I got to take over the studio this past week with Adam Liebman from SinglePlatform who came in to discuss smb sales in a podcast we entitled “Excelling at High Velocity Sales.” Adam was the first sales hire at SinglePlatform and was tasked with figuring out how they were going to sell their product to SMBs with 100% inside sales model. Before SinglePlatform, Adam was a quality contributor to the early sales team at Yext where he learned the best strategies for getting SMBs on the phone and having them to actually listen. The type of sales team a company has is molded primarily by the type of product it is selling, but if its product is geared towards SMBs and you’re building a high velocity inside sales team, then these key takeaways should help you on your journey:
(1) Roleplaying is Key – Before Adam even thought about hitting the phones he spend weeks working with CEO Wiley Cerilli trying out different strategies for selling the product. Wiley would put himself in the shoes of the SMB owner and Adam would try to pitch the product. The first couple dozen times Adam pitched him Wiley was not convinced and did not “buy” the product. Over time the pitch got better and Adam was able to convince Wiley to “buy” more often. This roleplaying exercise allowed the team to hone their approach without tarnishing their brand by pitching real SMB in an unpolished manner.
(2) Create a Rigid Script with Room for Dynamic Thinking – At SinglePlatform Adam trained his team to memorize the script that he had created word for word. In fact, some of the sales team members continued to follow the script verbatim for their entire career. Having your team strictly adhere to the script you’ve created allows you to more easily understand when there is a problem with a particular seller or the pitch that you’ve given them. If you give your sales team too much freedom for how they pitch the product it will be much more difficult to diagnose the cause of any problems that might pop up.
(3) Continuously Look to Improve Your Process – Adam was never satisfied with the quality of his team’s sales pitch at SinglePlatform. In fact, he required his sales managers to listen to every sales person’s calls for at least an hour every single week. They also looked at numbers like call time, # of calls, and close rate on a daily basis, and examined how performance broke down across the team. If they saw a weak spot,a they would spend more time analyzing and hypothesizing while trying to figure out how they could improve their numbers. Every rep’s approach is going to be a little different, so managers need to be able to adapt their coaching plan to the rep at hand.
If you’d like to listen to the complete podcast you can do so here.
