A how-to guide for training inside sales teams in a B2B SAAS companies.
For over 7 years I worked with SAAS companies and in all of them, I was either a part of, lead or built sales and digital marketing teams.
2 of these teams miserably failed while 5 of them created, some of the best salespeople you’ve ever seen. One took the customer count from 200 to 1000 within a year (of course marketing helped, a lot!), another one grew from a team of 10 to a team of 50 generating more than 6000 qualified leads for customers worldwide.
But most SAAS companies struggle to keep their inside sales teams in order, either due to churn sometimes to the tune of 100% of people changing every year or they never scale to the point where running an inside sales team makes sense.
In most cases, the major reason is that the management and the team are focusing on the wrong things. Usually, something like the number of calls or number of leads contacted or if a particular email was sent rather than the quality of these interactions.
Rather than what is important to drives sales,i.e. solving the customer’s problem in the least complex and most inexpensive way possible. Team leaders focus on the metrics like call volume and turnaround, instead of understanding if a particular call added value to the customer and the sales funnel itself.
The problem with this type of evaluation is, “Measurement”. How do you measure if the solution that your salespeople provided to your customer, is the most efficient one or even the right thing to say?
Though I would like to answer the question of “measurement” here. This post is not the one for it.
Most problems arise because the team itself is unsure about the goals, about what the product can do and what it can be used for?
In this post, my goal is to show you a blueprint that you can follow to help you efficiently train your sales team so that they can sell better.
Here we go,
Give them time
One of the most obvious mistakes that sales leaders make is expecting your salesperson to perform as soon as they join the company.
What they forget to understand is even a Michelin star chef takes his time to adjust to the tastes and culture of a new cuisine. Expecting your salesperson to be performing at 100% from day one is misguided and can only cause disappointment both for you and your salesperson.
The very first step is to give enough time to your hires to adjust to the process, culture and most importantly your product before they can actively move into sales.
How much time should you give them?
Try answering this, how much time does it take your sales team to close a customer? That much time or 60 days whichever works for you but just make sure the timeline is not less than 30 days.
From experience, I haven’t seen a shorter training period work, across industries, in any B2B SAAS product companies.
Don’t talk about your product, yet!
One of the most obvious mistakes that you can make while training your sales team is to talk about your product from the get-go. This not only creates a bias in the minds of your people but it creates one without enough information about the customers who would use it (buyer persona) and what this product can do for them.
You need to realize customer persona is as important to the sales team as it is to the marketing team. Most sales training programs barely speak about the customer and what their persona is?
Always start with “the customer”, who are the people that would use your product and how does it help them.
When you do tell them about your ideal customer, be doubly sure to let them know the benefits of using your product when compared to existing competitors.
It is usually preferable if you could justify the benefit in terms of time or money, made or saved for the customer. .
All you need to do is,
- Share a list of your customers or potential customers.
- Share a list of competitors and ask them to research their product and describe how your product might be different from them and if possible define the USP.
- Ask your recruits to research these companies or people to understand
- Which industry they are in?
- What might be the problem that your product can solve for them? (you haven’t given them an overview of your product yet)
- Why should they use your product and not anything else?
Tell them about the product, now!
Once they understand who they are supposed to be selling to and what is the problem that’s being solved, tell them about the product. Be as detailed as possible and do include the most commonly asked questions.
Preferably create an internal product document that they can learn from.
Learn the process
All sales teams good or bad should have a repeatable process that they follow, either by design or created in due course.
You as the leader or manager need to understand this and document it in a PDF or internal support page that anyone can refer too.
2 ways to do this,
- Create a pitch document that goes through every scenario possible
- Create a process flow chart
Ideally, create both.
Here is a sample,
Following is the process flow (this is just for the pitch, along with all questions that might be asked and how to tackle them) that I used in one of the earliest companies I worked in and help build a sales team for.
And a sample of the pitch document for a telephony product along with what needs to be done by the sales team can be viewed here.
The one above is just a sample, but your own document might be smaller or larger depending upon the product and the process that you follow. Just make sure that it is as extensive as possible.
Once your team is able to go through the document they would be able to get a preview of the questions asked by the customer and the answers to those questions.
let them write down the things they don’t understand. We will help them answer those at the end of this task.
Help them Answer
If you do go through with this process, your team would have questions.
Do not answer them until you reach this stage and once they have read through the process and pitch documents, answer each one of their questions in detail.
Use a whiteboard if required.
Get a buddy and let them shadow
Here is the tricky part, for every salesperson that comes in. I recommend assigning them a partner/buddy you would need to partner them up with a seasoned sales guy in your team.
Let the new salesperson, shadow a team member, listen to their calls, see how they work, how they answer customer queries and how they mediate with internal teams for delivery.
If you don’t have a sales team yet, I assume you would have sold the product yourself before you hired someone. let them shadow you.
Listen to recorded sales calls
If you are the type that records your sales and support calls, this step is for you.
And believe me when I say this nothing helps your team more than letting them know what they can expect from customer calls.
List down some really good calls for every sales scenario or use-cases that you can find on record, tag them and share them in the pitch document for your agents to listen.
If possible share atleast 50 such calls, if not skip this step.
Additionally, get them to note down anything they might not have understood; to be asked after the task is complete or ask their buddy if she is free.
At the end of this, you would have a salesperson who
- Knows who the customer is
- What their pain-point is
- How to solution your product to meet the customer needs
- Work with internal teams.
Assuming that’s what you were looking for and expect a 45 to 60-day timeline before they are ready to be on the floor talking to the customer.
Finally, run some mock calls and role-playing calls within your team, record them and help them improve their pitch.
Additionally, don’t rush through this entire training module in a week. Simply because that would create a sales team who barely know what they are supposed to do and would require you to constantly monitor and assist them.
that’s how I trained sales teams that went from 200 to 1000 within the year.
until next time.
Originally published at https://augary.me on January 1, 2020.
