Evaluating Customer Experiences

To discuss and deliver a training program on “Evaluating the Customer Experience”, expect that your audience will give you highly charged feedback that is vocal, interactive, and filled with very personal testimony – positive and negative. Why? Depending on the customer service outcome, in any given shopping experience, organizational and human behavioral psychology are forced into one place – revenue gain or loss at the expense of an emotional consumer.

Quantify Your Customers Buying Habits

Managing the Sales Learning Function becomes an important factor here in successful training and development.With this in mind, it is even more critical now to watch carefully and evaluate the quarterly value proposition percentages and net revenues of a business against the customer experience. Sales and Customer Service Training Managers need to teach their teams the importance of learning to execute best practice behavior that ensures a positively outstanding customer relations experience. The result of not applying these behaviors at any random moment when interacting with a buyer or repeat customer can have dramatic negative results on a business brand that is trying to sustain a positive marketplace perception.

The Customer is now a REAL Consumer Watchdog

It is at this place, where the consumer has a lot of “power” over the company. Viral feedback, negative or positive, flies in the face of internet social economics where the consumer will post comments on Facebook and Twitter. Negative postings can severely handicap a brand, cash flow results and organizational effectiveness. It is extremely expensive to fix the perception of the customer. Negative customer feedback can derail the efforts of a well planned business strategy designed at increasing customer market share.

The Customer is in Control

Organizations are facing more intense customer service pressures, so Trainers need to make sure that soft skill competencies in customer, sales and service delivery are taught in ways that reflect positive business results.

According to the Journal of Marketing Research, http://www.jstor.org/pss/3152082 “when a service failure occurs, the organizations response has the potential to either restore customer satisfaction and reinforce loyalty or complicate the situation and drive the customer to a competitor.”

The ASTD SalesTrainingDrivers.com defines “evaluating the customer experience” as assessing the effectiveness and positive impact of solutions and then communicating the results to the stakeholders. Key actions include: identifying and using operational metrics that clearly express beneficial results that are understood and valued by solution stakeholders. (net promoter scores, total cost of ownership, return on investment (ROI) time to competence and productivity ratios.)

Therefore, it is the Trainers responsibility to show how a total customer experience will influence customer perception, customer value, service quality and customer loyalty, as it relates to financially responsible business results.

Building a Business Case: Your Final Answer.

Building a business case is a sales competency of the ASTD World Class Sales Competency Model. Designing a business case can be a useful management tool that is pivotal to an organization’s success. It is used in supporting the overall planning and decision making for both operational and financial decision making that surrounds company products, services and solutions. 

Build Cross Functional Learning Systems

As a Sales Trainer and Sales Learning Professional, developing a firm understanding of business operations and cross functional relationships will help you collaborate with others who work with you.  A Sales Trainer can teach many things to the sales team to help build sales competencies. 

• Design a sales learning system that identifies a business need, threat, opportunity or problem
• Discuss alternative solutions to a problem and why they do not work.
• Prompt questions that can lead to information that uncovers reasons to buy.
• Gives sales forecasting statistics and reporting structure.
• Complete a risk analysis (organizational, financial or technical).
• Quantify benefits and costs or ROI analysis.
• Estimate budget requirements that decision makers can understand in proposals.
• Shows expected profit and/or cash flow consequences.
• Design sales project management schedules and delivery fulfillment deadlines.
• Position the case with your customer to direct a transfer of ownership.

Show Proven and Tested Methodologies

Learn to teach proven approaches and closing techniques that establish the business value of your proposal with credibility and impact. Sales Trainers can design practical training modules in business case selling. Use a business case to help decision makers follow a predetermined process or format to cover all factors being considered. This would include showing complex data that proves your case and helps justify the decision to close even when there may be several decision makers involved to review the case.

A strong business case can also be used as a performance management tool to identify sales and strategic opportunities, and manage best practices. It can turn sales data into action oriented intelligence to drive engagement, measurement, and accountability to drive business value.

Sales Leaders can help the team set goals and measure progress more accurately. The Sales Team can collaborate more effectively by following the process mapping which will improve their ability to compete. Using sales training methods and key performance indicators that follow the ASTD Sales Training Competency Model  framework , you will be able to provide ways to help Sales Leaders to gain insight make better decisions and take more effective action using real time Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to better track and manage the sales process – getting to the root cause of a particular sales issue.

Analyzing Organizational Capacity

Analyzing Capacity within a business organization can be one of the most challenging of the sales training foundational competencies. The reason is because a positive cash flow from sales revenue generated by a high performance sales force ensures that the company can afford to risk making strategic market decisions. It needs to be able to service and deliver quality products that can be sold to grow the business.What is the function of Business Capacity?

