Three New Roles of Reps to Achieve Sales Excellence

Achieve Sales
Excellence

The book Achieve Sales Excellence (on Amazon #ad), by Steven and Kinni, presents new roles required to be an effective sales professional based on the new customer rules.  Sales representatives who do not adapt will continually miss out on sales.  Those who do adapt will become increasingly successful and experience greater customer retention.  Retaining customers is often more profitable for a company than going through the long process of acquiring new ones.

To make a sale, insure future loyalty, and get referrals:  customers/clients today expect Sales Representatives who visit them to be able to fulfill the several new roles.  The first 3 roles presented below are their basic requirements of Sales Reps:

·         Be their Business Agent with the vendor (your company).  In other words they expect their sales rep to be an “ad hoc manager” or “outsourcing agent” employed for them (not by them) who can align the goals of the product/service with the customer’s business results.  To do so, the sales person must:

1. Be a single point of contact for customer who understands their goals and makes recommendations accordingly.
2. Manage and coordinate the vendor’s team of experts and the work they do for customer.
3. Be the ROI expert by reporting the value received from product service that helps customer achieve their goals.

·         Act as a CEO would for their business by understanding their issues, organizational structure, corporate culture, and their business strategy.  To do so, the sales representative must:

1. Understand who their r customer’s customers are and how they use final products/services.
2. Understand how the business works and align to their strategy and culture.
3. Understand their financial condition and how to connect vendor solutions to their needs to produce the results they want.

·         Be both Advocate/ Expediter to quickly resolve customer’s problems in a way in which they will be happiest.  It is more than being empathetic to complaints.  This requires the sales person to:

1. Know the vendor company as well as the customer’s.  Learn where can you bend the rules or   shorten the process to best support your customer needs.
2. Create an internal support network of valuable contacts you can call on when help or resources are needed.
3.  Communicate your customer’s expectations to everyone involved in order process and product/service development for quicker and more accurate response.

In my next post, I will present the advanced requirements – a.k.a. the next 4 roles.