Critical Skills For Sales Leaders - Improving Performance by Sharpening Sales Skills

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]

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Critical Skills For Sales Leaders - The 6 Key Elements of Wrapping Up the Sales

If you asked the majority of salespeople what "Wrapping Up the Sale" means, they will in most cases say it means to "close the sale". "Wrapping up the Sale" starts at the beginning of the sales cycle - most sales are lost at "Hello!"

Reaching an agreement or "clinching the deal", tying up all the loose ends, and getting to a yes decision is a critical selling capability in the sales process. As a salesperson, even getting a "No" decision is preferable to holding onto a "China egg" (an egg that will never hatch!). However, there is more to "Wrapping Up the Sale" than meets the eye.

The 6 Key Elements of Wrapping up the Sale

Assuming you have laid a firm foundation to the sale by qualifying your prospect, effectively discovering and helping the customer to self-discover their needs, and clearly demonstrating how your product/service meets the needs of all parties concerned with the decision, then there are 6 key elements involved in "Wrapping Up the Sale". These include:

1. Resolving concerns

2. Negotiating

3. Reaching an agreement

4. Implementation Plan

5. Follow up

6. Repeat business & referral strategy

Resolving Concerns

Prospects and customers present concerns and objections when they don't understand or agree with the claims you are making about your products and services. Many salespeople disengage from selling at this point and concede the victory to the prospect. Top salespeople, on the other hand, consider concerns and objections raised by the customer merely as a roadblock and an opportunity to question the prospect further and gather more data about their issue, with a view to further educating them on how they can help to solve their problem or dilemma.

Some concerns and objections may simply be intended to disarm you. However, if you panic in response to a concern that is a sincere obstacle, you may lose the prospect's confidence. The key is to:

First, concentrate on identifying the foundation of the prospect's or customer's concern. Is it a fear of buying something new? A pricing issue? A lack of technical knowledge? A lack of credibility or capability?

Second, because many customer concerns and objections are either covert or unspoken, or based on unclear requirements, further probing can reveal what you need to learn to satisfy their needs and wants. Objections are simply data requests - neither good, nor bad!

Third, when you allow the prospect to express the negative and unfavourable aspects of your offer, it brings the issues out into the open and allows you the opportunity understand the customer's uncertainty and provide the pertinent information to resolve it.

To help resolve issues, a great strategy is to include the customer in the solution process, as they're likely to prefer a solution in which they were involved. When you stop trying to overcome objections and instead work and partner with your prospect as a consultant or coach, you will be far more effective (and less fearful).

Negotiating

How you handle your selling negotiations will determine two key things:

Whether you bring home the sale and
At what margin you bring home the sale

Many salespeople mistakenly believe that negotiating is something you do at or near the end of the sale. Being an effective sales negotiator begins with your first contact with your customer or prospect. Your prospect is evaluating you; your company and the value of your product/service, right from the moment you make first make contact. Your goal is to be able to clearly demonstrate the value your solution will provide and negotiate a profitable agreement with the customer. There are a number of factors from your customer's perspective that have an influence on the outcome of your sales negotiation:

What is the extent of your customer's problem or pain?
How much do they want your solution?
How do they perceive the value of your expertise?
How specialised or unique is your solution?
How urgent is their need?
How much would they be willing to pay to solve their problem?
How much do they perceive your solution as merely a commodity with you as just another vendor?
How large is their risk quotient?
How much do they like you and/or your company?
What is their timing need?
How much do they need to WIN?
Can they approve the sale?

When you consider the above points, you see that your role as a negotiator proceeds all the way through the sales process. Your role is to constantly probe and seek out information that may be invaluable later should issues like price, terms, quality, delivery, etc. have to be negotiated. Don't wait until you're in the last round to begin negotiating! Remember that as a sales negotiator it is very important for both you and the customer to come away feeling positive about the experience. At the end of the day, the chances are very good that you will want, or need, to do business together in the future.

