Reason Two:
Experience ≠ Expertise
20 Years of Sales Experience Doesn’t Mean 20 Years (or even 1 year) of Sales Success!
No sales leader wants to admit they made a bad hire, but it happens all the time. “Experienced” sales reps use all the right buzzwords and tell an amazing tale of their past successes, but the hiring process often fails to weed out the pretenders. Even the best interviewers get “sold” in the interview process.
If you’re honest, you know that when you look under the hood, many of your “experienced” reps come to their jobs unable to research accounts and conduct effective discovery, incapable of navigating a political landscape and proactively building strategic relationships, unwilling to ask the hard questions and challenge their prospect’s assumptions or approach, and utterly lost in terms of building & communicating perceived value for their customers. Further, many can’t develop pipeline, effectively penetrate territories and accounts, or accurately forecast.
Perhaps the bigger challenge is that many of these same reps are still “selling” you on all the external reasons they’re not performing.
Effective sales teams are anchored on the fundamentals of selling. No matter how experienced they are or how complicated the sales environment gets, the best teams never lose focus on the basics.
Don’t Let Your Experienced Reps Tell You How Good They Are; Verify and Validate That They Are Workhorses in the Fundamentals:
- =Identifying stakeholders that matter and have power
- =Understanding the technical & operational challenges the customer is facing
- =Connecting those challenges to the customer’s business goals, objectives & priorities
- =Identifying and leveraging competitive differentiation
- =Building compelling and specific business value propositions that resonate with stakeholders that matter
- =Aggregating value propositions into a measurable, viable business case
- =Presenting the solution and business case with a compelling, competitive & differentiating approach
And then make sure your sales leaders drive for incremental improvements. There are thousands of actions and reactions in every deal, and many of them don’t go your way. But if reps focus on getting more of them to go their way in each successive deal, you’ll start to see rising win rates, faster closes, and bigger deals.