Sales team failure and strategies to fix it

This sales strategy idea is aimed at business leaders whose sales teams are not performing at the required level.

Companies hire sales people to open doors, develop relationships and retain them.

In my experience when sales teams under perform, the most likely causes are:

  1. Direction. Lack of sales management
  2. Activity. Lack of relevant sales activity
  3. Skills. The team is not equipped well enough to win business

Here are straightforward strategies to start addressing these causes and get the team to perform once again:

1. Sales management

  • Communicate clear measurable sales targets and conversion ratios to the team and individuals
  • Share clear expectations of sales people’s behaviours
  • Motivate and manage the team to success

2. Activity management

  • Agree measurable prospecting and other lead generation activity
  • Agree number of new sales meetings per week/month
  • Agree Number/value of quotations per week/month
  • Number of new/existing customer meetings
  • Review activity and progress through 1-2-1 meetings and use a CRM application to capture all opportunities

3. Sales skills

  • Observe how others sell
  • Do structured roles plays
  • Hold joint sales visits with feedback
  • Conduct Training during team meetings
  • Encourage the right behaviours
  • Discourage the wrong behaviours

If your sales strategy is lacking elements of the above feel free to get in touch I would be delighted to assist. Learn more

#salesmanagement #direction #salesactivity #salesskills

B2B Sales Psychology in a nutshell

Cold Calling 1

Sales person: Hello, I have a product I want to sell to you

Prospect: Bye

Cold Calling 2

Sales Person: Hello, We help companies like yours save/make money

Prospect: Tell me more……………

Sales Meeting 1

Sales person: Hello, we are wonderful and fantastic

Prospect: Bye

Sales Meeting 2

Sales person: Hello, what would be a good meeting outcome for you?

Prospect: I need a solution to a problem that is stopping us making more money……………….

If you or your company want to know more about how to start great sales interactions and make more sales, feel free to contact me on +447738010170

Happy selling!

#salestips

Three October Tips For Sales Managers

The final quarter starts today. Its a great opportunity to reset the dials and push ahead to end 2017 with a bang. And, when done well, 2018 will start with a bang too!

Here are three Sales Management tips to help make it happen in October and beyond….

Provide clear direction

Start the month with clear activity and sales expectations for each team member. You are the leader and the team are looking for your direction.

Motivate the team

Motivate your team by sharing company goals and the difference your company makes for its customers. You are the buzz for your team.

Hold the team accountable

Coach your sales team members once a week based on their activity and sales outcomes. Help them to focus and achieve. It is your job more than any other sales management activity.

These three simple sales management practices will pay off every time, all the time.

If you want to learn more about this or any other aspect of Sales Management, feel free to contact me for a chat on 07738010170 or email me.

Have a great October!

Sales Strategy in threes

For some unknown reason I like the rule of three. Maybe it is because I can only remember 3 things at the time. Perhaps I have learned my customers like simplicity. It could be because I can only visualise myself in the past, the present or the future.

After setting sales goals, we need a plan to get there.

So here is sales strategy in threes:

  1. Acquire new customers
  2. Develop existing relationships
  3. Retain customers

Acquire new customers:

  1. Hire sales people who can open doors
  2. Train and motivate them to make sales
  3. Recognise them as the driver of business growth

Develop existing relationships

  1. Hire account managers who keep doors open
  2. Train and motivate them to build relationships
  3. Encourage them to become part of the customer’s organisation

Retaining customers

  1. Deliver on all promises
  2. Think with the customer to solve their problems
  3. Become an invaluable partner

If you want to know more about sales goals, sales strategy or execution feel free to contact me. I support businesses large and small with common sense advice and action. contact me

Beat Your Best in October

Here is a simple sales incentive that works every time and gets great sales results. It includes 3 tips for success.

Incentives tend to be won by the guys and girls who perform well regardless. Great for them yet, this all too familiar scenario can affect the rest of the team negatively. In that case a well planned incentive has the adverse effect to what it was intended.

So how do you get the whole team excited,in extreme effort mode, go in motivational overdrive and make more sales than ever before?

Here is an answer: Set the challenge to every sales person to beat their previous best month in percentage terms.

A simple example to show how it can work:

John’s previous best month: £50,000 new sales

Charlie’s previous best month: £ 20,000 new sales

John achieves £60,000 new sales during the incentive. A 20% increase on his previous best.

Charlie achieves £ 27,000 new sales during the incentive. A 28% increase on her previous best.

Charlie wins the incentive. Well done Charlie!

Set the prizes as you see fit.

Why not try this principle for October 2017 to get a great month:

Beat your best month this year in October. Top 3 percentage increasers in the team win!

Here are 3 tips to help you make it work:

  1. Introduce the incentive with a lot of motivational noise
  2. Have clear and simple rules
  3. Update the team member’s progress weekly and daily by the end of the month

When I ran an incentive like this, 83% of the team increased their performance!

