One proven way of delivering information and developing new skills is through workshops. If two heads are better than one, then putting twenty people with common interest in a room together can help to flush out the hidden questions and engender personal commitment to creating TLA.

Other methods of training and skill development such as distance or e-learning, in-service development (on-the-job training) and self-development may also feature in the plan.

Whether workshops are off-the-shelf or made to measure is a matter for the design phase of the TLA Blueprint. Below are some of the workshop templates we have used at Selling Sciences to help our customers.

Competency Assessments

Pre-requisites: None

Many partnerships with our customers start with an assessment of the skill level of the current revenue generation team.

To perform to maximum potential, people need a range of key role competencies, as well as the appropriate knowledge and skills. To identify these, a Competency Model is developed, generally through job analysis workshops, against which individuals can be appraised to highlight both strengths and areas for development.

Not only does this process inform about performance issues but it also impacts upon selection, training needs, career progression and succession, compensation issues and continuing development. Our Development Centres, which typically last for a day, provide a wealth of information gained from a range of activities including psychometrics, work sample exercises, practical tasks and role-play. Every Centre is individually designed by our Business Psychologist to suit the specific needs of each client and, as appropriate, supplementary services, for example, team building workshops or one-to-one coaching, can also be provided.

We often find that Sales Management need individual assessment and monitoring based on their key role in revenue generation.  We offer a series of services that provide objective assessment of a manager’s ability to motivate a sales team and manage a selling process over time and if performance deficiencies are uncovered we can work with them individually to help them improve.

Assessment is a continuous process and, whether our customers want to continue this themselves or ask Selling Sciences to assist, is situationally-dependent.

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Pipeline Insight for Sales Management

Pre-requisites: None

The responsibility for leading and motivating the sales team rests fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Sales Management. These same management qualities are required when implementing a new Solution Selling ® process. Unless Sales Management’s knowledge and skills are at a higher level than their team’s, and their determination for change stronger, the resultant take-up of the selling process will be inconsistent with a consequential impact on the ability to grow revenues.

With the introduction of a selling process the role of the Sales Manager changes. Instead of simply pressing salespeople to explain when business may or may not close, the focus moves to helping the seller use the Solution Selling ® process to move the sale forward.

Sales Managers also have to produce an insight into when revenue will be brought in. The commonest reason why Sales Management lose their jobs is because of an inability to consistently meet targets and forecast revenues accurately and reliably.  Without accurate forecasts, executive management are unable to plan effectively, so Sales Management are asked to move on.

Objectives:

This workshop is designed to give Sales Managers the skills to:

• Analyse the quantity of the team’s pipeline to determine the likelihood of target attainment. This will enable appropriate corrective actions to be determined and implemented to overcome any deficiencies and will provide an insight into the sales skills that need improving and how they can be improved. Evaluate objectively the quality of opportunities in the pipeline. This will enable the appropriate actions for improving the odds of winning and shortening the sales cycle to be identified, implemented and monitored.
• Implement the Solution Selling ® sales process to provide them with a strong forecasting model that gets the prospects to map out the steps leading to a buying decision, as opposed to relying on the seller’s opinion.
• Relate the Solution Selling ® skills and knowledge in the context of what causes prospects to buy.
• Improve individual performance to consistently meet their goals.
• Motivate and lead their salespeople to achieve their goals by:
  
  
  • Better coaching
  • Improved communication
  • Enhancing sales skills
  • Continual monitoring of performance
  • Identify common process implementation obstacles

By implementing the Solution Selling ® sales process, managers will be provided with a strong forecasting model that gets the prospects to map out the steps leading to a buying decision.

We recommend this workshop is run before Sales Management and their reports have attended the full Solution Selling ® workshop.

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Inspirational Leadership

Pre-requisites : None

Sales Management is a complex profession with high expectations, high pressures and absolute measurements. Apart from the ability to create Top Line Abundance through understanding and coaching the selling process, other important attributes of a successful Sales Manager are those of leadership and the ability to motivate the sales team in hostile and demanding environments.