Reaching an Agreement

Assuming you have laid the groundwork correctly by uncovering and answering the prospect's needs and concerns during the diagnosis and capability presentation phase of the sales process, then "closing the sale" becomes a mere formality as opposed to an overworked and stressful affair for both buyer and seller. If you are struggling to close sales, you will need to examine your current methods for discovering your customer's needs and requirements and the way you demonstrate the value of your product or service.

Before you attempt to "close" the sale ask yourself "Do I know..."

The problems the customer wishes to solve
The objectives/goals the customer wishes to achieve
Company issues that will be impacted by the decision
Personal issues that will be impacted by the decision
Financial issues - What funding is available to solve these issues? What or who else is being considered?
Time frames
Buying influences - Who makes and impacts on the decision?
Decision Criteria - How are decisions made? What are the Next Steps? and
Have I clearly demonstrated my and my company's capability to meet the needs and specifications of the customer?

Implementation Plan - Sell back from the date they need it

When salespeople and their managers get together and discuss where the "sale is at" within the sales cycle, they tend to focus on what the next steps are to bring the sale to a conclusion. Their focus is on the "close date". However, to the customer, what is most important is the implementation or use date. It is vitally important that you work with end users and buyers in a collaborative effort to identify and work towards their implementation date. In other words, find out when your customer needs the product or service you are selling and then work back from that date to make a case for why closing now is important.

"Salespeople sell forward - but buyers buy backward" Skip Miller

The professional salesperson:

Works with the customer's buying schedule, which begins from the implementation date.
Identifies the activities and actions the customer must accomplish prior to the implementation date.
Gains agreement from the customer on the actions they must accomplish prior to the implementation date.
Sets their selling plans, scheduling them to align with the steps in the customer's timeline, working backwards from the date of implementation.
Uses the implementation date as a means of accessing senior managers and users (to clearly understand their implementation and other core issues).
Selling to the customer's implementation date allows you to accurately set your sales milestones and forecasts. It is also a great tool for bringing your proposals to life because it will include implementation considerations when many organisations only consider implementation after the purchase

Follow Up

Much of your success in selling can be attributed to what you do after you've made the sales call or the sale. Constant and persistent follow up is the key.

We work and live at a very hectic pace and the prospect or customer who hasn't called you back might well be interested in your product/service, but they just haven't gotten back to you yet. There is a great quote from Patricia Fripp, which says, "It is not your customer's responsibility to remember you, but your responsibility to ensure they never forget you."

The frequency and amount of follow up required is very dependent on the complexity of what you sell and the lifetime value of a customer in your industry. Research demonstrates that most potential customers or prospects won't buy the first time they meet with you. On average, they have to encounter a marketing or sales message on at least 5-7 occasions before making a purchasing decision. This makes follow-up an essential ingredient in the selling process.

Mark Victor Hansen said, "Don't think it, ink it". When you rely on your memory you are very likely to forget. Imagine for a minute that your brain was like a PC. What happens if you open too many windows on your PC? Eventually the system gets clogged and clunky and in some cases will just freeze! Something as critical to your sales success as follow up, should not be left to your memory; it simply doesn't work. The best and most effective sales and business people have developed their own follow up system to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Follow-up isn't just about selling; it's about developing relationships.

Efficient follow-up demonstrates that both you and your company have your acts together and really care about ensuring customer satisfaction. However, a large percentage of salespeople don't conduct sales follow-up. Afraid of what they might hear, they avoid the follow-up, often blaming their busy schedules for not getting to it.

During follow-up, it's important to ask open-ended questions and then listen. Asking open-ended questions gives you an opportunity to gather more information from the prospect to pinpoint his or her needs accurately. Ask questions that begin with; who, what, when or how many. Ask something that will engage the prospect and get them talking. Ask "How did you feel about what was included?" as opposed to "Did you get my proposal?" Or "Did it all make sense?"

Your follow-up should convey:

I am still interested in you and your current concerns and opportunities.
I have something specific and valuable to contribute that would benefit you and or your company.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.

