SELLING SKILLS ASSIGNMENT

(PGDM - 3309)

1.FUTURE TRENDS OF SALES MANAGER

Advances in technology will continue to change the way we sell and as well as the way
the prospect gets information before he decides to buy. We are getting close if not we
are already at the point were we can find information about everyone in the market.
When this becomes more amplified it will still take a skilled sales person to help the
prospect discover a leak that he was not aware of or show him a different way to solve
a problem.

It seems the future is already with us. Cold email marketing seems to be #1 right now
for B2B sales. You just have to look online though for consumer sales. It's linked to
how products are marketed. Through eye recognition at the checkout of a shop/store?
We're already receiving coupons in the mail of products we last bought.It's all about
personalization, and further targeting. Before, it was difficult to target an audience
properly through newspaper/TV/radio ads. Now we have the internet, we can be as
targeted as we want.

“The three major trends we’ll see in Sales have to do with information, automation, and
enablement. In the future, buyers will do more research and have easy access to more
information before they engage with salespeople. A lot of the repetitive administrative
work in sales will be automated. There are certain roles that are going to be affected by
technology and automation more than others. For example, Inside Sales roles have
more tasks that are more easily automated than Outside Sales Roles. Technology will
enable all salespeople to get more done in a day and spend their time more effectively.
For example, my company, Badger Maps, is focused on helping Outside Salespeople do
just that. Overall, more educated buyers, less administrative work, and tools that enable
the salesperson will make Sales a more interesting, and likely more competitive career
path in the future.”

Craig J. Lewis, Founder & Chief Entrepreneur Officer of Visage Payroll

Venture Capitalists are pouring millions into sales related technology. There’s a bunch
of funding activity around sales technology happening right now. The future of sales is
technology. Startups are already applying big data, deep machine learning and artificial
intelligence to every part of the sales cycle. There are currently nearly 150 companies
building products to help sales professionals, sales teams and companies automate their
sales efforts. And it’s not just sales CRM’s, startups are using artificial intelligence to
improve actual sales calls. The future will see the birth of a lot more of these tech
companies tackling more and more sales challenges. Some examples are Chorus.ai
| Conversation Intelligence for Sales Team, TalkIQ, Gong and Cogito.”

Elisabeth Marino, President & Founder of Sales Dynamo Consulting

“The sales process of the future will continue to change as communications and
information technology evolve. Push-button purchasing has become the norm, and will
remain a big player. Companies who want to stay alive will embrace technology just a
little faster than their target market, so they are always ready and available where their
customer is shopping. Video, VR, and a large social media presence will all be key,
along with whatever comes next. And when you’re in front of your target market, it’s
key to lead with value. This means you give something away – information,
technology, product; something that demonstrates your value to your
customer before you ever ask them to consider a purchase with you. You want to be a
key part of their buying journey, which helps it lead back to your business.”

Jason Kanigan, Business strategist, Sales Trainer and Owner of Sales On Fire

“People are no longer buying like it’s 2012. They’re not receiving a direct mail offer or
seeing a Google ad and converting from there. Instead, they’re going to trusted
influencers for reviews. Think about how you bought your last camera or car.
Consumers watch and read multiple video, Amazon, and other online reviews, and then
make up their minds with this information.

This means that the most trusted influencer wins. So having a body of work—
considerable searchable content, a recognizable entertainment style, and focus on a
specific field—is key to sellers. An example is photography reviewer Kai W, formerly
of the DigitalRev TV channel on YouTube. He hit all the key influencer requirements
with a much-copied presentation style, focus on photography, and huge amount of
content produced over the past half-decade; and when he recently left that channel to
start his own, his followers followed.”

Mike Smith, Founder of SalesCoaching1

“When considering sales as part of the future, one must ask what would it be without
it? Sales drive the revenues. If the economy continues to grow the opportunity to
expand sales is present.