Objectives:

The Inspirational Leadership workshop is designed for Sales Management to help them develop and enhance these key attributes, by focusing on "winning attitudes" – what makes one manager a natural leader whilst others struggle. We achieve this development by relating a sporting success in extreme environments to what it takes to lead a winning team in the sales environment. The workshop is based on the BT Global Challenge Round the World Yacht Race 2000/01, an event which provided an excellent case study for research conducted by Henley Management College . The research identified the key ingredients of high performance leadership sustained over a long period of time and determined the skills, attributes and the emotional intelligence needed to achieve this performance.

What is the relevance of this for Sales Managers? Well, the race closely replicates the business environment of today – challenging, hostile, changing and competitive. And leadership in any environment requires a focus on performance essential to driving the team forward. We have determined a set of behaviours necessary to achieve this drive. In the actual race, the winning skipper showed a further set of behaviours to sustain performance and build a motivated and cohesive team, whilst under significant pressure.

We have designed this workshop to replicate the pressure of a race and the challenges leaders have to face in ever-changing business environments. Specifically you will get a practical insight into:

• the characteristics of high performing teams
• the impact of leadership style on team performance
• how to motivate your leaders and teams
• building and sustaining team cohesion
• sustaining winning performance
• gaining commitment
• dealing with conflict

According to the researchers at Henley Management College , the skipper of the winning boat in the BT Global challenge race, Conrad Humphreys , was able to demonstrate inspiring leadership. He combined a constant focus on performance plus a meticulous attention to detail with an ability to inspire and motivate his team and he plays a key role in delivering this workshop.

"When you're faced with 5000 miles of ocean, no key landmarks, and a hostile environment, it is very easy to lose sight of the end goal. Leaders need to know how to inspire team performance, whether it is facing a storm in the Southern Ocean or seeing a decline in performance against sales quotas."
Conrad Humphreys .
www.conradhumphreys.com

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Solution Selling ®

Pre-requisites : None  

Objectives:

 Solution Selling ® is a selling methodology that is unique in that is has a well-defined sales process.

Solution Selling ® Sales Process

Few high-achieving salespeople can diagnose exactly what it is that makes them win some deals and lose others.  If you were to walk into any department of most companies, there would be proven processes in place, e.g. if you walked into the Finance area you would see a process for paying suppliers and producing Management information, and Marketing would have a process for launching new products or services.  What do you find if you look around most sales organisations? Often nothing more than each salesperson applying their varied skills in many different ways, with very varied and often unpredictable results. And with Management, often unable to assess progress.

Solution Selling ® gives salespeople and their support teams a simple way to measure their progress with each prospect, to understand success and prepare them to repeat it.  The outcome of a Solution sale should be a satisfied customer, wanting to buy more.

A sales process is a documented set of repeatable inter-related sales activities from market awareness, through the selling activities, to servicing the customer that can be communicated to anyone in the company.  Each activity can be measured for throughput and efficiency.  Each activity has an owner who executes the activity.  The result of each activity has a standard deliverable that is checked for quality and consistency.  Each deliverable can be assessed so that improvements can be made to either the people performing  the activities, or to the sales process itself.

The result is consistent and predictable revenue production.  

Behavioural model

Solution Selling ® is behaviourally-based; founded on extensive research as to how people buy and how they like to be sold to, and why many salespeople often ignore the traditional sales training they are given.  The programme takes this behavioural model and, through a series of practical exercises, teaches students how to initiate and control a sales cycle and behave in a way that makes the buyer want to buy from them.

Skill-Based

To execute a sales process successfully demands competencies found instinctively in some and missing from others.  Most sales development programmes prescribe “what” to do and leave it to the attendee to figure out the "how to".  In the Solution Selling ® methodology, having defined the most effective behaviour and selected a process that leads to success, attendees identify the practical skills they need to succeed and start to develop them.

To support the process in different situations there are a number of automated Job Aids that capture the knowledge required for success to ensure the seller does the right thing in the right way at the right time, and can repeat success.

