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By Michael Schultz, Executive Vice President, Wellesley Hills Group, LLC.
Trying to figure out what kind of sales training to give to consultative sales professionals that will improve their performance is no easy task. One approach that works is to use a profile that outlines what the best consultative sales people do to produce the best results. The profile will help you through the decision making process, making it much easier for you to find the right levers you can pull that will increase sales performance.
Allocating sales training time and choosing sales training initiatives are never easy. It is a difficult task to decide whether to engage sales conversation skill training, sales strategy training, proposal writing, product knowledge, or a host of other attractive areas. Everyone at the company seems to have an idea of what is more important at the particular moment regarding sales training. And the ideas are often widely divergent.
All of us have too often seen these raging battles between sales managers, performance consultants, trainers, marketing managers, sales professionals, and senior managers who all think the sales department needs a different kind of training to increase sales. To make some sense of these conflicts, those charged with engaging sales skill improvement initiatives often look for a framework to help them understand what the best sales people in their environment do to be successful. They then look to train average and struggling sales professionals to practice the behaviors of the top reps.
Often, their first challenge is finding a comprehensive, useful, practical, and applicable profile on which to base their work and reach some level of agreement between the divergent viewpoints.
Below is a profile we have found to work well when facing this dilemma:
The STACK Profile™ is designed to give you an overview, on one page, of the complete set of skills, knowledge, and attributes needed for success as a consultative sales professional.
STACK stands for Strategy, Tactics, Attributes, Conversation, and, Knowledge. We use the word STACK to suggest that there is an order and a somewhat linear process needed for designing a successful consultative sales force
Somewhat in order, the sales person must either possess, or develop, the following:
- Consultative Selling Attributes
- Knowledge Mastery
- Strategic Sales Skills
- Tactical Sales Skills
- Sales Conversation Skills
We say “somewhat” because each of the 5 areas must be developed in different matters of degrees at different times during the development process. Still they tend to go in order, and attributes come first.
Description: Consultative Selling Attributes
Wile many of us possess the skills, knowledge, and raw potential to succeed in a particular job function such as consultative sales, not all of us are “hard-wired” to want to do it with vigor and intensity over an extended period of time.
When you build a consultative sales force, the foundation of your success will be based on whether the people you hire for the jobs have the basic attributes needed for success. Because Consultative Selling Attributes are the foundation for success, they are on the bottom of the STACK. If you do not have the attributes indicative to consultative sales success in place in your sales force, all the skill and knowledge training in the world will not yield a top sales department.
You might, for example, be able to teach someone the skills needed to do the job of a consultative sales professional. You might be able to teach them all the knowledge they need. But if they do not possess an achievement focus, they will likely not exhibit the highest levels of performance because they do not feel the need to keep pushing the limit of their success.
As another example, you may have an achievement oriented consultative sales person with all the skills and knowledge they need. If, however, they do not have integrity or customer focus, they will not be successful over the long-term because their customers and colleagues may not (and should not) trust them.
Those of you who have worked with consultative sales professionals likely have seen what happens in the long run when any of these attributes (customer focus, relationships orientation, achievement focus, integrity, professionalism, and learning and teaching) are missing.
The Key Question to ask when working with attributes is, “Does this person have the baseline attributes to succeed in this job over the short and long-term, and if so, are we doing the right things to draw them out?”
The Rest of the STACK Profile Categories
The other categories outlined in the STACK Profile™ (Knowledge Mastery, Strategic Sales Skills, Tactical Sales Skills, Sales Conversation Skills) are equally as important as Consultative Sales Attributes. What good is a consultative sales professional without knowledge of their products and services, and knowledge of their customers, to know where they can solve customer problems? How successful can a consultative sales professional be if they cannot uncover customer needs in conversation, build solutions for those needs, and communicate them clearly and convincingly?
While this article contains a detailed description of the Consultative Sales Attributes, it does not contain detailed descriptions of each of the behaviors underlying them. Descriptions of the other categories and all associated behaviors are available to saleslobby.com readers for free. To receive the complete 18 page detailed description of the Consultative Sales Professional STACK Profile™, including descriptions of all categories and underlying behaviors, visit www.whillsgroup.com.
I hope that the graphic of the STACK Profile, and the behavioral drivers behind it, will aid you as you engage sales training and sales performance improvement initiatives. While it is not the only tool you can use to succeed in raising the performance bar, it is certainly a useful one.
About the author, Mike Schultz
Mike Schultz is the Executive Vice President of the Wellesley Hills Group, a consulting firm that specializes in improving the sales and marketing performance of small to mid-sized business-to-business companies that sell services or a mix of products and services. Over the past decade, Mike Schultz has held positions as a general manager, marketing and sales performance consultant, major account representative, and marketing and sales director. Mike holds an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, and a BA from Brandeis University.
He is also an avid fly fisherman and golfer, and actively studies and teaches traditional Karate and Jujitsu, holding the ranks of black belt and Sensei in each.
He can be reached at mschultz@whillsgroup.com.
www.whillsgroup.com.
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