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.

Improving Sales Productivity by Motivating the Sales Force

Christine had just recently been hired as a sales representative of a media company. Her job was to primarily develop new leads and generate more sales for her employer.

After going through the basic sales training (or induction) during her first week, Christine had been working real hard to meet customers and generate sales.

However, 2 months later and averaging 4 appointments a day everyday, Christine still had yet to made any inroads, let alone closing a sale. In fact, Christine was identified as one of the "high potentials" during her initial sales training with the company. She was supposed to become a "star performer" in the near future, and not the "laggard" she was now.

At the end of the second month, Christine was asked to attend "refresher" training, which was to re-attend the initial sales training (which she had when she first joined) with another batch of new sales hires. She was asked to "shadow" some of the experienced sales people, i.e. to go out with them on their sales meetings and learn from them. While most experienced sales people didn't mind bringing Christine along, a lot of those customers visited are old customers, and there's hardly anything that Christine could learn about developing and winning new customers.

Worse still, the experienced sales people in Christine's company were not transferring the sales leads that were meant for new sales hires and some are even transgressing into Christine's territory.

At the end of the 3rd month, Christine, along with other sales people in her batch of new hires, was fired for not being productive. In fact, most of the company's new sales hires did not stay on for more than a year. As much as 90% of the company's sales are generated by a handful experienced sales people, who in turn generated those sales from a number of existing customers.

The company had been trying to hire new sales people to develop new sales for new products in new markets with new customers, but with dismal results. Sales tanked, and there still isn't any clear indication how this pattern can be changed.

Striking the Right Balance

It is a delicate art for most sales organisations to strike a good balance to:

* Motivate experienced sales people to contribute more to the bottom line;

* Getting experienced sales people to adapt to changes in the market; and

* Hiring the right new sales people and getting up-to-speed ASAP

When experienced sales people get complacent or are resistant to changes implemented by management (in response to changes in the market), most companies are reluctant or even afraid to discipline (let alone fire) such experienced sales people. Since they generate the bulk of the sales results, and have built strong relationships with the key accounts over the years, they are pretty much "untouchable".

To counter the unhealthy bargaining power of experienced sales people, there are now some companies that are employing fresh graduates who have the energy, drive and commitment to be a lot more responsive to the decision makers, gate keepers and even the end users.

After some time, their hard work are likely to be paid off by winning new accounts. Some of these companies even went out of the way to cast more limelight on the high-performing "young guns" by giving them more attention during Annual Sales Meetings. Even though their sales figures may still have yet to catch up with the experienced sales people, it sends a clear message to the incumbents: If you remain complacent, your position as top sales person will be taken away.

Needless to say, some of the incumbents are not going down without putting up a fight. The more positive-thinking ones (who are the minority) will be motivated to work harder to win respect from both the rookie sales people and their management. The negative-thinking ones, on the other hand, may create some trouble, including:

* Leaving the company to work for the competitor (and bringing over their customers);

* Making things difficult for the new sales people by taking away their leads or transgressing into their territories;

* Using their clout to force management to give them preferential treatment

If management does not have the courage to intervene, the efforts to rejuvenate the sales force will fail.

Retaining the Right Sales Talent

Staff turnover in the sales department is always high. If the sales person performs badly, he will be fired. If he performs well, he will be poached.

To retain high-performing sales staff, companies have been offering all kinds of financial rewards and perks. Still, there will be some better offers that will beat your best offer. In such cases, you lose your sales talent.

To retain the right sales talent, companies will have to consider:

* What needs to be done to retain a person besides providing better financial rewards; and

* Who needs to be retained.

It is a common misunderstanding that sales people are motivated ONLY by money, and hence can only be retained via financial means. Research has shown that the motivating effect of financial rewards, even for sales people, are temporary at best. At worst, it makes experienced sales people using their relationship with key customers as bargaining power to ask for more money each time management wants to retain their services.

Neither is promoting high performing sales people to be managers a good way to retain them either. According to research, only 15% of the top performing sales people can be good managers. Appointing sales people who love to sell but hate to manage will simply lead to disastrous results.

A better way to retain sales people is actually to provide more public recognition of their efforts and contributions, as well as involve them in the formulating of new sales strategies and goals. Besides the money, sales people love the autonomy or freedom as well as the sense of achievement on the job. Giving them extra recognition company-wide sometimes beats giving them small increments in financial rewards over the long run.

Also, over the long run, it need not always be the current highest performers who will be future great performers too. Some experienced sales people that are not adaptable to increasing customer demands and subtle changes in the market may not remain as winning sales people in the future.

Training and Coaching as a Means of Motivation

Sometimes, new sales people will be de-motivated if they don't see the possibility of reaching their sales targets. In other words, if they feel that no matter how hard they try they will not succeed, then they won't even try at all.

Hence, many companies have used training and coaching as one of the means to motivate sales people too. Even most experienced sales people look forward to training and coaching session as well, as they feel there might be areas they can do better to win more sales.

However, most sales training and coaching programmes are implemented in sporadic and haphazard ways. Apart from sales training that are being outsourced to external trainers and consultants to train sales people, many companies have asked internal sales managers to conduct regular refresher training sessions, and more importantly, to be internal coaches for junior sales people.

While sales managers do have the experience, some lack the expertise to coach. To them, coaching is merely telling the sales people what to do, rather than getting the sales person reflect about what they can do to generate better results. In addition, since internal training and coaching can be perceived as something important but not urgent, as it is unlikely to be catastrophic if the training or coaching is postponed for a day or a week. Hence, many busy managers tend to postpone such training or coaching sessions so that they can handle their more urgent tasks on hand first. Unfortunately, there'll always be ore urgent things to handle.

So here are some tips for companies that would like to make their training and coaching sessions a little more motivating than it is right now:

1. If it's not written in the diary or the weekly meetings schedule, it won't be done. Get the sales managers to schedule in their training and coaching sessions AS IF it is an important sales appointment;

2. Keep the session short and specific. Unlike training that are conducted by external consultants, internal sales managers can conduct a 30-min or 2 hour training or coaching session that deals with specific work issues;

3. Don't just tell them what to do, get them to think as well. Given the current dynamic sales environment, sales people will have to think on their feet and adapt quickly. Knowing what to do sometimes is less important as knowing why to do it

c.j. is the trusted sales advisor who have helped international companies achieve quantum improvements in sales profits in China and beyond. He is also the 1st-ever sales trainer and consultant to speak at the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) International Convention. So far, c.j. has helped:

* A leading international hotel to produce the equivalent of an additional 5,000 room nights in China in the lull summer months of 2007
* A global leading architectural hardware company to increase the sales revenue of a key account in Shanghai by 10 times within 3 weeks
* The world leader in PC sales to transform their sales force to be more collaborative and solution-focused, and helping them to regain worldwide pole position from their nearest competitor.

Prior to this, c.j. was Asia Marketing Manager for a Fortune 500 logistics company, as well as Corporate Training Manager for Ringier AG, Switzerland's largest media group, in China, where he was responsible for sales team development, and helped increase the percentage of new hires to close their first sales within 2 months by 30%, as well as increase overall sales targets by more than 50%. Visit http://www.psycheselling.com/page4.html for more details.

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.