Ian Altman: Ian, welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. I am
your host. Ian Altman, so this is the time of year where we
spend a lot of time with channel sales organizations, and I'm
often honored to come and speak to organizations where they
bring together everyone in the organization. They bring in
their manufacturers, reps or independent third parties. They
bring in their business development people, their
regional managers, their product people, all together to get
excited, and they're gonna talk about their new product
offerings to get people really excited and pumped up about this
new stuff they're coming out with that's going to potentially
change their industry. Well, maybe not, but that's the story
that we tell everybody is, wow. This is going to be pivotal.
It's going to change everything as you know it, each team member
that you have, of course, wants you to dedicate an hour. The
product managers want to come in. They want to spend an hour
talking about the new features, the new capabilities, on why
everyone's world is going to change because of this
capability. It's usually something that's a very small
feature change, but we believe that it has changed the world.
Are you asking the right question, though, are your top
performing reps, whether they be independent manufacturers reps,
or whether they be your sales reps? Are they the ones who have
the most extensive product knowledge, or the top
performers, the ones who know best how to solve client
problems, how to uncover opportunities, how to ask the
right questions to get your clients to say, Wow, I need this
better than the alternative product that's out in the
marketplace. And what we find is that the top performers tend to
have the greatest sell sales skills. They tend to ask the
best questions. They tend to have the greatest curiosity to
uncover opportunities, rather than necessarily just having a
ton of new product knowledge. So if you want to introduce new
products, and you have new products to introduce, here's
what I would suggest you do instead, instead of spending
time talking about the features and benefits and capabilities of
this new product. Instead, have your product managers talk
about, why did you introduce this product to begin with? What
was the demand in the marketplace? What problem is it
designed to solve, and what questions should you be asking
as a rep to uncover the need for that product out in the
marketplace. So if you have a feature that, let's say, has to
do with HVAC equipment and how you hang metal, or whatever it
is, how you hang wires, then you better talk about, here's what
it does for installers that actually makes their life better
and reduces risk. You can't just say, well, here's something that
improves sheet metal or here's a new thing we want you to buy.
You have to explain to the customer what they would be
looking for. Say if you've been frustrated with XYZ, ABC in the
past, here's a way to solve that we found in our tests and our
studies. It reduces labor by 15% and reduces rework. Well, that's
a reason to buy it, not just the capability in itself. You also
want to solicit info in advance from your attendees that says,
Where are deals getting stuck? Where are we having problems out
there in the marketplace? What can the company do to reduce
friction and make it easier to do business with us compared to
other brands? Because now we're getting insight from them that
says, Wow, these guys actually care about what it's like to do
business with them. That's great. Now I understand where
the real value is. You also want to think through what can some
of those responses be? Someone might say, well, your stuff is
more expensive. If we get that in advance, we can say some
people have said it's more expensive. Here are three case
studies of why, even though it's a little bit more expensive,
people get a better result from this. How are your results
different? And now people go, Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. I
guess it does make sense that it is more expensive because we get
a better outcome. If you want to get top results for your team,
take a look at these Same Side, Selling Academy. Just visit same
side, selling.com to learn more. Create different role play
scenarios with the attendees, so you can model great
conversations and outreach techniques that drive results
for everybody. So you can say, look, here are ways to start the
conversation about this new offering. Here are ways to get
people to consider switching from what they've used in the
past to our solution. And then finally, ensure that the
attendees leave the event with actionable plans to reinforce
the concepts, and then set up a mechanism to reward ongoing
engagement, so you can create video based ongoing education.
Hey, we're gonna pull everyone together in a zoom session. And
we're going to discuss this, whether it's zoom teams, Google,
meet, I don't care, just some way for people to maintain
connectivity with each other and practice these skills. So
instead of showing up and saying, Here are new products,
here are new capabilities, here are the features and benefits,
instead remember, start with, here's this new product. Here's
the demand in the marketplace that prompted us to create this.
Here are the questions to ask to determine if your customers
might need this. Here's a way to start that conversation. Then we
want to understand where they're getting stuck today so we can
accommodate that and where we have friction in our process
that makes it harder or easier to do business with us, so
they're more inclined to do business with us than others.
Then we want to role play these different scenarios. Give them
tools to maintain connectivity with us going forward and
continue their education. See we can share all the information
about product features and capabilities via video we just
send out, but these types of interactions, practicing real
life sales, sales scenarios, those are things that work best
when everyone's in a room together, working on it, and
that's where we'll invest our time. And the people who do this
are driving dramatically better results than the people who
aren't. These are all concepts that we have the benefit of
experiencing every month in the Same Side Selling Academy, in
our Coaches Corner, where people are raising different topics,
role playing them, and getting real live feedback that improve
their outcomes. So if there are topics you'd like me to cover,
just drop me a note to Ian at Ian altman.com We'll see you on
the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. So long
you