Have you ever wondered what makes a sales representative truly effective? What specific requirements and practices set successful sales teams apart from the rest?
Sales representative requirements have evolved significantly, as highlighted in Keenan’s book, Gap Selling. The book emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs through strategic questioning and maintaining a structured approach to sales pipeline management.
Keep reading to discover the essential requirements that can transform an average sales team into a high-performing machine.
Frequently Ask Your Sales Representatives Questions
To ensure that your employees are meeting sales representative requirements, Keenan recommends frequently asking them questions about their clients and about the state of the sale. He explains that gap selling requires a more thorough approach to tracking and managing your ongoing sales when compared to traditional techniques. He argues that asking questions allows you to verify your sales representatives’ knowledge while identifying gaps in their understanding of the sale. Furthermore, by asking about the sale, managers can support their sales representatives by providing strategies and ideas to guide them through the process.
(Shortform note: Research supports Keenan’s call for a structured and rigorous approach to sales pipeline management. One study found that companies saw 28% higher revenue growth if they implemented just three best practices: 1) They explicitly defined their sales process step by step. 2) They devoted a minimum of three hours a month to tracking and managing their ongoing sales. 3) They trained sales managers specifically on management of ongoing sales. While these practices may sound like extra work, the effort spent following up with your sales team to keep them on track could potentially improve your revenue in the long run.)
He recommends that you focus your questions on two points: whether they understand their customers’ gaps and whether they know the next commitment to secure.
1) Do You Understand the Customer’s Gap?
In a gap selling pipeline review, Keenan advises sales managers to verify that their salespeople truly understand their customers’ gap. Recall that this requires a sales representative to fully understand their customer: their present condition, ideal future condition, underlying issues, and long-term goals. Furthermore, gap selling requires the sales representative to understand the value of closing the gap as well as the costs of implementing their solution. Keenan advises managers to ask for specific data from their sales reps and to ask follow-up questions to ensure that they’ve completed a thorough discovery and evaluation.
(Shortform note: One potential drawback of this discussion-heavy approach is that it may use up a lot of time with meetings, decreasing productivity by taking time away from other tasks. However, management experts explain that by implementing best practices, you can keep your meeting time productive. To use your meeting time wisely, define a clear purpose for the meeting, plan the agenda in advance, and set clear time limits for each item and stick to them. Furthermore, they recommend that you regularly request feedback on the meetings to improve them.)
2) Do You Know the Next Commitment?
Recall that each sale is a series of incremental smaller sales. Keenan recommends that sales managers verify their representatives’ understanding of a sale by asking them about the customer’s next commitment. What is the next incremental step in the sales process that their customer must say yes to? Managers must make sure their sales reps have a clear short-term target in the sales process to keep the deal consistently moving along.
(Shortform note: Management experts caution that regularly making sure that your employees are moving toward company goals could make them feel that they’re being micromanaged and stifled. Employees report that micromanagement increases their stress, hurts their confidence, and makes them feel distrusted by their supervisor. Management experts recommend mitigating this effect by showing your employees trust. They recommend delegating important tasks to demonstrate your faith in their abilities, and allowing them room to make mistakes and grow. Lastly, they recommend setting clear expectations for what your staff achieves, but giving them broad leeway in how to achieve it.)