A consistent, well-executed follow-up system that keeps past clients and customers close is the most effective method of ensuring a steady flow of referrals and repeat business. Whatever follow-up system you adopt, make sure it's easy to use or implement. All too often, when the system becomes too complicated or unwieldy it gets sidelined and placed in the "too hard" basket. A good follow-up system is essential for building a healthy pipeline. Take the onus off yourself as far as trying to remember things and build a system to do it. If your company already has an effective CRM system, use it. If not, develop your own. It is up to you as a responsible salesperson to drive the sales process; therefore, you must drive your own follow-up system.

Repeat Business and Referral Strategy

Today the best salespeople, selling to both Business-to-Business and individuals, are constantly looking to increase their focus and effort on attracting repeat and referral business. Most astute business people understand that customer loyalty is the most vital aspect of their business because their organisations will live or die from repeat business. No company can exist without customer loyalty and retention.

Customer retention is well known to be much cheaper than customer acquisition. As a result, top salespeople place a big focus on their customer retention and customer relationship management strategies. They constantly look at improving the share of business coming from their existing customer base.

Information technology helps both companies and their salespeople to achieve customer loyalty by providing tools for analysing customer data. This assists with making informed decisions, as well as managing the customer relationships from the sales process all the way through to fulfilment and ongoing follow-up support.

A customer's repeat business is earned by the salesperson that continually provides their customers with what they want. Without effective strategies or processes for consistently offering customers more of what they want, repeat business is earned less frequently. When you communicate news and offers frequently to both past and present customers via telephone, mail or email, it generally increases the frequency of repurchase and is a powerful step salespeople must take to grow their business.

Effective referral strategies

Referral marketing is a vital part of your sales strategy that you cannot afford to do without. Every salesperson knows that one of the most effective ways to grow their business is through referrals, yet most salespeople do not have a means of generating an ongoing source of referrals.

Referrals work because they come from a trusted source that has already benefited from your product/service and yet has no vested interest in your business. The recommendation is independent and unsolicited. In sales terms this means a rapid conversion rate. The sales process is rapidly accelerated because the service or product has already been tried and tested by a reputable third party.

As a salesperson asking for, and getting, referrals is a powerful and low-cost way of building or developing your career. It is a simple approach, which feeds on its own success, but has to be built on secure foundations. Most salespeople don't get enough referrals because of one obstacle - they don't ask for them! An effective referral generation program will take care of this problem by creating a system that generates a steady stream of referrals from your network.

Referral marketing is simple: if you provide excellent products or services that people need, they tell others of their experience. Those others will trust you and want to do business with you because of the recommendation of the original, satisfied customer.

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?"

Download Ian's latest white paper on how to recession proof your sales team in the next 90 days from http://www.salestutor.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Salestutor-Tools-and-Resources-Articles-and-Whitepapers.seo

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Critical Skills For Sales Leaders - Sales Performance Planning to Increase Revenue

How do you get your sales team to generate the greatest amount of revenue, consistently, year after year? Most sales managers think the answer lies in being aggressive, doing more sales activity, proactive business development, keeping the pipeline full and increasing the abilities of your salespeople so that they are more effective on the ground.

What about the value of better planning? World-class sales organisations establish aggressive sales objectives to achieve the best possible results. To accomplish these aggressive targets, they develop clear and effective sales strategy and Performance Plans. The Sales Performance Plan guides the sales leader's Sales Performance Coaching efforts, providing both them and the salesperson with a clear track to follow.

An effective Sales-Performance Plan can work to reduce your sales revenue peaks and valleys.

Generally the Sales-Performance Plan is an offshoot of the marketing plan, which is a critical component of the overall company business plan. Simply stated, the marketing plan defines your target market and outlines specific strategies which will attract, promote and sell your product or service. The Sales-Performance Plan details the essential steps that are required in order to retain the existing customer base, along with the specifics of how to reach potential customers and convert them from prospects into paying customers.

