By Peter Radizeski CHANNEL MANAGEMENT You hire someone with sales experience and then they don’t sell for you. Why? There are many reasons. One reason is the type of salesperson that was hired – order taker, hunter, farmer, whale hunter – doesn’t match up with your market and product portfolio. If the product is residential broadband in a greenfield project, that is much different than selling Webex in a rural market. A transactional sales rep is motivated by the small wins occurring frequently. A whale hunter wouldn’t be motivated by small wins. Someone selling Boeing airplanes wouldn’t transition well to a service provider. With Boeing, you know who the target prospects are. You have a multi-year window to build a relationship with the buyers in order to win business inside their buying or budget window. That sales rep might be good in federal government sales for a large carrier but not for selling to SMBs. The sales rep needs product knowledge and a value proposition (why us and not them?) at the minimum. She has to like meeting people and making relationships. Does she have an interest in people? Buyers have to like and trust the sales rep. The sales rep has to be a good interviewer who listens and asks probing questions to identify pain points as well as initiatives that the business is working on that the sales rep can help with. Sales equals Helping. It is designing the proverbial “Win-Win.” Time management is the key to sales. Using your time wisely to get in front of people who can say yes, who have budget and need, is the key to being successful in sales. There are 12 steps in the sales process. How will you schedule your time in order to efficiently and effectively use the time to achieve your goals? Is the organization setup to support and embrace sales? Most smaller service providers do not have a support system in place for direct sales – and especially not for indirect sales. Hundreds of vendors want to lean on the channel for sales but do not have a system in place that would yield results. There are just too many reasons that an organization makes sales hard. Quota being just the main reason. Quota is usually calculated in thin air – or off the basis of “we need them to sell this much to pay for themselves.” That strategy does not take into account average sales size or average sales cycle – or that the business has no marketing, no branding and no lead generation. Usually, service providers frown on compensating for customer retention, which is ridiculous considering that retention is the backbone of the company revenue structure. During the last four years training, coaching and managing numerous sales teams, all this and more has presented itself. Training is usually lacking. Attitude is what you hire for; everything else the organization has to train for – product knowledge, sales process, service delivery, value proposition, use cases, success stories and more. The sales manager should be constantly training and coaching. Role play and presentations are not a waste of time; it is preparation. Prepare the reps to go win business. Prepare them with scripts, questions, knowledge, use cases and more. Put in the effort to make them successful. All too often, sales reps are left alone to go do sales, or they are micro-managed but in the wrong way. It is about preparing the sales rep to win business – prepare them to help customers benefit from what your company offers. Some of the reasons salespeople can’t sell are because they don’t do the necessary daily activities to achieve sales, but some of it is they are not in a system that will help them be successful. Do you have a system in place to make sales happen? o Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consulting agency. RAD-INFO offers sales training, coaching and consulting. Peter is available to speak at your events on channel, marketing, strategy or sales. WHY YOUR SALESPEOPLE CAN’T SELL 44 CHANNELVISION | SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2023
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