Helping Trimble Loadrite Dealer Sales Reps Talk Their Customers Language
To sell successfully, you have to be able to step into your customers’ shoes, understand their headaches, then show them how you can take their pain away. Sounds simple, right? But it’s anything but…
Because to do it, businesses have to switch their way of thinking. You must move from focusing on your own goals, to obsessing over your customers’ aims. That takes time, curiosity, and empathy. And it takes the ability to step back from your day-to-day demands, see the bigger picture, and start playing the long game.
What happens when the product you sell evolves?
When Trimble Loadrite asked me for help, they were at a crossroads. Part of the global Trimble Loadrite network, Loadrite make weighing solutions for the aggregates industry. In plain language, they help quarries weigh big piles of rocks and gravel, before they load them into trucks.
For many years, these weighing solutions were pretty simple. Trimble Loadrite sold the quarries big scales. The quarries used them. Everyone was happy. Then the digital revolution came along, and other companies supplying machinery to quarries began to build weighing into their kit.
Trimble Loadrite had to evolve their offering to stay in the game and they launched a new Connected Quarry platform. This packaged weighing with data, to help quarry managers reduce waste, improve safety, and efficiency. It had huge potential but was a much larger sell. So, when Trimble Loadrite marketing manager Elliott Chisholm got in touch with me, he explained, “Our critical strategic initiative for this year is to help our dealers transition towards solution selling.”
Trimble Loadrite’s poor dealers were expected to sell a data product when they were used to selling big scales. They were feeling lost and struggling to explain Connected Quarry because they didn’t really understand how it helped quarry managers streamline day-to-day tasks.
The value of spending time with folks on the front line
We started by diagnosing the sales team’s pain. I interviewed regional sales managers and dealers in the US and audited their Connected Quarry sales material.
If I could only give business owners one piece of advice, it would be this. Spend more time with your customers and more time asking your sales team about your customers. You can’t do too much customer research. And you’ll always see return on investment in improved sales if you test what you learn and adopt what works.
With Trimble Loadrite, interviews with their sales team uncovered gold, helping us understand their customers’ challenges, and sales reps’ difficulties. You can do this for your business too. Here’s a few questions to get you started.
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• What are the key challenges stopping reps making sales?
• What’s most important to help your sales reps be successful?
• What’s working about your sales process now?
• What’s not working?
• How well do sales reps engage with info and training/ coaching?
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• What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to making sales?
• What do you need most to be more successful?
• What are the biggest problems our product / service solves for our customers?
• How do our customers talk about this problem?
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• What’s the biggest problem you have with X (the problem you solve)?
• How does our product / service help fix this for you?
• What’s the best thing about our product / service?
• How could our product / service help you more?
Empowering Trimble Loadrite dealers to sell in a more consultative way
As a rule of thumb, the more complex your product offering, the more consultative the sell. What I mean by a consultative sell, is a sales process that helps your client unpack their problems and explore solutions. This is what the Trimble Loadrite team needed to learn, and I recommended three tools to help their dealers sell in a more consultative way.
Sales methodology
I helped Trimble Loadrite adapt my three-step consultative sales methodology to their dealers’ needs.
Analyse. Establish rapport by showing your customer you understand their market, and you’ve helped people like them before. Then ask the right questions to uncover their challenges and needs.
Plan. Quantify the cost of those issues in terms of lost productivity and profit, then outline the value of the solution you have in terms of the positive impact it’ll have on your customers’ business, using your customer’s own language.
Execute. Get your customer’s commitment, close the deal, and ensure your product delivers the success they’ve been promised.
Sales playbook
Once you’ve a sales methodology, your sales playbook describes what you do at each stage of that process and reminds you how to answer questions from your customer along the way.
The best way to answer questions meaningfully, is to understand your customer’s world. They don’t want you to vomit your product features all over them. They want you to show them how your product can help them fix their problems.
Take a Connected Quarry example. If trucks are overloaded, it’s hard for drivers to control their speed when they drive down steep quarry roads. Not only is this a safety hazard, but maintenance costs go up, and they chew through tyres. Once the Trimble Loadrite dealers understood what overloading trucks did to the quarry’s bottom line, health and safety risk, and maintenance schedule, it was easier for them to talk about the benefits of accurately weighing aggregate before it’s loaded into the trucks.
Supporting sales tools
I also worked with the Trimble Loadrite marketing team to develop a suite of sales tools.
An interactive model showing the three key areas of a quarry where the Connected Quarry tool helps solve problems, along with question prompts to help sales reps uncover problems the quarry manager’s having in this area.
A quarry machinery guide, explaining problems Connected Quarry can fix, how these problems cause headaches, and how the tool helps.
Case study templates for dealers to capture success stories from customers.
A review of competitors, so dealers can explain how Connected Quarry compares.
Together, these tools gave Trimble Loadrite’s dealers and sales reps the customer insights and customer language they needed to sell Connected Quarry in a more consultative way.
Elliot was pleased with the outcomes from our collaboration, saying: “Ian assisted us greatly in achieving this initiative by providing independent objective research and understanding of the offering, customers and dealers. With those inputs he helped craft a customer focussed sales playbook, process and supporting sales tools which have been enthusiastically received by sales team and dealers.”
Removing barriers along the customer sales journey
When you make a sale, you go on a journey with your prospective customers. To move them from being unaware of how to name their problems to closing the deal, you need enough industry and customer knowledge to ask the right questions at the right time.
If you understand your customer's world and explain how you can solve their problems in their language, that will set you apart from your competition. Someone will always be cheaper than you. But if you can talk knowledgeably about the positive impact your product has on your customer's business and how you make their lives easier you’ll always have the edge.
If you want to evolve your sales approach to be more consultative and effective, I’m here to help. Check out sales coaching for engineers or contact me directly for a bespoke programme of business mentoring at hello@iancartwright.co.nz.