Tailor Your Training: Step Three in the 5 Steps to Selling Services Success

Step Three in the Five Steps to Seriously Selling Services involves training. But, not any run-of-the-mill sales training. To be successful you need to invest in quality, services-specific sales training tailored to the issues and uniqueness of your situation. Generic, off-the-shelf packages have their place. SPIN Selling, Professional Selling Skills, and Strategic Selling are all good basic primers for box sellers, but they don’t cut the mustard when selling the invisible. The mindset, approach, knowledge, skills, and tools are different when selling services. Therefore, you need to put everybody through high-quality, services-specific sales training. Find services experts with training competence and tailor a program specific to the needs of your organization. Make certain that the following components are part of the curriculum: why sell services, how to sell intangibles, selling how customers want to buy, building trust, qualifying great services business, developing services power maps, selling services to the “C” level, compressing sales cycle time, and so forth. To keep things interesting and fun, incorporate lots of opportunity for participation, including custom role-plays built around specific scenarios that the sellers must address. It is important to get your product sellers both competent in their selling services capabilities and confident enough that they will try it with customers and prospects.

An important part of any good training is providing usable tools and teaching participants how to use them. Appropriate tools for selling services include feature-benefit profiles for all of your key services offerings, qualifying checklists, case studies of customers espousing the value of using your services, ROI calculators, and sales call planners.

To maximize buy-in to a probably skeptical group, when I develop selling services training I like to involve the top product salespeople, the Ace Flanagans, in the development of the course. I use one-on-one interviews to understand their thinking. I also conduct focus groups with my client’s best and average box sellers to understand their issues and challenges. I always interview sales management to learn their perspectives and their issues. Their participation will not only improve content quality, but also help gain needed credibility for the training. Even better, when possible I conduct interviews of key people within my client’s key customers to learn their issues, expectations, wants, and needs regarding services, and then I build this into the training. This is an extremely powerful way to drive change, as it is fairly easy to dismiss your own views as biased, but it is difficult not to pay attention when your best customers say they want to buy services!

Tags: selling services, training