Business capacity involves analyzing, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, managing, and planning all functions of the company for financial, statistical, and behavioral data. This process allows business leaders to clearly identify how to grow and sustain the health of the organization. This includes: technological, operational and human performance. You can perform activities that align and maximize capacity measurements and improvements within any part of the organization.

According to the ASTD World Class Selling, http://www.salestrainingdrivers.org/ the definition of “Analyzing Organizational Capacity is to: “Assess and weigh competing requirements against available resources to minimize risk, ensure quality deliverables, and balance capabilities with capacity.”

Key actions would include:

1. Assessing resources accurately

2. Balancing risk with goal achievement when determining next steps

Should I integrate the capacity of my SALES  or TRAINING department?

Absolutely! It is extremely valuable for you to understand the financial, operational and human requirements and costs to run your training department. As a Sales or Talent Management Sales Trainer, you are responsible for the knowledge management of the sales team and its’ performance outcomes. The health of your own training department is vulnerable to business capacity shifts and changes. The better you understand how analyzing capacity works the better your departmental efforts will be measured for your own success as a Trainer!

How does this relate to Sales Training?

Your sales team’s performance in any given month will reflect the increases or decreases in the “capacity” to which the organization can utilize internal or external resources. In this case, we are talking about the companies’ ability to access financial resources that come from new and existing sales revenue. Sales revenue is the anchor of life for all business, The company will suffer in capacity when a sales organization is not strong. The business must be able to “afford” to adapt constant change and if it cannot do that without strong sales leadership, revenue increase and consistent sales productivity. If the organization be able to adapt to capacity changes or sustainability is threatened.

SPANNING BOUNDARIES

Warning! Your companies market research data has just been hacked! How did this happen? Some sales guy just “spanned his boundaries!” thus the State of a Free Capitalistic System and that is a GOOD thing! Spanning Boundaries is a Sales Training Drivers  World Class Sales Competency. It falls under the category of “business insight” and involves the active collaboration of cross functional teams or work groups. The purpose is to collecting critical information on organizational challenges. Sales training and the need for knowledge management will be invaluable to this process as it relates to team building, prospect data collection, cultural behavior analysis and market trends.

Knowledge Management is focused on leveraging different knowledge bases that can provide Sales Trainers up to date resources faster and more efficiently than one leader, group or organization can do by itself. In other words, two or more resources working together towards a common goal is better than one. Wikipedia describes it this way – “Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences.” The incoming information is shared, stored and analyzed by knowledge management so that sales leaders and upper level management can address the business climate and organizational development concerns quickly. Boundary spanning teams and workgroups will continue to collect and bring in the information for problem solving and finding new ways to capitalize on learning and development opportunities.

The organizational challenges being examined externally by a cross functional sales and marketing teams could include: business intelligence, global competition, changing marketing demographics, cultural development or technological advances by a competitor.

Internal boundary spanning by the team could look at challenges and root weaknesses in executive leadership behavior, succession planning, and an in depth look at interpersonal communication breakdown between senior leaders, departmental directors, and managers.

Sales Directors and Sales Trainers will look to give Senior Leaders information on how to solve sales revenue and sustainability problems collectively. This will require the deliberate initiation of highly trained boundary spanning teams. What may be most difficult for Senior Leaders, Talent Management and Marketing / Sales Analysts, is that the re-organizing the traditional vertical organizational charts showing how employees directly report to one another will be changed for open source communication.

This is no easy task. It pushes the critical need for knowledge management expertise front and center to measure the success of changing people processes. It will need to ensure the alignment and commitment to a collaborative business strategy. However, it has been found that teams engaged in boundary spanning are more likely to achieve team goals. Just be careful of how you collect and distribute culturally diversity information.  Gathering this data and dispersing it into the wrong hands could pose serious organizational concerns. Everyone wants real time business intelligence that is critical to stay competitive.

SETTING EXPECTATIONS – A Sales Training Drivers Foundational Competency

Setting expectations for your training class is a reflection of your expectations from upper level executive management. The Trainer is expected to deliver a training program that delivers business results. Executives want to show the impact of your training in their financial statements in the form of increased revenue and employee productivity! (Hint: this is the key to obtaining that increase in your training budget!)

Setting expectations is your most important organizational development responsibility when training a set of sales employees. This is very important!! READ ON!!

BOTH the CORPORATE TRAINER and the SALES MANAGERS are expected to ensure that your sales training and field sales efforts will produce high performance teams! The objective now is to PARTNER and discover ways “come together” with a daily/weekly program of measurement and evaluation of sales employees that marry their respective educational and vocational knowledge, talent and resources. This will ensure that human performance improvement meets business results that are expected by upper level executives and stake holders.

