An Organization's Guide to Turning Professionals and Technical Experts
into Motivated and Successful Sales Professionals
An arborist expresses her frustration to a co-worker: "I'm in this
business to save trees and the environment, not to be a
salesperson."…Acarpenter sighs as he hangs up his tool belt to go to yet
another sales appointment…An accountant puts off the task of marketing
her services…A landscaper quits his job because there's too much selling
– he didn't want it to be like this.
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? In all types of companies,
bothlarge and small, there are—more often than not—highly skilled
employees, or 'experts', who believe that selling and making money are
in direct opposition to doing what they love. All too often, the
greatest challenge is helping these experts to not only see themselves
as sales people but to be proud about selling as their profession.
Failure to recognizeand help experts overcome this dilemma will
significantly impact a company's growth and bottom-line results.
We believe that being passionate about what you do and making money are
not mutually exclusive. Professional and technical experts can indeed be
hugely successful in sales—all the while maintaining the respect of
loyal clients, avoiding 80-hour weeks, and continuing to do the job they
love.
How can you create that reality for your sales people and for you? Here
are five steps that move you closer to this reality.
Step One: Sales leadership needs to evaluate their beliefs about selling
as well as the company's culture to ensure that it fosters and
reinforces the belief that selling, making money and doing what one
loves are compatible and desirous. Whether conscious or unconscious,
subtle messages, behaviors and organizational practices may reinforce
beliefs that negatively impact SALES success. Sales leadership must
adopt sales-empowering beliefs and strategies to ensure that the culture
and all its practices support and reinforce these beliefs. Failure to
recognize and continually revisit this first step can sabotage all other
efforts.
Step Two: Sales people need to evaluate their beliefs about selling.
There are several categories of beliefs that sabotage selling success. A
few include beliefs about being a sales person; making money; asking
about and for money, how and 'why' people buy, and what prospects and
clientsexpect from them. Each of these areas and others need to be
explored before new empowering beliefs can be developed and encouraged.
Step Three: The organization needs to define their sales process and
thentrain experts to follow it. Most professional and technical experts
thrive when given a clearly defined set of steps to follow. They feel
most comfortable with order, structure, and a process in place. An
organization that has experts selling must define the sales process so
that it can be taught, practiced, and followed by these individuals.
Having a clearly defined sales process makes the job of training,
managing and coaching sales people easier.
Step Four: Identify and provide training on specific selling skills that
experts need to be successful. Our experience suggests that the
followingskills are typically lacking in professional and technically
trained sales people: Rapport building, questioning, active listening,
influencing and prospecting skills. Too often, experts willingly share
their knowledgeby giving free technical advice, thus creating a
situation where the prospect doesn't need to buy the services being
sold. Likewise, experts are use to 'giving' solutions rather than
helping buyers discover the potential benefits of buying from them. An
unskilled salesperson has a higher potential for selling the wrong
product or service, walking away frompotential deals and losing
opportunities while utilizing and expending the company's resources.
Additionally we have found that many experts are not skilled in building
relationships because their academic studies have overemphasized
technical knowledge rather than people skills. Everyoneknows so very
well that customers buy from people they like, which is why
rapport-building skills are so essential to sales success.
Step Five: Reinforce and reward the new selling habits and beliefs that
support sales success. Supportive beliefs, coupled with a strong sales
process and cutting-edge selling skills, allow the expert to develop
effective habits that reinforce and result in selling success. Habits
are built over time through repetition and reinforcement, as well as
through honest, open, and consistent feedback from the sales manager. A
well developed and clearly defined behavior plan—one that outlines those
behaviors that, through experience, support selling success—needs to be
embraced, referred to frequently by sales managers and practiced
consistently by sales people.
There's always a choice to continue doing what you've always done, but
there is no choice if you want to win -- today's competitive marketplace
demands highly skilled sales people capable of keeping up with the every
changing needs and wants of buyers. Professional and Technical experts,
who must sell for a living, will only survive if they embrace the belief
that selling and doing what you love are the first two ingredients
fortrue selling success.
By Theresa Gale and Mary Anne Wampler
