Two summers ago, I presented the principle concepts to growing RMR to the executives of a large system integrator. After the presentation, I led a roundtable session with the objective of establishing action items. I was full of excitement as we were moving through the necessary items — they seemed to get it. They listened! They embraced the strategic approach! Then my joy came crashing down — we started talking about sales training.
One of their sales leaders proclaimed: “We already have a pretty solid program in place. We send our salespeople to a week-long on-boarding program when they start. We’ve also got a very good sales training program for continuing education.”
Usually, these are magical words to me. On-boarding? Continuing education? Fantastic! However, their programs were aimed at basic sales training and making sure their salespeople followed their process. Don’t get me wrong — it was a good program, but it is not enough to help them sell RMR.
“What about training specifically for your RMR services?” I asked.
Their answer: “We will just bring in the manufacturers to teach them how to sell their hosted services, and we can do a refresher session on our maintenance agreement.”
Excitement dwindled. Another victim about to spend a ton of resources to get minimal results.
The RMR Sales Approach
Security integrators have a tough time grasping the need for specific sales training for services that create recurring revenue. I completely understand — selling these services looks so similar to selling projects that one wonders why anyone would need a different training course. That is the challenge: realizing that selling these services are completely different than selling projects.
The primary difference between selling these services and selling projects is the approach your salespeople take with customers. When selling services, it is not about selling benefits — it is all about managing change. Your customers are not used to buying and using these services; they are used to planning a capital budget, planning a project, owning all of their data on their servers, calling you when something breaks and paying for time and material. This is how they have done business forever, and changing is hard to do, regardless of the benefits.
RMR sales training is an area where you can truly differentiate your company from your competition. It is one of those critical elements to success that does not seem important to most groups — and even if it does, many will not take the time to do it.
Three Ways to Train Your Team
What can you do? With your crazy schedule and limited resources, how can you train your salespeople to sell these services? Here are four ideas for a security integrator to train their sales team to sell RMR.
1. Make the program realistic.
Let’s face it, you are busy. We are all busy, but if there is a single group of people that are over-the-top busy, it is the leaders of security integration companies. Sales training for RMR services is one of those “important but not urgent” items. If you make your plan too ambitious, you will quit after a few weeks and turn your efforts to more urgent (and probably less important) items. Look at the long haul and don’t try to make your salespeople experts in the next month or so. First of all, they will not absorb it; secondly, you are too busy. Are you sensing a theme here?
Action items: Your RMR Sales Training Program can be built by following the simple steps below. Be prepared to be underwhelmed, but I promise that following these actions will deliver a sales training program to your team that will enable them to sell more recurring revenue.
Train on one service per quarter. That’s it. Focus on you maintenance agreement this quarter, hosted access control the following quarter, remote video monitoring the quarter after that, and so on. Create a repeatable training process for each service — don’t force yourself to reinvent the wheel every quarter. Such a routine could look like this:
- Manufacturer (or service manager for maintenance agreements) provides basic training on the service.
- Probing questions for the service that will make an emotional impact on the customer.
- Role playing session #1.
- Case studies. Have one or more of your salespeople share a success story with the team about the service.
- Role playing session #2, and make this session feel like a final exam.
Whatever you built for your process, cut it by a third. It is more effective to perform a three-step process very well than doing a below-average job on six steps.
2. Build a list of probing questions for each service.
If I had to name the most common mistake made by salespeople trying to sell new services, I would say that they present the solution too soon in the conversation. They are excited and they are salespeople, so they often jump into “let me tell you about this killer new service that will solve all your problems.” Although I love the enthusiasm, they will get knocked upside the head using this approach.
As stated in the opening, selling RMR services in all about managing change. One of the key factors managing change is to help your point of contact sell your services internally to the other decision makers. The only way this happens successfully is to get your contact emotionally engaged by asking the right probing questions.
Action items:
- Create a list of typical qualification questions for each service. There is nothing mysterious about these questions — they are the same probing questions you have been asking forever, with the general theme of “what’s your current situation?” Limit this list to six questions per service.
- For each “scenario question” listed above, create two to three “outcome questions.” Outcome questions ask “if you do or don’t buy our service, what’s going to be the outcome for you?” These questions need to reach the personal level and help your customers envision how the ultimate outcome affects them.
- Dedicate one training session to presenting all of these questions. You should ask for further outcome questions from your sales team. Get them engaged and make sure they are buying in to the concept.
3. Role Play.
I hate role playing — really, I hate it. I can speak in front of 2,500 strangers in the most relaxed manner, but ask me to play a role in a conference room with seven of my peers and I am having a panic attack. No one likes role playing, but everyone — and I mean everyone — benefits from it.
Action items:
- Do it. Role playing is such an uncomfortable exercise that most managers will just skip past it, but you have to do it. By the way, if you present it to your team in a transparent way and let them know that you are also uncomfortable with it, they will accept the exercise more easily.
- Create three scenarios for each role playing exercise. A scenario can be as simple as describing the contact the salesperson is meeting with, the type of company and situation, and the relationship your company has with them. You then list the goal. The goal could be: convince the customer to accept a meeting with you and your hosted access control provider.
- As the salespeople take turns playing the role of “salesperson,” a manager should play the customer, and everyone else needs to play the role of evaluator. As evaluator, they need to list three strengths and one suggestion to the performer. After each role playing exercise, the manager asks random evaluators to provide input. Don’t assign evaluators — make it random so no one ever knows whether they are getting called on or not. This keeps everyone engaged.
4. Get your manufacturers involved.
Let your manufacturers know your plan, and ask for their help. Most of them will embrace your request — they love helping their channel partners who get creative. They can provide help in many of the areas listed above, but their main role is to provide the basics in selling their services: pricing strategies, benefit statements, competitive intelligence, common objections, etc.
Action items:
It is actually very easy, but you need to let them know ahead of time. Simply tell them which quarter you plan to focus on their service — for example, in Q3 we are going train on hosted video — and check in with them periodically to make sure they are prepared.
Schedule the time and location, and let them do their thing, but know what “their thing” is ahead of time. Make sure they cover the items you need and they do not just pull out their standard presentation.
Chris Peterson is the founder and president of Vector Firm (www.vectorfirm.com), a sales consulting and training company built specifically for the security industry.