Workshop Outputs

• At the end of the typical Solution Selling ® workshop, attendees will have an understanding of:
• The pitfalls of traditional selling behaviour
• How risk adverse non-expert organisations buy products and services they don’t fully understand:
  
  
  • how needs develop in the minds of the buyer
  • how needs can be developed across an organisation
  • how they make the decision to buy
    
    
• The key skills needed to succeed in high difficulty selling situations
• How to establish personal credibility, confidence, power and control throughout the sales cycle
• The concepts of Team Selling - the roles of the salesperson, sales support, support and management
• How people buy - the three levels of need, and the buyer’s psychological buying phases:
  
  
  • Changing concerns over the buying process
  • Anticipating the buyer’s behaviour
  • Why risk objections are positive and how to handle them
    
    
• How to match their selling behaviour to the buying phases
• How to:
  
  
  • get the prospect to understand the value of what they are buying
  • show a prospect the salesperson understands their business
  • get the prospect to admit and focus on problems you can help them address
  • diagnose their problems with a bias towards your product capabilities
  • put responsibility on the buyer to solve their problems with your product and services
  • create a vision of a solution in the buyer’s mind using your capabilities
  • reduce demonstration / pilot / trial times by having the buyer want to buy
    
    
• How to gain access to and establish credibility with senior executives
• How to confidently negotiate the final agreement without giving away discounts
• How to manage their sales pipeline and improve predictability of forecasting

 Those who adopt and implement the Solution Selling ® process will:

• know how to isolate differences in markets from differences in sales skills and approach
• have salespeople able to give post-salespeople specific measures for customer success so that they can manage and develop accounts over time.
• have a consistent basis for the allocation of time & other key resources to sales opportunities
• be able to determine whether a lead has a large or small potential
• be able to adapt to changes in the market such as new players, new buying trends
• be able to communicate locally and with remote offices in a way that minimises expense and maximises effectiveness
• have a common nomenclature that indicates where the salesperson is in the sales process compared to where the customer is in their buying/evaluation cycle
• have salespeople become productive quickly by equipping them with the product and market knowledge in the shortest possible time
• avoid being trapped with people who cannot say "yes"

 What Others Have Found:

Here are some comments from other Sales Executives, on the outcome of their teams attending the Solution Selling ® programme:

• Even in what has been described as a difficult market we grew our revenue in 2003 by 59% by using Solution Selling ®  
• I started out looking for a sales training program, then realised after meeting with you that Solution Selling ® might offer even more in terms of a real process and finally discovered through the programme itself that we can systematically and successfully approach a fundamental redesign/re-engineering of our sales philosophy and organisation by using Solution Selling ® .
• We have already noted better qualification and better value justification techniques in the sales force. The programme is reducing long expensive sales cycles and improving our negotiation stance.
• Our people have bought in 100% and are using the skills they learnt. Compensation plans for 2004 will be tied to the use of the techniques.
• Our win rate has gone from one in four to one in two and our sales cycle has decreased at the same time.
• I have never been more than 5% adrift in my forecasting since attending the workshop.
• This has taught my team “how” to sell; I wish I had adopted the Solution Selling ® process ten years ago. This is the best workshop I have ever attended.

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Boardroom Preparation

Pre-requisites: None

Objectives:

In the past, salespeople could be reasonably effective by doing demos or building prototypes for middle management, hoping the customer would see something they liked and would buy. However, in these uncertain times, senior management of companies want to understand the value first and worry about the solution afterwards so, as the decision point in most prospect situations has risen up the organisation, salespeople must now be confident dealing at boardroom level. You could of course argue that they should always have been able to do this.

They must now be boardroom negotiators; able to establish credibility, communicate at the same level, understand the issue that will deliver value, capture relevant information and convince decision-makers he or she can solve their need. No amount of product training is going to help in this situation but what follows will.

There is no better preparation for selling to executives, than practicing selling to executives in a workshop. Our close contact with senior executives across many industries means we can arrange access to experienced decision-makers who will then be used as real-life case studies to sell to.

Salespeople and their Managers will be taught pre-call planning and preparation, how to analyse internal political influences, group dynamics and motivational factors. They will gain first-hand experience of what creates interest with senior executives and be shown how they have to bring demonstrable value to the buying process to earn the right to more time.

They will learn how executives will provide a high degree of control once they believe in your ability to deliver on the steps leading to a buying decision.

And all this will be tested out with role plays and case studies involving real executives.

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Implementation Consulting Services

Change will only be achieved if people understand the failings of the current way of doing things, can see the value of the new and are supported as they make the transition.

