So it is with effective lead generation. Generating leads for new business isn't just a combination of behaviors and skills. As a sales leader, make sure that your salespeople are growing their business using the solid practice management strategy called Selling to Zebras. This concept came from Chad Kozier, the author of the book Selling to Zebras, and here are a few key concepts to implement with your team:

Three Simple Lead Generation Steps to Selling to Zebras

1. Segment your book into thirds.
Take a look at the top third of your business. If your business is like most, that top third represents over 90% of your revenue. These are your best clients. The idea behind Selling to Zebras is to ensure your lead generation strategy focuses on attracting more active buyers who resemble those top-tier clients.

2. Identify common traits and demographics.
What do your top clients have in common? Consider factors like industry, point of contact, how you made the connection, volume of sales or size of the organization, and key trigger points that signal they’re ready to buy.

3. Focus your time wisely.
Commit at least two-thirds of your lead generation time to looking for or attracting only those companies or individuals who resemble your top third. Avoid wasting time on unqualified or mismatched leads.

Bonus Tip for Your Salespeople

Chances are, the top third of each salesperson’s clients know at least five other companies like them. They should ask them for introductions. It’s a powerful way to leverage their existing network for growth.

Of equal importance is for every salesperson to know and be able to clearly articulate what isn’t a Zebra for them. This helps to bring clarity to their network and prospecting efforts. Here are some reasons why knowing what isn’t a Zebra is so important for salespeople:

It Eliminates Ambiguity

• If you aren’t specific about who you serve best, it’s hard to get introductions. If you are vague in your prospect description, it will be more difficult to ask your advocates for introductions. Introductions have been proven to be the #1 lead generation strategy for top producers to grow their business. You must be specific and clear about what type of Zebra you serve best.

It Reduces Your Opportunity Cost

• Every salesperson’s opportunity cost is simply this: if you called on Company ABC, that means you aren’t working on Company XYZ. Your opportunity cost is what you aren’t working on that might be more viable for you and your organization.

If you know what you don’t want and the reasons why, it might reduce the quantity of opportunities in your pipeline, but the quality will increase dramatically. As a sales leader, take some time in your next team meeting to help your sales team improve their lead generation efforts and success with Selling to Zebras.

The Experience – Are Your Clients Satisfied or Engaged in the Customer Experience in Banking?

Many companies have a team of people that are held accountable for measuring and ensuring a positive client experience. For example, have you talked to a service company recently that didn’t ask you to take a 3-question survey at the end of the call? In the past, the focus was on gauging customer satisfaction. But in recent years, in light of direct and non-bank competitors, the focus has evolved to discovering clients’ engagement levels as a score for the customer experience in banking.

In fact, a recent Gallup survey discovered that:

• 48% of consumers who were satisfied with their banking relationship also said they would consider their institution for their next product or service.

• When they said they were both “satisfied and fully engaged,” the ratio rose to 83%.

Engagement can occur across all the various channels in banking: online, chat, customer service, in-branch, and social media. At times, these impersonal, multi-step digital avenues can work against the bank as well. So how does a bank turn a satisfied banking client into a more engaged client?

Meaningful Engagement Involves People-Powered Conversations

Equipping and training your customer-facing people is the silver bullet to creating and increasing customer engagement in banking. Consumers and business managers alike have been emailed, texted, pinged, and surveyed to the point of apathy. But when a need arises or a financial goal must be attained, there is no greater opportunity to drive engagement than when the phone rings or the customer walks into the bank.

When that happens, are your people prepared to ask enough of the right questions to truly understand and consult with the client? Are they capable of creating a conversation so impactful that the client is not only satisfied but wowed — ready to tell their family and friends about the experience and looking forward to the next one? That’s engagement. And when clients are that engaged, they have no interest in talking to other financial providers because their needs have been met and exceeded. Only adept, people-powered conversations can achieve that.