These plans should include execution details. Specifically featuring: who is doing what, by when, how and with what resources. The plan may also include details on how to deal with roadblocks and other obstacles. An effective Sales Performance Plan anticipates and create contingency plans against competitive threats, delays, etc

Leading sales managers have a healthy obsession with planning to ensure they reach their targets and better planning is the key to producing consistent and predictable sales numbers. An effective Sales-Performance Plan is made up of a variety of issues depending on your own individual sales environment.

Elements of a Sales-Performance Plan

A well constructed Sales-Performance Plan will not deliver sales results on its own. As with any plan, it must be actioned in order to produce a result. However, a well developed Sales-Performance Plan will direct every sales activity, greatly increasing the likelihood of the salesperson achieving their sales goals. The Sales-Performance Plan details the key objectives and the actions required to achieve the salesperson's goals.

o More effective Sales-Performance Plans will create, build and nurture a healthy sales pipeline.

o A well thought out and well-managed Sales-Performance Plan ensures your salespeople meet revenue goals and attain their sales quotas.

o A good Sales-Performance Plan will also include development and up-skilling objectives that you and your individual salespeople have determined to be lacking in order for them to achieve their sales goals.

The Sales-Performance Plan contains a brief description of the actions required in order to achieve the goals. The Sales-Performance Plan must briefly specify the following:

Who: Who are the individuals responsible for achieving what needs to be done?

What: What is required to be done to achieve the goal?

When: By when must the required actions be done?

Tactics: What tactics will be required to achieve the goal?

Resources: What resources will be required to achieve the goal?

Measures: How will success be measured, by whom and when?

None of your salespeople should ever begin their year, month or sales week without a clearly specified sales plan. The plan must lay out and detail their key objectives and action plans to achieve their desired results. Once the plan is submitted and agreed upon, it needs to be reviewed on a regular basis.

Target elements to plan for may include:

o Increase $ volume

o Increase the % in sales volume year over year

o Increase sales of specific products/services

o Increase average deal size

o Decrease average length of sale

o Increase $ volume by customer

o Opening new accounts targets

o Margin

o Ratio improvement

o Key account increases in existing product purchases

o Key account new product purchases

o Customer retention goals

o New product objectives

The Sales-Performance Plan needs to be split up into 4 X 90 DAY ACTION PLANS with set dates and strategies for their execution. The plan must be simply broken down and laid out for easy reference and follow up by you as the sales leader. Territory Sales-Performance Plans may also include some of the above measures as well as other goals for growing the territory.

Territory Sales-Performance Plans Territory Planning (a mix of customers or key accounts and prospects in a specified geographic location) is the process a sales team uses to analyze and plan around key accounts and opportunities within their assigned sales territory. For a Territory plan to effectively drive revenue, it must include both strategy and tactics and detailed actions for delivery of each objective.

A typical Territory Plan may include:

o Analysis and objective setting around the company's products and services, market segments, competition, trends, and profiles of key accounts.

o Specific key objectives

o Opportunity/threat analysis

o Account identification and estimates of account potential

o Account situational analysis and account strategy

o Detail on territory/account tactics - What to sell, for what price and by when?

o Key account increases in existing product purchases

o Key account new product purchases

o Customer retention goals

o Channel development

o Deeper key account penetration

o Re-establishing abandoned customers

Developing, reviewing and regularly updating your Sales Plan is critical to consistent sales success.

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?"

Access great tools and resources produced by Ian at http://www.salestutor.com.au/Content_Common/pg-tools-and-resources.seo

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Critical Skills For Sales Leaders - Sales Performance Coaching For People Development

Sales Performance Coaching is a function of 4 core practices of people development

1. Tuition This involves providing the salesperson with the direction, instruction and the knowledge they require in an effort to help them understand what they need to know in order to change their current approach.

2. Consultation involves identifying and analysing the specific issue or situation at hand and assist the sales person to clearly define the goal and map out a plan for their accomplishment

3. Coaching involves helping the salesperson to effect a change by self discovering the answers and thereby make adjustments to their current behaviour or approach. The Sales Performance Coach does this by providing them with regular guidance, feedback, insight and direction to ensure successful execution

4. Performance Management This involves ensuring the salesperson stays on track and holding them accountable to the measurable performance activities required to achieve the goal.

