Would you believe it if I told you that there is a simple way for you to improve your organization's sales performance? It's true, and it's simpler than you could ever imagine. No tricks, no ploy, no hard sell, and no tactics.
Here it goes ...the trick to improving your organization's sales performance is to improve their communication skills of your employees and enhance their self-awareness. There it is!
I know, you're saying that's all; it can't possibly be this simple. After all these years of perfecting your sales pitch, the solution was always right in front of you. Communication will drive high performance on your team. If you learn how to help sales professionals in your organization to understand their customers better, to listen, understand their pain points and how your organization can solve those pain points, and finally articulating your organizational value to the customer, you will experience higher sales performance results.
So how do you teach your employees to communicate effectively and build partnerships with your customer?
First, they have to understand themselves better and learn what makes them tick. Sales professionals need to learn about their behavioral style, their motivators, and their preferences. An excellent tool that allows employees to understand their style better is the DiSC® Sales profile.
The Everything DiSC® Sales Profile is designed to help you discover your unique strengths and limitations when it comes to sales. Taking this DiSC assessment will help even the best, and most experienced salespeople become more effective at their jobs.
In addition to helping you recognize your own style of sales, the DiSC test will also help you understand the different buying DiSC personality types of your customers. Once you understand your sales style and the buying styles of customers, you can learn to adapt your sales style to that of the customers unique buying style. This profile will be beneficial to anyone either in a sales position currently, or aspiring to one.
There are four main DiSC personality types when it comes to the DiSC® profiles – you have Dominance (D), Influence (I), Conscientiousness (C), and Steadiness (S). The four DiSC personality types are broken down into a chart with 12 different styles. The Everything DiSC® Sales Profile will place you in one of the regions on the map.
The Everything DiSC® Sales Profile will start by giving you an in-depth look at your specific style. It will offer insight into your sales priorities. Your sales priorities are the areas where you focus most of your energy. It will then go on to tell you exactly what your strengths and weaknesses are and explain them at length.
Once you have gained this new insight into your personal style, the DiSC test will also take you through an in-depth explanation of the different buying styles. Not only does it outline the different DiSC personality types of buyers, but it will tell you how your specific sales style relates to each of the different DiSC assessment types of buyers. The DiSC profile gives you valuable information on how to interact with each customers style to successfully close your sale.
For example, it will tell you that a D style buyer is fast-paced and outspoken, and will offer many other details and suggestions as to why they are this way. It will then recommend how you should react to this particular type of person based on your DiSC personality style of sales. Do you need to slow the conversation down for them? What part of the sales process do you need to focus on more than others? It is not always easy to adjust yourself to every person that comes through the door, especially when your DiSC assessment types are incredibly incompatible. The Everything DiSC® Sales Profile will help you to understand better how to adjust your sales style to engage with your customers effectively.
The Everything DiSC® Sales Profile can help an individual who is seeking to improve their sales skills and expertise, or it can be extremely beneficial for an entire sales team to take the DiSC assessment. If everyone knows their own styles, and in turn their strengths and weaknesses, they can all work together to support each other, and everyone will be able to recognize the DiSC assessment types of customers to achieve optimal sales outcome.
Besides completing a DiSC personality test, you can work with your employees to connect to the customers' experience. As a result of the sales professional understanding their DiSC personality style, and behavioral queues, they can have a deeper understanding of the customers' personality style. They can look for and understand behavioral queues to learn more about the customer. Doing so will help them adjust their strategy and approach. For example, they can learn to put themselves in the customers' shoes, in their position to assess the organization and the challenges that the organization is facing. Connecting with the customer experience will allow them to develop a hypothesis on what it would take for the customer to move forward with a buying decision. Working on their hypothesis will allow them to identify any roadblocks that may prevent the customer from moving forward with a buying decision and develop a customized solution tailored to the customer's needs.
A final solution that you can embed into your sales professionals development process is role play. The saying "practice makes perfect" holds true, especially for sales professionals. I remember early in my career in Sales Training for Pfizer, all of our new hires went through an intense development process which included role-playing. Our sales representatives had to act out a scenario that they will likely be faced with when selling to a doctor. The role play was recorded so that the playback can provide the Sales Representative with an idea on their performance. They could visually see how they responded, their facial expressions when faced with tough questions, and their demeanor, whether they remained calm and relaxed or if they were nervous. Also, our Senior Sales Executive also provided them with feedback on their performance. The role play scenario, combined with video playback and real feedback, gave our Sales Representative and a realistic view of how they handle a sales meeting.