Telecoms Company

The ‘Tell Sell’ problem

Traditionally trained sales professionals are all taught to sell by focusing on company and product features and benefits.

We call this the ‘tell sell’ because it works on the basis that the sales person tells the prospect about how good their company’s products and services are with little or no real focus on what the customer may need or want. The result is usually very low levels of sales and a lot of price discounting to get the sales in the first place. In our last case a whole sales team was failing to make any sales at all.

They knew all the closes

The company in question has a small sales team that were struggling to make sales despite having a reasonable flow of leads and opportunities to follow up on. They knew all the closes though including one called the ‘Half Nelson’ and one of them even proudly proclaimed that he had phoned a prospect over thirty times in a single week.

When we started working with them they were unwilling to adapt to the kind of sales approaches and techniques that work with modern and usually cynical buyers. The most important thing about modern selling is that it is essentially all about listening. If you ask questions and listen prospects give you answers and if you ask the right questions prospects also tell you everything you need to know in order to propose an appropriate product or service. We call this the ‘Listening Sell’ Working with the sales team,
we helped them to:

1. Understand the difference between an assumed sales cycle and the real buying cycle that buyers go through
2. Develop a structured series of questions to ask prospective customers as a fact find. This helped them overcome their inclination to tell.
3. Develop a series of lead generation letters to help the sales team approach targets with something more than just a cold call
4. Build a process for engaging prospective customers that gives them a reason to engage
5. Develop the skills required to approach selling from the perspective of the customer as opposed to trying to force products on the customer.

Each of these steps alone is important in its own right, but brought together into a programme that took just three months to complete made a huge difference to the performance of the sales team of this now fast growing company.

They don’t need the closes anymore

The result of the work we’ve done is startling in the short period of time we had to complete the project. The team still don’t close deals, they don’t need to.

The deals in the main don’t need artificial, contrived closes anymore because the sales people have taken their prospect through a natural buying cycle, proving the value of the company’s proposition to prospective customers.

From a standing start, in four months the sales team went from sporadic sales to delivering at least half target with a pipeline of deals that bode well for achieving target on a month by month basis thereafter. The buying cycle has also been cut from more than 12 weeks to an average of 6 weeks because the sales team are proving and demonstrating value helping them to build credibility faster and more effectively.