How to Maximize Account Penetration and Jump-Start Sales
by Alan Rigg
Published on this site: June 16th, 2005 - See
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Maximizing account penetration is one of the most critical functions
in sales. Why? The depth of account penetration has an enormous
impact on revenues and profitability.
Think about it – if every one of your company's salespeople
sold every product and service in their portfolio to every business
unit, department, and division of every account, what kind of number
would they produce? Something huge, right?
From a sales management perspective, few things are more frustrating
than having a bunch of "one trick ponies" on a sales team.
These are salespeople that have developed a comfort level with one
product or service, and that product or service makes up 80% to
100% of their sales.
I used to work for a computer distributor that had numerous salespeople
that fit this mold. They would congratulate themselves for selling
servers to an account, completely oblivious to the fact that the
very same account was also buying storage, networking equipment,
software, and professional services. The distributor's salespeople
only scratched the surface of the total available opportunity in
most accounts.
Here is a second huge frustration for sales managers and executives
salespeople that don't produce "traction" with new products
and services.
When your company introduces a new product or service, you
make a pretty sizeable investment to train your salespeople
to sell the new product or service, right? Doesn't it drive
you crazy when only a fraction of your salespeople actually
sell the new product or service? The return on your sales
training investment stinks, and your company never sees the
revenue boost it expected to receive from the new product
or service.
Why do I bring up lack of account penetration and lack of
sales traction for new products and services in the same article?
Because the same problem is often at the root of both issues!
That problem is an excessive focus on technical details.
Many managers and salespeople believe that salespeople need to
become EXPERTS in order to sell a product or service effectively.
To develop this understanding, companies invest enormous amounts
of time and money in exhaustive training to educate salespeople
on product features and benefits, performance characteristics, industry
information, pricing guidelines, promotional activities,available
collateral material, etc.
Unfortunately, when salespeople leave these training sessions,
they often have no idea how to FIND or QUALIFY opportunities for
the product or service they were just "trained” to sell!
This leaves the salespeople frustrated, as they feel the time spent
in training was wasted. Management is equally frustrated with their
sales team's inability to gain traction with new products and services,
and their inability to learn to sell their company's entire portfolio
of products and services.
This mutual frustration results from a lack of recognition of one
very important fact:
When a salesperson identifies a qualified opportunity, there is
usually no shortage of knowledgeable resources that can assist the
salesperson with converting the opportunity into a sale.
These resources may include technical or other specialists from
the salesperson's own company, or similar resources that are employed
by suppliers or channel partners.
If salespeople have access to product/service experts, why should
they spend time learning technical details? Instead, why don't they
laser-focus their learning on how to find and qualify opportunities?
Your company can facilitate this kind of focused learning by
redesigning product and service training curriculums to address
the following topics:
- Product/Solution/Service Overview: What does the product
or service do (in plain English)?
- Differentiation: What are a few KEY differences between
this product or service and competitive products or services?
- Business Problems: What business problems does the product
or service solve?
- Qualifying Questions: What questions should salespeople
ask to determine whether a prospect or customer has the business
problems that the product or service can solve, and to QUANTIFY
the impact of these business problems?
- Expert Resources: What expert resources are available
to help
salespeople manage technical details?
If your salespeople have access to product/service experts, you
can turn them into prospecting and qualifying machines by focusing
your company's product/service training curriculums on how to find
and qualify opportunities. This strategy will help your organization
maximize account penetration and jump-start sales for new products
and services.
Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in
Selling:Why Most Salespeople Don't Perform and What to Do About
It. His company, 80/20 Performance Inc., supplies specialized sales
assessment tests and consulting to help organizations build top-performing
sales teams. For more sales and sales management tips, visit: http://www.8020performance.com
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