Creating Your Own Sales & Marketing Guide

Sales training is important for teaching the basic selling skills, from cold calling to closing. New sales people need this training as well as seasoned veterans who forgot more than they remembered and also need to keep up with the latest selling skills since things have changed over the years. However, it is one thing to say this is how you do cold calling, for instance, and yet another to say whom you should be making those cold calls with. Sales training can’t stop at the basics. You need to expand that into “information training”, or training that also provides the vital, company-specific information your sales team needs to become more successful. This is the difference between generic sales training and customized training for your company.

An example of this would be if you taught your sales team how to prospect but did not teach them what types of prospects are most likely to purchase your product or service. Another example would be if you taught them how to qualify a prospect by asking the right kind of questions, but not specify exactly what questions should be asked for your type of customers and business. Finding out these company-specific bits of information is not an easy task, however. Many companies don’t track their successes and failures to identify what works and what doesn’t work. Without capturing the best-practices of your successful sales people, it’s difficult if not impossible to determine how and why each sale was won or lost. Without this important information, you cannot duplicate your successes nor eliminate your failures.

In this sort of environment, your sales team becomes fragmented, with each sales rep doing things different from the others. You’ll have a few top performers, but the rest will be marginal or poor. The result – 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your sales reps. Sound familiar? It should since this is a typical scenario in most businesses today. Left unattended, the non-performing sales people will quit out of frustration, or from poverty, or maybe even get fired for missing their revenue goals before they have a chance to quit. Management will spend countless hours recruiting replacements, re-training them on their products, pricing, markets, competitors, and the like. Perhaps even provide some basic selling skills. Then six to 12 months later have to let them go due to poor performance. And the cycle repeats itself over and over.

Since successful selling requires collaboration between people and departments, one of the first things to do is develop a sales process. The process will define who does what, what information to collect and record, who to hand the next step to and when, and other details that help define the flow of events that help the entire sales cycle. Additionally, the sales process teaches the sales team what steps they need to follow in the sales cycle to move a lead from a cold suspect to a loyal customer. On top of this, the sales reps should learn the selling skills needed to perform these steps properly. Where the process defines “when” to perform each step in the sales cycle, the selling skills teach “how” to do them. However, there is one more step that needs to be taken, as mentioned earlier.

Let’s say the sales process says it is time in the sales cycle for the rep to present the solution to the prospect, since he already executed the prior steps such as qualifying the prospect and learning what their needs and problems are. At this point, the sales rep and prospect will enter into the negotiation phase. While the sales process defines when to begin this stage, the selling skills teach the best ways to negotiate, which is also valuable knowledge. The one additional step that is needed is to teach how to negotiate for your company. In other words, what latitude does your sales team have when negotiating? At what point can they make decisions on the company’s behalf, such as pricing concessions, delivery options or additional freebies? When do they need to check with their management before committing to anything outside the normal, pre-approved product package and published pricing? Where can they go to find more information to help during the negotiation phase?

This is what needs to be defined to complete the process. Yet this is what is missing in many companies. While this is just one simple example in the sales process, there are dozens more that need to be defined in order to help your sales team know exactly what you’re selling, where to sell it, how to sell it, who else is selling it, how to compete with them, when to sell it, how to close it, and lots more. If your company offers multiple product lines, then these missing pieces are multiplied by the number of lines you have, hence compounding your challenges.

A tool that helps bring this all together is the Sales & Marketing Guide. This Guide includes valuable information for the sales team that can be studied and referred to throughout the sales process. It includes items such as market data, your target prospects, cold calling scripts/outlines, qualification questions, product features, benefit statements, pricing information, competitor information, marketing material (e.g., brochures, corporate and product presentations), common objections (with sample responses), negotiating rules, and more. All of this information will be unique to your company and its products being sold. The Guide will also be sprinkled with selling skills throughout each section to help teach how to perform these functions and steps along the way. Sales & Marketing Guides work because they are a single repository of all the information needed during the sales process and are available to everyone involved in the sales cycle, not just the sales team.

Imagine a new sales person starting for your company. It may take up to six months for him to be fully productive and achieve 100% of his quota. If you can get him to 100% in, say, just four months, imagine how much more revenue your company will be recognizing by reducing the learning curve by two months, not to mention the increased commission for the new sales rep. And more money means happier sales reps and fewer turnovers, although money is not the sole motivator of sales people. They also need to feel appreciated and valued. By handing them a Sales & Marketing Guide, along with training on your sales process and on selling skills, your sales people will feel more appreciated and therefore motivated to perform better. They’ll feel like your company actually cares about them and their success. If you spend the time developing a Sales & Marketing Guide, then you will indeed care about your sales people and their success. When they succeed, so will your business.

Don’t begrudge your sales team’s success. I’ve seen too many companies restrict their sales team’s income by putting a cap on their commissions (very bad move), assume their sales people already have the selling skills they need (there are new skills needed, or they forgot, or they never learned many of them to begin with, or they are new to sales in general), and basically treat their sales people like second rate citizens. It’s ironic that the one revenue generating organization in a business is frequently treated like they are outsiders, strangers or, even worse, the enemy. I’ve heard sales managers refer to their own people as stupid, lazy and useless, yet they do nothing about it. I’ve seen CEO’s and Presidents refer to their sales teams as a waste of valuable company resources, but don’t fund the tools they need to be more effective and successful. This is the revenue generating arm of the company. They need support, training and resources to be effective and to help the company grow.

Give them the tools they need to succeed. Develop a sales process for them to follow. Offer training to improve their selling skills. Invest in the creation of a Sales & Marketing Guide so they know the who, what, where, when, why and how of selling your products and services. With their success comes your company’s success. Give them more than just the “how to” of selling. Give them Information Training.

Good luck and good selling!

Russ Lombardo

Creating Your Own Sales & Marketing Guide - To learn more about this author, visit Russ Lombardo's Website.

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