10 Tips to Drive Your Sales Performance Every Week
/Help, my sales team has lost their energy and focus! Come and motivate my team, please!
A typical result of a sales lulls, decline in deals, fewer phones ringing, fewer deals closed. In summary, your once active sales team's focus and energy have gone dormant. How long are you willing to wait till your team erupts again with sales?
There are only two options; let your team slowly become extinct or supercharge your team to drive sales performance each and every week!
The most successful organisations develop and live by "Sales and Client Focus" as a central theme for their business. There is no use having a list of tips unless we also have something to aim for, so I have included the goals and objectives of a sales and client-focused business as a starting point. You may wish to refine these to make them relevant to your business.
Sales and client-focused businesses typically have two goals for their sales teams:
Create and maintain long term mutually rewarding client relationships
Sell an agreed number or value of their products/services/solutions profitably. These businesses typically have four measurable objectives or key performance indicators (KPI's) for their sales teams:
Generate sales opportunities (Sales Leads)
Qualify sales opportunities
Develop profitable sales opportunities
Close profitable sales opportunities
Could you ask them how they think they are going and what else they believe that they could do to improve their sales performance? By asking, you cause them to think about their performance and set some higher standards.
The strongest need we have is to remain consistent with our beliefs. So help your team to build some expectations around doing more/pushing themselves to.
Here are 10 Tips to drive your Sales Performance every week:
Know and believe in the products/services/solutions you sell. You can't transfer your confidence about your solution to your clients if you don't have confidence your company can deliver accordingly. You need to know how your solution will help, and why it’s worth buying.
Show your clients you care about making a difference. People buy from people they respect and trust.
Create and maintain a positive attitude. People avoid negative people because they have enough stuff of their own to deal with; you don’t need to exhaust them further. People are attracted to individuals who are confident and positive because we all want to be like that.
Always be networking and prospecting. Get your face out there, develop your personal brand. You can't close it if you haven't found it.
Take responsibility for a successful outcome. You can make sales and provide excellent client service to exceed their expectations, or you can make excuses, but you can’t do both.
Do more listening by asking questions. Uncover your clients’ wants, needs, and pain. You will make more money when you align what you deliver to how your clients make their money.
Know and understand your company values; ensure all employees including those in higher-end management are following them. If you or those in your team are feeling lost, find time to sit down with the salespeople and re-familiarise the values to ensure you are following and upholding them. It could steer them towards future sales and save them from possible disaster.
Go face-to-face more often! If deemed important or you want to leave a lasting impression on the client, try to find time to do a face-to-face meeting. You can follow up over the phone and only use email for an audit trail. Remember, if you’re not, someone else (one of your competitors) is.
Focus on setting and managing client expectations. Set price/value expectations early. Remember, never give away value because it's almost impossible to get it back.
Always be up-selling. Your clients need you to be up selling; they can't afford to forget anything that may put their project at risk.
Always be seeking completion. Your clients are busy; they want you to assist them in crossing things off their to-do list, I mean who doesn’t like crossing things off their to-do list.
I threw in one for free! Now how can you use this?
Here are some ideas on how you could use the info above this week:
You could print out the list and discuss it with your management and your sales meeting.
Look for ideas to implement that will help your team drive sales performance.
Your team could print a copy and carry it with them in their folders as a reminder to help them keep focused.
Your sales managers could use the points as a checklist to assist them coaching their team and as a review list after sales calls.
The goals and objectives could form part of your sales team's job descriptions. If you haven't got sales metrics in place or if you need to review your sales metrics you could consider the objectives/KPI's listed above.
Developing and establishing your organisation’s sales and client-focused structure helps to leverage your sales team to deliver more than modest results quickly. We all know that people perform better when they are doing what they enjoy. Driving your team to success will create a more focused and energised workplace and culture giving your team a change of pace and supercharging their performance weekly.
Develop salespeople who are confident and focused on winning; your clients will thank you for it.
SG Partners can train and develop your team. Contact Us
