Experienced Belbin users and experts in sales training “Organised Solutions” use Belbin to achieve great results with sales teams. Here John Butel of Organised Solutions tells us how they do it.
Learning to understand the way we work is the catch cry of today’s personal development. One of the best and easiest tools to use to do this is Belbin Team Roles.
We have been using BELBIN to improve sales people’s ability to engage, negotiate and close customer business, and it is producing tangible results.
Organised Solutions, use a TRAIN-COACH methodology, and run a BELBIN based sales training program called “Sales Psychology – reading your customers’ mind”.
Using BELBIN Team Role profiles, sales people learn the 9 different Belbin team role types, their characteristics, similarities and differences. Once established, sales people map their Work Styles, to define how they typically sell.
In many cases this works well, usually with their existing customers. The program then uses the Observer Words to refine their abilities, balancing their selling approach to improve their business conversion.
But the big improvement comes when they realise their last 4 BELBIN role types is their Selling Achilles Heel!
Using real situational cases, each sales person explores an analysis of their “difficult” customer behaviour traits based on their knowledge of the Belbin 9 Team Role types.
The objective is to select which 2 of their bottom 4 role types represents the customer behaviour. Sales people use these selected roles types and analyse using Belbin Sales Psychology charts to formalise their next sales strategy approach.
This helps build a process of empathising how they need to change their sales approach to “connect” with this new and often unfamiliar BELBIN Work Style.
In a recent example one of the sales people had been struggling to close a new customer for 2 months. They’d completed all the standard opportunity checks and balances. “Need, Budget, Decisions Makers, Timeframe & Outcome”.
Everything checks out! During the live Situational Session, they analysed which team roles this client was exhibiting and build a Belbin Map of way they prefer to BUY.
This gave the sales person a new sales strategy to close the customer. Within 24 hours they had the order and the customer was on board.
Since that time, with Organised Solutions Belbin-based sales coaching, this sales person has gone from strength to strength, improving they forecasting consistency, closing sales easier and hitting their sales targets.
In another example a new sales person, who had come from different industry customer service background, started to question whether they had the skills and capabilities to be a sales person.
When their Belbin Profile was examined and compared to typical sales team members, theirs clearly showed more customer service and attention to detail skills versus the typical BDM sales skills. Rather than expect a complete change of Belbin styles, during the a post training coaching a new selling strategy was devised to leverage their existing style (TW-IMP-CF-RI) to reframe how they sold.
The results within 1 month were obvious. Using their ability to connect with people, they easily gained appointments (TW-RI). By asking process oriented and detailed questions about how things were done , they quickly mapped out a process improvement and was easily able to document the details helping to define how the customer could move from “current Status” to a better outcome (IMP-CF).
Using their different Work Style combination, they were able to sell larger contracts than most, with long term annuity revenues giving her immediate sales results.
The result was by leveraging their existing BELBIN Team Roles to their advantage they become more successful than the typical sales person’s Belbin profile.
Belbin helps sales people turn selling UpsideDown.