New Sales Enablement Ideas – SAVO’s AMPs, Part 1 – Consultative Services

If you are in charge of improving your sales team’s performance, you undoubtedly have hundreds of vendors calling to sell you the next greatest sales enablement or sales 2.0 products. That’s good news, because 10 years ago, no one was calling! There were just a few fledgling companies focusing on how to improve this space. On the flip side, it is a huge burden to sift through all the options to find the best. One innovator has found a solution.

(This post originally appeared as a guest blog on SAVO’s site.)

SAVO defined the Sales Enablement space years ago, so it makes sense that they are still the go-to company working to simplify and improve the sales process. During SAVO’s 10-plus years in the space, in partnership with over 200 customers, it has identified eight key sales enablement initiatives that are most critical to driving high-performance sales teams.

SAVO calls these initiatives AMPs, which is short for Achieving Maximum Potential. It’s a whimsical name, alluding to the fact that you can turn up the volume on the area that benefits your organization. While the name is a pun, these are seriously good ideas, presented as templates, best practices and product components that are guided by a SAVO consultant. The result? Your teams can rapidly implement and adopt best practices.

In an eight-part series, we will review each of AMPs. I’ll share thoughts based on my experiences setting priorities and gaining buy-in when building out sales enablement teams at three different companies.

AMP 1 – Consultative Selling

I consulted my bookshelf of binders that I’ve been collecting since the early 1990’s; I took my first class in consultative selling in 1996. It may be an old term, but sales teams need these skills now more than ever. Post recession, most of our buyers are burdened with more tasks than ever. At the same time, organizations are constantly reaching for loftier performance goals. If a seller can provide insights and thought leadership, it can help move him or her to that ethereal position as a trusted advisor and guide the decision making process.

Let’s focus on the root word for this methodology – consultant. In the U.S., there are over 400,000 companies that self-identify as consultants. Having worked with several, I’ve learned a few practices that sellers should adopt:

Immerse in the situation

Consultants launch a project with an immersion phase. They interview stakeholders, observe current processes, research the situation and synthesize the findings into a document that explains the problem and outlines the potential solution.

Evolve solutions collaboratively

Good consultants constantly provide status updates to ensure the client agrees with the evolving solution – much like what you would expect of a top sales person. Often, this includes educating clients and highlighting key points along the way. Clients and customers need to constantly learn how to do things differently and better.

Commit to implementation

The best consulting firms walk away from projects if clients want to hear a solution, but don’t plan address the need and fully implement. The best consultative sales people know they have to convince customers to commit to an adoption plan if they want their products and services to succeed.

While this is a simple way to look at the consulting industry, many of us agree that sales people need to spend more time immersing themselves in their clients’ business, developing solutions in close partnership with clients and challenging customers to buy only if they are committed to a full implementation.

Consulting organizations are very methodical about this practice, and you can enable this concept in your sales teams. Your sellers need model examples of immersion meetings with supporting guides for leading the conversations. They need to know who in the organization is building effective solutions and how they are presenting them to customers. Taking a firm stand with prospects to ensure they implement what they buy in order to realize its value is not easy. SAVO has collected best practices in all these areas and can help you amplify your consultative selling skills so you, too will begin to sell solutions instead of products.

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