Hi!
My name is c.j., your trusted Sales Advisor, and here's the
May 2009 issue of Psyche-Selling TM
eNewsletter.
At the end of this month, I
will be heading for Washington D.C. to present a paper on "Optimsing Your Sales Training
Effectiveness in China"for the American Society for
Training & Development (ASTD) International Conference
& Exposition. If you happen to drop by, pls. go to
http://registration.experient-inc.com/ShowATD092/Default.aspxinvitation code 2562 for
Psycho-Geometrics® LLC, Booth #1107 to get your complimentary pass to
the Exposition. The deadline for getting the free-pass is 15
May 2009, U.S. time.
Since these are also times
of diminishing and disappearing training budgets (not to mention the
H1N1 virus), I'll summarise my paper and share it with you, in case you
are not attending...
Hence, this month's topics:
-
How to Pay Less and
Get More Results for Your Sales Training in China;
and
-
7 Ways and 14
Checkpoints on How to Win in Trade
Marketing
This
issue's main article is on "How to Pay Less and Get More Results for Your Sales Training
in China", and it gives training managers some
ideas how you can meet top management's directive to reduce sales
training budgets, while still helping the sales department to improve
their selling skills.
-
Before you fix your sales training,
review your sales force hiring, promotion and incentives practices
first;
-
Whether you decide to get internal or
external trainers to train your sales people, what matters most are
your training objectives, and how you measure training success.
-
When deciding who will be the right trainer for
you, prioritise your requirements on a score sheet and discuss with
your team objectively. Read on... ...
To read the rest of
this newsletter, pls. click
here (http://www.psycheselling.com/page4.html).
How to Pay Less and Get More Results for
Your Sales Training in
China
by c.j.
Ng
When earnings
fall, most companies do the one thing that is easy to implement, and
will make the earnings look better. That is to cut costs and
budgets. And one of the first, if not the first, to be cut is
the training budget.
However, rather than deciding to cut or postpone all kinds of
trainings, some companies are trying to retain the "must-have"
trainings, i.e. the ones that are critical to the company's
performance, such as sales, supply chain management, quality management
etc. Still, the budgets available for such training are still
very tight, and these companies are looking into ways of dong more with
less.
Some
companies have tried to use internal trainers instead of external ones
to conduct sales training. Others have switched to less
"expensive" trainers instead. Well, the question here isn't
so much about whom to engage as your sales trainer, but rather how you
can plan and execute sales trainings that deliver your desired
results.
To achieve this, you will have
to first overcome some of the common weaknesses of most sales training
initiatives:
-
Sales training content
is outdated OR does not match the current buying practices of customers
-
Ineffective reinforcement or post-training coaching
-
No measurement of improvements after the training
-
Getting the wrong person to do the training, etc
Getting Your House in Order
While the purpose of sales training is to
improve the selling skills so that they generate better sales results
for you, to achieve such an objective may require the orchestration of
a few other components as well. These
are:
-
Hiring: Do you have the right sales person for the
right sales job that will fit into your corporate
culture
-
Promotion: Have you promoted the right sales person to be
your sales manager whom will lead and motivate your sales team
effectively
-
Incentives: Is your sales team
incentivised to go the extra mile and get better deals for you.
If you need
someone to get new customers and get quick deals, it will be very
painful to train someone who is more comfortable cultivating long-term
relationships with customers and grow their business.
Similarly, if you need someone to spend more time partnering with
customers and create strategic sales, it will also be quite masochistic
to train a sales person who is highly skilled in high-pressure
selling. Here are some statistics from HR
Chally:
-
Only 19% of effective new
business developers are effective at maintaining long-term customers
-
Less than 15% of key account managers are comfortable developing new
businesses
-
Nearly 65% of salespeople who
fail could have succeeded in the right type of sales position for their
skills
You can refer to
our past issue "If You Want to Improve Sales and
Profits, Stop Your Sales Training?!" for more
details.
According to
HR Chally, less than
15% of superstar sales people succeed in management. The job
of selling is very different from managing a team of sales
people. Some superstar sales people are so good in what they
do, they don't even know why they are good, much less impart their
skills to
others.
Here are some of
the criteria of what a good sales manager should
be:
-
Directs and controls others in your team
-
Optimise the company's profits through the actions
of your sales team
-
Analyse customer behaviours, sales
people's actions and market trends effectively
-
Train your team members
-
Makes joint calls and then coach the sales person
on how to deal with customers better
You may ask why is hiring the right
sales person so critical to getting good sales training
results. Well, according to research conducted by
Huthwaite, 87% of what is learnt in a sales training session
will be lost after 1 month upon completion of the training
programme. And the key reason behind this is due to
ineffective post-training reinforcement, coaching and monitoring by the
sales managers. In fact some sales managers hardly, if ever,
train or coach or nurture their
teams!
