Turn Your Reps into Commercial Coaches

Turn Your Reps into Commercial Coaches:

The next time you head out to sell a solution to a customer, think about it from this perspective – this may be the first time your customer is ever purchasing this solution. So why do we frequently let the customer tell us how the sale should proceed? And even if they have purchased this solution before, it’s likely been years… and many of the players and much of the internal politics are now different. Do they know the best path forward?

Now think about it from this perspective – as sales professionals, it’s our JOB to sell these solutions, day in and day out, to a wide range of customers, each with a very different set of circumstances. There isn’t much we haven’t seen go right and go wrong.

All of those lessons learned are incredibly valuable, and can be used to coach the customer on how the sale should proceed. Help them avoid mistakes, prepare for obstacles or objections, and make their purchase experience smooth and easy. We call this Commercial Coaching.

We first uncovered that the best reps out there are coaching their customers through the sale in our latest work on the New High Performer Playbook. Star reps are not out there indiscriminately talking to anyone, they’re very purposefully seeking out Mobilizers to help them build the case for change and build consensus. But once stars find a Mobilizer, they don’t just hand over the reins and walk away – they very actively coach the Mobilizer through the consensus building process.

If you haven’t seen the Mobilizer and Commercial Coaching work yet, you’ll want to start there. But if you are ready to start building your own versions of the tools, then this blog post is for you.

These are some lessons we’ve learned from members across the last several months as they’ve taken these ideas and tools and adapted them to their world.

Lesson 1: Half the battle is building a Commercial Coaching mindset. You have to sell reps on the need to be commercial coaches, and don’t overlook how much of a change this is for most reps. Show them why the mentality that “the customer knows best” is a dangerous mentality. Unfortunately, that mentality incorrectly assumes the customer knows who all the key players are in their business relative to this solution, why they might object to the solution, how to overcome those obstacles and gain consensus, and how to do all of that with some political savvy. Teach reps that it’s ok to be a little more prescriptive. We’re not asking you to outright tell the customer what to do (that WOULD be bad), but to make suggestions and collaborate with the customer to come up with next steps.

Lesson 2: Build collaborative tools to help reps have constructive conversations with customers. The hardest part about having a conversation you’re not comfortable having often times is just how to bring it up. The first half of that battle is asking leading questions. The Commercial Coaching Toolkit lists out self-discovery and collaborative questions to prompt your Mobilizer for a response. But if that’s not enough, offload that burden a bit by building tools that reps can use at different stages in the customer’s buying process.

One of our favorites comes from Business Objects, and it’s called the “Sequence of Events.” Sit down WITH your Mobilizer, and together map out all the potential next steps. Or better yet, have a pre-populated one (with common pitfalls already embedded) and let the Mobilizer customize it.

That way, when the Mobilizer asks “why would that step be in there?” the rep can respond by teaching the Mobilizer the danger of not including that step and coaching them through how to avoid it.

ADP builds on that concept by building tools to coach customers at every step in their buying process – starting from the initial sales call with one Mobilizer all the way through organizational consensus and implementation of a solution.

Lesson #3: Celebrate your failures. The best way to build a tool like the Sequence of Events is to ask your reps about the worst deal that ever fell apart or got derailed. Those are all stories to build into pitfalls and embed into your Commercial Coaching Roadmap.

To illustrate this, I’ll share the story we like to tell of an enterprise software company who, after a few months of pursing a deal, got the go-ahead from the Customer’s CEO…but then found out a week later that not even the CEO had the authority to make purchases like this. Purchases of this size had to go to the board of directors for approval. Now, the good news is that story had a happy ending because they won the deal. But they had to wait TWO AND A HALF MONTHS for the board to reconvene. That’s a great potential next step to go into your sequence of events – consult the board!

If you can find potential obstacles from past deals, you can better anticipate ways to coach your customer through the difficult world of consensus building.

SEC Members, visit our new Commercial Coaching topic center for more resources and tools, or check out our webinar replay on the topic.