Articles written by Reality Training
How to Sell Series :
Changing the Way We Sell
by Bob Morrell of Reality Training
When we walk into an Apple store, we may spend a few hundred pounds on IT. We experience amazing service, we love being there and we walk out feeling that we’ve just had the most delightful shopping experience. On a recent visit to another retailer, potentially to spend many hundreds of pounds we were met with ‘Kelpu’ (can I help you). This is clearly an unacceptable response to the arrival of a potential customer.
In some organisations there is a disconnect between sales and service that is extraordinary when you consider that for the majority of consumers ‘brand loyalty’ is a something that can only be earned by building customer relationships. Over the last three years we have been fortunate to work with many retail companies, and feel that we must comment on the sales techniques and strategies currently being employed, given the economic environment.
3 Questions for the next 10 years:
How can we adapt our sales approach?
For businesses emerging from the recession they should feel justly proud to have survived such a sharp downturn. In doing so, they also need to make decisions about how they adapt their sales approach to customers and how they manage their staff to achieve that change. At a recent convention, we delivered a Master Class which made the case that the previous 10 years of relative happiness could not be repeated. Many companies are saying goodbye to talented staff, reverting to old style Sales Management techniques and also lost effectiveness. This is because the majority of managers were poorly prepared for the recession, and either pulled back, hoping their staff would survive on ‘unconscious competence’ or reverted to putting unfair pressure on their staff, which was counter- productive.
As a customer facing person rises up through the ranks of a typical organisation they are often thrown into areas of greater responsibility without the necessary skills and knowledge. The different hierarchies help to define job functions, and therefore the individuals feel that they have become ‘qualified by experience’ to cope with those functions. This perceived ‘qualification’ is rarely the case. As junior, middle and senior managers they rise admirably to the challenge of function, which in many ways disregards ‘purpose’.
What is our purpose from a customer’s point of view?
The hierarchy then exists to populate the ‘to do’ lists of their managers and this attention to managing managers moves them, naturally, away from the most important purpose – that of our customers.
The customer knows nothing of hierarchy, position, responsibility, targets, forecasts and product ‘focuses’. Their purpose is to buy as quickly and as enjoyably as possible. Where managers lose sight of their purpose in customer terms, we suddenly see increases in customer dissatisfaction, complaints, delays, falls in profitability, and an increase in inefficiency, which in a small company is potentially ruinous and in a larger company, severely dents profits.
In delivering sales training, you meet people who have sold products for most of their lives. The passion for their jobs remain. They have adapted to change from the top, but now must change because of economic pressures. The ability to sell anything, takes on new importance when I am also responsible for the profitability of that transaction. This calls for more intelligent selling, more upbeat and sophisticated conversations and an ability to sell imaginative outcomes. It calls for those sales people with the most experience to take on the challenge of bending ingrained habits and embracing new techniques. The empowerment of managers only really works when they have the opportunity to negotiate, properly, with customers, suppliers and their staff. Autonomy comes from greater trust, which is engendered by following through change programmes that deliver true results on the bottom line – and they can only ever do this when the customer facing element is addressed.
Are my sales staff equipped to cope with the challenges of the post recession economy?
When times are good we can be forgiven, perhaps, for believing that we don’t need to ever change the way we work. But of course, consumers change all the time, have become more knowledgeable than ever before, so we have a clear choice. If I work in retail, a call centre, as a home worker, or as a franchisee, I can either accept that the internet is always going to beat me on price, and roll over, or I can choose to change my approach, deliver value for the customer by providing great service, and prepare to handle these objections in a professional manner.
As a manager I have the choice to take a longer term view, study the way my customers are buying and adapt my team to meet their purpose through new techniques and move with the times.
Sales people who are given ever changing targets, objectives, product focuses, incentives linked to results, are very clever at beating the system. Miss-selling becomes habitual due to poorly managed targets. Wouldn’t we rather have our staff putting their energies into developing profitable relationships with customers instead of working out how to fudge the figures to hit an out of date target?
The Rewards for Change
In considering these questions there is an opportunity to invest in changing the way we sell and also to make strategic plans that are more customer-centric than ever before. To anticipate trends and to move ahead of the customer, back to a position of consultant, instead of order-taker, will begin a strategy that will strengthen the retail market as it moves into the uncertain waters ahead. We, as consumers, will want to buy more specific products that require knowledge to sell. We will have to pay more for our products, so better to equip our staff to increase prices rather than fall back on offering discounts. We will want to make it easier to buy, so why can’t we focus on helping our customers which will mean more sales, more up-sell and more referrals? By developing managers who understand the connection between sales and marketing we can recoup that return on investment far quicker and produce measureable results that could be the cornerstone of future growth. Of course we cannot pretend that any of this is easy, but it is possible. Without this change the retail sector risks a shift towards a service vacuum of unknowable proportions.
Reality Training have worked with the Automobile Association, TUI (Thomson – First Choice), The Co-Operative Travel, Bourne Leisure, Halfords, Channel 5, Last FM. - See Client List
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