Archive - November 2000
Uncover Hidden Revenues With Skilled Internal Selling
Why Does Skilled Internal Selling Matter?
While effective internal selling doesn’t directly produce the big flashes of revenues that external selling can, it does increase efficiency and ensure that more external sales
happen—two outcomes that can have a marked impact on your company’s bottom line. By outfitting your sales professionals and managers with the skills they need to effectively propose new solutions for customer needs that your company is not currently meeting, you can help your organization:
- Capture and mine more revenue generating ideas,
- Strengthen relationships with current customers, and
- Generate new business.
What is Skilled Internal Selling?
First, let’s explain what Skilled Internal Selling isn’t. It isn’t inside sales. Skilled Internal Selling is effectively proposing an idea—the use of one of or a combination of your company’s products, services, or other resources—in a new way that will benefit both the customer and your company. The skill is in making sure the idea is proposed effectively, in the language of the executives who have the power to approve it. This means your sales professionals and managers must be able to:
- Confirm the idea is aligned with your company’s strategic goals,
- Include the revenue/expense justification for the investment,
- Detail the broader competitive impact of the solution,
- Provide a strategic profile of the account,
- Utilize credible benchmarks and estimates,
- Address the concerns of all business functions that will be involved, from marketing to legal,
- Understand the criteria decision makers will use to evaluate the proposal, and
- Identify appropriate stakeholders to build cross-functional support for the idea.
Who Benefits From Skilled Internal Selling?
While you, your company, and your customer all benefit from streamlining and standardizing your internal selling process, the one-day Skilled Internal Selling training solution itself is targeted to sales professionals and managers at or near the customer level. These are the individuals in the best position to identify unmet customer needs and formulate solutions to meet those needs. This program provides them the guidance they need to get those ideas proposed and approved.
What are the Results of Skilled Internal Selling?
A growing startup in an innovative healthcare marketplace implemented Skilled Internal Selling after recognizing that many good ideas were hidden behind bad proposals and that turning bad proposals into reviewable proposals utilized too many resources. The program helped the company take advantage of more revenue-generating opportunities. Today, the company is a leader in the marketplace and is known for having a sales force of strategic thinkers.
Call or click now to learn more about Skilled Internal Selling from Alliance Performance Systems
(941) 766-0058
6 Strategic Behaviors of Best-in-Class Sales Professionals
Decades of research from our work with top innovative global biopharmas reveals best-in-class sales professionals do certain things very effectively…
…we call these “strategic behaviors,” and our research shows these behaviors are the most valuable differentiators of top-performing reps.
There are actually more than a dozen strategic behaviors, but our researchers have identified the six that, if adopted by middle-of-the-curve sales professionals, can have the most immediate impact on performance.
Click here to read our latest article, 6 Strategic Behaviors of Best-in-Class Sales Professionals, and download the included bonus job aid, the Key Account Insights Generator, a tool your sales reps can use to get themselves thinking more like top performers and driving new business.
Deliver Customer Value, Differentiate Your Business
The Issue: To differentiate in a crowded marketplace, science-led healthcare businesses must train their sales professionals to deliver customer value.
Sometimes, this is easier said than done. Successfully delivering customer value takes a research-based sales training system that:
- Emphasizes the key behaviors of top performers
- Integrates a common framework and language into the organization, and
- Is expertly customized to both the organization and the industry
The Solution: Achieving Sales Excellence
Achieving Sales Excellence (ASE) builds on extensive sales force effectiveness research to help your sales professionals and your business deliver the customer value that extends far beyond the product. The ASE system is customizable and scalable and has helped leading companies in and out of the healthcare industry win customers and boost results.
To learn more about Achieving Sales Excellence, read our latest article:
“Deliver Customer Value, Differentiate Your Business”
Coaching for Success: New Sales Managers, Same Old Skills?
Making the case for a comprehensive sales coaching training platform.
Promoted to District Manager Because They Could Sell, are these Top-Performing Reps Equipped to Lead?
The District Manager (DM) plays a pivotal role in any major account sales organization, and reps recently promoted to the position find themselves with some pretty big shoes to fill. Linking the reps in the field with top leadership, and serving to translate high-level strategy into detailed tactical account plans, newly-minted DMs find themselves with a myriad of new responsibilities when that promotion comes. But being a great salesperson and being a great manager and coach are two very different qualities—requiring a distinctly specialized set of skills.
Coaching is Key
Of all of the skill sets that a new DM needs in order to be successful in their pivotal role, the one that has the greatest positive impact on sales results is also the one that is most misunderstood among salespeople: coaching.
Our market research and decades of experience training sales mangers teaches us something more about coaching: it is a distinct skill set from selling, one that can be learned through training. But ask 10 sales training managers what good coaching looks like and you’ll likely get 10 different answers.
Read Alliance Performance Systems’ latest article, “Coaching for Success: New Sales Managers, Same Old Skills?” to learn more about the pivotal skill sets required for effective DMs and the key characteristics of the most effective coaching sessions.
Strategic Alliances Podcast #004: Major Concerns For Pharma And Biotech, Part 3: How Do We Get Our Sales and Marketing Teams To Work Better Together?
It’s sales and marketing not sales vs. marketing. Peter Pisarri, VP of Client Development at APS, explains what it takes to get your sales and marketing units to play for the same team. Part 3 of a 3-part podcast focused on the major concerns of pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
The Strategic Alliances audio podcast, from Alliance Performance Systems, offers insight into strategies and tactics you can use to improve your company’s sales and marketing results. Each podcast also includes valuable commentary designed to inspire sales representatives, account managers, and other members of the sales team to think about a different way of selling – a way that truly puts the focus on the customer. Topics like business acumen, negotiation, customer needs, coaching, leadership, and more are discussed with subject matter experts and leading consultants. Alliance Performance Systems is a performance improvement consulting firm that has been successfully designing and implementing sales and marketing solutions for Fortune 500 firms since 1994.
Listen to Episode #004
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Why Telling Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Change—Part 2
Last week, we learned the brain is likely to blame for the discomfort Dr. Sanchez experiences as you try to convince her to switch to your company’s latest product, Newazol. Neuroscience taught us two things about Dr. Sanchez’s behavior. First, it revealed that contemplating change requires some intellectual heavy lifting in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Dr. Sanchez—like all humans—would like to avoid doing that painful mental work by avoiding change, which, in this case, is associated with Newazol. Second, neuroscience revealed that humans perceive change as an error or threat, which activates the brain’s fear-center—the amygdala—and produces an instinctual response to move away from the threat. So, Dr. Sanchez doesn’t just look like she wants to be anywhere but standing in front of you. She really does want to be anywhere but there. No number of breath mints could alter that truth. She’s staying put only by fighting her animal instincts. Read More
