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1
Share and Make Sure Sales Professionals Understand the Realities of Your Business
One of the biggest assumptions sales leaders and managers make is that sales professionals really understand how the business operates and how it makes a profit.
Do not assume everyone understands the realities of your business. Ask yourself, do sales professionals understand how you make a profit and whatâs important to your operations? How about competitive intelligence? Have you researched and collected current
Assignment
Begin inserting financial operating metrics and competitive intelligence into your regular meetings with your sales professionals. Also use one-on-one conversations as an opportunity to share what the business is focused on, including the impact to sales, cash flow, and profitability.
competitor information that can be shared? Do they understand your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flows? How about your strategy, business brand, and key goals and objectives?
Epilogue
The best sales professionals relish opportunities to share in the realities of your business. This enables them to sustain a competitive advantage when selling against overly optimistic sales competitors.
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2
Align Your Sales Professionals to the âLikesâ of the Customer/Client
This is about relationships that your sales professionals
want to have with the customers/clients, and not about the fluffy âlikesâ that unskilled sales professionals put stock in as those that work with their customers and clients. Customers and clients know what they âlikeâ in a business relationship. Sometimes itâs purely transactionalâand they only want to purchase your product/service at the
Assignment
Create a client/customer profile that includes their general âlikesâ in developing business relationships. Share this information with the sales team and others within your organization to ensure this is used and helps facilitate building prospect relationships and maintaining current customer relationships.
lowest possible price. A relationship doesnât matter.
On the flip side and most important side of the sales process, itâs your sales professional and her/his relationship that matters. Itâs also about the investment he/she makes in solving a business problem. Skills and competencies associated with your sales staff will have to be matched to the âlikesâ (or, defined differently, âpreferencesâ) of the customer/client. Customers and clients donât know what they donât like. It will take extra effort for your sales professionals to uncover the âlikesâ or âpreferencesâ as part of their relationships, when they buy products and services or solve their business problems. Customers/clients are also likely to pay extra, or value the relationship more when their âlikesâ and their needs as an organization are matched to the sales professional.
People donât like to feel as though they are being sold. Rather, they like the opportunity to make decisions about their purchases. Coach your sales professionals to focus on allowing your clients and prospects to feel that they are the ones making the buying decision. You will experience a marked increase in closed.
Epilogue
Business relationships grow when you understand how your customers âlikeâ to buy, not to be sold. Being sold imakes your client decline a sale.
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3
Collect Feedback From Your Customers/Clients for Improvement
Improvement in your sales performance is an ongoing task. This is a motivational factor imbedded in the DNA of all top sales professionals. Your support in collecting constructive feedback will not only be welcome, but also will be a demonstration that you
Assignment
Develop a formal written and verbal customer survey process. Build a process that includes commitments to regular intervals of formal feedback and review of results.
are truly trying to comprehend the process of feedbackânot just for the sake of collecting feedback, but for the importance of learning how to improve the sales process. This translates into a motivating factor for your sales professionals. This should be a major priority, but donât get confused about only collecting feedback from your sales team. Sharing objective feedback also builds confidence in your customer relationships. By doing this on a regular and routine basis, your sales team will understand that it is an important part of their jobs to provide you with important feedback that they hear from their customers /clients. Used correctly with your sales team, feedback can also be tied to formal individual and team performance coaching.
If the information is handled constructively, your sales team will use it as a motivator to solve customer problems, address customer inquiries and complaints, and be willing to proactively provide you with a continuous loop of constructive process improvement-focused feedback. Along with your expectation to provide collected feedback on a regular basis, this will facilitate a continuous improvement philosophy for your sales teamâs ongoing growth and development as sales professionals.
Epilogue
Feedback is the cornerstone of sales process improvement. This applies to your customers/clients as well as your sales team.
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4
Benchmark Individual and Team Sales Performance
Itâs true that what you measure gets done, and top-notch sales professionals want to be benchmarked. This is the only way a top professional gets motivatedâby going above and beyond goals and objectives that have been set for past performance! Sales professionals are motivated by their ability to beat and exceed sales targets. Once these targets are set and agreed to, a top-notch sales professional will exhibit behaviors that coordinate her/his time and daily activities to beat and exceed sales goals and targets. Also remember that benchmarking sales metrics for performance allows you to see gaps in performance
Assignment
Identify and document your key sales performance metrics. Identify your competitionâs key sales metrics. Include this in formal individual and team performance appraisals.
that need to be addressed. In addition to increasing individual motivation, benchmarking can provide you, as the manager, visibility into the benchmarks your competition uses and perspective on how to beat them.
Take note as a sales manager: Your competition benchmarks their performance against yours. Your sales professionals are also knowledgeable about whatâs expected of their competitorsâ sales teams.
Epilogue
Because itâs in a sales professionalâs DNA to be motivated by metrics, goals, and objectives, benchmark their performance in order to help them understand how their performance stacks up.
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5
Align Sales With All Departments
Donât be a sales manager novice. If you want to be the best, then keep in mind that sales planning, budgeting, and forecasting must align with all the resource requirements of marketing, finance, operations, customer service, and manufacturing. This should be one of your major priorities on a recurring and annual basis. This also needs to be an ongoing part of sales operations management during any given fiscal
Assignment
In addition to the formal sales planning required as part of sales management, create a formal process for your sales force to collect and provide competitive /external sales information and competitive intelligence.
year. As you align your sales process to the rest of the business, also think about sales force intelligence-gathering and how the information you gather about your competition can be incorporated to help the rest of your organization perform better. The information collected by your sales team needs to be collected in a formal way, and continuously shared so that this information can be incorporated into communications with key operations of the business. Salespeople love to acquire, and are motivated by acquiring lots of intelligence about their competitionâtheir paychecks depend on it. Use the assignment here to include your sales team in the intelligence-gathering process. It assists in building a strong relationship with your sales team.
Epilogue
Sales professionals want to win and contribute to the ongoing sustainability of the company.
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6
Set Sales Goals That Are a âStretch,â Not Realistic
Mediocrity kills sales performance. Some sales professionals âsandbag.â Top-notch sales professionals are motivated by their ability to achieve and acquire more, more, more. If you want sales performance to be the best, and you want to highly motivate your sales team, itâs time to think about going beyond what is realistic and create and lead sales goals that are truly a âstretch.â
Assignment
Do not be afraid to set âstretchâ goals and objectives for your sales professionals. They relish wanting to achieve, and achieve to a higher level. Review your current performance and compensation plan. Identify areas for sales performance improvement and set the expected targeted performance. Include pay incentives to achieve the targets.
Most sales professionals also set goals for themselves that are higher than what you set for them. Ask for and have a continuous dialogue with your sales professionals about their goals and objectives, and what you have set for them to accomplish. You might also want to consider reviewing your compensation program so that you have the ability to stretch opportunities, not just meeting ârealisticâ goals and objectives.
Epilogue
Set the âstretch goalsâ and coach vigorously to help your sales professionals accomplish their goals. Watch them relish the challenge.
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7
Develop a Specific Sales Plan That Is Communicated to Everyone in the Organization
Beyond your sales team, the rest of the organization has a strong desire to understand how the business is growing through increases in sales and new cust...
