Are you and your team speaking the same language?

Here’s a mystery.  Most departments in an organization have a common language and a common process.  Everyone in Accounting talks the same language.  In Marketing, there’s a very analytical process which everyone agrees to measure results.  In Operations, or Engineering, or any other part of the organization you care to name, everyone agrees on the process by which the work gets done, and everyone agrees on the key terms that connect to that process.  Yet Sales, for some reason, typically doesn’t have a consistent process that managers and salespeople understand and agree to follow.
 
Creating a common language and a common process for every sales professional in the organization seems like the kind of common-sense step every team would follow.  Yet most of the sales leaders we at Sandler talk to have no shared process to use when interacting with salespeople about the most important issues, such as coaching, debriefing, on boarding, and sales-funnel management.  Mutual mystification and improvisation are the default settings. 
 

• When a salesperson tells you a meeting with a prospect “went well”, do you both agree on what “went well” actually means?
• When a salesperson says a prospect is “definitely qualified”, are you sure you’re both using the word “qualified” to describe the same thing?
• When a salesperson tells you that a proposal is “ready to present”, do you both know with absolute certainty that the prospect’s answer to the presentation is not going to be any variation on, “Let us think it over?”
• Does the salesperson know what it takes to close out the current step - and what the next step in the sales process is?

 
If you answered “No”, to even one of those questions, you and your team are not on the same page.  Sales professionals who follow the Sandler Selling System methodology, by contrast, are consistently on the same page with each other.  How can you tell if you’re one of these sales professionals?

• You know that the only kind of meeting that can possibly “go well” is one that leads to a clear, scheduled next step - with an agenda that both you and the prospect have agreed on ahead of time.
• You know that prospects who are qualified meet three specific criteria: They have a pain that they are motivated to fix that you can make go away; they know what the available budget is and have discussed it with you; and they have been completely transparent with you about the decision-making process that will yield either a yes or a no. That’s what  “qualified” means. 
• Last but not least, you know that any presentation that results in a “think it over” response is fatally flawed and should never have been given in the first place. 

 
Make absolutely sure you and your team are using the same vocabulary and the same playbook once the game starts.  That’s non-negotiable.  If you don’t commit to this rule, sustainable positive change for you and the team is impossible.
 
For information on how to get Sandler’s Gate Selling Tool, which will help you implement this rule, contact us today, 888-287-2635.
 
Contributed by Sandler Training Albany, NY www.winningprocess.sandler.com
 
Excerpted from the book The Sandler Rules for Sales Leaders. Copyright © 2017 Sandler Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.