Sales Managers are prone to ask two questions of their sales team:-
How much? and By when?
I have jokingly made the remark in the past that is all that a sales manager needs to manage his sales team. Fortunately there is more to motivating, coaching and leading a sales team than these two questions. These two questions pre-suppose that the only thing to focus on is closing sales.

However that is like telling a pro-golfer all he needs to do is be a good putter, forgetting that there is a lot of work to be done before getting to the green. Driving off the tee up the fairway, avoiding the bunkers and getting on the green. So in sales it is a series of steps and agreements throughout the sales process.

The steps may look like this:
Initial Engagement
Qualification
Identifying Needs
Specifying the Solution
The Proposal
Commitment (the close)
Follow Through

Most sales are lost because one or more of the steps in the process are overlooked without any agreement before moving to the next step.

Each step needs to built on a firm foundation before moving to the next step. And each step requires a certain skills set of communication to enable the sales professional achieve a commitment and a series of agreements which will allow him to move the sales successfully forward.

In future blogs we will discuss each step in depth, in the meantime visit our workshops on Sales Solutions

Colly Graham
www.collygraham.co.uk

Once people believe there is going to be a recession they start to feel negative about their selling prospects.

Do you have a clearly defined Sales Strategy?

A Sales Strategy is basically a calculated and tactical plan for acquiring new business, growing existing business and making and exceeding the company sales quota. As in all good plans you need to begin with the end in mind. What is it you want to achieve – be specific? Knowing what you want to achieve will allow you to formulate the necessary steps to achieve the results you are seeking.

• How Much?
• By When?

There are four basic parts of a sales strategy:
1. New business acquisition
2. New business acquisition tactics
3. Existing business growth strategies
4. Existing business growth tactics

Four Parts of the Plan
Sales Quota: This critical element of plan sets the tempo of efforts throughout the year and provides quarterly, monthly, weekly and even daily sub-goals for you to achieve.

Sales Territory: Refers to the geographic area, list of named accounts or specific market niche you have been assigned to in which you are to sell products, services and solutions.

Strategy: The plan necessary to accomplish the company’s sales’ goal

Tactics: The steps necessary to carry out the plan.
Analyse your existing customers – who has not bought in the last three to six months – go after them and bring them back into the fold.

Stop being a hunter and become a farmer – look at the activities of the farmer and apply it to your accounts.

With the farmer concept, you look upon your accounts the way a farmer would look at his land. The farmer cultivates, prepares, plants, seeds, waters, fertilises, weeds, protects, grows, develops crops, harvests and then starts the cycle all over again.

1. Cultivating – learning as much about your customer as possible to discover opportunities to see what you need to plant so that you can harvest the results.
2. Preparation – putting yourself in a better position to service the customer, building your relationship to understand his business at depth, asking questions to uncover and discover further opportunities.
3. Planting – using your skills as a problem solver to offer solutions for the further problems you have uncovered within the account. Helping the customer realise that he has further problems that you can solve.
4. Seeding – demonstrating how you can solve this problem.
5. Watering and Fertilising- showing how other customers have benefited by placing further business with you
6. Weeding – keeping your competitors out of your accounts.
7. Harvesting – requires that you get further business from the existing customer – you get more sales!
8. Continuous Harvesting – requires that you maintain excellent customer relations

And finally build and strength your relationships with your customers.
Build a relationship of mutual trust and respect with clients through rapport. Protect your accounts from competitors by adding value to the relationship by identifying opportunities that have a positive impact on their business. Today’s customers have become more sophisticated and demanding of higher levels of customer service than ever before. They want someone they can trust who understands their needs and wants.
Customer loyalty should be what we seek to give rather than what we seek to get.

As Zig Ziglar is famous for saying, “You can get anything you want in life if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

salesxcellence

1. In 3-5 years, half of what the person knows about selling is obsolete.
Sales technology is advancing at a radical pace.
2. Experience alone will not be enough to keep up with the changing market.
What would you do if the doctor said, “I haven’t read a book or been to a
seminar in medicine since I graduated from medical school 20 years ago.”
Sales technology is helping professionals keep their skill state of the art.
3. Why do the very best of every profession spend so much time in training?
4. Top sales producers spend approximately two weeks per year in training.
5. “The success of current business strategies and the development of innovations
frequently hinge on the skills of the sales force. Customer Service strategies are
impossible unless the sales force is well-trained in this arena.”
- ASTD, Annual Research Report.
6. A new salesperson’s enthusiasm will carry them for the first 90 days, then
selling skills must be in place or a dramatic drop (or total failure) in productivity
will occur. Without skill reinforcement, in 12 to 18 months another drop
(approximately 20%) will occur.
7.80% of first year sales people develop fears of selling and fail because
they lack the basic skills of selling.
8. Past experience and formal education have no correlation to success in selling.
9. Make your sales calls count. “Companies with less than ten salespeople
report an average sales call cost of $336.00.”- McGraw-Hill Research
10. “Sales people completing a selling skills intensive training program show
increases in productivity ranging from 35% to 1665%. Yet, an estimated 70% of
companies provide no selling skills development at all.”- ASTD, Annual Research Report.
11. Companies often lump product knowledge, motivational “rah rah” sessions
and technical skills development under the heading of “sales training.”
Yet none of these actually help the person sell skillfully.
12. We see training as insurance on our biggest asset – human resources.
Find me a company without that insurance, that has stopped training its salespeople,
and I’ll target that market and that company and have its business by year’s end. David Barcusee of Bergen-Brunswig.- Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, January 1990.
13.”95% of the training that’s done on the job is done so poorly that the job suffers measurably.
And both the trainer and the trainee agree that it’s the trainee’s fault, but it isn’t.”-
Training Magazine June 1993
14. “Great salespeople have an edge because they are able to let go of obsolete ideas…”
- Donald Trump – Personal Selling Power, September, 1993
15. After one year on the job, it costs approximately £60,000 to replace a Sales Professional.
16. After the first 90 days, the enthusiasm of a new job wears off and reality sets in.
Without skill development, 80% of “new to sales” people will wash out of selling
within the year.
17. How important is contact management? Industrial Distribution’s study
found that neglect and/or an attitude of indifference are the causes
for 82% of customers to go over to the competition.

