Welcome to the same side selling podcast. I'm your host Ian Altman. Companies invest a ton of money in hiring salespeople, so why is it that so often we end up hiring people who just fail during the onboarding process? Well, I've spent the last 18 years helping other companies on maximizing the performance of their salespeople, and what I can tell you is that it's not for lack of effort. It's not because there's a flaw in the interview process. It usually has to do with a mindset of how we approach onboarding. See, the most common way that organizations onboard salespeople is they hire somebody new and they say go follow around so and so they're a high performing salesperson and just do what they do. Next thing you know, you get somebody who's eating cheese steaks for lunch every day and trying to learn how to write left-handed because the person they're following eats cheesesteaks every day and writes left-handed, and then we think, well, the problem is that we need more product knowledge. So what we do is we enroll them in training about product knowledge and what our company does and how we provide our services, and we indoctrinate them into all this terminology, all this jargon that has to do with what it is that we do. But what we don't do is we don't say to them, "Look, here are the right questions to ask our clients and prospects to figure out whether or not they have a need for what it is that we do. Here's what we can help the most. Here are the questions that really get to the truth in the buyer-seller interaction. So you're not wasting time chasing a rainbow that doesn't have a pot of gold at the end of it. See, if you think about it, what you'll often see in organizations is a disproportionate amount of time spent on product knowledge. Here are these new capabilities. Here are these new features. But what I want you to think about is this: Your top-performing sellers aren't necessarily the people who have the greatest product knowledge. They are, however, the people who typically know the most about what motivates clients to make decisions, what what is the catalyst for them to embrace change? How do they accelerate the process? What are the what are the steps that the client has to go through in order to change and in order to purchase what it is that you sell? So, what I want you to think about is how do we indoctrinate the team into that mindset. How do we make sure that they understand how to approach clients from the perspective of the same side with them? So you're talking about the kind of problems that you solve for organizations like them, and what things might be worth a change. Now it's something that we do in the same side selling academy, and it's always gratifying for me when I hear people tell stories about how wow our sales cycles cut from nine months to three months. Our average deal size has grown by 40% These these aren't ridiculous assertions for people, but instead, what it is is these are people realizing they're following a defined process, and then they can onboard new people to that. So I can say to somebody, "Here's the structure and process we want you to follow, and I can put someone into a learning sequence in our academy that actually steps them through that. I can ensure that if people struggle with the right messaging, we can come up with consistent messaging that runs across the organization, where if they're sending an email, our system can prompt them to include certain things in their emails that they might otherwise not think to include. It can help them realize that some of the things they might be saying are adversarial in nature, rather than ending up on the same side working together, instead of being in that death match where one side is butting heads against the other, so once again, it's not for lack of effort, it's not for a lack of intention, but instead it's realizing the top performers are people who understand a process, follow a defined system, have a defined step-by-step approach for onboarding, and then they have a way to practice and role-play this on an ongoing basis with their colleagues.
Ian Altman:
And when they get stuck, they can reach out to somebody who can walk them through those steps. And that's why we see people who go through a defined process; those the people start producing much faster, start having greater success and hit that hockey stick of growth a whole lot faster than the people who don't. So there's nothing wrong with talking about products. There's nothing wrong with educating people about different competitors and things in the marketplace. But recognize that your top performers are the people who have a defined system they follow. And when you onboard them, you quickly get them ingrained to that same system, so they're speaking the same language as everyone else, and that gives you the ability to evaluate their performance and know who are the high achievers and who are the people who need a little more assistance. And when we do that, that's when we start seeing these case studies of companies that grow sixfold, tenfold, fivefold in a very short time frame, because they're actually following a process that gets people quickly into a new methodology that drives results. If there are topics you'd like me to cover, just drop me a note to Ian at IanAltman.com. We'll see on the next episode of the Same Side Selling Podcast. So long.
