MIAMI, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 02: Kendall Fuller #29 of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates after ... [+]
Closing the complex sale is a lot like winning a Super Bowl. It takes a great team and it takes a great coach. Congratulations to the Chiefs and let’s not underplay the role of Andy Reid and his coaching staff, who turned that team around since arriving in 2013.
No one player, not even a quarterback as great as Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes, can win all by their lonesome. The same is true for the complex sale.
Are you that rugged individualist that dreams of closing a complex sale all by yourself? Well forget about it.
“The days of the lone wolf salesperson closing a complex six- or seven-figure deal are gone,” says Alice Heiman.
Selling is in Heiman’s blood. Coaching salespeople is a family tradition. Daughter of the famed Miller Heiman sales consultancy co-founder, she has spent 20 years coaching sales professionals nationwide on a variety of skills, strategies and tactics.
To gain more insight into the importance of coaching salespeople to help close a complex sale, I turned to Heiman, a leading expert on the topic and the founder of Alice Heiman, LLC, sales consultancy for midsize companies, which strategizes with sales leadership to grow sales.
“Sale managers and salespeople really need to be on the same page,” says Heiman. In the complex sale, there are two key roles a sales manager must play. The first is coaching the salesperson to get positioned properly and the second is building relationships with key decision makers. Salespeople tend to find one or two interested decision-makers and base their whole strategy for closing the deal around them. Since we know that there are often six to eight decision-makers involved in a complex sale, this exclusion of key players often leads to stalled or lost deals.”
So how can salespeople learn how to widen their focus to include all key stakeholders in a potential deal? “The role of the sales manager,” Heiman asserts, “is to coach the salesperson to find the six or more people who will be involved in the decision, build relationships so they can understand how each decision maker will win when they get the results they need, and provide the information that will help them make the decision. Coordinating all of these people and understanding the results they need can’t be done alone, so coaching sales staff on what resources to bring in becomes imperative for sales managers.”
In addition to coaching, Heiman told me, sales managers have another key role: “On large complex deals, managers need to be involved so the salespeople can position them with the right decision-makers. Sales managers help the salesperson position other senior executives. This way, the strategy includes coverage of all decision makers with someone at a like level. The relationships are critical to advancing the deal. It really takes a team with a good strategy. Even if a complex deal can be closed by the salesperson alone, getting the renewal or growth within that account will take a team to secure.”
I asked Heiman for specific tips she would give sales managers. She emphasized that “managers need to ask questions in order to provide good coaching. Here are a few I suggest asking after salespeople return from a meeting with prospects: Who else will be involved in the decision that wasn’t at the meeting? What other solutions are they considering? Where are they in the buying process? On what factors will they make the decision? What is their timeline for implementation? What are the next steps? Usually there is so much missing information that it becomes obvious to the salesperson that they are poorly positioned. They will need to identify more decision makers, gather more information and use their own team more wisely.”
Sounds like super coaching advice to me.
