To compete in any marketplace, especially the competitive arena of financial services, advisors, producers, lenders, and relationship managers must have a strategy for success. The top 7% of salespeople, the elite producers, certainly follow a sales strategy and can articulate what they do consistently to find and develop client relationships. There are many ways to differentiate and compete but there are 3 key areas to developing a competitive sales strategy.
- Must have a USA: This acronym stands for Unique Sales Approach. How are your salespeople distinguishing themselves from the competition? Have you heard and seen their first call approach by phone and in person? The 80/20 Rule applies to most salespeople and proves out that the majority of revenue comes from about 20% of clients. In order to have a USA, producers must spend time defining their profile and determining how to go about finding and reaching more of them.
Working with clients over the past 30 years, we know that if a salesperson is an expert in a particular area, their ability to open doors, have compelling conversations and serve/sell to a particular segment is more successful. What specific types of clients are your relationship managers best at working with? Focusing on a segment allows salespeople to develop deep domain expertise in an area and that experience provides them with stories and an understanding of the challenges faced by that client type. Credibility grows as prospects and clients recognize that this salesperson is different. In fact, they are advisors with a particular set of skills that can truly help them and their company.
When your salespeople are experts, their messaging will resonate on first calls and in social selling platforms like LinkedIn, Google, at association meetings. Top salespeople are always gathering industry information about their target client and building their acumen in their expertise. Spend time with your team listening and helping them refine their Unique Selling Approach to help them develop a truly competitive sales strategy. - Must follow an ESS: This stands for Effective Selling System. According to our partner, Objective Management Group, the pioneer and leader in sales evaluations, an effective sales system measures an individual’s ability to follow a proper sequence of stages and milestones of a structured sales process. An effective sales process evaluates a salesperson on sales-specific attributes such as if their process has key milestones, and if their process yields consistent results. When a salesperson excels at sales process, opportunities will be consistently defined in their pipeline. When a salesperson is weak on Sales Process, their pipeline will have inconsistently defined opportunities, creating longer sales cycles and pipeline bloat.
To demonstrate just how critical having an ESS is in developing a competitive sales strategy, you can see on the chart below the correlation of Sales Process to Sales Percentile. 87% of elite producers follow a sales process, while only 20% of weak salespeople do so. Which category do you want and need your salespeople to fall into? Make certain that your company has, follows and inspects a consistent and effective sales process.
- Make sure to ABP: One last acronym for you, this stands for Always Be Prospecting. The skill and habit of prospecting relates directly to your producers’ skills and commitment to hunting. One of the findings on the sales evaluation we utilize includes the specific skills that top prospectors have mastered:
- Will prospect & prospect consistently
- Has no need for approval
- Schedules meetings
- Recovers from rejection
- Maintains a full pipeline
- Not a perfectionist
- Reaches target clients
- Gains referrals from clients and networks
- Uses social selling tools
- Attends networking events
Your best salespeople schedule time on their calendars to prospect as part of their competitive sales strategy. And today it is even more important that they do so. Here is a sobering statistic about the world of modern day selling: the average number of attempts to reach a prospect has increased to 16-18, but most salespeople quit after less than 5 attempts. Maybe they think that, “in the good old days,” people used to return calls but the world has changed. Prospects are a hard fish to catch. Make sure that your team has persistence and a commitment to ABP as a key to developing their competitive sales strategy.
