As mentioned before in this blog, it is important to stay the course. Things may get worse before they get better; overall sales volume may dip before it goes up. People will complain and look for every possible reason why this selling services thing is a terrible idea. You will need to stick to your guns as people test how serious you are. It is hard to do, but again, firing your number one box seller, Ace Flanagan, when he refuses to try and sell services sends a powerful message.

The other critical fact is that understanding and articulating the invisible is much more challenging than discussing feeds and speeds, features and functions. What you think, what you say, and what you do are different when selling services.

A few people adapt quickly and intuitively, most people, over time, can be adequate at selling intangibles given enough training, tools, and reinforcement, but another group will never quite get it. Not because they are bad people or don’t try, but because they are wired differently. From a sales management perspective, this is a very big deal.

Even if you follow all of this advice exactly as outlined, and I hope you do, about one in three product salespeople will not be successful in selling services. (Hey, it’s not their fault—they were hired to sell boxes.) You should understand this from the beginning and be prepared to help them find new jobs inside or outside the company.

Conclusion

So there you have it—the Five Steps to Selling Services Success. Getting the sales force to effectively sell services is critical to long-term success in seriously selling services. Sadly, the common approaches most executives take to bring about this change just don’t work. To be effective, all aspects of the sales performance system musty be changed, coupled with solid training, backed by strong reinforcement, and supported by a leadership team willing to make some tough calls to make sure that the change sticks.

It takes at least a year to yield meaningful results and often three years to make them effective. Yet, do not despair. Future blog entries will outline the steps to kick-start selling services by getting everyone who touches the customer involved in the selling services process.

Tags: selling services

Very strong training, as outlined in Step Three in the Five Steps to Selling Services Success, is a vital catalyst, and is a mandatory start for changing selling behavior. Remember, though, for almost all of your sellers, this is a very big change, and training won't do it alone. Behavior change takes time and support, so be prepared to invest some time and money into it. Instead of thinking a single two- or three-day training event, craft a learning system with ongoing reinforcement over at least a year.

For example, back up the core sales training with a reinforcement workshop within 90 days to let people share successes and practice new skills in a safe environment. Make sure that the date is announced during the core training, and that expectations for the reinforcement workshop are laid out for all participants. Just letting them know that they are to report on the usage of what they will be learning is a powerful motivator. An even more powerful incentive to get them to do what you ask of them is that they don’t want to look stupid to their peers. This will greatly improve the odds ofthem paying attention and taking the training seriously. If you can’t do a face-to-face reinforcement workshop, at least have a reinforcement video teleconference with the same objectives. Though obviously not as powerful as a face-to-face event, a couple hours of a well-facilitated session will still send a strong signal and advance the selling services cause. If you don’t have video capabilities, then an old-fashioned Webinar can do the trick.

Also, make an electronic classroom available to allow for “ask the expert” dialogue and the further sharing of war stories. Participants may not want to “look dumb” to their management, but if trust was developed with the facilitator during the initial training, sellers will be more open to shoot straight and thus get the help they need to improve.

Consider investing money in providing in-field coaching. You are asking salespeople to perform much differently than they have in the past, and providing one-on-one modeling with real customers and coaching afterward are powerful motivators to personal change. In organizations where sales managers are responsible for hands-on coaching of their people and spend most of their time working with their sales reps, it makes sense to extend their skill set to coaching their people on selling services.

Note, however, that there are a couple of challenges to this approach. First, product sales managers within your company may not be much good at selling services either! Unless they have a different background than their sellers, they probably don’t have the right knowledge, skills, and mindsets to coach the selling of services. Before sending them out to coach sellers on how to sell services, they will need to acquire not only the core training provided to the sales force, but additional training in how to coach. Again, this is another investment, but one that will pay off in the long run.

A second consideration is that in some companies “sales management” spends very little time actively managing salespeople. In these companies, sales managers are often the company’s best sellers and have revenue targets of their own. These individuals are key to the company making its numbers. In these situations it is unrealistic to expect that they will be able to provide the reinforcement requirements outlined above. Not that they are lazy or evil, these folks have big bogies to make if they are to be successful, and that trumps people development every time. For example, I have a long-term client that has built his organization’s success by having a very entrepreneurial approach to selling. The sales managers are the top sellers, and it is in the best interest of the company that they spend a minimum of 90% of their time in front of their customers. They contract me to do in-field coaching of their new hires to help accelerate their learning curve and speed their success. If your company follows this model then you should also look for outside expertise to do the one-on-one, in the trenches, customer-facing sales coaching needed to accelerate selling services performance.

GIST: Behavioral change is difficult, and no matter how good the training is, you won’t get the results you want without strong reinforcement.

Tags: selling services, training