Grow Your Business While Others Shrink

Transcription

1 Presents Grow Your Business While Others Shrink Questions? You may contact Jim at: Name Copyright 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Dallas TX

2 ABOUT JIM PANCERO Jim Pancero has the most advanced, leading-edge "business-to-business" sales and sales management training available today. Everything he does is extensively researched and has one bottom line focus...to increase an organization's strategic competitive advantage and market uniqueness. Jim's work focuses on sales organizations with high priced, large and/or competitively complex products and services. His information-intensive keynote speeches, training programs and indepth consulting work detail his innovative selling processes and strategies for the new economy and global marketplace. Even during a sixty-minute keynote, Jim provides the most experienced members of his audience with proven, immediately usable advanced ideas to increase their competitive advantage and enhance their selling processes. His combination of humor and real-world examples evolved from his experience researching and training in over 80 different industries. Jim has been directly involved in "business-to-business" selling for over 40 years. Six of those years were spent successfully selling the largest computer systems for the Data Processing Division of the IBM Corporation. During Jim's prestigious IBM career he earned several awards including the coveted "Golden Circle" designation annually awarded to the top 5% of their international sales force. In 1982, Jim founded his advanced sales training and consulting company. Since then, Jim has conducted over 3,000 presentations or consulting days for 600 companies providing a career average of five events per client. Over 90% of Jim's clients utilize his services more than once. You can learn more about Jim at Pancero.com as well view video clips on YouTube THIS IS JIM S 19TH YEAR PRESENTING TO AN ISSA/INTERCLEAN ANNUAL CONVENTION OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS. 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 1 ISSA Growing Business

3 REALITIES/CHALLENGES OF TODAY S CHANGING MARKETS - Customer consolidation fewer buyers each with more negotiating and buying power - Non-traditional competitors keep entering the Jan/San/Packaging markets - Customers buying direct - Impact of Google and the Internet 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 2 ISSA Growing Business

4 THE TOP FOUR DISTRIBUTION SALES TEAM CHALLENGES TODAY 1 Baby Boomer top producing sales reps are being lost due to retirement or health challenges - How many employees will you lose because of retirement or health in the next five to seven years? - Of the sales reps you will lose what percent of your total sales are they generating? - How ae you preparing for this change? What are you doing about it? 2 Your most experienced sales reps are also usually the least likely to be actually prospecting on a regular basis - Where are your sales reps functioning? Building Mode Usually 1 to 3 years selling - Most proactive prospecting efforts Growth Mode Usually 2 to 5 years selling - Some proactive prospecting - Majority of growth generated within existing customers Maintaining Mode Usually 6 to 15 years selling - Little proactive prospecting (but will actively follow up on sales leads) - Working to maintain positive year over year growth Harvesting Mode Usually 15 years to retirement - No proactive prospecting but might follow up on an easy lead - Working to maintain relationships with long term customers to keep as many orders going for as long as possible. 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 3 ISSA Growing Business

5 THE TOP FOUR DISTRIBUTION SALES TEAM CHALLENGES TODAY 3 Sales managers spend majority of their time acting as Head Doer and little time as Head Selling Coach - Majority of distribution sales managers are currently carrying some territory responsibilities - The greater your personal selling responsibilities as a manager the more reactive you will be as a coach and leader of your sales team - Sales managers function more as Transactional sales managers than as Selling Process coaches and leaders of their sales team Selling Process Coaching Transactional Coaching IDENTIFY Proposal or Price Quote Issued CLOSE - Transactional Sales Coaching - Reactive Starts after proposal is issued My door is always open to help - Major focus is to help close the business with minimal loss of margin - Cut it to win it - Selling Process Coaching - Proactive Starts involvement before rep makes first call on prospect (optimum) Get in here and tell me how the Jones account is progressing. - Major focus is to help define account selling strategy and multiple stepped tactical implementation plan - Get it set up correctly from the beginning 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 4 ISSA Growing Business

6 THE TOP FOUR DISTRIBUTION SALES TEAM CHALLENGES TODAY 4 If you are an independent distributor you likely have a competitively weak Internet Footprint - Old, simplistic design - Larger competitors have stronger websites offering more products for sale - A two year old website is competitively obsolete - Challenging to use and order products - Incomplete information on your company and/or product lines - Little product or cleaning support online - Not being used as a product revenue generator to sell products - Little to no Social Media presence 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 5 ISSA Growing Business