When setting expectations, the Trainer is seen as a trusted advisor to employees who are expected to master multiple sets of behavioral, psychological, linguistic, and communication skills for the purpose of producing business results that ultimately brings incoming revenue. Your bonding with your students is simple: Accept them where they are in the learning environment and assess their needs for selling in the field. Address the needs of each student behaviorally, isolate their strengths and help them become proficient in overcoming their weaknesses.

• What happens after the initial training is over and you are on to your next class?
• Is not your training job measured by the productivity and performance of your students?
• How is the learning function managed with the previous class and how is it measured to ensure your best practice training is effective long term?

There is a huge break down in sales organizations today between:

1. Talent / Training Management

2. Field Sales Management.

This break down must be fixed if business leaders want to increase revenue and sustain high performance sales teams. Your curriculum, learning activities and sales support must show that your student productivity is sustainable leading to high performance behavior. You are ensuring that a transfer of knowledge will result in skilled competencies. Repetitive Sales coaching, purposed-based recognition and encouragement are often missing in sales courses even though training lies as the heart of human performance and behavior change. Tim Mulvaney, an Organizational Development expert with The Mulvaney Group in New York City and creator of “Courageous Conversations” said this about sales development: “Go Big or Go Home!”

Workplace Learning is just now becoming its’ own valuable industry. Workplace Learning Professionals specialized in education training and human performance have not been involved in day to day individual coaching, monitoring and evaluating sales employee behavior after a training course is over. This has typically been the Field Sales Managers job.

• Is your training really that effective when your students are rushed into the hands of the Sales Manager?
• What happens when you are not involved in the field process?
• Why is it, (1) month later, and your training is executed with a “wing it” approach”?

Question?  Are the Sales Managers or Sales Support staff in your company skilled in:

Talent Management processes?

Instructional design methods?

Managing the learning function?

Human Performance Improvement Training?

Why is the Field Sales Manager not educated on behavioral teaching when in a sales team building role?

Why are Top Producers promoted to teaching a sales team when they have no teaching, behavioral psychology or proven team building  expertise?

Why NOT? There is mounting evidence that if Corporate Sales Training Educators and Sales Managers worked together on a consistent weekly basis with the sales team members, the sales team productivity, performance would dramatically increase!

Isn’t increasing business revenue and business results one of the most important goals of  the organization?

Negotiation is vital to organizational effectiveness. Sales Trainers can implement better sales training programs by teaching negotiation tactics. These tactics can be used to facilitate sales support and it can also be used by the trainer themselves to justify a business case to upper level management for increasing training budgets and obtaining the funds for new training technologies and resources that drives sales support. GET YOUR BUDGET BACK!

Sales negotiation is an increasingly important part of the sales process. Negotiation starts when the sales professional and the buyer are in agreement that a sale should be made.  A price will be compromised when the sales person gives a price drop incentive or increases the benefits. At that point, the buyer will be more open to purchasing when there is an increase in benefits.

The buyer will also negotiate before making any kind of commitment and give objections to the sale to see what they can “get” as a part of the deal. The sales person will then overcome these objections by raising the value of their sales position. The sales closing will occur when all the objections are answered and all selling points are negotiated. The final offer, commitment and the signing of a contract that outlines the financial agreement will be the result of these series of negotiations.

• There are many financially rewarding outcomes for trainers when they teach sales negotiation skills. For instance, most negotiation techniques and strategies can easily show sales professionals how to add 10% to sales revenues going directly to the bottom line. This is of great value to the organization and will win points with your training department at the Executive level!\

• Sales management negotiation can also be used to reduce staff turnover and reduce recruitment and training costs. Proving these business outcome measures with evaluations of profit increase from sales performance will prove that training is critical to the bottom line. The resulting outcome of negotiation can improve staff quality, work production consistency, increase profits and earn you a seat at the Executive board meeting! You will be showing the C-Level executives how you  accomplished this through teaching the sales staff how to negotiate. They will not argue with your ability to show positive cash flow by way of positive employee behavior change!

Also when developing and implementing a training program focused on negotiation skills, you may consider the idea of “creative collaboration”. Creative collaboration in negotiating arrives at a better collaborative outcome where both parties have an opportunity to develop and improve synergies between each other which benefits both sides.

For many trainers, however, negotiating is confrontational. NOT NEGOTIATING is one of the reasons you may have seen a budget cut in your training department!