Helping Your Team Have More Powerful Conversations

Our sales evaluation partner, Objective Management Group (OMG), has identified 21 Core Sales Competencies that are critical for success in sales, business development, and relationship building. These competencies fall into three categories:

1. Tactical Competencies

2. Mindset Competencies (Sales DNA)

3. Grit Competencies (Will to Sell)

Want to improve conversations? Evaluating your bankers’ competencies is fundamental to predicting a team’s overall success. In fact, bankers with high competency scores on the 21 Core skills are 50% more likely to be top performers. Bankers and sellers with higher competency scores perform better on win rate, new opportunity finding, and relationship building. By identifying and training the right competencies, bank leaders can give their teams the tools and training they need to succeed in their specific roles and to drive more engaged and enduring relationships.

Steve Jobs was a masterful storyteller. Just go back and watch any of his presentations where Apple was releasing a new product. Storytelling in sales is a trait great salespeople have mastered. Peter Guber said this in his book Tell to Win: “stories provide emotional transportation.” The key takeaway from that quote is that stories are capable of moving people. Stories are capable of inspiring people. If you are good at storytelling, you can move people from where they are today (presumably dealing with a problem or a villain) to where they might be in the future after they have overcome that problem or villain. And when that happens, your prospect becomes their own hero.

The Power of Emotion in Storytelling in Sales

The key to storytelling in sales is to harness the power of emotion. At Anthony Cole Training Group, we have known for quite some time that people buy emotionally and justify with logic. I completely agree that your technical skills need to be excellent and that you need to be a subject matter expert. But that is not what moves people to the point of taking action to solve their problems. What makes that happen is when emotion enters the equation and your prospect self-discovers that they must act. Fear, disappointment, and frustration are examples of just a few of the more powerful emotions that your prospect might be facing.

Probably the most powerful emotion in life (after the emotion of love) is the emotion of hate. And to be clear, there is too much hate in the world. For my money, I believe there are only three things that are okay to hate:

1. Cancer

2. Racism

3. Alzheimer’s

These are villains that everyone is against and for good reasons. Steve Jobs was a believer that the best storytellers always give their prospect a villain to root against or a problem to hate so much that the prospect feels compelled to fight for a better future.

Stop talking about things your prospects don’t care about. Give them a villain to conquer. Some prospects are just waiting to become a hero. They just need something to root against. That is a conversation worth having.

What makes sales practice difficult is that many salespeople just don’t like it. Here is our advice for the sales leaders: they don’t have to like it, they just have to do it. Once that is made clear, and leaders initiate structured time and scenarios to incorporate into their sales practice plan, salespeople will begin to get more comfortable with practicing sales techniques.

Here are just a few unedited comments made by salespeople about sales practice and role play in our sales training this year:

• "Allowing us the practice, although uncomfortable really allows me to get a feel for the layout of the conversation and dig deeper to have more successful conversations."
• "As uncomfortable as roll playing can be, practice makes perfect."
• "Discussing the different sales bases, what information needs to be collected in order to move forward. The role play & seeing it in action helped me a lot."
• "Drilling down within my real-life scenarios made be better prepared for my meeting tomorrow than I would have otherwise."
• "Makes you be prepared. Role play gets to the pain. Am I a commodity or do I bring something valuable to the table other than save you $. Listen, drill down. Lots of good stuff, even for those like me who have been doing this for a long time."

Much like salespeople, sales leaders might not like to run sales practices, but they too just need to do them! It can be difficult for managers because they may feel on the spot to demonstrate how the sales conversation should sound and may not be that comfortable themselves. Yes, to some degree, sales leaders should understand and be able to role play an effective sales conversation. However, here is an effective tip: rely on others. One of the effective approaches for sales practice with a team is to gain the insights from other producers.

Here are some other good guidelines for sales practice and how to role play:

• Leaders, have regularly scheduled time and topics to role play on your team’s calendar

• Don’t get too fancy, just dive in!