1. New products and services.

2. Digital cannot replace personal contacts
3. Uncapped earning potential
4. Untapped markets, Nationally and Globally

If one can find a business that will provide a competitive product, give meaningful
training and support a rewarding compensation plan, the future is excellent. Both for
the company and the sales team.”
 2.FUTURE TRENDS OF PRE SALES
MANAGER:
Identifying Leads

Opportunities have exponentially increased for salespeople, due to digital innovations,

more systematic RFPs, and the pervasive use of inside sales for lead generation. But
more does not equal better. To achieve the ideal qualification rate of roughly 50%,
today’s best-practice organizations rely on advanced analytics to identify opportunities
early in the sales cycle and prioritize the most desirable ones. They use techniques such
as propensity-to-buy modeling, micro-market targeting, account-level opportunity
assessment, and churn prediction to separate the high-quality, high-probability
opportunities from the rest.

One presales team helped a building materials supplier improve its qualification rate by
using order histories of existing customers and analyses of prospective markets. From
this data, they developed a list of prospective “ideal customers” most likely to buy the
company’s products. Identifying which customers to pursue helped increase bid and bid
conversion rates, resulting in a 3–5% improvement in win rates.

Submitting Bids

The root cause was inadequate presales allocation. The company’s technical presales
experts were not assigned to the highest-opportunity bids, and there were frequent
disruptions to their assignments (e.g., being reassigned to the priority du jour).

To turn things around, the company developed a staffing approach that gave an at-a-
glance picture of the availability and skillsets of presales staff a quarter out. It
redesigned and simplified its bid review and approval process, and instituted a
mechanism that allowed key account managers to provide suggestions and
recommendations to the presales team immediately following a bid submission.

This new approach helped the company staff 15 percent more deals with presales
resources and anticipate 30 percent more “must win” deals (for the same number of
total presales resources). Sales reps’ time on proposal development was cut in half.

Closing Deals

The key to closing deals is presales’ ability to shape conversations with the client to
position the company’s solution as the ideal one. This approach is not about developing
a “smoke and mirrors” pitch, but rather investing the time to have a deep understanding
of the client’s needs (met and unmet) and then highlighting those elements of the
solution that can address them.
This is precisely what a European telecommunications
company did when it merged its mobile and fixed-line store
networks to increase cross-selling opportunities. The company
assigned presales “store rangers” (experts in both mobile and
fixed-line options) to roam the stores and speak with
customers. This had the dual benefit of increasing sales with
individual customers and providing training for the full-time
store salespeople. On days when a ranger was not on site,
stores used videoconferencing to patch in a live presales
expert to answer questions, help configure a new service, and
even fill out paperwork. After a year, this approach resulted in
an increase of 30% in overall sales for the store network.
Renewing Deals

While “presales” might imply that their work is finished once

a sale is made, the best companies have presales teams that
are active after the sale as well. Great sales reps have always
tried to anticipate customer needs and to deliver on them
consistently. But top-notch presales teams can help advance
from anticipating customer needs to predicting them with
greater precision, recommending what the sales force should
sell to specific customers, and providing expertise.

Such tactics helped one U.S. insurance company improve

customer retention rates by 20%. On presales’
recommendation, the company implemented a new call-center
system that went beyond displaying a customer’s history (e.g.,
tenure and claims record). Additional analytics also assessed
the customer’s real-time emotional state and predicted the
likelihood of keeping or losing the customer if the issue was
not resolved immediately. The system also recommended the
conversational style the agent should use, such as a “soothing”
or a “just the facts” approach. This helped bridge cultural
differences between American customers and
call-center agents based in the Philippines.

Presales can also accelerate sales pipeline velocity by

anticipating what will trigger a renewal, standardizing tools to
ensure best practices across the sales team, and automating
processes to send alerts and recommendations in advance of a
contract’s renewal date. Companies that do this well can
recommend special offers and promotional deals that will
encourage a quick renewal—and even close the deal before an
RFP is open to competitors.

When it comes to driving sales growth, quality trumps

quantity. And that requires companies to improve the quality
of their presales engine.