How To Use Act! for Your Sales Training #ActCRM

Charisma, a strong network, blind luck, or skills: what explains great sales results? Like any complex activity, it’s easy to throw your hands up in frustration and say all of the above. That’s defeatist thinking. How can you make your sales training give you the best returns on your investment?

Use Act! as a support system to track, report and encourage your staff to implement what they learn.

1) Check Your Beliefs About Sales Training

“All business skills are learnable.” – Brian Tracy, sales expert

In her bestselling book Mindset, Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck defines two mindsets that shape results. The fixed mindset believes that skills and capabilities do not significantly change: a weak sales professional isn’t likely to change. In contrast, the growth mindset emphasises change and development. This is a critical distinction if you are going to improve in sales training. With a fixed mindset, you’re more likely to give up before you develop proficiency in new skills. The growth mindset, you believe you can grow and research finds you are more likely to persist and succeed in learning.

Adopting a growth mindset will help you get the highest value out of sales training.

Attitude matters – skip it at your peril!

Action Step: Take the quiz on the Mindset Assessment to see which mindset you have. If you have the fixed mindset, ask yourself if that perspective is helping you to reach your goals.

2) Complete A Sales Training Program And Track Followup Afterwards

Truth be told, there are multiple sales training methods that work.

Buying a sales training program, attending a sales seminar or using online training all have the potential to work. For sales professionals in the B2B environment, two popular options include SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham and The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Once you choose a sales training program, how do you ensure you get results?

If you get the opportunity, see if you can get the opportunity to attend an inspirational presentation by one of Act!’s co-founders, Mike Muhney.

Often people are excited and galvanised by a sales training course but, unfortunately, these effects can wear off without regular maintenance and monitoring.

Set up a tracking process to reinforce the principles and processes of the training for a set period. For example, schedule a weekly 30-minute meeting for three months to review the key points you learned. You might focus on prospecting, managing stakeholders or the art of landing large sales with Act!. Many traditional professionals like accountants, lawyers and doctors are required to take training regularly to keep their skills sharp. Why not apply that idea to the sales world?

Action Step: Select and attend a sales training program if you have not taken one in the past 12 months. Next, set up series of weekly meetings to track whether you practice the principles.

3) Set Sales Lead Indicators In Act!

You want closed sales at the end of the month, quarter or year. How can you increase the odds of hitting that goal?

The answer lies in tracking lead indicators for sales - measures that tend to predict the future. For example, a few common leading measures in sales include: number of meetings held, number of proposals sent and number of prospecting actions per day.

To train your sales staff in how and why to use lead indicators to close more sales, ask them to identify the best lead indicator for your sales process. For example, your sales process may look like this:

1. Call 1: you introduce yourself to a prospect by phone.
2. Initial Meeting. If the call goes well, you arrange a meeting with the prospect by phone or in person.
3. Needs Assessment. Determining the client requirements and scope of the project.
4. Proposal Presentation. If the previous steps go well, you are invited back to present a proposal.
5. Negotiation. Sorting out the final details and payment.
6. Close. You ask for the order and get a YES!
7. Sales Fulfilment. Payment Received. Your CFO sees cash in the bank and you can supply goods/services.

Steps 1-4 are promising candidates for lead measures. I recommend focusing on steps 4 because it will ensure prior steps are carried out with quality. If you choose steps 1 or 2 as your lead indicator, quality may suffer.

To aid you in tracking this measure in Act!, choose a lead indicator involving calls, emails or in-person meetings. Those interactions are almost always a requirement to win business and Act! is well set up to track those activities. In the past, sales professionals used notebooks to track this kind of information. That works but it is a lot of effort to keep up.

Create Opportunities for your sales in Act! and link the activities to those Opportunities. Then use Act! Insight, Dashboards, or some reports to make the measuring and monitoring a simple task.

Action Step: Meet with your sales representatives to choose a lead measure that you can track in Act! and which predicts ultimate sales success.

Resource: For more insights on using lead indicators to accomplish your sales goals, read “The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals" by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey.

4) Sales Managers: Monitor for Success in Act!

