For Steve Benson, field sales was the best direction for him. His career portfolio includes IBM, Autonomy, and Google until he started Badger Maps in 2012, a solutions provider for sales people that primarily works through automation to help them focus more on the actual selling.
Today, Steve talks about what you can do to be effective field sales reps. And even if you’re not in field sales right now, the strategies shared by Steve should still keep you handy.
Here are the highlights of my conversation with Steve:
Actual field sales experience vs. what’s taught in business school
Sales is not an academic field in the sense that there are not a lot of research about it or processes. It’s hard to teach it in the classroom.
The biggest headaches of field sales reps:
An overwhelm of data and processes that they don’t necessarily help them get a sale and are not their job. It gives them a “busy work” feeling that could prevent you from being efficient. (Ex. more admin work)
The Secrets of Being an Effective Field Sales Representative
- Product knowledge
Understand your product and your competitors’ products. Understand what the key value propositions are around your product.
- Having deep knowledge of your buyer and your buyer’s business
Aside from understanding your product, you also have to understand the decision maker, what makes them successful, what three things keep them up at night, and their drivers (what makes them personally happy and what are their key metrics or key performance indicators)
- Organizational skills
You should be able to juggle the development of new business versus the existing ones. As field salespeople, you need to be able to manage tons of activities.
- Badger Maps
Badger is a tool made for salespeople to help them juggle all these balls and organize their day in the field and build out their schedule in a way that makes sense as well as figure out the timing of activities throughout the day so they can:
- Keep track of activities
- Capture data you enter and send it into system
- Achieve 25% less drive time to get 25% more meetings and customer interactions
- Collaboration functionality that connects to a CRM thereby increasing usage
Steve’s Major Takeaway:
Leverage the technology that exists today to make your job easier and be more successful. Technology can’t fix it all but it allows you to do more of the actual selling.
Episode Resources:
Visit www.badgermapping.com and sign up for a free trial so you can test out how cool this tool is for yourself.
The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
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