When salespeople aren’t meeting quota, leadership can try to guess what is happening. They can place blame on a process or on the people on their team. They can chock it up to just a bad quarter or bad luck. But truly strong leadership will see the revenue performance shortcomings as an opportunity to learn and grow — and conquer revenue goals in the future.
The latter is exactly what Pitney Bowes leadership did when their sales weren’t meeting their goals.
The Sales Training Program
In February of 2017, Pitney Bowes engaged Mereo to take more than 300 of its salespeople through a training program. After a lot of deep diving into their company, talking with their clients and observing all the cogs and wheels moving — or not moving — from the outside, we devised a training program to reorient the sales conversation from solution-centric to client-centric. We designed a three-step program:
- Training the sales management team with an abridged program (no training program will stick unless leadership is engaged).
- Spending two days with salespeople (and with their leaders at the table for support) in intensive training leveraging BOTH real life and role-play situations based on actual client scenarios.
- Holding ongoing reinforcement sessions post-training with individual feedback.
We educated the salespeople and their leadership on techniques and tools to engage prospective and current clients in the context of their business workflows. Through understanding typical customer processes, typical challenges those processes can present to the goals of the company and opportunities to improve these processes, the salespeople started to see ways to better engage their clients.
At Mereo, we believe in seek to serve, not to sell™. This tenet led us to develop training that helps salespeople think about the business processes of the customer and to stop thinking about the product or solution first. This allows for new, engaging conversations between the salesperson and the buyer.
The Results
Within six weeks of the training program, Pitney Bowes achieved 137% quota attainment, a 37% growth in their sales pipeline, and an increase in deal size and appointment setting success approaching 80%.
What Does This Mean For You?
If your salespeople aren’t meeting quota — or you’re eager to put your business on a path to sustainable revenue growth — consider investing in one of your greatest assets: your people. It doesn’t stop there, either. In order for any new concepts to take root, leadership must be 100% invested, and that means taking the training alongside your salespeople.