In addition to applying the above 4 core practices of people development there are 8 steps you as the sales leader need to take to implement and become an effective Sales Performance Coach:

The 8 Step Sales Performance Coaching Process

1. An execution focused plan.

Ensure you have a clear and well laid out tactical sales plan to achieve the required sales goals. The plan needs to specifically detail: who is doing what, by when, how, and with what resources.

2. Set clear performance expectations.

Before you as a sales leader can expect your salespeople to deliver what you expect of them, your first step is to be absolutely sure that, in your own mind and on paper, that you have clearly established what it is specifically that you expect of them. Once you have determined what you expect, now you need to have the expectation discussion with each of your salespeople.

3. Identify core behaviors for development.

Identify the key behaviors you and your individual salesperson have determined to be lacking in order for them to meet your expectations and execute their sales plan. These will provide you with the basis for and focus of your one on one coaching.

There are 5 Mission Critical Skills of Outstanding Salespeople. If you want your sales team to produce 20% more, the question you have to ask yourself is...are they 20% better?

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 sales productivity and sell more, more often.

The 5 Mission Critical Skills of Outstanding Salespeople are:

1. Time and Self Management

2. Business Development

3. Diagnostic Acuity

4. Engage All Parties

5. Wrap Up

4. Set aside quality time weekly to debrief the week that was and the week that's coming up.

The fact is, that if you will invest the time to conduct a weekly debrief the week that was and the week that's coming up, over the next ninety days, you will completely turn your sales around.

5. Set specific behavioral goals, measure progress regularly

Change is a process, not an event and therefore you cannot expect to send your salespeople on a training course and have them instantly change behavior. Once you have determined the specific dysfunctional behaviors and strategies that are road-blocking an individual salesperson, set joint goals to improve and change the areas of greatest impact.

6. Collect Sales person behavioral data by engaging in joint sales calls and provide honest and data specific feedback.

70% of learning happens on the job. The most effective method for you to observe behavioral change is to witness the individual salesperson perform in their role. By careful observation you can gather specific data to provide them with accurate feedback. Now you can effectively challenge and guide them to improve their sales performance and behavior.

7. Offer training where applicable

- Demonstrate the 'ideal" way. Provide the salesperson with resources, books, CD's, online tools, seminars and workshops to accelerate their learning and reinforce your message.

8. Follow up; follow up; follow up.

There is one skill that as a sales leader you absolutely have to develop. If you haven't done so already, this skill will greatly determine your success or failure as a manager of others. This incredibly simple and yet powerful skill is the ability to effectively follow up. When your sales team knows what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by and when they can ABSOLUTELY count on you to follow up on their commitments to you....then you will achieve results that up and until now you have only dreamed of!

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]

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Sales Success: Four Critical Steps

It's been said often, "Some folks can't seem to see the forest for the trees." Perhaps that's true in any arena, but it seems that it's rampant in sales, especially when sales are down. Time after time, when sales start to fall we find sales people becoming so caught up in the "slump" that they fail to focus on the four critical steps to consistent sales success.

Motivational speaking is a multi-million dollar a year business and, in large part, it is attended by those who need that inspirational reminder of what they already know. Not that speaking for a living is bad. I do that. The audience, however, through years of experience already knows the answer. They just need to be reminded.

Sales people tend to be motivated by immediate gratification. Those who have been in sales successfully for years understand that seeds planted today come to fruition later. Although there are moments of immediate gratification, frequently the fruition will take time. Motivational speeches are, perhaps, that little nudge to focus them not on the slump, but on the outcome.

Let's define the four critical steps to sales success, in order to re-establish successful habits. Mind you now, once you read this you'll know just how simple sales success can be, if only you'll focus on these four items and ignore all other distractions.

Question One: If your income comes from sales, are you making as much as you want or need?

