Understanding The Sandler Sales Process
While many prospects respect and value our blogs, white papers and videos, they have no idea how to take the next step to invest in Sandler Training and consulting from Sandler. So we’re sharing our approach.
Sandler’s four-step sales process is designed to make sure our odds of being effective at solving your issues with our sales training program are nearly 100 percent. During this process, we ask a lot of tough questions including:
During the initial conversation, typically a ten to fifteen-minute call. We typically want to know about your business and your reasons for reaching out to us. This helps us discern if your challenges are difficulties we can help you manage. Once we determine that a meeting makes sense, we outline and set up a meeting
For our Discovery Meeting we’ll invite you to our Sandler Office. Everyone who meets with us completes our business outlook survey, the results of which help us focus our discussion on the parts of your economic engine which you feel need work. Several prospects shared with us that completing our survey gave them an opportunity to uncover other challenges in their business that were being masked by observable “symptoms.”
In the process, we typically uncover some unanswered questions such as these 4 critical questions:
1. Can we be more effective?
2. How much more effective can we be?
3. What will it take to accomplish that?
4. How long will it take to accomplish that?
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Can we improve our sales culture and who can be more effective in their roles?
Can we sell more consultatively?
Can we be better at reaching actual decision makers?
Can we be more consistent with our sales process?
Do we need to change our selection criteria and can we improve ramp-up?
and more.
Your investment in the evaluation and benchmarking phase normally begins with each person on your team taking an online questionnaire.
Your sales force and sales management answer customized questions that give us unbiased data and provide us with the answers we need to formulate development plans. We typically interview each participant and their managers and the business executives to get understanding of goals for improvement.
We pore over the data, meet with you to discuss the findings, and compile recommendations on what can be done, how long it will take and what the ROI will be.
By this point, it’ll be clear to both of us what should be done.
The results of these surveys form a unique development plan for each person we train that is incorporated into our training. If we decide not to go any further together, this data will help you better develop your team.
Our prices vary, depending on factors like:
• The level of training customization
• Whether the training is private or part of our public (mixed) programs
• How we deal with remote salespeople
• Travel costs
• Timeframe and urgency of the situation
• How much hiring needs to be done
• The number of participants.
If someone wants to work with us, we normally find a way to make it happen. Our help will cost more than you want it to, but not so much you’ll have to walk away without help.
Let's face it, no one really has a budget for improvement.
But the fact is without your help identifying and sharing your investment level- we cannot design a plan.
The investment not only includes the monetary investment, but we will need to have in-depth discussions on how much time and other recourses such as coaching, accountability, self-study, management involvement, etc.
We will make recommendations but together we will tailor a plan to meet your goals for improvement.
Most of our clients are worried about the effect on cash flow and the risks involved in making sure they get a return on their investment. That’s the whole reason we do the sales force evaluation — to answer those questions and only engage if it makes sense.
Together we execute on the plan we developed. We deliver almost all our training at our business offices through our sales, management/leadership and customer care development groups. Our clients shared that they appreciate having a professional environment to learn in as well as the networking opportunities with their training colleagues.
As we onboard your teams, we set up self-study access, success paths, and behavior plans as well as coaching and accountability plans that were identified from the benchmarking.
Dates will be set up for client-review meeting and our progress. Discussion will determine how we need to adjust as the plan as it is continued to be implemented.
There is little risk to talk with us to figure out if our help makes sense. We are not for everyone, we understand that and as part of our up-front contract, we both have permission to tell each other if we conclude that it doesn’t make sense to become partners on the journey.
Want to take the next step, set up and exploratory call with Eric- ethompson@sandler.com or (920) 819-4186