Are you struggling with the overcapacity and commoditization that is facing the chemicals and materials industries? That struggle is driven in part by the ease of replication in production technology and a build-up of capacity, particularly in emerging markets.
The situation is made worse by high levels of economic volatility and uncertainty. You need to equip your sales team to fight back with major changes to your go-to-market strategies. Successful differentiation on your part will only come from your sales team itself. But as with technology sales 20 years ago, the level of skill required to succeed has increased extremely quickly.
Challenges You Are Facing
Effective sales and product training will drive revenue from high-margin products and value-added services (especially digital). It will place greater emphasis on industry influencers/specifiers and non-price decision criteria. It will also help refocus from products to ecosystems, e.g. the circular economy or precision farming. All that will require a shift in sales behavior and the ability to sell through insight, influence, and trust.
Your sales team will learn advanced negotiation tactics to resist price pressure and maintain margins. Sales training will arm them with the commercial acumen to understand the financial impact of the decisions that they make. They will also build the proactivity and skill needed to move away from “Friendly Helper” status in order to maximize the share of the wallet.
You’ll be able to improve your sales team’s forecasting ability and yield management skills. Training your sales managers in pipeline management and forecasting will be necessary. That will help you make the most of flexibility in manufacturing capacity, including JVs and plants with modular capacity.
In situations of uncertainty, you will need the ability to transform product and service portfolios quickly in response to PESTEL factors and changing customer needs. Sales training will enable your salespeople to uncover and sell against a wide range of customer needs and have the business acumen to work outside their functional comfort zone.
Your sales team and sales leaders will be equipped with the skills to sell effectively to procurement. That will enable them to defend value against sophisticated techniques like “best of the best” models, while also understanding and “selling against” the specific needs of procurement executives.
Research Based Sales Training
Our sales training and coaching programs are based on decades of experience, along with benchmark research including what sales winners do differently, top performance in strategic account management, and the top-performing sales organization.