  • Convert the consumer to some sort of call to action.

Your ability to build and manage a smart and healthy sales funnel is the key to closing more and more sales. A healthy funnel should have a good mix of suspects and prospects at different levels of the funnel. It is not the quantity, but the quality that matters. If you want to achieve a healthy funnel, you must dedicate a few hours of your day to building your funnel and growing it. Your sales funnel will take care of you if you take care of it. 

 If you have a sales funnel that is not bringing in desired results, write to me in the comments section so that I can help you re-engineer it and if you don’t have one at all, create one and see the magic work.

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How to be a successful Salesperson

How to be a successful Salesperson

by | Jun 18, 2019 | Aarambh, Prachand, Sales, Uncategorized

Ummmm…Ehhh…..well…..but….sorry……

These are the words you so often hear from those sheepish-looking, white-faced, trembling salespeople who seem to vanish behind some product catalog or their working bags. Their confidence and determination seem to be at the lowest ebb and they appear like empty sacks. Try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

Would you like to purchase anything from such salespeople?

Now imagine sitting before a confident and a determined sales person. They shine with enthusiasm and have a positive aura all around them. Successful salespeople are looking into your eyes.

They are smiling.

They look confident

That’s the way you want to look and you want to feel when you are dealing with a prospect or a customer because confidence makes the other person want to buy. Confidence makes a huge difference whether the other person wants to buy or not. Its confidence not only in you or your ability to solve their problems, but it is also confidence in understanding that your company can deliver on its promises. That it backs up its products. That sort of confidence really just naturally comes out when you meet people. It is not something you can fake. It is something that you feel inside and resonates in your sales talk.

So, if this is your area of weakness, you must work upon it by knowing all about your company and its products.

After that comes determination.

Determination is the rock-solid belief that you will just stick to it until you win. You will not miss your goals. You are determined to meet your numbers. It does not matter if you have an old laptop or an old mobile or an old motorbike or no catalogs or your company has an old website that has not been updated. It just does not matter what is in your way. You are determined to meet your numbers and you will win. Have you noticed this in top salespeople???

They just don’t give up, because they are determined.

Do not worry…

It’s just a sales call and not the end of the world. Be confident and determined. Have that positive aura around you. Let that enthusiasm show.

I assure you; you will rock and set the market on fire.

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STAYING MOTIVATED

STAYING MOTIVATED

by | May 28, 2019 | Aarambh, Prachand, Sales, Uncategorized

Are you feeling burnt out and exhausted?

Does it feel like a lifetime when you were bright-eyed and optimistic enough to take on the world all by yourself?

Are you overwhelmed by your emotions, and the feeling of insecurity is plaguing your mind?

You are not alone, it happens with all of us. For some, it happens every day, for others a million times a day.

Do not be disheartened, these are just signs that you need to step back and get yourself motivated.

Motivation is a process we develop within ourselves that enables us to meet goals. It comes from within you and is self-generated. It is not something that will happen with a motivation quote or two, motivation is something you do for yourself rather than something that happens to you. It is a set of mental processes well within your control. Our motivation levels may often get affected by internal and external influences, but it is of utmost importance that an individual gets himself motivated fast to face new challenges.

Understanding how to motivate yourself to be proactive, positive and focussed is critical if you want to succeed in sales and here are a few tips on how you stay motivated.

  • Wake up and be awesome- Every day is a fresh start. Wake up with determination and with a thought that today is going to be a great day. Wake up every morning with the thought that something wonderful is about to happen.
  • Set Daily, Weekly and Monthly Goals– Salespeople must set up a daily, weekly and monthly goal for themselves. Determining the number of calls, quotes, presentations and then meeting them is a self-motivating formula.
  • Set ambitious goals and go for them- De-motivated salespeople do not set ambitious goals as they do not believe in themselves. On the other hand, successful salespeople set ambitious goals to motivate, stretch and focus themselves, set out a vision and a strategy for achieving those goals. Having a plan and working the plan gives you the required motivation.
  • Align with the best and eliminate negativity- Winning is contagious. Spending time with performers is a great source of motivation. Remove and separate from negative influences. Rather find a group of people that challenge and inspire you. Spend a lot of time with them and it will change your life.
  • Reward yourself and celebrate small/big achievements- Rewards motivate. So make sure, that you reward yourself for achieving those small goals you had set up for yourself. Buy yourself an ice cream for smaller achievements or an expensive dinner for a bigger achievement or even a holiday with your family for achieving something big.
  • Get a competitive edge- One of the best ways of motivating yourself is to invest in yourself and your personal development to get that competitive edge. This may be achieved by enrolling yourself in a sales training programme or buying good books on selling techniques or even watching a sales training /skill development video on YouTube.
  • Get your team involved- One of the best ways I used to motivate myself was creating an unspoken competition amongst my own team to go that extra mile. Create competition amongst your own team, exude energy and persuade others to make selling more enjoyable.
  • Rely on past achievements- Remember all your past successes. Think back to those times where you have truly excelled. What were the initial setbacks? What did you do to overcome them in order to achieve that success? Whenever you do something remarkable, write down a summary of your success and stick it up on the wall beside your computer screen. Whenever you are down and out, look over the list of your past successes and remind yourself that the next success is just around the corner.

This is your 8 step formula to stay on top of your game and I would like you to make it an integral part of your life. If you skip a beat, it is ok… catch up with it again and be awesome.

Remember Thoughts Become Things, and you have total control of your life and who you want to be.

Stay Motivated. Stay Awesome.

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A Successful Approach to Negotiation & Negotiation Skills

A Successful Approach to Negotiation & Negotiation Skills

by | May 14, 2019 | Prachand, Sales, Uncategorized

Like it or not, you are a negotiator…..Everyone negotiates something every day (The quality of our life and business depends on our negotiation skills). Most of us negotiate throughout our personal and professional lives: negotiating your salary in a job interview, your product price with a prospect, fighting over discounts while purchasing a new air conditioner, even bargaining over petty amounts buying vegetables and even persuading your little child to eat his piece of cake.

If you are a salesperson you don’t just need to know how to negotiate, you need to master the science of negotiation skills and that my friend is non- negotiable.

Negotiation is a process of specialized problem solving when two groups or individuals start from opposite positions and attempt to reach a satisfactory middle ground (Win-Win is the key), with each side hoping to give up as little as possible.

Alternatively, negotiation can be seen as an attempt by two or more parties to reach an agreement where the following conditions are present:

  • The resources being negotiated are scarce such as time, money, etc.
  • Agreement and conflict exist simultaneously.

There is a mistaken notion that selling and negotiating are the same. While there is a number of similarities, there is one important difference. To negotiate, you must have authority to change something, such as price, delivery or contract terms. Secondly, you must use this authority very judiciously to get something of value to your company in return.

In practice, it is found that most people use negotiation too early in the selling process and fail to get commensurate value in return. In short, negotiation authority is used routinely to win sales.

Negotiation should not be used to create interest in buyer but to clinch the deal. Negotiating too soon is the commonest mistake of inexperienced negotiators or rookies. Giving things away prematurely create expectations that larger concessions will follow later.

Negotiation should never be a substitute for selling. Negotiate late and negotiate little, and be a successful salesperson.

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