Increase Your Sales Throughput with Process Alignments
| No matter what you offer for a product or service, customer buying habits have changed and organizations are becoming increasingly frustrated by a lack of market understanding, conflicting strategies between marketing and sales departments, and a lack of understanding about buying decisions. These frustrations are leading to unfocused selling efforts and wasting precious marketing dollars.To combat this, organizations must align their sales & marketing process to answer key questions in each stage of the prospect’s buying process in order to convert market opportunities into sales. Here are some pointers about what you need to accomplish when the prospects are asking the following quest Why do I need to solve this problem?
The customer is looking to learn so you should teach them in the way that they want to learn. Connect your teaching to something they’re passionate about but remember to be polite and keep it relevan Why do I need you to solve this problem? The customer needs to make a decision so you need to become a trusted advisor by creating relevance, building credibility, demonstrating value, and being honest about limitations Why should I buy from you now? The customer is looking to commit so you need to motivate them by providing a reason and making their decision easy by eliminating risk. How do I get the most out of my purchase? The customer is looking for confirmation so you need to continually add value, fix all problems as they arise, and inspire them to demonstrate why they made a good decision. By aligning your sales process to your prospects buying process, you will shorten the sales cycle and utilize your marketing dollars more effectively because your efforts will be focused. |
Maximize Sales Opportunities through a Division of Labor
With the sales function in most companies looking remarkably like production did prior to the industrial revolution we can apply the same division of labor principles to the selling function in order to increase productivity or in this case “sales”.
The primary duty of a sales person is to convert new opportunities into a sale but most companies do not allow them to perform that duty because salespeople are increasingly expected to perform non-selling activities such as customer service and even fulfillment duties. By assigning the non-selling activities to other positions in the organization, a sales person will be able to increase performance of their primary duty of converting opportunities into sales. But who in the organization should the non-selling activities be assigned to and how do all of those people and activities work together to increase the number of opportunities for the sales person? The positions and their respective duties should include:
The Promotions Coordinator is responsible for communicating the product or service offering to targeted prospects in order to generate leads. What is your company doing to keep the top of the funnel full?
The Sales Coordinator is responsible for ensuring that leads are followed up with by the sales people and that the sales people’s calendars are full at all times with business development meetings. They are also responsible for communicating the result of those meetings to the departments responsible for fulfillment and ongoing customer service. At the end of the day, sales people should only be reading what is in the CRM and not entering data.
The Technical Team is responsible for maintaining selling capacity by developing unique offerings to the market, providing marketing materials, automating standardized communications, and monitoring key activities such as business development meetings and conversion of opportunities into sales.
The Salesperson should only be responsible for conducting the business development meetings and converting the opportunities into sales. Additionally, a company may be able to decrease the amount of sales people since non-selling activities can be performed by more administrative and technical skilled staff.
The number of people dedicated to the above listed positions will vary depending on the size of the company, the amount of products, and the number of opportunities that are being generated by effective marketing but by having the right people in the right positions with the right procedures and the right promotions for the right product, a company will maximize the amount of selling opportunities and can guarantee an increase in their sales.
Stop Wasting Money on Sales Training!
Ask any sales manager about the need for continuous sales training and you instantly get agreement that it is important. So why isn’t there more of it going on? The fact is, most money spent on sales training is wasted. Typically, it annoys the sales team, disrupts your sales opportunities, bores the talented team members, and is totally forgotten within 30 days.
This is true for three reasons:
1) Credibility – “Who is this sales seminar leader and why on earth should I follow his/her advice?”
2) Relevance – “Maybe this stuff works in the X industry, but I don’t see how it applies here.”
3) Reinforcement – “I’ll implement these new ideas just as soon as I have the time.”
You can get around these issues and realize a greater ROI from your training budget with an internal “Sales Excellence Committee”. Put the best of your best sales talent on it. (i.e., those who are most respected by the rest of the team) and that alone will take care of missing links one and two.
Next, provide proof that you’re serious about using the knowledge of these folks for the benefit of all your reps. In other words, provide funding for and relentlessly conduct monthly 1/2 day “SEC” meetings. Their objective is to identify, clarify and communicate sales best practices and integrate them into tactical actions that produce the fastest, most tangible results for your business.
At the risk of being repetitive …the mission of your Sales Excellence Committee is to:
1st – Identify the best sales practices of your best reps
2nd – Clarify – write them down in specific detail
3rd – Communicate – make sure ALL your reps know how to replicate the power of each best practice.
