Drive 40 Percent Sales Growth by Sharing Best Practices
What rep wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall throughout the sales process for a top producer at their company selling a newly rolled out product? To see how they created urgency, addressed concerns and finally closed the sale?
What if sales managers could take their sales team’s top talent, bottle it, and pass it around to newer reps so everybody could close more deals? That’s the power of sharing best practices.
Top sales reps get all the glory—they sweep awards ceremonies, they snag bonuses, etc.
But at some point you as a manager have squeezed just about every dollar of revenue you’re going to get from your company’s rock stars. At that point, growth has to come from somewhere else.
Leaning on the Middle of the Pack
One of our own clients recently showed us how leaning on the middle of the pack to step up their game can work wonders for hitting steep revenue targets. The client needed an incremental uptick in sales in order to hit their number and the organization’s top dogs were already tapped out.
So, sales managers identified core products and asked the top reps to record short videos on how they pitch them. The managers whittled the presentations down to the best two or three and made them available to everyone as best practices to emulate.
This tactic for sharing best practices drove 41% growth among middle-of-the-pack sales reps and the bottom third grew sales by 38%. Needless to say they made plan that year.
Many companies have discovered sharing best practices can be a sales multiplier. Top performing companies actively capture institutional knowledge from seasoned reps for newer generations of sellers twice as often as underperforming companies do, according to a 2015 study by Aberdeen Research.
And today, communication tools like videos, texts and podcasts are so accessible, sharing best practices is something any company can implement.
How do you get your sales force in the habit of sharing videos?
Our clients’ teams have used these tactics:
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Make it a competition.
Create a fantasy football-themed contest that reps opt into for money and prizes. A 5-minute video on how a rep closes a deal earns a touchdown. An action related to the close earns a field goal. A video or audio of a best practice is a point. It becomes fun. A client who tried this found their 70-rep sales force turned in a total of 45 submissions within the first week. An added advantage—the managers gained visibility into how the reps talked to their clients. To get the same level of insight otherwise, a manager would have had to ride along with sales reps every day of the week!
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Curate breakout sessions from your sales kickoff event.
Some of the best sales training happens when people from your team get into a room together and compare notes. A top sales veteran facilitates the discussion, and the session almost runs itself. But all of these great insights stay in the room—or worse, they disappear—after the meeting. Instead, have someone set up an iPad on a stand and record the breakout session. You can curate that content to share with the sales associates who were outside the room.
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Conduct interviews during key events.
When is your star sales rep the most hyped? Right after they’ve gotten off a sales call. They walk into your office and report the whole conversation play by play. Capture this story on video, while it’s still fresh in the rep’s mind. Or conduct win/loss interviews on video. Use questions like:
- What department did your buyer report into?
- What were the biggest roadblocks in the sales cycle?
- How did you overcome them?
- We’ve been running into this objection a lot lately, how did you handle that?
From there, watch it grow. Once sales reps get used to sharing their secret sauce and benefiting from the wisdom of others, they want to contribute to the system. Look at the generosity we’ve seen with people sharing their ideas and experiences on YouTube.
The idea that reps are selfish with their strategies is a myth. We’ve just never given them a convenient enough way to share them for the rest of the team to benefit. Here are several resources to help you drive sales growth in your organization: