How to Get Your Sales Team to Follow a Process (Without Resistance)
In today’s competitive sales environment, the success of your sales teams demands precision, synchronization, and a powerful action-oriented process. However, the backbone of your business solely relies on the cohesion of your sales team. A proactive, winning sales team attitude can help you build lasting, loyal relationships with clients to close more deals. The main trick is how you manage and retain your sales team and navigate through the intricacies of the entire sales journey, which helps in reshaping the way you approach and achieve sales triumphs.
Understanding the Importance of a Structured Sales Process
In this blog, we will explore how to avoid any sort of resistance in effectively managing a top-performing sales team. Well, for starters, a company needs to build a positive work culture with transparent communication channels and dynamic yet strategic teamwork. This will optimize the entire sales process by implementing specific actionable sales strategies such as the MEDDIC methodology.
This tried and tested framework provides a structured approach to qualify leads or customize your sales strategy to target your customer throughout their buying cycle. This generally requires aligning your sales team with the sales principles of MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion) to navigate sales challenges and opportunities across your targeted businesses.
Though, in ideal conditions, this structured sales process looks refined and would be 100% workable if implemented properly. But, in practical terms, at some point, your reps can hit a wall, as it might be too overwhelming for them to follow such a complex sales process for the first time. This is quite concerning because 60-80% of the team is in dire need of a strategic approach focused on hitting the exact target agenda to boost your overall sales performance.
The Top Challenge: Why Sales Reps Resist Sales Processes
Top Objection #1: The Dangers of Letting Your Best Sales Reps Go Rogue
In almost any sales team, there are at least one or two reps who are the A-players, constantly exceeding quota and bringing in a healthy percentage of the overall revenue. They often have direct relationships with the big players and consistently good results, so they end up thinking they don’t need to follow a new sales process. However, the high-fliers fail to see the bigger picture that a more structured approach can lead to greater team-wide success.
Overcoming Resistance #1: No-Nonsense Strategy to Help High Performers Embrace the Process
Top performers, though a little restricted and comfortable in their way of thinking, are always on the lookout for exceeding their deal size. They need to see the data-driven statistics to understand the potential monetary growth for the long term. If the sales managers succeed in closing more deals quarter after quarter for the next year and bring in a hefty amount of sales commission, they should be rewarded to uplift their team-building spirit. Later, ask them to coach their team to make them feel their presence matters.
Top Objection #2: Understanding the Root Cause of these Complex Complaints
It is one thing to theoretically lay down a sales process that seems logical and easy in the initial stage, but in the practical scenario, the sales reps need to follow through the step-by-step sales process steps during their ongoing daily conversations with customers on their agendas. If the process is too complex to follow, the rep might feel intimidated to follow through, afraid of upsetting the clients, which prevents them from staying in control of the entire sales process. On the other hand, the customer might feel the sales team is too rigid or pushy with their own sales structure, which might make them feel their association is not being valued, making them inclined to move toward another better option.
Overcoming Resistance #2: Ways to Break Down the Sales Process and Make It More Digestible for the Sales Rep
The Sales Team needs to be trained in real-world sales dynamics. This helps them understand the steps that need to be taken to simplify the entire sales process. For this, the sales team might need a specialist who has been using this process for decades and has high sales numbers to back up his claims to inspire others. These experts can accompany their reps on-site to give them the practical exposure of implementing the new structure in small, manageable chunks. This will smoothen the entire sales process with time efficiency for both the sales rep and the client.
Top Objection #3: The Sales Challenges in Strictly Regulated or RFP-Driven Markets with This New Formal Process
If you have to regularly deal with governmental or heavily regulated markets, you might have a deep understanding of the competitive aspects of any Proposal Request. This generally happens if the sales rep is dealing with an organization partially or wholly owned by a government entity with multiple formal requirements. This is the reason that the sales reps couldn’t convince the client to go beyond the proposal criteria they have followed for ages. The need to follow the web of formalities and not the actual sales process can be a huge disaster, as RFPs shouldn’t be in command of the sales process. However, on rare occasions, if the RFP is directly involved with the client and generates demand, it can create a lot of complexities within the sales cycle.
Overcoming Resistance #3: Different Tricks to Maintain Process Integrity While Tackling RFPs for a Winning Team Culture
Train your sales reps to be strategic with the RFPs in which they were not involved in the initiation process. Instead, encourage your sales team to focus on understanding the client’s pain points based on the approved sales approach. This way, you will have a much broader chance to close the deal. However, on the rare occasion that they choose to engage, make sure they have access to key evaluators and decision-makers to maximize the chance of closing the deal. This ensures that the team does not lose sight of the overall sales strategy in favor of strict adherence to the proposal guidelines.
The Must-Follow Silent Rules to Convince Your Sales Reps to Follow Any Standard Sales Process
In order to create a positive work culture when it comes to adopting something completely new, it is common for the sales team to resist even the slightest change. This is not because they are not interested in a more proactive solution. However, it is not easy to transition from already existing sales prospecting tactics, which might bring out a lot of positive results. Though managing and retaining a top-performing sales team with precise actionable strategies to target the strategic growth opportunities and optimizing sales processes becomes significantly harder. However, if we follow these silent unwritten rules, we can cultivate an environment where all employees feel valued and respected to openly raise their concerns:
• Cultivate a Culture of Open Communication: Establish a culture where team members can share ideas, concerns and voice their opinions without fear of judgment. This encourages brainstorming and can help team members work through their differences.
• Encourage Regular Feedback Sessions: Create a space where employees are given the chance for open dialogues to identify areas for improvement, which encourages team members to contribute to the decision-making process.
• Set Realistic and Motivating Sales Targets: The targets assigned to the individual sales reps should be specific, achievable, and aligned with broader business targets to keep the team focused and motivated.
• Regularly and Strategically Document Important Updates: Use shared drives or cloud-based platforms like Google Drive to store and share important decisions or procedural changes to ensure that everybody is in the loop.
How to Embed MEDDIC to Help the Sales Team Follow the Sales Process Without Resistance
Other than the generic rules that a Sales Team must follow, we can also apply the MEDDIC training process, which can effectively improve everyday sales opportunities. This framework is designed with a methodical approach to ensure the sales reps follow the entire sales process with minimum resistance. Once a company master’s the MEDDIC theory, they can create their own targeted sales journey, from strategic planning and managerial involvement to easily integrating MEDDIC into their workflow. Here’s how you can successfully embed MEDDIC in your Sales Process step by step to avoid any struggles:
Involve Managers in MEDDIC Sales Training
With the correct leadership involvement, the sales manager can ensure that the MEDDIC methodology is adopted without resistance. The Sales Leaders can easily integrate MEDDIC methodology across the team by actively participating in role-playing exercises for team encouragement with follow-up check-ins for weekly reviews to maintain consistent application.
How it helps: The sales reps are less likely to resist the changes by the level of leadership commitment. They see their leaders using MEDDIC to evaluate deals, which encourages them to integrate it into their daily sales processes.
Also can read – What is MEDDIC and its sales process checklist
Plan for Embedding Success from the Start
It is vital to review the positive and negative aspects of the existing sales process prior to implementing MEDDIC in the team’s daily sales routines. A clear plan is necessary, as the adoption of MEDDIC can feel disconnected from day-to-day activities, causing resistance among the team. Don’t make this too complex; this just needs to be simple sets of questions like “How do we ensure MEDDIC is used every day?” and “What resources can accelerate adoption?” to set your sales team up for planned success.
How it helps: Having clear strategies, such as regular deal reviews through the MEDDIC lens, makes the process more approachable and part of the normal workflow, reducing resistance over time.
Make MEDDIC a Habit
Train your sales reps on MEDDIC to integrate it into their workflow for regular deal reviews using the CRM dashboard. This helps visualize MEDDIC components and encourages feedback loops that allow for continuous learning. Reps become familiar with identifying and progressing deals using MEDDIC’s six components, making it part of their everyday sales rhythm.
How it helps: The sales team naturally incorporates it into their sales process by making MEDDIC a habit. The more familiar they become with using MEDDIC, the less resistance they will feel. Over time, it becomes second nature, and the sales team begins to see the value.
Use Real Deals to Explore MEDDIC
Sales teams need real-life sales scenarios to truly grasp the practical application of each MEDDIC component, such as identifying the right Champion or understanding Metrics. This hands-on approach helps reps get better equipped to apply the framework in the field and recognize its value with the sales progression.
How it helps: When sales reps can see how the MEDDIC components work in actual deals, they become more invested in the process and are less likely to resist its use.
Communicate Through Successes and Show ‘Why’ It Works
One of the best ways to overcome any sales resistance is to demonstrate the positive outcomes of following the MEDDIC process. For example, after implementing MEDDIC, sales teams often see a significant increase in win rates, average deal size, and reduced sales cycle lengths.
How it helps: Sales reps can see the direct correlation between following the process and achieving sales success, making them more likely to adopt the methodology.
Have Patience for Gradual, Successful Adoption
Understanding that embedding MEDDIC into sales wouldn’t provide immediate results but needs gradual, continuous improvement to get there. With proper training, coaching, and time to internalize the concepts, sales teams will start to see the benefits of MEDDIC in their day-to-day sales activities.
How it helps: Patience ensures that reps have the space to learn and apply MEDDIC in a way that makes sense for them, leading to higher buy-in and fewer instances of resistance.
In Conclusion:
Sales teams need to feel supported and empowered to adopt a new sales framework effectively in day-to-day sales activities. Through strategic training, real-life deal application, and clear communication of successes, organizations can ensure their sales teams embrace MEDDIC without hesitation, leading to better forecasting, higher win rates, and ultimately, increased revenue.
