What Sales Managers Can Learn From Football Coaches

Training Industry recently featured “Go For an Undefeated Season!” by Veelo CEO Chanin Ballance.

The parallels between playing sports and making sales are easy to see. We invest time learning skills, practicing them and then combining them with natural talent to make things happen. However, knowing exactly what to do in the moment is the key to winning – whether it is in sales or football.

Exceptional training not only focuses on skills but establishes a high-achieving atmosphere as well. Help great players become coachable, develop a love of learning and welcome advice along their journey. The best teammates want to become better continually.

Read the full article on the Training Industry website.

Hungry for more insights on how to maximize knowledge retention, skill mastery, and onboarding effectiveness in general? Check out our newest brief, “Onboard Smarter, Not Harder“:

Onboard Smarter, Not Harder: A Quick Sales Onboarding How-To | Veelo

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Help Your Champions Build Consensus Among Decision Makers

(A guest post from Dan Walker from Consensus @goconsensus)

Of all the training topics that you can train your team on, few may provide the increase in productivity that training on building a buying consensus would provide for business-to-business (B2B) selling. This is because of group buying dysfunction.

What is Group Buying Dysfunction?

Group buying dysfunction is when a purchasing organization struggles to get consensus from the many stakeholders in their organization that need to make a purchase decision. From the perspective of the sales rep, working on a deal suffering from buying dysfunction, it feels like you’re not getting any feedback on the progress of your deal from your internal champion or other stakeholders. Sometimes, it’s total radio silence or it feels like questions coming out of left field.Consensus

A huge reason for group buying dysfunction is that the purchasing company is hesitant to provide feedback to the selling company until they have something concrete to communicate. It’s unfortunate because it gives the seller little to no feedback on what internal conversations are taking place. Now, consider the view from the purchasing organization, it’s hard to even schedule times to get people together to discuss a new initiative. This can be intimidating for your internal champion. On average, there are 5.4 decision makers involved in each buying decision.

 The Answer is Buying Acceleration

Champions and gatekeepers own access to decision makers. But, don’t forget that you own the process and must retain the messaging as it is circulated inside of an organization. Strategically, you want to enable the buyers to have the materials/messaging that they’ll need to make a purchase decision. Traditionally, your internal champions are communicating to the decision makers on your behalf. That’s risky business. At this point it’s critical to understand that your champion doesn’t understand your product or your messaging as well as you do. That’s why you need to equip them with the right tools/messaging so they can easily and effectively take the right next steps to reach the other decision makers.

Coach, Coach, Coach

This is when coaching comes into play. At the end of the day, you need to enable your champion and fellow stakeholders with the right information that they’ll need to make a purchase decision. Spend some time understanding the personas of the decision makers and enable your champion accordingly. This is trickier than it may seem. Keep in mind that these stakeholders don’t share the same perspective of value. That means your content needs to be personalized to reflect each of their concerns and value perspectives. If you can do this, you’ll get access to more decision makers far more often. We all know if you can get better access to decision makers your close rates and possibly your sales cycles will improve. That is what buyer enablement is all about; the right content, at the right time, every time.

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