SALES MANAGEMENT
1. Sales managers are primarily responsible for obtaining results through
the efforts of their salespeople. Their payoff comes through the development of
others. Yet, sales managers spend less than 15 minutes per month per salesperson
in actual skill development.
2. “…Selection and training of field sales managers has become one of the
most acute problems facing top management.”
- Harvard Business Review.
3. “50% of Sales Managers surveyed have never read a job description of what
they were supposed to do.”- American Management Association
4. “78% of Sales Managers were dissatisfied with their training or had never
received any specific training to equip them for their roles as Sales Managers.” American Management Association
5. “Only 1 out of 44 companies surveyed had any kind of company sponsored
sales managers training program.”
- American Management Association
6. Using the right interviewing and hiring techniques can reduce the number
of inappropriate people being hired by as much as 40%.
7. “Top managers today make more decisions in one month that their
grandparents made in a lifetime.”
- Kenneth Blanchard – Training Magazine June 1993

INVESTMENT:

1. “Based on research of small, medium and large companies, the medium amount
spent on sales training amounted to less £300.00. per sales person on training
2.. “Over the past 50 years, investments in job related training have
consistently outperformed investments in machine capitol. Quite simply, a
trained workforce produces more productivity gains than capital investments do.”
- Training and Development Journal, January 1990.
3. “By the year 2000, 75% of all workers currently employed will need
retraining. Technological and societal changes are reshaping jobs in every
industry. -Training and Development Journal, January 1990.
4.”75% of the people who will be working in the year 2000 are already in the
workforce. The only way they will have access to training is if companies like yours supply it.
Training and Development Journal, January 1990.
5. “The surplus labour supply of a few years ago has dwindled to almost nothing.
Companies won’t be able to buy talent, instead they will need to create it with training.”
Training and Development Journal, January 1990.

People buy benefits, not products. So we need to answer the all-important question:

“What’s in it for me?

A benefit is what the customer can expect to gain when he buys your product. The gain refers to the expectations that will be satisfied by the benefits your product offers – the psychological factors that come into play to prompt the customer to make a buying decision.

Once you have identified the buying motives at work, you will know which of the product’s benefits you will need to stress in your sales call.

The second step in your sales-call strategy is to analyse the customer’s needs and desires. Needs are the “must-haves” Your job is to find out by careful questioning which things the customer must have to be able to do his job correctly. In addition the “must haves” there is the “would like to haves” these are the extras that can get you the sales against the competition. These are the benefits that might not have occurred to the customer.

Every buying decision then whether to satisfy a must have or a like to have is motivated by something. So you need to discover the buying influencers.
These influencers can be:

• Financial Gain
• Avoid Financial Loss
• Convenience
• Save Time
• Be More Efficient
• Acceptance and Respect
• Quality of Life
• Beautify Home
• Pleasure
• Planned Purchase
• Relaxation
  

People decide to buy on expectations. They buy what they believe your product or service will do for them. They buy a concept of what they expect to achieve when they buy your product or service. The concept is the solution your product or service will provide. The benefits are how well your product or service fits the solution your customer is hoping to achieve

What solution does your product or service provide?

Colly Graham

www.salesxcellence.co.uk/

]]> http://salesxcellence.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/why-people-buy/feed/ 0 Colly http://salesxcellence.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/action-sales-management-coaching/ http://salesxcellence.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/action-sales-management-coaching/#comments Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:44:55 +0000 Colly Graham http://salesxcellence.wordpress.com/?p=23 ]]>

Have your people set specific goals and connect with them regularly to maintain accountability.

Sales Hurrah

Good questioning allows you to identify clearly and to qualify early in the selling process. It can help you understand the current situation. It helps build rapport and opens up channels of communication. It helps you understand the decision-making process. Questioning enables you to find significant difference between your capabilities and those of your competition. Good questioning can uncover your competitors’ weaknesses and highlight your won strengths.

Questions Open Control Confirm

Open questions cannot be answered yes or no or with a number. They usually begin who, what, where, when or how. They allow the customer to express himself freely:

“Tell me, what is causing this problem?”

“What is it going to take for you to solve this problem?

Write two examples of open questions you might ask?

Control questions allow the sales person to keep control of the subject matter being discussed. They might be closed questions where the only answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Control questions help the sales person to control the customer’s answer. First establish a friendly environment by asking open questions.

“What if there was a way to reduce the time in ……………………, how valuable would that be?”

“How important is it for you to control your costs ?”

Write two examples of control questions you might ask:

1 Confirm Questions summarise the sales person’s understands of the customer’s situation. It lets the customer’s situation. It lets the customer know that you understand the situation.

High impact sales training which increases revenue, improves margins, lower operating costs. We offer sales related training in both public and in house sales training courses, and sales consulting.. selling is learned through the experience gained by practicing the art and science of selling.

We train Sales Managers to focus on developing the knowledge, skills and strategies necessary to transform a sales team into a dynamic, productive force. The Sales Manager’s role is successful to the extent to which he or she is able to develop a highly skilled and productive sales force. In the end nothing else will matter.

Step your telephone sales up to a new level – in today’s marketplace being good is not good enough, being excellent is not enough that’s why we train outstanding telephone sales people.Telephone sales training designed to make compelling telephone sales calls that get immediate results. Practical training for results.Contact us