7 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET ACTION #1 Strengthen your sales team and future sales exposure 1) Take a confidential inventory of your current sales and support teams - Do you need to start developing an interviewing and hiring plan to prepare for the loss of key producers on your team? 2) Assess the selling skills of your current team and develop a training process to fix/improve the selling skills of your team - Take my free Pancero.com online advanced sales or sales leadership 20 question evaluations - Each free online test generates a personal report that is ed to you along with your answers to the twenty questions - Three ways to use these Pancero.com free tests with your team - Management confidentially evaluates each sales rep (without their knowledge) so you can assess where your team is now...and what they most need to improve - Sales rep and their manager each complete an evaluation of the sales rep and then meet to share their responses and to discuss where they agree or disagree and to identify a training action plan to help this rep sell more at higher margins - Use these survey questions as interviewing questions when searching for new sales people or sales managers - (And if you are strong enough) Have sales reps evaluate their manager using the sales leadership evaluation - Have a secretary or independent person summarize all rep scores (to keep the discussion from becoming negative or too personal) - Discuss as a team with their manager how things can be improved and more successful 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 6 ISSA Growing Business

8 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET 3) Add account planning and selling skills coaching and training to your regular team meetings - Utilize free videos on YouTube and professional trainer and speaker s websites - Majority of videos are under 10 minutes (perfect to show in a sales meeting) - Show a video and then lead your team in a discussion of three questions 1) What did you think of the video? 2) How relevant are those ideas to you and your job? 3) What do you now plan to do different or better based on our discussion? - And then a fourth question to be asked after your training when you see or talk to individuals - What success have you been having trying the new ideas/skills we discussed? ACTION #2 Increase your team s ongoing new business prospecting efforts 1) Assess the prospecting potential of each sales team member - What is their ongoing plan to be continually adding new business? - Where is your sales team investing their prospecting efforts? - Prospecting by actively searching out new companies to sell (Proactive) - Prospecting by actively searching for new and additional business opportunities within their existing customers (Proactive) - Prospecting by just answering the phone when it rings or following up on easy sales leads given to them by others (Reactive) - The older and more established the sales rep the more reactive (just answering the phone) prospecting they will likely be doing - How much energy will you need to invest to get your Harvesting Elder sales rep to proactively prospect? - How much prospecting is being done by your sales support team? (Inside sales, warehouse personnel, drivers?) - What can you do to increase your support team s identification of new prospects to help the sales team? 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 7 ISSA Growing Business

9 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET ACTION #2 Increase your team s ongoing new business prospecting efforts (continued) 2) Build prospecting and the opening of new accounts into sales rep s compensation plans, yearly goals and bonus dollars - Assign annual quotas or expectations of how much new business you expect them to generate from existing customers they sell as well as from new customers - Consider a prospecting contest or offering sales accelerator bonuses (Double commissions on the first three months of any new account or major new product area sold to an existing customer) - The more time you spend talking, and coaching, you team about their new business selling efforts the more new business you will tend to see generated - Ken Blanchard said The things that get worked on first tend to get fixed first 3) If you are not happy with the ongoing prospecting being done by your team, consider growing your markets by hiring a prospecting only sales rep - No assigned territory or current customers Their territory is any customer not currently buying from your company (or that has not been called on by another rep within the last 60 days - Offer some type of minimum or guaranteed first year (or even two year) salary to help them build their territory - Helps you prepare for more senior top performers that will be leaving due to age or health - Provides you with Bench strength in case a critical territory needs to be covered - One actively prospecting new rep in an office who starts generating new business will tend to cause at least some of your more sedentary older sales reps to start prospecting again 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 8 ISSA Growing Business

10 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET Action #3 Shift your sales leadership from Transactional Management to Selling Process Leadership Transactional Sales Managers Coaching Language Selling Process Coaches and Leaders Coaching Language Focuses on the results - What are you going to sell and who will it be? Focuses on the selling process - How are you going to sell this account and why aren t you also calling on their owner? Tell/Lecture Ask questions Focus on the negatives to fix and improve performance Focus on the positives and efforts to fix and improve performance Think and plan for your next best move Think and plan more moves ahead than either your customer or competitors Focus on history and today issues - What did you do? - How are you going to fix this? - What can you do to close this? Focus on future focused issues - What did you learn? - What do you plan to do next? - What else can you do to increase your competitive advantage? Follow the Golden Rule as a coach - Treat others as you want to be treated Follow the Platinum Rule as a coach - Treat others as they want to be treated (forgetting about yourself) 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 9 ISSA Growing Business

