Create Easy Paths For Risk Averse Sales Reps

Top tier sales reps continually stretch their comfort zones.  They gain confidence by enhancing their professional and technical skills.  They focus on expanding their horizontal and vertical contacts within their accounts.  They smartly approach new prospects in unfamiliar industries and territories. They represent their entire product line and are always searching for new applications. They create and tell Success Stories that prove how customers enjoy significant results by overcoming challenges through the solutions they provide. 

Mid-tier reps risk daily disappointment from their status quo strategy.  Instead, they should expand their comfort zones to smoothly navigate an uncontrollable sea of customers, competition, economy and their own companies.

An integrated sales and marketing leadership team can make it emotionally easier for these safety seekers by cuing them into areas where top performers have blazed a path for them.  They can tailor these ideas to their own style, which enables originality and authenticity.

At a minimum, mid-tier reps should retell success stories of top performers as they develop confidence and skills to develop their own.  This content will expand their horizons and they will find it less risky to look for similar opportunities and apply similar solutions because others have blazed the path for them.

Build a portfolio of online press releases and success stories fit for the moment.  Make this part of ongoing sales training and an agenda item during all sales meetings.  Online Press Releases reveal why a customer or partner has selected your company.  Success Stories prove that you delivered on your promise. Video Testimonials make the story real.  

Success Stories Create Emotional Attachment to Your Brand

Don't Let Selling Interfere With The Sale - Instead, Tell Me A Story

A portfolio of compelling success stories proves that your company is in the customer results business and that you're not just a vendor of products and services.

With each one narrowcasted for a target audience, and without sounding like an infomercial, a Success Story inspires people to act. Each story demonstrates how you've tackled challenges similar to theirs with solutions that produced desired results.  As a retention tool, success stories remind customers of what you did for them.

Brand your company as an array of customer stories that can be narrated by your employees and by external people who draw their own conclusions, insert themselves into your story, and retell it in their own words.

Top tier BizD professionals are natural "Story Sellers".  The middle tier, who fear the risk of tackling new customer challenges, will learn what your company has done for its customers and feel less threatened when looking for new customer problems to solve.

If you don't tell your stories, you are wasting an opportunity to differentiate your company.

If you don't have compelling stories to tell, you probably compete on features, price and delivery, which shouldn't give you a high degree of confidence in your business.

Stories should be available in hard copy and online to provide more details that support the narrative. Online versions should include keywords that enable self-service discovery by those looking for solutions.

Email marketing campaigns can direct a story to the appropriate audience if your CRM system or mail list includes the right account and profile information.