You can find
out more from our past issue: "Mistakes Companies Make When Hiring
their Next Sales Superstar".
Ultimately, it is
said that the sales person's mind works faster and more accurate than a
super-computer when it comes to calculating their incentive payments.
They know how to reach their targets and optimise their pay by taking
the most efficient of all actions. What this means is what
gets paid, gets done, and if you don't provide the incentives for sales
people to change their ways (or dis-incentives if they don't), then
your sales training effectiveness will be compromised.
You can get more details from
our past issue: "Re-Configuring Your Sales Incentive
Plan".
Setting Your
Training Objectives
If you were to ask any sales manager, what will be the objective of any
sales training, the reply is likely to be "Get more sales (at higher
prices)!"
While this is
very much the ultimate objective of most, if not all, sales trainings,
the question here is what areas need to be improved before you can
increase sales?
Since sales revenue generated
is an end-result, in order to improve this result, you will have to
look into the processes that drive this results in the first
place. Hence, instead on focusing on the final objective,
look at which are the processes that need to be improved and work on
those
areas.
E.g. if you find that your
sales people have a hard time dealing with customers' pressure to cut
prices, perhaps you can
first:
-
Identify the sales processes involved in a typical
sale;
-
Identify which process(es) actually caused our
customers to focus so much on price discussions (e.g. did we quote the
price too early, or we didn't understand the customer's business needs
well enough, or we didn't get the customer to buy-in to the value we
provide, etc.)
-
Set the training objective to be
rectifying these causes of giving too much
discounts
-
Monitor and measure the improvements on these
processes
-
Then monitor and measure the improvements of
selling at higher prices
Perhaps the biggest headaches
faced by many sales trainers (internal or external) is that some
companies decide to have sales training only when sales are really
doing badly, and then they expect immediate improvements to the
bottomline. Ironically, part of the reason that these
companies are doing badly in sales is because they hadn't paid enough
attention to the sales processes that drive the eventual
results. So it degenrates into a vicious cylcle of the
company wanting some "magic bullet" to improve sales, while the sales
trainer tries in vain to explain it is the process improvements that
will improve sales.
Engaging the Right Trainers
Typically, companies
can choose between internal and external trainers for their sales
training. Whether you are getting internal or external
trainers, your selection criteria will have to be based on "what
kind of trainer(s) will be a best fit to deliver our sales training
objectives now?", more so than any other
criteria.
While it seems
like common sense to select the right trainer for most training
managers, there some selections that are sometimes bizarre.
We know of companies who require trainers to have years of experience
in their industry, when what they said they are looking is someone who
can train them new ideas to meet future challenges as their industry is
changing real fast.
There's also a
Fortune 500 IT hardware company in China that actually raised issues
about the trainer's accent, and then promptly fired the trainer, even
though that trainer is a subject-matter expert who is real good in
designing new training programmes from scratch. While it is
true that the trainer has difficulty pronouncing broadcaster-standard
putonghua,
participants can undertsnad him well, and have graded him highly in
evaluation sheets for previous trainings.
Depending on your current situation, your sales training requirements
can be:
-
Designing a sales programme
from the ground up (i.e. observing sales people in action, break down
the sales processes, devise ways to improve each process through
training)
-
Implement existing training programmes (no changes,
just do it)
-
Emphasize role-plays and case study discussions in
workshops, an then give de-briefings and pointers (sort of like a
group-based coaching)
-
Conduct train-the-trainer programmes for sales
managers, so that they can train their own
teams
-
Audit current
sales training programmes, and identify ways to improve on them ,
etc.
In fact, one
of our key customers are engaging us to help them develop their their
senior sales managers to double as internal sales trainers.
Their challenges are
-
Their sales managers don't know how to train (and
haven't got any training
experiences);
-
They need external help to customise a
sales training programme to their needs, and incorporating their CRM
system into their sales processes;
-
They need ongoing
identification of new training needs based on their weaker links in
their sales processes;
-
They need advice on
how to schedule their internal trainings so that their internal
trainers are not over-burden with
work;
-
They need to audit their internal training, to make
sure the time is well spent.
So we worked out a plan (that goes
beyong the typical train-the-trainer programme) that will help
them
-
Reduce operational training costs (by getting internal
senior managers to do the
training);
-
The trainees get more attention (it will be just 1 sales
manager to 5
trainees);
-
Their trainers are well-trained to do the job
well;
-
They get
professionally designed training
materials;
-
They get updates and further coaching from the
master-trainer
To choose
the right trainer, you can create a score sheet of the list of
proritised criteria for the trainer(s), that is based on your sales
training objectives. Most companies, even those that have
very structured learning methodologies, are still using gut feel when
choosing trainers, and sometimes that may end up as bad, if not
ridiculous, choices.
