Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Building a Sales Team: Tailoring to Your Industry
Blog / Sales Management / Sep 8, 2015 / Posted by Nikolaus Kimla / 4974

Building a Sales Team: Tailoring to Your Industry

In my last blog, I pointed out that today salespeople must be customer-centric: that is, placing the majority of focus on the buyer, their issues and needs instead of the seller’s product only. In this blog let’s discuss the need to be industry-specific in these efforts, and what that requires.

So now we have a salesperson that has entrepreneurial spirit—a salespreneur. The salespreneur is customer-centric, honing in on the buyer’s needs and issues, and then applying sound product knowledge to those needs.

The next step is to ensure that a sales team is precisely focused on the industry they are in. In a rather obvious example, the seller activities for a company that builds custom cabinetry are going to be vastly different from one in investment banking. A CEO or sales leader in either industry could not take some generic sales process approach and try and apply it—it has to be specific to that industry.

The primary reason for this is that buyers in each industry will have completely different actions. Someone shopping for cabinetry will want to be assured of things like workmanship, the fit into existing space, materials used, and of course price. Someone seeking the services of investment banking would be concerned with interest rates, percentage of company being asked for, board seats required and other factors.

The seller’s actions must be customer-centric for those specific buyers (as we talked about in our last blog) and tailored for that industry.

A Sales Playbook

These actions must become a sales playbook for the company. Each of the stages in the sales process must have a “chapter” in that playbook—or might perhaps have its own playbook, one for each stage.

The playbook describes what must be done in each stage by the seller, in coordination with the buyer. Both the buyer and seller have actions that must be taken for the sale to advance from stage to stage.

The Right Tools: A Vital Necessity

For the playbook and all its coordinated actions to truly function, though, a company will need a CRM solution. But many CRM applications—especially traditional ones—don’t have the needed flexibility to be rapidly adaptable to specific industry seller actions as outlined above. As we’ve shown, no two industries are alike, let alone companies.

A “generic” CRM is old-school—it is seller-centric as opposed to customer-centric. You must be able to, through CRM, focus on that customer and their specific needs and buying patterns.

In this regard, Pipeliner CRM stands alone:

  • Pipeliner is instantly customizable to a company’s sales process, and can be changed on the fly when needed.
  • Within Sales Stages (steps of the sales process), specific tasks and activities necessary are also instantly customizable, and can even be made mandatory.
  • Pipeliner’s unique Smart Org Chart & Buying Center make it possible for salespeople to keep exact, visual track of all contacts and influencers attached to a company and an opportunity.
  • Exact records of factors specific to a buyer and company can be kept and instantly retrieved when needed, so all data pertaining to that specific buyer, company and industry is always available.

So ensure your sales team is focused in on exact, specific actions needed for your industry and, of course, for each company. Also make sure you have Pipeliner CRM to fully keep up.

Find out how vital Pipeliner CRM is to your success. Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Watch for the next in our series on Building a Sales Team.

About Author

CEO and partner of pipelinersales.com and the uptime ITechnologies, which I founded in 1994 and has since played a significant role in the development of the IT-environment. pipeliner is the most innovative sales CRM management solution on the market. Pipeliner was designed by sales professionals for sales professionals and helps close the gap between the requirements of C-level executives for transparency and the day-to-day operational needs of field and inside sales. I am also the founder and Initiator of the independent economic platform GO-AHEAD!, which orientates itself on the principles of a free marketplace in terms of liberal and social responsibility. Connecting people, the trust of business leadership in terms of values such as freedom, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit, and strengthening their awareness in order to create a dynamic boost within the economy triggered through spontaneity, all stand for the initial ideas surrounding GO-AHEAD! I studied in Los Angeles and Vienna and received my Masters's Degree in 1994. I am married and have 3 children My Specialties are in: Sales Management, Sales CRM Software, CRM Cloud Solutions, SAAS, Business Strategy, Software Development, "Pipeline Management", Social responsibility, outbound sales, b2b sales, inside sales, sales strategy, lead generation, sales process, entrepreneurship, coaching, mentoring, speaker, opportunity management, lead management, Austrian School of Economics

Author's Publications on Amazon

This is a practical manual covering the vital subject of Sales Management. I firmly believe that sales are the most important profession for dealing with today’s turbulent world and Econo my, for salespeople create wealth and produce peace. But salespeople need a competent, stable leader—and…
Buy on Amazon
Inside this eBook, you’ll discover a series of chapters dedicated to some of the most important areas facing sales today. From the sales process definition to measurement, lead generation, and proven sales techniques, this comprehensive eBook will provide you with the information you need to…
Buy on Amazon
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when…
Buy on Amazon
People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon…
Buy on Amazon
Sales management isn’t a simple subject by any means. But at the same time, it does have some basic and somewhat simple fundamentals—and that is what we are bringing to you with this book. First come pain points of sales management, and how to overcome…
Buy on Amazon
Today the Internet has transformed a seller's market into a buyer's market and author Nikolaus Kimla states that the role of sales has never been more crucial. It is now time to give salespeople the role they factually can play: entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They…
Buy on Amazon
This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company. Behind the development of that CRM application and, in fact, behind everything we do, we have a real cause. The story begins with…
Buy on Amazon
For the future, there must be a perfect balance of humans and technology. You have to have the perfect technology, andthen the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation. Today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps…
Buy on Amazon
The salespreneur is based on the concept of the entrepreneur. Before we can explain the salespreneur, you have to have some understanding of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur plays a crucial role in any economic system. The entrepreneur seeks out information that can be utilized for…
Buy on Amazon
A seasoned captain would never leave port without a competent navigator. In a similar way, a sales manager might be a total ace at "commanding the ship" – at inspiring and coaching sales reps, pointing out and getting agreement on making quotas, and keeping everyone's…
Buy on Amazon
..
..
.
Sales Process Automation
.
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. For information on cookies and how you can disable them, visit our privacy and cookie policy.