Five simple questions to boost sales
There is way too much head scratching and hesitation going on in American businesses these days. We tend to believe that some sophisticated solution will bring clarity to our business problems. My question is, why make business more complex than it needs to be?Have the markets hit bottom? How fast will the economy recover? Are we working our way out of a collective “mental recession?” Should we change sales strategies? And the beat goes on.
It seems like most people have forgotten the Keep-It-Simple-Stupid philosophy. We forget because we tend to believe that some sophisticated, complex solution or clever new strategy will bring clarity to our business problems and issues. My question is, why make business more complex than it needs to be?
Whether you have a young company or a well-established one, as CEO/owner you and your sales manager should follow the adage, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.”
Focus on these 5 sales management questions to boost sales:
1. Do you have the right salespeople?
Are they farmers when you need hunters? There is a huge difference between the two types of salespeople. Managers need to assess every one of the salespeople individually to determine what skill sets each possesses. My rule of thumb is simple: how do the salespeople spend their days? If the majority of their time is spent in front of new prospects and/or growing business in existing accounts then they’re meant to stay.
2. Does each of your salespeople have a well-documented sales behavior plan?
A sales behavior plan is an outlined description of what sales activities each salesperson needs to do daily, weekly and monthly in order to achieve revenue goals. The plan includes the number of face-to-face sales calls required, the number of closes, average revenue per sale, amount of prospecting time, etc.
3. Does the sales department use a common sales language?
This factor is consistently overlooked in most sales organizations I’ve seen. The assumption is that the salespeople know how to sell, so why waste money on training. The purpose of a sales language is that it makes the sales manager’s coaching job more practical.
Wouldn’t it be easier to coach a diverse group of salespeople if they all used the same sales process? Wouldn’t it be easier to determine how a sale was lost or gained if you could point to a specific technique that was used during the sales call?
4. Do your sales managers both sell and manage salespeople?
If that’s the case then stop it, now! Sales managers have one responsibility and that’s to develop salespeople. Getting the most from your sales team is a full-time job in and of itself. A salesperson who continues executing poor sales calls compounds the number of lost sales. Multiply that by 8 to 10 sales people and see how that affects the growth curve.
5. Do your salespeople research their prospects before a sales call?
This is so incredibly simple that it boggles my mind when hardly anyone does it, especially with lots of info at your fingertips via the Internet. What if a salesperson made a cold call on you and during the conversation cited an industry article you had written? What if, during the call, the rep cited information about your company and industry and that knowledge led to a sale?
Here’s my spin on pre-call researching: my instinct says that closing ratios would increase by a minimum of 30 percent if salespeople researched prospects before they called on them.
These five actions are simple, but you’ve got to incorporate them into your ongoing sales process. As a reaction to a perceived shift in the overall marketplace, creating some grandiose new strategy to bolster sales will have no guarantee of success. Plus time may be wasted unnecessarily changing course rather than standing firm. A ‘steady as she goes’ mindset will better position your firm.