Sales Management may need help during the transition and we offer a number of support services designed to maintain momentum during implementation:

• Sales process design
• Management reviews and audits
• Sales process implementation review clinics and refreshers
• Customisation workshops to prepare initial materials
• Skill development workshops
• Customising Solution Selling ® Job Aids:
• Key Player lists
• Pain Sheets & Pain Chains
• Prospecting tools
• Control Letters
• Pipeline Reviews, looking at Quantity, Quality, Balance, Time in Code, etc.
• Role play set-ups for sales meetings
• Market Research
• Research on Key Accounts
• Key Account reviews
• Competitive Analysis
• Keynote speakers at sales meetings and kick-offs

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Pipeline Reviews

Pre-requisites :

Attendance at a full Solution Selling ®workshop and responsibility for a pipeline.

Objectives:

The Pipeline Review is designed to protect your investment and support the implementation objectives of Solution Selling ® by helping sellers to apply the methodology to real world opportunities and thereby reinforcing the commitment to implementation.  You will have heard of the expression “use it or lose it” so in these sessions we are picking up on any difficulties the students may have had using Solution Selling ® and reminding or suggesting ways to improve.

Delegates should attend their first review around 60 days after their workshop.

The usual format for the review is in two parts. The first is a half-day refresher open to Management, salespeople, pre-sales and post-sales. We start with a brief overview of the process based on the flowchart and then ask the salespeople to nominate areas in which they have had difficulty. Typical topics raised are: [I find it difficult to:] stimulate interest, get someone to admit Pain and gain access to Power etc. We will then give 30 – 60 minutes to each of the topics prioritised by the salespeople.

The second part is to invite each salesperson to spend about 75 minutes with a Selling Sciences consultant and their immediate Sales Manager. In that time we review selected accounts from their pipeline which are scrutinised for accuracy of coding, step reached and next steps and an action plan is developed for each. Then the Selling Sciences consultant spends 15 minutes or so in private with the Sales Manager, answering their questions on the review process itself and the discussing the progress of the salesperson with recommendations for remedial actions and monitoring.

Some clients want us to continue the review process to reinforce the implementation effort of local management. These reviews are scheduled on a quarterly or half-yearly basis. Depending on the level of management and staff turnover these can be formatted just as the 60 day review or, more typically, the overview piece is omitted.

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Solution Services ©

Pre-requisites : None

Objectives:

Recent research has shown that nearly 80% of purchasers of software and related services believe they did not receive the anticipated benefits and, as a result, were dissatisfied with their supplier.

The most frequent cause cited was poor communication in both the suppliers’ and purchasers’ organisations, resulting in confused objectives. Executives in the purchasing company failed to define their expectations to their project teams in terms of business benefits and success criteria. Sales organisations, understandably anxious to get on with the next prospect, left it to their implementation team to agree terms of reference with the clients’ project teams. The net result was an implementation that focused on product features rather than on business goals.

The Solution Services © programme teaches project teams how to build an effective transition from sales to service, with a focus on delivering the value identified in the sales cycle. The result of using this methodology is a satisfied customer wanting to buy more.

It provides a common perspective, language and methodology for the sales and services organisations to share, and demonstrates that client satisfaction is everyone’s responsibility.

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Business Situation Awareness™

Pre-requisites: None

To succeed in selling requires the salesperson to understand and appreciate the roles, responsibilities and issues ('Pains') within the prospect's organisation. So when salespeople are asked to sell into the boardroom, they consequently feel out of their comfort zone and then struggle to have intelligent conversations with senior managers.

Few sellers have ever held an executive role in a major company; they haven't experienced the day-to-day pressures and the associated Pains of their target prospects. Therefore it is understandable they find it difficult getting executives to admit Pain and to be receptive to the picture of how specific aspects of the sellers offering can address the problem.

In Solution Selling ® we call this Situational Knowledge and Capability Knowledge.

Objective:

Attending the Business Situation Awareness workshop enables salespeople, managers and consultants to experience the most common business roles (such as CEO, Sales and Marketing Director, CFO and Production Manager) and to appreciate the challenges faced by these people, thereby enabling attendees to improve their knowledge, and their confidence. Students work in a stimulating team environment as they build and drive their business in competition with other teams and the outside world.