To
get more details, you can meet me in person in Washington D.C. on 1
June 2009 (www.astd2009.org session
M120). Or you can e-mail
info@directions-consulting.com or call +86-136 7190 2505 or
Skype: cydj001 and arrange to
buy me a mocha. All information shall be kept in
confidence.
Power Breakfast Hour: 16 June
2009
How to Pay Less and
Get More Results for Your Sales Training in
China
Join
International Sales Leadership and Performance Coach c.j. Ng in this
breakfast meeting in Shanghai where he will be sharing with you what he
had presented at ASTD 2009 in Washington
D.C.:
- What needs to be done before you
even train your sales people;
- What are some ways
that you can design your sales training content in cost-effective ways;
and
- How to select the right trainer within your
budget constraints for your sales training
VENUE: Waga's Hongyi
Plaza 288 Jiujiang Lu.G116 (Near Nanjing Dong Lu Subway Exit 1, pls.
enter via the office entrance) (venue is subjected to change depending
on participation)
DATE: Tuesday, 16 June
2009
TIME: from 08:00 a.m. - 9:30
a.m.
PRICE: Just Pay for your Own Breakfast at the
Counter (50% Off before 10:00 hrs + 1st cup of coffee @ additional RMB
12 ONLY!)
To make this a more conducive discussion, we are expecting a small
group of about 15 people only. The room can only take in 18, so please
register early to avoid disappointments. Please e-mail your
registrations to
sales@directions-consulting.com
Pls. check out our
web sites
www.directions-consulting.com and
www.psycheselling.com/page4.html for more
inspiration.
Practical Tips for Retail Channel
Managers:
7 Ways and 14 Checkpoints on How to Win in Trade
Marketing
by Stephen
Giam
It is old news about the explosion of new media
and increasing dilution of traditional media, a new and fast growing
generation of consumers is developing new information search habits and
different ways to seek product information.
Trade
Marketing, as the name suggest, is a direct marketing activities
targeted at consumers through the trade channel, usually a retailer. In
this instance, the retailer is also at the point of purchase, meaning
the customer is ready to make a purchase, be it planned or prompted.
Organized retailers are getting larger and more
dominant and probably more demanding. Organized retailers know that
they can command a lot more than just a traditional profit or margin to
have products listed in their stores. Their demands could include
listing fees, distribution fees, promotional support, and other sources
of buying income. Given this change in landscape, it is sad, but
unfortunately true, that we still see “Sales Managers” of fairly large
organizations visiting large retail chains wishing to get listing armed
only with a price
list.
Within this evolution
of a larger and more organized retailer, it is only natural that Trade
Marketing today is gaining greater attention since it can be argued
that it is marketing activities that are closest to the customer. The
decision to a purchase decision is literally one arm’s reach! Global
FMCG companies such as Nestle, Unilever, P&G have long started
the shift from traditional above the line marketing to Trade and
In-Store Marketing.
This transition is not just
about a shift of budgets. It requires new organizational structures and
roles. For example, Brand Managers will need to work closely with Trade
Managers to understand how the retailers and consumers tick, then
develop fitting brand strategies.
Key Account
Managers will need to match organizational drivers (what they company
wishes to achieve within their categories) to the Retailer’s Triggers
(what will trigger the retailer to want to work more closely with the
Supplier). This is often mistaken as “retailer relationship” when in
reality, the emphasis should be on a win-win-win
(retailer-supplier-consumer), not how much each party gets along with
the other.
This short questionnaire aims to provide
some distinction between traditional sales and distributor management
from Trade Marketing. There are four possible answers, and you may have
more than one answer per question. The four possible answers
are:
A –
Absent meaning it is not in place.
P – Present meaning is present, but might not be important
of effective. Therefore these are activities that you might want to
stop doing.
I –
Important meaning it might be Important but absent. These are
activities to Start
Doing
E – Effective meaning how well you are currently
performing.
Enjoy!
7 TIPS AND 14 CHECKPOINTS – WNNING IN TRADE
MARKETING
Trade Marketing is NOT distributor management. Trade
Marketing sees the Retailer as a point of purchase, and retailers are
carefully stratified to ensure that the more important retailers get
more focus and attention.
Do you have some
form of a Retailer Classification System?
Is it regularly
updated and fairly reflective of the Retail
Universe?