Sales managers: this step is for you. Choose a schedule – weekly and monthly are good options – and monitor your staff’s performance at each stage of the sales process. Recognize who wins in terms of lead indicators and sales!

Action Step: Speak to your Act! consultant to help you in customising Act! and generating reports on the metrics you need to track this data.

Want to improve your sales efficiency with Act!? Contact me today for a free consultation.

What CRM Experts Don’t Tell You About Winning Large Sales

Large sales, enterprise accounts, the big fish.

It’s all about the large accounts that increase profits and prestige overnight. Ever since SPIN Selling was published, sales experts have recognised that work in small sales does not transfer to large-scale deals. I will assume your team has robust sales skills once they are in the room with the prospect. Optimizing performance before and after the meeting will be our focus.

1. Preparing For Major Sales Meetings With Act!

You’ve decided to pursue a large, well-known, corporation as a client for your business. You know that landing that account will bring instant credibility throughout your region. Through networking, you have managed to identify a few managers at the company. How will you convert this information in a productive meeting?

• Do your pre-call research. Get on the phone with your customers to find out what software they are using and problems they have experienced. If you are selling technology, market research tools like BuiltWith may be helpful.
• Opportunity Notes in Act!. As you prepare for the meeting, include links to resources and notes in an Act! Opportunity for future reference. Significant sales can take weeks or months to close, so it is helpful to have these notes available beforehand.
• Hold a pre-call meeting. This step is critical if your major sales involve team presentations and coordination. A few days before your first sales call, organise a short meeting to outline what you have learned and what you plan to cover.

Sales Resource: Read Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount for additional insight on prospecting. Blount makes an excellent point with his 30-day rule. If you are disappointed with your sales results today, check your calendar from 30 days ago. For example, if you take it easy at the office in December, you will have to work extra hard in the new year to catch up!

2. Improving Major Sales Follow Up With Act!

After you hold the major sale meeting, you leave with a signed contract! Well, that might happen if you are lucky to meet an exceptionally hungry buyer. If you are seeking to close a large sale, the process takes time to close.

Disciplined follow up makes all the difference. There’s just one problem with that suggestion. Sales professionals know they need to follow up. Yet many of them get distracted with other work and sales opportunities and never get around to it. Use Act! to augment your follow up discipline.

• Set reminders. Remembering to call the next day is easy – doing so a month after a meeting is more difficult. Using Activities associated with the Opportunity in Act! helps you stay engaged with the sale.
• Connect with multiple stakeholders. Did you notice that some technical experts at the prospect’s company objected to your solution? If so, document those points in Act! and work on developing answers for them. Link all the client contacts to the Opportunity in Act!
• Use email marketing. After your initial introduction to a major sales contact, they may be interested but simply not ready to buy. Using drip-marketing or inviting them to sign up for your email newsletter are excellent ways to sustain the connection.

3. Growing and Keeping Customers Loyal With Act!

So far, I have focused on bringing new customers in the front door. That’s critical for growth especially if you just starting our breaking out of a slump. Landing new accounts is not enough. Keeping current customers happy and doing more business with them matters as well. Analyse your customers in Act to find cross-selling opportunities such as:

• Analyse your most profitable accounts. Some customers are more profitable than others. Use 80/20 analysis to identify the outliers in your profits. How can you reduce the burden generated by a high maintenance client?
• Document client review activities. Some sales professionals are good at “farming”: growing an existing account over time. To encourage this practice, ask staff to document their efforts to network and meet other people at the company. If this activity is neglected, you may lose the account if a single manager or executive leaves. Don’t wait for a problem to happen at a loyal customer before you pick up the phone.

What The Other CRM Experts Aren’t Telling You.

Why aren’t you landing more major accounts? You probably lack one of three disciplines: sales goals (you are not shooting high enough), sales strategy (you have no idea how to land the big fish) or process (you do not have the right techniques or tools). I can help you with the last of these … However, no technology can fix the other problems associated with landing big sales.

Contact me to discuss ways we can use Act! to improve your company’s sales processes and efficiency.

If you would like to help other Act! users, please post your best strategies for landing the big deals as a comment to this post.