Perfecting the Perfect Sales Rep

What do you get when you mix the passion of an evangelist, the critical curiosity of a homicide detective, the empathy of a family counselor, the competitive zeal of a professional athlete, the discipline of a concert pianist and the persuasive capability of a trial lawyer?  The answer is an enterprise SaaS salesperson. 

 

Each of these traits are necessary elements of a consistently successful enterprise salesperson, as he/she needs to collect information from the customer to determine product fit and project urgency while coordinating internal and, possibly, external resources to support the sales effort.  The trick is to collect the right information, have that data be objective and remain focused on only what is critical to win.

 

The challenge, though, is finding people with these attributes.  Can we compensate for the reality that not all of our desired sales traits will be met by each salesperson?  The simplest way to augment our salespeople’s skillset is with a sales process, supported by an AI sales support system that has the ability to guide the sales rep through the sales cycle, including navigating the various obstacles faced along the way, while instructing the sales rep to mitigate these potential roadblocks.

 

The reality is that in order to truly help the salesperson, the sales process system, such as that provided by the MOIC Sales Engine, must strip the sales cycle from subjectivity and replace it with objectivity, ensuring that the system is always dealing with absolute truth instead of guesswork, faulty assumptions and a general lack of awareness as to what the customer is thinking/doing.  Part of the value of MOIC Sales Engine is that it focuses first and foremost on the observable customer behavior, versus our behavior.  For example, has the executive sponsor of our project accepted the ROI (Return on Investment) analysis (business case) that we have prepared?  This objective customer action provides insight as to the viability and urgency of the project.  If we are having difficulty creating the business case or identifying the customer's compelling event that is deriving their urgency, Virtual Dave can guide us to the tactics to use to uncover this data.

 

Let's face it: while all the obvious elements of a sales cycle are easily identified by virtually all salespeople, MOIC Sales Engine provides insights that the salesperson likely doesn't know (or doesn't want to know).  For example, since we know that we want to always demo last, Sales Engine, through its integration with Virtual Dave, explains how to ensure we demo last and why we must insist on demoing last.  At the same time, this data point objectively tells us if we are algorithmically positioning to win, versus being used by the customer as column fodder.  After all, we know that if the customer won't let us demo last, they prefer another vendor to win, giving us the opportunity to walk away from the deal and save valuable resources for a winnable deal.

 

 

The nuance is that it takes both tools to serve as foundational systems to ensure consistent sales execution of complex business systems.  The sales process system serves as the salesperson’s step by step roadmap (think Waze for salespeople), while the sales support system provides guidance to achieve each step in the sales process.  MOIC Sales Engine, by identifying early in the sales cycle what is inhibiting our deal from happening, effectively turns each rep into 1.5 reps, killing bad deals early and driving focus onto the deals that, objectively, are likely to happen in the predicted timeframe.  This objective focus improves our win rates, our sales rep participation rate and, ultimately, our exit multiple.

 

Finding the perfect sales rep is an onerous (and marginally likely) task, so augmenting their skills with tools such as MOIC Sales Engine and Virtual Dave relieves the sales manager from having to sift through a series of subjective beliefs that are deluding our salespeople and greatly diminishing our ability to win.  If your SaaS organization needs help providing these tools, please ask Virtual Dave or email dave@moicpartners.com.