LESSON LEARNED: Learn to negotiate and earn a right to speak in the C-Suite! Show your Executives how your training has increased new business revenue and reduced operational costs as your sales team brought in more sales! A little math, a little negotiating skill and a little guts can bring BIG DIVIDENDS – especially when it comes to the organizational support for your training budget!  This is a more ‘partnership’ approach. Everyone likes a Win-win!

Building relationships – Partnering Up Pays Big

People prefer to do business with people they like! How do you do that? One of the most rewarding aspects of great sales training is teaching others how building great relationships with prospects, customers and their client referrals.  This article is about building relationships.

Building relationships is foundational to performance improvement and transcends all areas of your life at work, play and at home.

A good Trainer will teach that the most important person in a conversation is the other person! Steering and focusing the conversation on what is happening in the other persons life will be 90% of the conversation in the sales process. The other 10% will be the sales person questioning and gathering feedback. (Yet, statistics will show you that 80% of sales professionals still do not do this even after training because the skill is not practiced enough!)

These statistics show that Sales Trainers and Talent Management still have a lot of collaborating to do! Sales Training Drivers.com is committed to helping the Workplace Learning Industry foster more of this collaboration and help sales professionals stay on target to meet their professional and personal goals.

The business goal of building relationships is to teach how to move the sales forward for mutual benefit. Show your sales team that building rapport is broken down by value percentages representing the highest amount a prospect will likely receive and absorb your message during conversation. Rapport is comprised of your ability to use:

1. Words (7%) – 93% of people only listen to 7% of what you say and only remember 3%.

2. Tonality (38%) – the tone of your voice matched with someone else’s level of tone

3. Physiology (55%) body language, facial expression, posture, stance, composure, movements, gestures

Learning how to use words and body language is crucial to successful selling (and training!). It must be done over practice sessions, one on one coaching, role plays, and measured evaluations. Practicing the use of specific words, tonality and physiology during the sales process is an art in itself. Less than 10% of sales professionals ever fully master it! Your ability to present yourself appropriately and ask questions will prompt people to give you the personal answers you need to solve their issues and sell them.

Teach active listening skills and questioning techniques that check for agreement. It will show your sales team how to look at the prospects problem from their point of view. Have your sales team learn how to present your product or service as a valuable addition to the security, comfort, and enjoyment of your prospects life. Teach them how to become interested in their prospects lives. (family, job, and recreation activities, and financial concerns). This takes a lot of practice in building transferable behavioral skills in relationship building.

We all want to feel special and we all want to feel OK.  Many customers will go miles out of their way to do business with someone they like and will make them feel happy and appreciated. Once someone likes you, they will bring you into their inner circle of influence and their friends will become your friends. Your business will grow much faster while other sales people who do not build quality relationships are vulnerable to the ups and downs of the economy, trends and budgets.

ALIGNING with CUSTOMERS: The Fortune is in the Follow up!

Customer Alignment is a foundational competency for training sales teams. 1. “How do you treat your customers” and 2. ‘How do your customers affect your organization’s bottom line”.  This article talks about aligning with customers.

Without customers there would be no organizations to employ you as a Trainer. Without recurring and new sales revenue, the organizations will not be able to stay in business. Sales training and your ability to teach a sales team how to align their customers is pivotal to the success of your training program and your organizations sustainability.

Your Sales Training objective is to teach the team to align sales with the customer buying process. Focus on the customers wants by asking strategic questions about them. Build rapport and establish a common emotional experience with that customer to win their trust. Their answers will give you the information you need to make the sale. Learn how to attract and win the RIGHT prospects and customers. Separate the curious from the serious so that you are not wasting your time or theirs – talking about things that are not facilitating your sales goal. You have to ask them for the order eventually! Make sure your conversation is moving the sales process forward. When training customer alignment strategies, your curriculum must be centered on how to build customer relationships first and then the processes. Analyzing sales processes do not engage people to buy.   What Best Practices can you teach to align customers and maximize sales opportunities?

What Do Customers Want?

1. High quality products sold at reasonable prices (Give a Price Comparison and Quality Check)
2. Tell the truth about how the product or service is made. (Check the label or ingredients or warranty)
3. Tell the truth when delivering marketing and advertising campaigns. (Where is the Proof?)
4. Listen to the customer during communication and restate to understand.
5. Give reasonable options to return a product that is unsatisfactory
6. Deliver what you promised ON TIME.
7. No arguments when a customer service complains about returning a product.

