The most successful B2B sales people all focus on 3 key areas:
Incorporating these 3 disciplines into your daily, weekly and monthly activity will immediately separate you from the 50% plus of sales people who reportedly do not hit their targets. We see it time and again at our Sales Academy Programme that once sales people start focusing on these 3 key areas they start to unlock their real potential.
Have you ever worked out how much it costs to run a sales meeting? Not just the direct cost of having all your team in the room together, which by itself is expensive, but what about the opportunity cost of missing out on improved sales performance or having a detrimental impact on sales culture?
Many sales meetings are not only costing companies a fortune but may also be causing a negative return. Meaning that many sales meetings are not only delivering little in value but more importantly they could be causing a negative impact on sales culture and sales performance.
When our friends from Sales ITV surveyed 1500 sales leaders and sales people they found that 69% of sales leaders used their sales meetings as a primary motivational strategy for the sales team but 57% of sales people stated that they found their sales meetings de-motivational! Wow that is a significant disconnect.
As the new year begins, we’ve reflected on 2018 and would like to share five key insights on what we’ve seen in the world of sales. Through working with hundreds of sales leaders, sales people and companies in 2018, we get a unique view as to what’s working and what’s not.
What is the purpose of a sales person?
A good question to ask yourself or your team is what is the purpose of a sales person? If you’re only thinking about your company then you might say the purpose is to drive revenue to the business. I wouldn’t suggest for a minute that this isn’t part of the answer, but if this is the only answer then my suggestion is your positive revenue outcomes may be short term.
Money talks
I’m half way through an interesting book by Daniel Pink – DRIVE! It’s very interesting and worth a read.
Daniel says the model of incentivizing people with money is outmoded and “rooted more in folklore than in science”.
My initial reaction to this (and I stress this is solely my personal opinion, it’s not based upon research) is “that’s just not right”. It just doesn’t align with what I’ve observed over many years in, and running sales teams. Money talks. (IMHO) – especially for the good reps.
Is my reaction biased because I’m a very coin operated person? Maybe yes. Maybe I’m an outlier to his research.
But then I realized that Daniel’s research wasn’t for salespeople, it was for the population as a “whole” (my speech marks).
Ok, so that may make more sense – I think sales people are different to the general population. That’s what often makes them sales people.
And maybe I should qualify this position even more –maybe my position is even better suited to hunters – the Bus Dev people! The “outside” team. And not so much (still is , just not so much) to “farmers”.
So, what am I saying?
Sales Training course for up to intermediate B2B sales people.
To increase the capability of B2B sales people enabling them to increase skills, their focused activity and conversion rates. A gap of one month between each session will provide participants with the opportunity to trial new learnings and report back to the group.
Managers will be made aware of the content to be covered on each session so that they can support participants to implement new learnings.
So your sales team is not performing as well as you’d like them to. What can you do? If you’re like most sales managers, you will know that training is one of your biggest tools (beyond changing out people – but who says you’ll recruit better this time!) to drive better performance, which is so often the key to how to improve sales. But how do you make sales skills training effective?
One of the most fundamental components of a successful business is a high-performance sales team. By having qualified personnel selling your brand to clients, you can increase your bottom line and minimise cost-cutting measures.
But what is your current sales productivity like? Is your sales team performing at the rate that they should? Do you know where it should be right now? For many businesses, the idea of a productive sales team sounds nice, but implementing a comprehensive strategy is beyond their grasp.
Sourcing and recruiting sales staff who are superstars is just half of the puzzle. If you don’t have a robust and effective onboarding process for your sales staff, you might never get them to perform to their full potential. Worse still, you might not retain them for the long term. We’re going to share five tips with you today that will see you ramp up your new sales staff, and get them performing to the best of their ability, faster and more effectively.