If you want any advice or ideas on motivating a sales team to top performance, feel free to contact me.

www.thebestsalescoach.co.uk

gert.scholts@thebestsalescoach.co.uk

#salesteamincentives #salesincentives

Pointing fingers

Excuses in the worlds of sales, who needs them…………

It is easy to fall into the trap of blaming others for not getting the sale.

And when you believe the prospect’s attitude and behaviour is the reason why you did not get the sale, you might as well decide that the sales profession is not for you. It probably is not.

Here is the deal: Products do not sell themselves. It is the sales person’s job to convince the buyer the product/service being sold, is the best solution.

Don’t blame the customer, competition, traffic jam, marketing material, laptop or problems at home. When you point your fingers at others, three fingers still point at you. Don’t complain, condemn or criticize. Instead, pick yourself up, learn from the experience and go for it again. That way you will succeed.

Practical tips and sales ideas

#Salestips #motivate

5 simple accountability strategies

Clear direction is vital for any sales business.

The whole sales team needs to know what direction they are heading. Clear accountability comes a close second. In Sales this means every sales person takes total responsibility for delivering their agreed sales targets. There are no excuses!

It is the sole purpose of their role.

Here are 5 simple strategies to achieve accountability:

1) Agree sales targets

Agree clear activities and targets with each individual and for the sales team. Link these targets to the overall plan for the week, month or year.

2) Be S.M.A.R.T about targets

Targets work best when specific and measurable, attainable and timed. Write them down if need be and give them to each sales person. And make sure the targets are in the sales person’s remit.

Net Profit is not one of them, Revenue and minimum Gross Profit are. Link any bonuses to financial outcomes.

3) Trust the team

Trust your sales people with total responsibility for the group of customers they are account managers for or when chasing pure new business prospects.

Both “farmers and hunters” should have ownership of the relevant targets for their allocated customers.

4) Expect and Inspect

Once you have set clear targets and expectations, make sure you pro actively support progress.

During the one-to-one meetings I have with sales people, and in group sales meetings, results are reviewed, strategies are refined and we celebrate small and big successes. Everybody in the team shares their progress and we tackle any hurdles there and then.

5) Look forward

As long as the individual sales person wants to succeed, there is always a way forward. Too much looking back can damage morale. When coaching future sales champions I do not dwell on the past. We work on what we can do better and push ahead to target achievement.

Using these strategies over time has helped me to create high performance sales teams.

If you have particular issues,challenges or solutions related to accountability I glad hear about them.

gert.scholts@thebestsalescoach.co.uk

#accountmanagement #salesteammanagement #Accountabilityinsales

Stop buying excuses

Here is a short blog about excuses and how buying them jeopardised my first months in sales.

At the start of my sales career, I soon learned why I was selling products and how these products benefited customers. The key was speaking to as many potential customers as possible and eventually some would buy my products. It became a very successful formula until I started to take a few short cuts. The worst shortcut was to do the minimum amount of fact finding and presenting my products before the customer had committed to a solution.

I also learned more about excuses instead of getting results.

Here are some of them:

“customer was not in”

“could not get to the decision maker”

“she is thinking about it”

“they think our solution is too expensive”

“they will proceed after Easter”

“his boss was against it”

“the purchasing director will look at it”

“they have a supplier already”

“he is very happy with his supplier”

“he left the company yesterday”

“their needs have changed”

“there is not budget for this at the moment”

Sales started to drop and I found myself with a bigger pipeline every day. I was hanging on to every prospect’s promise to buy. Every time my Manager asked me about deal progress I cited the excuses as clear next steps. I clearly believed in them. I had bought these excuses rather than sold my products.

Things got worse when I decided that my time was best spent chasing these potential deals rather than prospect for more. My pipeline stagnated and one by one the so-called sales opportunities dropped out. So I was back to square one again and had to build my pipeline from scratch applying the basics in sales: prospect, qualify, present, close.

How to attract brilliant new sales people

How often have you seen a sales job advertised where the essence of the job has been left out?

Where is the WHY, the very unique reason the company exists for its customers?

I know great sales people will be attracted when they find core inspiration in the advertised role. They want to read statements like this:

John Chuck started Fishbone in 1983 because he believed there was a different way to prepare sea fruit. He invented the unique seapikker making life much easier for food processor staff.

We are as passionate about this today as he was when he risked everything and started his own business. Our fun and focused no nonsense approach to business is as fresh as our food.

Sales people want to be part of the founder’s dream and make it happen too, no matter how many free “Friday Fridges”, “Fitness Clubs” or pension schemes are on offer.

Come on recruiters and HR professionals; tap into sales people’s passion for the company cause, recruit them and they will perform without the need for endless training sessions, drawn out performance reviews and micro management.

Needless to say that you also want clear evidence of past sales success.

These sales people are not easy to find and certainly worth the wait.

#recruitingsalesmen #motivation #Why #SimonSinek #Motivation #Training #salesteammotivation #salesteammanagement