BSA is particularly valuable in helping those who have developed skills in selling technology

to technologists to learn how to sell solutions to business.

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Solution Thinking ® Workshop

Pre-requisites : None

Intuitive 'Solution Sellers' are often frustrated at the inability of their salespeople to think outside the box. They wonder why they can't find truly innovative approaches to a customer's problem and thereby differentiate themselves and their products from me-too offerings in the market.

Objective:

There are three key selling situations in which outstanding creative skills can have a remarkable impact on revenue growth: when bringing new products or functions to market; when bringing new salespeople on board; and when a salesperson has diagnosed the reasons for a Pain and now needs to build a strong Capability Vision.

In every case, the skill of the salesperson in understanding the customer's present situation, developing needs and helping the customer to build vivid, exciting visions of a real solution is vital. It helps to establish credibility, generate enthusiasm and ultimately gain personal commitment from all the different executives in the customer management team. All of these tasks require the skill of creativity.

Solution Thinking ® exposes participants to how their minds work and gives them tools and skills that will improve the way they think in the future.

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Opportunity Selling

Pre-requisites : preferably attendance at a full Solution Selling ®Workshop

Opportunity Selling is designed to help sales teams create winning strategies for key opportunities. It is a Sales Planning Method that covers both Strategic and Tactical elements of a sale and focuses on winning specific opportunities in accounts. It is ideally suited to large complex sales to large complex accounts, but is scaleable.

Opportunity Selling assists in these intricate situations by helping salespeople and managers plan before committing valuable resource and time to an opportunity. Planning is defined as the intelligent assembly of tasks and resources directed towards achieving a desired result.

Objective:

Opportunity Selling helps by:

Focusing on the customer:

• What is the customer trying to accomplish?
• What is the value to the customer for changing?
• What value have we already bought the customer?

Focusing on task:

• How can we help the customer accomplish their goal?
• What is the business and political value associated with accelerating change?

Focusing on resources:

• What resources do we need to advance the sales campaign and win?
• What is the investment required to compete and win?
• What is the timing of the required resources?

Enabling the sales team to :

• Identify key contacts early and developing coverage plans to win
• Use facts to develop strategies to overcome competition
• Learn the sources and lines of influence among key customer contacts and using the knowledge to create a positive outcome

Opportunity Selling is an interactive, leader-led workshop. Participants will learn skills and execute techniques for a specific real opportunity:

Assess the opportunity

• Perform an initial assessment and make the decision whether or not to proceed

Advance the opportunity

• Analyse organisational politics and influence and develop plans to navigate through to the decision makers
• Analyse competitive positions and establish plans to protect and win the opportunity

Reassess the opportunity

• Monitor progress and determine if you are in a position to win

Develop and execute WIN plans

• Develop detailed, tactical plans to close – including specific customer-focused tasks to demonstrate customer commitment
• Sales teams will leave the workshop with a defined, tested and documented plan to improve their position to win and will be able to repeat this for all relevant opportunities.

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Strategic Account Management

Pre-requisites :

Attendance at a full Solution Selling ®workshop and current or intended responsibility for Strategic Accounts.

Objectives:

The objective of this workshop is to give those who have been using Solution Selling ® in the real world an opportunity to improve key selling skills, and to introduce and practice some advanced concepts in the context of getting to and managing strategic customers.  

Suppliers often say that their biggest customers are their Strategic Accounts but what is meant by this? The acid test of course is to ask the customer whether they believe the relationship with the supplier to be strategic. If not, what would cause the customer to change their mind? One element of being perceived as more strategic is if the supplier had delivered consistent measurable value but how can this be achieved in today’s hectic transactional market place?

The genesis of this workshop is that participants learn the most when applying knowledge and skills to realistic and challenging sales scenarios.  They will be expected to consolidate their existing Solution Selling ® skills and knowledge to be used as a platform to build on as they move to advanced skills and techniques of Account Management.

To achieve this, participants will work as a team on real situations. Students will apply the concepts of Account Management to these opportunities and will then be required to show how they could overcome the particular obstacle and move the sale or relationship forward to the next step and ultimately to a successful conclusion.

The target audience is Solution Selling ® experienced students who are required to sell and manage Strategic Accounts and who are required to improve sales productivity still further.

