6 Vital Skills to Stand Out and Sell More
By Collin Stewart
How can outbound sales reps stand out in a sea of competition? When every salesperson sounds the exact same, it’s time to do things differently.
Dale Merrill is a highly sought-after international speaker, sales thought leader, and co-author of Strikingly Different Selling: 6 Vital Skills to Stand Out and Sell More. Dale joined the Predictable Revenue podcast to break down those six skills and how we can use them to drive revenue growth.
SALES DEVELOPMENT IS A SEA OF SAMENESS
Dale first encountered this problem when outbound sales leaders started approaching him asking how they could stand out more. Their reps were having a hard time booking meetings, and when they did, they weren’t closing the deal.
The problem was that these sales development reps (SDRs) looked and sounded like everyone else. So Dale and his co-authors began to investigate how reps could stand out in a different and better way–a way that actually resonated with their clients.
WHAT WE’RE MISSING IN OUTBOUND SALES
Working with several global companies, Dale and his colleagues reviewed over 2800 top outbound sales professionals and watched almost 1700 client meetings. After each meeting, they sat down separately with both the salesperson and the client to ask how they each thought the meeting went.
The general response was that salespeople thought it went well or even very well. Unfortunately, their clients didn’t share the same opinion. Most C-Suite clients described the meeting as a waste of their time.
When Dale and his team probed a little deeper to understand the disconnect, they found that these clients had actually been looking forward to the meeting, but it ended up falling short of their expectations. Many of them said something along the lines of, “It wasn’t the dialogue we were hoping to have.”
So where are we going wrong?
The two biggest mistakes salespeople make
After talking more with the clients, Dale identified two key problems with the traditional outbound sales approach:
Salespeople talk too much–about themselves, their company, and their product. Instead, they should be focused on listening to the prospect.
All salespeople look and sound the same.
After partnering with an intelligence agency, Dale was able to analyze over 19,000 outbound sales interactions, and what they found was that 42% of the time, buyers couldn’t tell the difference between sellers.
These findings led Dale and his co-authors to develop a new framework for sales development, one that lets reps see themselves from the client’s point of view.
CLIENT-FOCUSED SALES DEVELOPMENT
The foundations of this framework focus on every sales interaction being three things: relevant, distinct, and memorable.
Relevant means focusing on what matters to the client, distinct means the salesperson must show them something different and better than the competition, and memorable means making the experience easy to share and hard to forget.
The end goal is that a meeting goes so well, that the client shares their experience around the coffee machine the next day because it stood out so much.