If you answered, yes - Stop reading! You obviously are practicing the fundamental principles that create success and reading further is a distraction. Go back to doing what you do best.

If, on the other hand, you answered No - then you don't have enough sales. Sales create income and not enough income equals not enough sales. Solution - go get more sales.

Now, I know from making hundreds of presentations to countless sales professionals, some of you are a bit perplexed at my simplistic approach. How, you say, do we just go get more sales? We'll get to that, but for now stick with me. The first step is increasing your sales volume. Simple. There is nothing hard about this concept. It is critical to grasp, however, because the solution is always to the left. That statement will make sense a bit later.

Question Two: If you don't have enough sales to support your income needs, then aren't you lacking in enough people to see - enough presentations or appointments?

This one seems obvious. If you are not generating enough sales volume either you lack people to see (enough appointments) or your closing skills need improvement. More times than not, the issue isn't just closing skills, it's people to present to and close.

Let's look at this two ways: (1) if you are having trouble setting appointments from your leads (which, by the way is closing), then you will have more trouble closing the sale when you do make a presentation; and (2) inadequate presentations will always result in inadequate sales.

So let's look at our matrix thus far. Remember the solution is always to the left!

PRESENTATIONS = SALES = YOUR INCOME

O.K., so you get it? The solution is always to the left. If you don't have enough presentations you won't have enough sales. So what now?

Question Three: If I don't have enough presentations, then how many leads do you have in your pipeline?

Well, I don't know. Probably enough! Really? Ask yourself this question; do you suspect that highly successful business people guess at their income or assets? Better still, if you were having surgery tomorrow would you want the person administering the anesthesia to guess at the amount? Of course not! Then, why would you guess about your leads?

If you don't know how many leads you have, then you don't have a finger on the pulse of your lifeline. For sales professionals, lead acquisition and management is critical. You can take it to the bank, if you lack presentations, you lack a sufficient number of leads to support your sales efforts.

Let's go back...remember the solution is always to the left. Look at the matrix again.

LEADS = PRESENTATIONS = SALES = YOUR INCOME

The point is - you have to have leads in order to make presentations and enough presentations equal sales and that creates your income...right?

So are those the four things?

No - those are three things that help to generate your income. Your income is the outcome and we've just identified three of the four critical steps to success. So what is the fourth?

Question Four: Since you've identified that lead deficiency is a problem, what's the solution?

Good question! Any building built on a weak foundation is subject to crumble. Likewise, any sales professional who misses the foundation of sales success will struggle and, likely fail. This foundation is prospecting.

One of my dear friends and a great professional speaker, Gary O'Sullivan (www.garyosullivan.com) states in his book "Principle Power" the following: "Every day you don't prospect, the next day you must settle for a lesser degree of performance!" Ladies and Gentlemen...that statement is a fact. The foundation of consistent sales performance is prospecting on a consistent basis.

How many times have I heard someone say to me in a job interview, "You hand me a lead and I'll close 'em. I'm a closer." Well, let me say, I didn't hire those folks because they were applying for a sales position and closing is just a part of the process. True sales professionals do four things: (1) prospect for leads; (2) develop the leads they identify; (2) make sales presentations; and (4) close sales. Each of those represents the four critical steps to sales success.

Remember the solution is always to the left!

PROSPECTING = LEADS = PRESENTATIONS = SALES = YOUR INCOME!

Sales success requires constant attention to the four critical steps to success. For presentations to your sales organization to help them refocus or remind them of what they already know (but need to hear from a professional) contact Chuck Gallagher at http://www.chuckgallagher.com.

On a crisp October day in 1995, Chuck Gallagher took 23 physical steps? opened a door? and began a new experience that was life-changing. Gallagher explores that experience and the success that followed? while involving the reader in ways that could be life-altering for them. Gallagher captures the heart of the audience in an honest way that deals with human emotion. For information on Chuck?s keynotes and workshops go to http://www.chuckgallagher.com or for a free ezine on Ethical Choices contact Chuck at chuck@chuckgallagher.com.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.