Best Practice Training: Customer Alignment

1. Teach customer service and sales teams to builds relationships with customers
2. Teach the importance of loyalty, trust, respect, positive communication
3. Teach how to create an enjoyable experience during the sales process.
4. Teach customer service skills that handles existing customer calls quickly
5. Teach how to identifying and resolving what the customer wants and needs.
6. Teach suggestive selling to support an increase in revenue.
7. Teach how to create new business revenue from existing customer referrals
8. Teach how to create a strong value proposition during the sale
9. Teach active listening skills for mutual sales agreement
10. Teach customer service excellence as a measurement for quality and performance.

HBR’s article on provocative selling made a big splash earlier this year — multiple executives we know picked up on it and shared it widely with their colleagues.  This article provides a quick overview.

The idea was that sellers need to move beyond selling solutions to provocatively identify a problem, present it in a new light, and position their company as being able to address the issue.

The SEC recently released research supporting this notion.  Their update of what differentiates high performers from average performers identified the “Challenger” sales rep profile to be dramatically more effective than the traditional “Relationship Builder”.  A “Challenger” is 5 times more likely to be successful in a typical sales environment — 13 times more successful in a complex sales environment.

The SEC’s findings are more evidence that sellers need to be active partners in identifying or creating opportunities in order to succeed in today’s environment of extremely tight expense controls.

More information:
“In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers” by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore:
http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/03/in-a-downturn-provoke-your-customers/ar/1

SEC’s “Replicating the New High Performer — Introduction to the Findings”:
http://www.executiveboard.com/salesandmarketing/

Sales Training Drivers

The ASTD Sales Training Drivers.com BLOG is dedicated to defining professional selling standards and setting expectations for sales development and performance. We are committed to helping sales organizations and individuals measure their effectiveness with world-class sales enablement. 

 It is our pleasure to share major trends in the sales profession with the greatest Impact on current and future practice of the sales profession pertaining to globalization, commoditization, competition, technology and demographics. We are dedicated to discussing the challenges and solutions that occur in sales development and talk about the ASTD Sales Competency Model. 

ASTD SALES TRAINING COMPETENCY MODEL – What is that?  

• ASTD World Class Sales Competency Model focuses on a “sales system” not a process or technique.
• Does not replace training manuals, books, methodologies or practices.
• Provides functional expectations about sales profession success.  
• Creates a Sales Learning culture without losing customer focus.
• Defines and ensures relevance and permanence of organizational sales competency
• Defines Knowledge, Skill, Abilities and Behaviors for sales competence.
• Future oriented, honors the past, applies to all sales organization types and levels
• Focused on improving sales performance through learning, training, and job analysis by Workplace Learning Professionals, Sales Trainers, Managers, Associates, Academia  

 WHY DO SALES LEADERS WORRY?  

• Frustrated with increasing pressure to meet sales quotas every month and meet company goals.
• Upset why sales associates cannot increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue numbers.
• Unsure why sales associates find training ineffective and less than useful.
• Worried why Senior Executive Leaders are turning to training departments to align selling efforts.
• Concerned about how to implement a competency-based approach to sales training.  

 REACTIVE SELLING ISSUES 

• Most efforts to improve sales training has been focused on a “reactive” approach
• Sales Leaders need to accelerate team performance to increase revenue and customer satisfaction
• Sales people find sales training ineffective and less than useful.
• Lack of Organizational Management Support / Unproductive focus on short – term results
• Company uses a Technique Approach to teaching sales skills
• Sales Managers are not measuring individual sales associate behavior accurately.
• Sales Coaching is not defined and are not taught effectively by Top Producers.

 PROACTIVE SALES ORGANIZATION SOLUTIONS 

• Focus Sales Leaders on a “organizational system” approach to sales training for sustainability
• Hold every employee accountable for an understanding of company mission and vision.
• All members of the sales organization will understand the business strategy and how to leverage technology in pursuit of goals.
• Each employee is coached to help identify the personal impact they have on overall sales efforts.
• Professional employee focus is on Human Performance Improvement
• Create Learning functions to help develop team skills for sales success and organization growth
• Evaluate selling skills, knowledge and attitudes during exchange between buyer and seller 
• Measure and document the value between buyer and seller.
• Expand the organizations sales capacity.  
• Increase in sales capacity = Increase in sales revenue.  
• Sales capacity is measured by: Leadership Position, Market Share, Customer Loyalty  
• Sales Capacity and Sales Competency must be balanced.  
• Include everyone indirectly involved in revenue generation: HR, IT, Production, Accounting
• Include all employees in the sales organization directly responsible for revenue generation.
• Include Sale Support: Operations, Tactics, Leadership, Management, Strategist, Developer, Manager, Analyst, Administrator
• Identify and tailor skill gaps for Sales Leaders, Training Team and Team Members  
• Create coaching programs to offset personal development deficiencies for each sales member.
• Define and build on-boarding or leadership development programs