It’s been thirty years since the inception of sales methodology as a product or service offering within the overall sales training industry. In the 80s, training programs like SPIN Selling, Solution Selling and Professional Sales Skills (PSS) were developed with the purpose of teaching sales teams to sell more effectively. This intellectual property (IP) was then licensed to organizations for their internal use. The burgeoning sales training field was accelerated with the Information Technology (IT) revolution in the late 80s, and even further with the explosion of the Internet in the 90s. And it remains ubiquitous today, as nearly all sales organizations have attempted to adopt one or more training methodologies to improve their performance.
We often speak to sales leaders who have been through two, three or four different methodologies and have become fatigued with the various iterations of what is the “best” way to sell. Too often companies try to get a certain methodology to work within their unique markets without taking the time to customize the steps, tools and content that will be used to approach their customers. This never works – instead of improving sales effectiveness, you instead lose the confidence of your team as they’ve invested their time and energy in a failed program.
Major shifts have occurred in buying behavior, as well as new strategies for customer engagement. Current sales methodologies have components that work and others that don’t. A customized sales process is good because it is designed solely for your organization, one that includes tools specifically geared for your teams and your customers. You can leverage the investments you’ve already made to make your sales organization even more effective.
What is certain with customization is that sales teams are much more likely to participate in a sales process that is uniquely theirs. A collaborative process helps create wide-scale buy-in from marketing, customer service, inside sales, technical support and other customer-facing departments.
If your organization has tried to adopt a sales methodology without success, or just needs some fine-tuning in your current process, please consider Flannery Sales Systems’ expertise to give your sales managers and teams a customized sales process approach. Visit our web site at www.drive-revenue.com. There are sure to be several questions and topics to consider, but whether you do this with us or with someone else, just remember — YOUR SALES PROCESS is the answer.
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Comments (1)
This article seems to be conflating sales process and sales methodology. I agree that each company should have their own sales PROCESS. However, sales METHODOLOGIES are different. A sales methodology is like a language…sure you can speak Spanglish, but while everyone might not understand Spanish, NO ONE will understand Spanglish…or at a minimum, everything you say is open to argument/interpretation.
I was trained on Sandler, and if the whole sales team is speaking the common Sandler language, they can move forward as a unit. If they have invented their own language, the 1) still need to teach it to each other and 2) the new language likely has some holes in it that will still need to be uncovered, such as, “what do we do when X happens?”
At any point in the sales process, a Sandler team knows what to do next. I bet that most homebrew methodologies/processes can’t make this claim. However, I 100% agree that the sales process should be customized to the individual company…that’s necessary since all businesses are unique…but not unique enough to reinvent English…I mean a methodology.