Corporate Executives are always looking for ways to boost revenue. That usually means turning up the heat on the sales team to produce better numbers. Research shows that increasing the pressure to perform on the sales team doesn't necessarily increase revenue. Pressure to perform might bring in a few short-term sales, but at the end of the day, customers don't respond well when they feel pressured into buying.
If you want your sales team to produce 20% more, the question you have to ask yourself is, are they 20% better? The best sales leaders don't only increase the pressure to perform on the sales team; they set about making the individual salesperson more effective.
Building the selling capability of your salespeople to sell and build relationships is a very effective tool for gaining competitive advantage. A well trained sales team will set you apart from most of your competitors simply because most sales organisations don't really invest the time, effort and resources required to effectively train their sales teams.
Most companies will invest some time and resources to train their salespeople on their particular products/services. However, salespeople that rely on their product/service's capabilities to win business will, more often than not, leave sales opportunities lying on the table.
Companies that only train their salespeople on their particular products/services leave sales opportunities lying on the table The right sales performance improvement training, that is, sales training specific to your industry and market segment, assists salespeople to master the skills, tools and techniques, concepts and behaviours and attitudes required to enhance their persuasiveness, influencing the buyer to make purchasing decisions in your favour.
An effective sales performance improvement training program can reduce sales personnel turnover as well as enabling salespeople to:
Understand their customer's underlying buying motivations and maximise their effectiveness with each customer encounter
Qualify and prioritise genuine selling opportunities more efficiently, improving the cost effectiveness of their selling activities
Deal more effectively with customer concerns and objections
Plan, use and manage their time more efficiently
Maintain a positive mental attitude when things are not going their way
Salespeople who lack confidence in their ability to market your company's products and services may experience frustration and low morale resulting in unmet sales quotas and revenue goals.
There is absolutely no substitute for a well-trained and highly motivated sales team!
Effective sales training benefits new and seasoned salespeople alike Training is critically important for both the new and seasoned salesperson alike. Experienced sales leaders place a high premium on both product and selling skills training and purposefully design their programs to be timely, relevant, and ongoing. An effective program should:
Train your sales team to engage new prospects and how to sell based on value without simply dropping your margin
Train them how to effectively listen and diagnose the needs of your customers
Train them how to effectively ask the "hard" questions up front and qualify sales opportunities so they won't waste time and resources with prospects who can't/won't buy
Engage multiple decision makers
Train the team what to do to ensure they bring home the sale
And much more.
There are no shortages of skills in which you could be training your sales team. Extensive research has identified the five Mission Critical Selling Skills that a sales professional must master to effectively move beyond their current limitations and to achieve your sales goals. When understood and mastered, these five skills will dramatically help you to increase your salespeople's productivity and get them to sell more, more often.
The 5 Mission Critical Skills of Outstanding Salespeople are:
Time and Self Management
Business Development
Diagnostic Acuity
Engage All Parties
Wrap Up
In his best selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey makes a strong case for the fundamental importance of training, or as he calls it, "sharpening the saw". What often happens is that over time, the sales team becomes less productive because sales managers are reluctant to invest the time away from their busy schedules as well as the resources it takes to effectively train their salespeople. So train, train, train and continue to build the capability of your sales team. The result will show up in your "bottom line".
As one of Australia's leading authorities and coaches in sales management, Ian Segail has been involved in the coaching, training and development of sales managers and salespeople for over two decades.
Drawing on 25 years of experience in sales, sales management and leading an HR and training team, Ian brings a strong dose of fiscal reality and practicality to his works as a Sales Performance Coach.
Engaging directly with business owners and both novice and experienced sales managers alike, across a wide variety of industries and selling disciplines, the focus of Ian's work is to transform sales results for companies by improving sales management practices. Ian is the author of "Bulletproof Your Sales Team - The 5 Keys To Turbo - Boosting Your Sales Team's Results" and a number of business articles, business reports and white papers including "The fish stinks from the head!" and "Why Sales Training Doesn't Work."
Ian has an insatiable hunger for studying selling and people management and has passionately pursued answers to the question "How come some people can sell and most can't?"
He can be reached via http://www.iansegail.com
Read Ian's latest free report - "The 7 Most Costly Mistakes Sales Managers Make" here http://www.bulletproofyoursalesteam.com [http://bulletproofyoursalesteam.com/free-report/7costlymistakes.html]
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