In December, I used a LinkedIn post to solicit questions from owners, sales managers, and sales reps. If you have sales or sales management questions you’d like to ask, send them my way via LinkedIn or via email: [email protected].

Here are the answers to the first two:

Q1: What are some areas of training and development for sales professionals in every stage of their careers? 

According to data from the Brevet Group, ongoing training results in 50% higher net sales per sales rep. Printing companies tend to rely upon their vendor partners for much of their sales training resulting in more product training than skills training. However, product training doesn’t always move the performance needle. While it helps, it often leads sales reps to pitch new services in the wrong places and rely too heavily on product specs instead of using an insight-driven sales process to create demand. A combination of selling skills account development strategies, and product training delivers the best results.

All sales professionals, no matter the stage of their careers, benefit from refreshing their skills and learning new strategies to help penetrate accounts and develop new opportunities.

Selling has shifted, and the best sales reps are seen as trusted advisors by their customers, not just printing experts. Trusted advisor status grows from business acumen, marketing knowledge, and high-level selling skills. The more reps understand the markets they sell into, the more valuable they are to their clients. Training on business acumen, focus market trends, critical business challenges, marketing strategies and tactics, and position-oriented responsibilities will help reps have more relevant conversations with key stakeholders.

Virtual selling has become the norm even in the print industry, so assessing the virtual selling skills of reps, especially more tenured reps, will help you define specific training priorities. Reps may need training on using virtual tools like Zoom and Teams, using presentation applications like Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote, and delivering compelling presentations virtually.

For some reps, training in business writing may be necessary. Writing a professional email, prospecting letter, or LinkedIn post are critical skills today. Unfortunately, many reps in all age groups have issues with grammar and sentence structure, so providing access to a business writing course can have a big impact.

Here’s the process for defining your training priorities.

1.     Define the skills needed to sell successfully for your company. (See my article on hiring sales reps for a list of skills and aptitudes needed today.)

2.     Using the list created in #1, assess the skills of each rep using a scale from one to five, with five representing full proficiency in the skill.

3.     Ask the reps to assess themselves using the same scale.

4.     Perform a gap analysis and work with the rep to prioritize the skills that will have the biggest impact on performance.

5.     Create a training plan for your team and for individual reps to work on their priorities. Your training plan should include:

• the skill priorities
• who will do the training or the online resource to be used
• when the training will take place
• how you will reinforce the training
• how you will validate that your reps are incorporating their new skills into their daily selling practices.

Hopefully, you have a training budget that will allow for an outside resource if you need one. If you don’t have a budget, assume you can achieve a portion of the 50% net increase mentioned above from Brevet to build a business case to secure funding from your senior management or owner. Remember that your training will be much more impactful if paired with coaching as a reinforcement. Accountability, current rep sales levels, and rep bandwidth play a part in determining how much of an increase you will realize.

Q2: How should reps deal with the threats of a looming recession and customers who want to reduce their spending on print or marketing services?

If your reps aren’t already dealing with this, they probably will soon. Economic disruptions are scary for business leaders. Decision-makers are more cautious, tend to scrutinize their spending more thoroughly, and often delay decisions as they wait to see what the market does, what their peers are doing, and how their customers are reacting.

The good news is that to survive, businesses need to sell, nonprofits need to raise money, hospitals continue to treat patients, and consumers continue to spend money on things they need. Your customers will continue to buy what they need.

Sellers need to stop pitching and focus on solving critical business objectives. Reps must work harder to engage the stakeholders who own those critical objectives. Lower-level stakeholders or contacts typically don’t understand the business impact of what you sell and are more likely to focus on price. Senior-level stakeholders still have to drive their business forward no matter the market circumstances, so they care about results and ROI.

Reps should focus on getting to the right level and building a business case for their solution. It’s critical to understand the value of a lead, a customer, a student, or a donor. The risks of an accident (safety signage), lost customers, a lengthy process, or a communication error can be part of the business case. With this information, reps can help their customers understand the possible savings or the value your solution can create. The more detail the rep understands, the better their chance of crafting a cost-effective solution.

Reps also need to qualify each opportunity carefully and often. They have to ask tougher questions throughout the sales cycle to ensure enough value exists for the customer to make a change or spend their money. And reps must keep confirming where the problem they are fixing is on the customer’s priority list as the customer navigates the disrupted environment.

Reps simply can’t “out nice” their competition in a down economy. Reps must outsmart competitive reps, focusing their time on customers and opportunities that can close. Your reps have to use their time to focus on customers and opportunities where they can create tangible value for customers. And reps must use a sales process that helps customers understand why they should buy anything, buy it from them, and buy it now. 

If you have questions to ask, send me a message on LinkedIn or via my email: [email protected] or use the contact form below to get in touch.