Many firms find it helpful to use an outside facilitator to start and keep the ball rolling. This person would need all the classic qualifications of a sales trainer PLUS expertise in knowledge management and process engineering. Your best reps will always be the best source of sales tactics and strategies that work. Don’t waste time and money on standardized sales training. Tap into the gold mine you already have on the payroll. Fund it. Plan it. Do it.
Do your sales and customer service functions meet 911 expectations?
When you dial 911, you may not necessarily think of what is happening behind the scenes, you only know that you need the services that 911 provides and you need it fast. Your focus remains on the reason you dialed number in the first place and then a series of events happen that are out of your control….hopefully with a great outcome.
Why does dialing 911 work? First of all, people know to dial 911 because the message has obviously been promoted well. Secondly, before the number existed, countless hours were spent on planning and training to make sure execution would be performed flawlessly to deliver their “product” once they were called. Not to diminish the responsive and important role 911 plays in our lives, but what happens when one of your customers dials your company phone number and has a need for something you offer?
With proper planning and training, your company can implement the same standards to be just as responsive:
- People: Do you have the right amount of people to service your customers? Do you have the right people to service your customers? As the relationship between the organization and the customer becomes more involved, most companies have more than one person involved in the delivery of their product.
- Positions: Do you have the right people in the right positions? People have different skill sets and matching those skills to job function is essential for an organization to ensure the delivery of their product to their customer.
- Procedures: Anything that is able to be duplicated has a well defined procedure in place that is able to be replicated with the same result. This holds true for organizations that want to increase their customer retention and revenue per client. Any deviation from a well defined procedure could end with very bad consequences.
No one ever wants to plan on calling 911 but hopefully your marketing has been effective enough that customers plan on calling you when they have a need. By having the right people in the right positions with the right procedures, you can deliver your product as flawlessly to your customers as 911 professionals do when their product is needed.
Learn more about how your company can maximize their sales function at www.salestechnik.com
Reverse engineering of your sales goals
When a prospect told me they wanted to sell more but did not have a plan other than imploring their sales team to make more calls, I took a sheet of paper and showed them how I have been able to help my customers meet their sales goals.
Most plans, directions, and instructions are developed and read from the left to right -or- from the top to bottom, I have always started at the bottom and worked up. Why you ask? Because most sales people just focus on the next opportunity and don’t take the time to really think about how they won the last sale.
It is very simple. Write down your current sales goal and your past ten selling successes with the activities and actions that led to those successes on a sheet of paper. Additionally, write down what you might have done better and sooner in the relationship that could improve your sales cycle next time. Ask yourself: What made the customer decide to buy? What activities did you do to get in front of that customer? What information did you give to that customer and when did you speak or meet with them. Who introduced you to that company and how did you meet them? What was the trigger that made that prospect interested?
On a second sheet of paper, write down your sales goal at the bottom of the page and draw a target around it. Now in reverse chronological order, list the activities and actions that must be done in order to achieve the goal.
Congratulations! You now have a road map of what activities and what actions you need to replicate over and over in order to meet your goal.
Are you a selling organization?
If your company is a typical company, you have a series of sales people that you expect to operate autonomously and efficiently in the best interest of the company to help increase revenues. Is that the best practice to move you forward in the future?
Have your sales increases kept up with the market increases? Are you bringing as much new money to the bottom line as you are to the top? Are you retaining all the new clients that are closing? Do all of the other departments know who your clients are?
If you answered yes to all of the above questions, then congratulations, you do not need to have a learning session about where you want to be three years from now. However, if you did not answer yes, then there is a great opportunity before you.
In today’s economy, companies have to sell smarter as well as make sure that they are 110% successful in executing delivery and customer service in the manner that the customer expects. By making sure companies have the right people in the right positions with the right procedures, companies can sell their extra capacity and position themselves for further growth.
What got you here won’t get you there……
As companies have built new production capacity through the implementation of LEAN principles over the past few years, their weakest link is now the sales process that is still being managed by principles from the 1950’s. “Outside” sales people are only selling 20% of the time because of the way the organization is designed. If a company is serious about growth, they need to evolve their company to a customer orientated model that allows more sales to happen. Placing the right people in the right positions with the right procedures will allow a company to increase their customer retention and maximize their selling opportunities.
I hope these thoughts and philosophies help you increase your opportunities.
Peter C. Rathmann 