11 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET Action #3 Shift your sales leadership from Transactional Management to Selling Process Leadership (Continued) 1) Spend more time riding with your reps to observe, coach and improve their selling skills and efforts to manage their territory 2) Implement one on one account planning between a sales rep and their manager for their most important existing accounts and prospects - Help them identify and define the steps they will need to follow to successfully sell this account - The five questions of successful account coaching 1) Where are you now with this account? 2) What else do you need to be doing? Who else do you need to be talking to? 3) What is your multiple-stepped plan to get there 4) What are your plans to maintain and grow the business once you have it? 5) What other help do you need to win this business? 3) Lead your team through Selling campaigns - Selling campaigns One to three month time frame where you invest extra attention and efforts (as well as additional rewards or bonuses) on a particular area or group such as: - Focus on a specific customer set (all current day care and retirement center customers) - Focus on a specific product (or product group) customers are buying now (going to all customers buying single-fold paper towels to propose lower total cost paper dispensing systems) - Focus a new business calling effort on all restaurants not buying from you - Never have a contest or promotion that has a single winner - Very un-motivational to your sales team Puts team members against each other - A contest needs to have the ability to have multiple winners so one person winning does not hinder the winning potential of the other workers - Poor contest First one to open up a new account gets a gift card - Great contest Anyone opening up five new accounts wins a gift card 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 10 ISSA Growing Business

12 THE FOUR BEST ACTIONS TO HELP YOUR TEAM GROW SALES IN A SHRINKING MARKET Action #4 Strengthen your Internet Footprint and electronic presence in your markets - Your website and electronic presence validates your perceived market value and competitiveness - Customers will never believe you are a higher valued/higher priced competitor if you have the oldest and least effective website in your market - Evaluate your website compared to your toughest local competitors (including the nontraditional competitors that keep entering your markets 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 11 ISSA Growing Business

13 KEYS TO YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND GROWING YOUR BUSINESS WHILE OTHERS SHRINK 1) Strong response to Why buy from you? consistently delivered by your entire team. 2) Defined (and coached to) Selling Process Best Practices. - ID to Close new business selling process. - 1/1 to 12/31 processes to support your best customers. - Operational Steps of a Sales Call and personality flexibility skills. 3) Proactive Selling Process coaching to all team members. - One to four hours a month, (for each assigned sales person), discussing Future Focused account and territory planning and strategy. - Free up time to coach. - Each sales person adds a written plan for his or her most important accounts and prospects each month 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 12 ISSA Growing Business

14 The University of Innovative Distribution offers advanced marketing and sales leadership training for your entire experienced distribution leadership team. Each day offers seven different distribution classes being taught by experienced instructor experts each sharing their latest proven concepts they have spent years, and even decades researching and mastering. Your feedback and input as a student are critical to maintaining the highest UID quality content standards. All instructors and classes are evaluated by students at the end of each day to insure continued excellence and relevance of UID programming. Co-sponsored by Purdue University and over forty of the largest distribution trade associations Of the 579 attendees to last year s March, 2015 session: - 22% attended a prior UID session - 53% under age 40-13% International representing Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Mexico and Canada Register early UID has sold out each of the last three years Registration opens October /2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 13 ISSA Growing Business

15 VISIT PANCERO.COM TO ENHANCE YOUR SALES AND SALES MANAGEMENT TRAINING - Blog Articles for Sales Pros and Sales Managers to help you with In-House training. Each article has a "Print & PDF" button that will format the article for your printer or create a PDF, your choice. - MP3's - MP3 audio training by Jim that you can listen to while on the go, can be played from your phone or tablet. - Videos - Watch training videos from Jim. Sales and Sales Management topics are covered, including new videos covering SWAT Team Selling and more coming so bookmark the site. TAP INTO THE APP! Have Jim s expertise at your fingertips, Videos, Audios, Articles, Sales Evaluation, available anytime to help sharpen your selling and sales management skills. Available now for iphone, ipad, Android, Tablets. Search for: Jim Pancero Evaluate Your Skills! Free 20 Question Sales and Sales Leadership Tests! The 20-question multiple choice Sales Evaluation for sales reps is a comprehensive analysis tool designed to help you as a sales rep increase awareness of your strongest selling skills, as well as the skills that, if improved, could most help you increase your selling abilities. The goal of the 20-question multiple choice Sales Leadership Evaluation is to help improve your ability to lead a sales team. By answering these evaluation questions, you can learn specific skills that could improve your leadership success. Both tests can be taken multiple times to see how your skills are increasing and all tests results and analysis are instantly available online and ed. Connect with Jim on Linkedin jimpancero Sign up for updates! 10/2015 Jim Pancero, Inc. Page 14 ISSA Growing Business