If your sales team have reached their quota so far this year, congratulations are in order. You and your team belong to the 45% who have successfully found a path to high sales growth. Well done! Whatever you are doing to recruit, train and motivate your people, keep on doing it, do more and make it better.
If you and your team belong to the other 55%, stay positive and read on. Your journey to fix for your team’s sales performance starts here.
Sales performance is directly related to salespeople’s ability to do the job and their attitude doing the job.
I break it down in three strategic areas:
- Skills.
- Knowledge.
- Motivation.
They all need to be 100% in order to get the best sales performance.
The better equipped sales people are, the more likely they are successful reaching their sales targets.
Lack of sales skills
Poor sales skills are major obstacles to sales performance.
No matter the quality, size, price or other features of your product, salespeople need to be the best they can be in Qualifying*, Presenting and Closing. If only one of these skills is failing them, they will under perform significantly.
*According to the TAS group up to 40% of sales people do not understand the need to qualify customers.
- Coaching. Get each team member to score themselves on each sales skill using a scale of 1 to 10. The lowest scores are the areas where we should focus our development effort through coaching and training.
- Sales process improvement. Work with your team building or reviewing your **sales play book or sales process. There are always improvements we can make. Come at it from the customers’ perspective. What do we do for the customer to enjoy a positive buying experience?
- Use shadowing another salesperson as a powerful technique to build sales skills across the team.
** My experience is that less than 50% salespeople use a sales play book or have a sales process
Lack of sales knowledge
A lack of knowledge is a major contributor to missing sales targets.
There is an old saying ‘knowledge gives confidence’. This certainly is true in the sales profession where salespeople must be ready to answer many different customer questions. ***A salesperson is an expert and problem solver in the eyes of customers. They need to trust the salesperson before they make a purchase.
***According to Gartner research, sales people who assist buyers to make buying decisions are most likely to win the deal.
Remedies:
- Expertise. Invite product managers/industry experts to join your sales team meetings and run regular products and process knowledge sessions
- Gamification. Devise a product knowledge quiz for the team.
- Recruitment. Improve the product knowledge element in you boarding process by using salespeople to run a product session
Poor sales motivation
A lack of motivation badly affects sales performance and can affect other team members too.
Sales team motivation is perhaps best measured in how well the team is applying the skills and knowledge learned. To capture this, apply a simple activity-based and quality driven measurements; Key Performance Indicators
Salespeople who repeatedly do not complete CRM, miss key performance indicators and under perform in sales results, may just not appreciate the considerable commitment needed for real success.
Remedies
- Set clear target, activity and quality expectations. Review performance and support progress through scheduled, regular 121 sessions with your team members.
- Root cause analysis. Find out from your under performing salespeople what motivates them in the job and find ways to link that motivation to the required performance. Perhaps a review of the commission scheme is needed.
- Coaching. Coach or hire a sales coach to address the motivational, skill or knowledge issues.
During my work as sales coach I learn that in sales, everybody deserves a fair shot. A lack of form is a phase we have all gone through. We have to have eachother’s back.
Yet, if under performance is due to incompetence and there is no reasonable way forward, it is perhaps best to cut losses early.
Feel free to get in touch for advice and and support achieving high sales growth. gert.scholts@sales-coaching.pro