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Coaching and Mentoring

Pre-requisites: None

Objectives:

Change and improvement do not happen by accident or hope and often there are situations where individual Sales Managers or salespeople need specialised help.

The services offered here are situationally-dependent but are designed to provide a measured improvement in the performance of Sales Managers and their teams, with any problems quickly identified and resolved. Any weakness in the current team will be exposed and, with assistance from Selling Sciences, decisions made on how to remedy them.

Support can be provided on the following items:

• Execution of strategies and tactics to close the gap, and monitoring progress against specific objectives
• Win loss reviews
• Regular pipeline analysis to ascertain opportunity progress, pipeline balance and to offer remedies
• Assistance with development of Personal Development plans for individuals and coaching Sales Managers and/or their teams to remedy problems
• Establishing hiring profiles
• Assisting with Solution Selling ® implementation, the services offered being dependent on what the problems are

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360 Assessments

As our Partnership with a client develops we are often asked to verify continually that salespeople and their managers are utilising their skills correctly to improve pipeline quantity and quality.

We believe that the majority of the skills required for sellers to be successful are developed by the proper use of Solution Selling ® and that these should be tackled first. This can either be done through the concept of 360 Assessments or Certification based on assessment of a certain number of opportunities.

Either way, Sales Management carries the responsibility for successful implementation and use of a selling process and have to be intimately involved in these assessments. They also bear the responsibility for helping develop Personal Development plans post-assessment so that weaknesses can be corrected.

Each salesperson would assess themselves and simultaneously be assessed by peers, their manager and colleagues to determine their level of selling skills as defined in the Assessment phase. A report will be written and this will be reviewed with the Sales Manager and recommendations made to rectify skill weaknesses.

Special attention will be paid to improving the Sales Manager’s ability to perform assessments, diagnose problems and coach staff themselves in the future.

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Certification

Pre-requisites:

Attendance of a Solution Selling ® Workshop and responsibility for a pipeline.

Objective:

Salespeople are often viewed as intuitive, creative, egotistical, and confident and would seem the last people to want formal recognition of their skills.

However, the pressure on salespeople is greater now than it has ever been. Life also does not get any easier for Sales Managers and more and more they are demanding a way to view objectively salespeople’s skills, as opposed to what they claim to have done or be able to do.

In most sales organisations there is a mix of competencies, skills and knowledge being applied with varying degrees of success. Certification of individual Sales Managers and salespeople as competent is a means of setting a standard that the team can be measured against. By getting more sellers to strive to or achieve this standard will result in improvements in revenue production.

Certification in the use of Solution Selling ® is achieved in two steps. The first is to establish the skills and competencies of a salesperson by performing a 360 analysis (see above) as an assessment as to whether the salesperson should be considered for full Certification.

However, the ultimate test is whether the Solution Selling ® skills are being applied to individual opportunities and the pipeline is being managed correctly. This can only be achieved by repeated testing over time. Selling Sciences will examine and debrief individual opportunities and the overall pipeline to ensure adherence and, once satisfied, will issue a certificate of competence valid for a year.

The ability to certify salespeople in their use of Solution Selling ® on a continuous basis can be linked positively to their compensation package and progression paths. Individual mentoring and coaching is available to help candidates achieve certification.

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Masterclasses

Pre-requisites:

Previous attendance of a Solution Selling ® Workshop.

Objective:

If Solution Selling ® is properly implemented by Sales Management, they will find it becomes much easier to assess the skills strengths and weaknesses of their sales teams. Congratulating a salesperson on their strengths is easy but how do you improve their weaknesses? These Masterclasses are designed to answer just that question.

Each Masterclass is designed to be stand-alone and is completed in a day or less.

• Prospecting – how to stimulate interest and create demand for your products and services
• The Business Conversation - how to establish enough credibility for a prospect to trust you with their Pain, to diagnose the reasons and to build a Vision with Value
• Working with Power – how to get access, the reasons for trying in the first place, and how they can give you Control through the Evaluation Plan
• Value Cycle. How to get the Power Sponsor and others to see enough Value in your solution that it creates a compelling event to move forward.
• Negotiation. How to develop the Win / Win and minimise discounts.

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