Helping your team to plan for their customers' success with your products and services

Hello Sales Reset Leader

What do the members of your sales team hope to achieve when they meet with customers? What does success look like?

For most salespeople, success means getting a purchase order.

At Sales Reset, we’re convinced there’s a better priority. We’re passionate about prioritising your customer’s success with your products and services.

Your sales team’s results will improve when your team members prioritise their customer’s success.

We introduced these hugely important ideas in the email newsletter your team members received this week. We gave your team members practical advice about planning for their customer’s success with your products and services.

The rest of this newsletter assumes you have read this week’s Weekly Sales Reset:

• Title: Planning for your customer's success with your products and services

• Subtitle: Shifting from a focus on winning the order to prioritising your customers' success

Let’s look together at how you can coach your team this week.

How to improve your team's results this week

• Evidence of planning for success

• Recommended coaching session agenda

• Expected pushback about planning for success

• Role-Play Recommendations

• Leadership Reflective Practice

Evidence of planning for success

Before you start a coaching session with a team member, review the evidence of how they’ve been working.

The best place to look for evidence of planning for success with your products and services is in the proposals your team members have created.

When you review your team’s proposals, how clearly defined are the objectives and outcomes each specific customer needs?

In our experience, many salespeople's proposals are based on generic outcomes and objectives, often copied and pasted from previous proposals.

Ideally, you hope to see objectives clearly written using the customer’s words and that are specific to their unique situation. You hope to see a credible plan in the proposals showing how your products and services will deliver these objectives.

Here’s a very specific piece of evidence you can look for. Pay particular attention to when objectives are written exclusively in words without any reference to numbers. These objectives are clearly not measurable.

If there are no measurable objectives in the proposal, it’s highly likely there will also be no specific dates that identify when specific outcomes have been achieved.

What is the evidence of each team member planning for their customer’s success with your products and services?

Recommended coaching session agenda

Before leading your coaching sessions on planning for success, ask your team members to review the current edition of Weekly Sales Reset.

Give yourself time to reflect on WIIFM, “What’s in for me,” and empathise with your team members about how they might be sufficiently motivated to plan for the success their customers will achieve with your products and services.

Here’s this week’s recommended coaching session agenda:

1. Start with a brief review of their experience and results from their previous coaching session.

2. Ask your team member for their observations about planning for customer’s success with what they’re selling.

3. Together, review the evidence you found in your preparation with each team member.

4. Identify and prioritise a small range of specific practical things that this team member can do differently and better.

5. Spend some time role-playing with the suggestions below.

6. Finish the coaching session with agreed and specific action conclusions.

Expected pushback about planning for success

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are some areas of possible pushback from your team members on the theme of planning for success.

1. Insufficient Engagement: The primary customer contact with whom your team member is meeting is insufficiently motivated and engaged to discuss outcomes and success.

2. Reluctance: A customer may be reluctant to be drawn into conversations about success criteria. For instance, in a formal bid process, the customer contact may not want to have a conversation that appears to reopen bidding criteria.

3. Range of Priorities: Your team member might discuss the challenges of involving many stakeholders, each with different priorities and success criteria. How does your team member prioritise potentially conflicting definitions of success?

4. Coaching Skills: Your team member may currently lack the coaching skills to develop these conversations, especially with more senior people.

5. Lack of Awareness: Some team members, particularly those who are new to your team, may lack sufficient awareness of what successful outcomes might be available from using your products and services.

Now that you know these potential pushback areas, what are your best responses?

Role-Play Recommendations

1. Defining Objectives and Outcomes: Choose an important meeting that is already on your team members' calendars. Role-play the part of the discussion where they will seek to define objectives and outcomes.

2. Developing a Plan: In a separate role-play, continue the discussion to clarify the elements of a plan to achieve these clearly defined objectives and outcomes.

3. Reasons for Loss: Choose a recent and significant lost opportunity. Role-play the part of the conversation with this customer that should have been about planning for success. Your goal in the role-play is to identify what might have been done differently and better to incorporate planning for success in the sales process.

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

Leadership Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Here’s a link to a page explaining how these weekly Sales Reset Leaders newsletters are designed to help you improve your sales team's results every week with structured coaching and practice.

Please feel free to unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of this email if these newsletters are no longer valuable to you!

Community of Practice

Ask Questions, Share Your Experience

If you have any questions or experience to share:

• LinkedIn Group - Join our World-Class Customer Success Selling Group on LinkedIn to ask questions or comment.

• Sales Reset Together Community - Click here to learn more about our private community of members committed to achieving and maintaining their Sales Reset.

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?