• Determine roles: prospect and producer

• Salesperson should share the opportunity’s background in 5 minutes or less

• Remember, this is not a strategy discussion; the conversation must be in the role

• Begin and continue the conversation as you would with your real prospect, making sure the prospect uses typical objections

• If you need to step out of role play to make a point or gain feedback, state “out of role play”

• After sales practice, gain feedback and insights from the team

  

What should the team sales practice?

If a company is operating without a defined, stage-based sales system, it will be more difficult to create productive sales practice sessions, so start there. Using the ACTG sales approach, here are areas that salespeople should practice to become proficient, along with some tools sales leaders can use in practice sessions:

1. Making the initial prospecting call: 8-Step Compelling Phone Process Worksheet

2. Uncovering problems and pain that must be fixed, asking consultative questions to discover if this is a real prospect or just a shopper: Drill Down Questions Worksheet

3. Asking real questions about time, budget, and resources: Are They Really a Prospect Sales Brew

4. Overcoming objections and asking about the incumbent are always tough areas and must be role-played!: Winning Sales Pitch Sales Brew

5. If a prospect is fully qualified, in a sense, they should “close” themselves, but here is an effective approach to sales practice for closing: Critical Closing Questions Sales Brew

Every sales leader would agree, it is important that salespeople practice their sales techniques with co-workers so that they do not practice on their prospects. Improving skills, practicing the game plan, and getting feedback from the practice sessions are crucial for success. Sales leaders, just get started and don’t get caught up in making it perfect. Practice is never perfect.

Prospecting is difficult. It is not usually fun. If you are a manager, don't tell your people to "just pick up the phone and have fun with it." They will know you don't know what you're talking about and haven’t recently dealt with rejection in sales.

Facing rejection, not talking to anyone, having people hang up on you, having people ask you to never call again, people lying or avoiding you, not returning calls or emails, pretending to be interested just to get rid of you, asking for free help, taking your info to fix the problem themselves, or canceling last-minute — ZERO FUN. And the list goes on.

If prospecting isn’t fun, then what is it? Here’s another truth: You don’t have to like it; you just have to do it.

Salespeople must put a lot of preparation, emotion, intellect, and skill into being successful at prospecting. Our evaluation partner, Objective Management Group, has found that one of the biggest contributors to sales success is the ability to be rejection-proof. Even with all the skills, techniques, scripts, and preparation, if a salesperson cannot handle the rejection in sales and emotional roller coaster of prospecting, they will struggle, be inconsistent, and fail more than they succeed.

The Strength of Handling Rejection in Sales

When dealing with rejection in sales is a strength, an individual will:

• Be able to ask tough questions and challenge their customers to earn their respect

• Remain objective and actively listen to prospects and customers

• Feel empowered to take positive action without being sabotaged by negative self-talk

• Push back over price objections, competition, and indecision

• Lean into discussions about budget and funding

• Get back on another sales call immediately after being rejected without feeling hurt

In the end, salespeople need to prospect. If they have a solid phone approach so they don’t look, act, and sound like everyone else, they have a chance.

As a manager, if you help them understand the root causes of their prospecting woes (non-supportive beliefs, need for approval, etc.), you can help them improve. If you make them practice so their phone conversation is as natural as breathing, they’ll improve their results.

Dealing with rejection in sales is all about being resilient. Here’s our easy-to-remember philosophy: SW3 — Some will, some won’t, so what, move on.

Recently, one of our insurance producers shared this:

“I used to get hung up on rejection, but now I follow the model: some will, some won’t, so what, move on. That mindset shift has been incredibly freeing and has helped me stay focused and resilient.”

The bottom line is that rejection in sales isn’t fun. It’s about getting the job done — being resilient and tenacious in your prospecting efforts so you have solid appointments that turn into solid opportunities that turn into closed business. THAT’S where the fun is: new relationships and new opportunities to help clients.

Learn How to STOP Hiring Mistakes at our 30-Min Webinar on June 16th!