Pierre Laboisse, Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at am OSRAM.
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Instilling an entrepreneurial spirit in your sales team can help your business grow in ways you never imagined. When your reps take personal ownership of the business they are pursuing, they are more engaged and motivated. As entrepreneurs in the field, they will always promote your business to potential customers, employees of other companies, and industry leaders.
So what exactly is an entrepreneurial mindset? It’s about a willingness to take initiative and seize opportunities, a passion to keep winning, a thirst to learn from customers, and a relentless effort to raise the bar.
When talking to your salespeople, recommend that they follow these four steps to become more entrepreneurial in their thinking, practices, and strategies and help accelerate your business.
1. Know your customers and their markets in depth.
Whether it’s an existing or potential customer, learning as much as you can about the person and company you’re trying to sell to is a time-consuming but worthwhile process. Knowing your customer and understanding their unique situation is crucial to success. The insights you gain lead to deeper, more focused conversations faster.
Think like an entrepreneur. Discover the desires and buying behaviors of all your customers and potential customers. Know the size of the market you are working with and the number of customers in your target range. Before you pursue a specific client, you need to know everything about them: name, position, areas of interest, past successes, current projects, and current challenges. Understanding where the customer gets their information and who their peer groups are can be very helpful. Learning about their educational background, club membership, hobbies, and interests helps build a personal connection.
Knowing your customers well allows you to make the best recommendations and find common success. At ams OSRAM, we are a technology-driven semiconductor company that co-creates with our customers. It’s important to bring them unique technology ideas, understand their needs, and identify opportunities where we can pursue success together. The steps outlined above help us create intimacy and trust that results in productive collaboration.
Understanding your customers at this level of granularity is a key attribute of most successful entrepreneurs and salespeople. Because when you know your customers well, you can deliver the solutions they need to succeed.
2. Seize opportunities to see the big picture.
At ams OSRAM, we encourage sales people to focus on the overall success of our customers, as well as our business, instead of focusing on their own industries and regions. Entrepreneurs care about the overall success of their clients, always keeping their company’s vision, mission, and strategy in mind. You want your sales team to do the same.
Cross-selling and teamwork are emphasized, which means that reps promote other products outside of their lines of business. For example, if you are focusing on automotive sales and your customer is discussing the converging world between automotive mobility and entertainment, maybe you can offer more AR/VR tracking technologies to guide the customer and create a win-win situation. -winner. This is important as more and more customers are expanding their capabilities and offering new applications and services. Cross-selling leads to increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction and better relationships with our customers.
3. Know all of your company’s products.
Naturally, entrepreneurs who start businesses have extensive knowledge of all the products and services they offer. They know exactly what these products and services do, how they can help, and who they can help. As a salesperson, you should have the same level of expertise in your own area and a high level of proficiency in your company’s overall portfolio. Take every opportunity to train on the products, solutions and systems offered by your company.
When a customer reviews the product or service you’re selling, you need to be able to answer all their questions quickly. This will build trust with the customer, and trust brings sales. You should be as familiar with the product or service you are selling as the entrepreneur who created and developed it. Then you can answer the questions confidently and accurately. You are not just a salesperson; you are a solution provider.
4. Use your creative side.
Entrepreneurs starting a business face an endless series of challenges. To solve them, they must be creative, agile and able to solve the problems that arise every day.
If you’re a salesperson, you know that feeling. You deal with multiple customers who have multiple needs and multiple questions. With only so much time in the day, you can’t always go back and forth between those customers and company management. You have to find answers on your own and do it quickly.
Successful salespeople meet this challenge by learning to be creative. They think things through, they consider customer needs and they are able to quickly identify the right product or service that they should offer as a solution to the customer’s needs. They are also prepared and familiar with their clients’ accounts, allowing them to quickly address crucial points. It shows that you care about your client’s success and are committed to doing so. Once you’ve developed the skill of creative thinking and kept up to date with the mechanics of the account, you can then apply it in many ways beyond direct selling.
Personal growth leads to business growth.
By training your team in these four steps, you can soon develop a more entrepreneurial, agile, creative and effective sales team. They will understand that sales mean more than numbers and will commit to a mission that goes far beyond quarterly goals and quotas. Your sales team will embrace the growth process, both their own growth and that of the business. In part 2 of this article, I will discuss other powerful ways to instill an entrepreneurial spirit in your organization.
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