Trade Marketing is NOT just about revenue. Trade Marketing
rides on the retailer target consumer profile to develop marketing
activities. For example, during Christmas, a hypermarket may sell more
Champaign than a club, but it is the club that is better positioned to
deliver a brand experience.
Do you have a clear
idea the retailer current and planned target
shoppers?
Do you see
your product as a brand experience? Even house brands are brand
experiences!
Trade Marketing is NOT about one-size-fits-all. Trade
Marketing activities are likely to follow an 80/20 rule, where 20% of
the outlets may get 80% of a budget. This means that Trade Marketers
should have some form of consumer based retail classification system
and budget allocation
process.
Do you have
a clear budget allocation system that that is skewed towards your key
accounts? (Need not be organized retailer if that is not your primary
focus)
Do you have
some form budget to identify who the budget is to be spent?
Trade Marketing is NOT just about Channel incentives.
Trade Marketing activities must revolve around understanding the
customer. Some research process is likely to include some form of
buying decision trees and brand
preferences.
Do you
have some form of consumer behavior reports beyond market
share?
Will these
reports be of interest to your
retailers?
Trade Marketing is NOT just about selling to Trade. Trade
Marketing is very much concerned about selling out. Trade Marketers
must work with their channel partners, as well as internal product and
brand teams to create offers that serve to entice trial or repeat
purchases. The offering for trial and repeat purchase could be entirely
different.
Do you see
you have clear measurable objectives for your marketing
activities?
Do there
measurements go beyond sales volumes, for example to induce
trial?
Effective Trade Marketing is NOT about just about Retailer
Relationship. The “relationship” should cover making win-win decisions
and occasionally some very tough business calls.
Do you have a client
contact report that covers mulitple levels of the client
organizations?
Do you
conduct business reviews with your
clients?
The process does NOT start with the Retailer. Effective
Trade Marketers will have extremely robust in-house activities that
look at Account Profitability, Investment Returns, Activity Planning
and Results Review.
Is your finance department involved in your sales
meeting?
Do they
actively contribute their expertise in increasing Key Account
Profitability?
So, in summary, effective trade
marketing is really about having rock-solid internal processes. These
processes will include Customer and Retailer insights, after which
Product, Brand and Trade activities are designed, delivered and
evaluated. Until these processes are in place, many Key Account
Managers are still using an outdated Distributor Management
Model..
Reproduction of
this article for non commercial purposes is granted. Please include
this statement: Copyright Stephen Giam, Step Up International Private
Limited. Www.StepUpInternational.Com. Stephen has more than 15 years of
retail and trade marketing experience in Asia, and currently runs
results driven workshops in helping retailers and their suppliers
improve sales and service. He can be reached at
Giam@StepUpInternational.com
For more ideas on effective trade marketing, you
can also e-mail
info@directions-consulting.com or call +86-136 7190 2505 or
Skype: cydj001 and arrange to
buy me a mocha. All information shall be kept in
confidence.
About
PsycheSelling.com
Sales...
...
the lifeblood of a company, a matter of "life and death",
survival or extinction. Indeed, something that needs to be
studied, applied and re-modified
consistently.
Yet today,
-
many companies still don't have a coherent approach
as to how they can generate more sales and achieve better
margins;
-
many sales people are still lying to their
customers so that they can meet their targets at the end of the
month;
-
many customers are still waiting ethical and
professional sales people to help them find out their real needs, and
provide solutions that work
Psyche-Selling TMis set up so
that companies and sales people can make healthy profits and STILL
provide genuine solutions to
customers.
Psyche-Selling TM
would like to create an environment where customers can trust sales
people to give them what they want, and NOT be pushed with all kinds of
products and services. In return, customers will become loyal
fans of these ethical and professional sales people, and repay them
many fold for the
long-term.
Psyche-Selling TM
will not rest, until the above is achieved. Not just in
China. Not just in Asia. But everywhere where buying and
selling takes
place.
Psyche-Selling TMis a
wholly-owned brand of Directions Management
Consulting Pte Ltd that specialises in the field of
improving sales performance by enhancing the performance of the
entire sales team. Apart from the regular "selling skills
training", Psyche-Selling TM conducts pre- and post-training analysis,
interviews, monitoring and reviews, working closely with managers and
even senior management, to deliver real improvements in sales
leadership and
performance.
Hence, Psyche-Selling
TM
would like to be
known as the preferred choice of outstanding and remarkable clients,
and pride ourselves as such. We will also be continuing to
assist our clients achieve greater heights in 2009 and
beyond.
Enquiries and
suggestions, pls. e-mail
info@psycheselling.comor visit www.psycheselling.com
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