Sales Tune-up

In any economic climate it is important that your sales force focus on the task at hand, be well trained in product and process, and all speak the same vocabulary. Training is critical to sales force alignment. Having your sales team go through sales training will give everyone on your team a boost in performance.

My personal favorite for sales training is “Solution Selling”, however many organizations are not able to budget time or money for this. When time and money are tight I have found a good training program is a seminar by Fred Pryor Seminars called “The Ultimate Sales Workshop”. The seminar is one day in length and is very inexpensive. If you send a group, the cost per individual goes down making it even less expensive. If you send enough people an interesting learning dynamic happens at the seminar, where your group learns from their participation and the participation of others. You even have the option of bringing a trainer in and having this conducted on site. I have included a link to a ConceptDraw MINDMAP that outlines the content covered in this budget seminar.


http://www.mindmappedia.com/?id=152665800&q=sales

Customer Communication is King -- Sales and Marketing Team Work

It is critical at whatever stage the economy is in, good times or bad times, for your customer messaging to ring true with your target market. If the potential customers you are talking to do not understand what you are trying to convey, then your company is in big trouble. And that is spelled with a capital T. If your salespeople send more than a few percent of their time trying to explain what it is you as a company are trying to convey, you are then not in an optimum sales situation.

I have just a brief example of shaping the message to the target audience. When my son was very young his favorite fast food was a cheeseburger from McDonalds with ketchup and pickles only. He would go with me and tell me he wanted a cheeseburger, but please only ketchup and pickles on it. When I ordered it the way he wanted it ordered the McDonalds clerk would repeat it back multiple times, and with a high degree of certitude my son’s cheeseburger would have either mustard or onions or both on it. This would cause me to trek to the counter to exchange the cheeseburger for one that would meet my son’s standards.

This disconnect in communications got old very fast. McDonalds would always be gracious enough to make another to my son’s specifications, but the hassle quotient was off of the scales.

I started thinking about the issue at night once and determined for a product that contained only a bun, hamburger, cheese, onion, mustard, ketchup and pickle there had to be a better way to communicate my son’s requirements and make the process easier to digest.

I determined that I would order my son’s cheeseburger by what he did not want on it. “One cheeseburger with no onion and no mustard, please.” The clerk would repeat back, “Cheeseburger, no onion and no mustard.” Bingo, the rate of successful ordering for my son’s cheeseburger shot through the roof.
But there was still one small problem. When my son heard me order in the new fashion he would say to me, “But I want pickles and ketchup only on my cheeseburger.” With my son it was very easy to communicate to him that because of the finite number of ingredients only ketchup and pickle on a cheeseburger was exactly the same as no onions and no mustard on a cheeseburger.

My Son was happy, I was happy, the clerk was happy and somewhere Ronald McDonald and the shareholders of McDonalds were happy because the cost of preparing my son’s food had been reduced.

I use the above only as an example of customer communications and how critical it is. Lack of clear communications could be why you lost an account, why your close rate is not as good as your competition, or why you often leave your customers with a dazed and confused look on their face. Talk to your key salespeople and find out if messaging might be getting in the way of representing and selling your company. If it is, then fix it.

Revenue...

When setting revenue goals for the year a company should always prepare a top-down and a bottoms-up look at the revenue projections; and then work to gain alignment. When preparing the bottoms-up revenue number one should look at the revenue per sales individual and then make a list of what factors may accelerate or decelerate that number. Sales training, product training, more marketing spend, new product introductions, shape of the economy, ability to compete, changes in pricing, big changes in partners, new competition—one can go on forever on items that have an impact on a salesperson’s performance. The final determination that needs to be made from looking at all of these factors is to decide if your sales reps are going to sell more, the same or less than last year.

If you determine they are going to sell more, and history gives some supporting evidence of that, then what is the multiplier. Is it 110%? If you have 20 sales reps, and they averaged 1 million each last year, and the revenue forecast for next year is 40 million, the odds are that you will not hit your number.

What are you going to change? Are you going to double your sales force? That may work, but many times when you are growing your sales team the law of diminishing returns kicks in. When you get to this point it is really important to understand your sales force and how they compete. It is also important to understand why you win deals, and of course why you lose deals. I find that most of the time, it is easier to achieve a boost in sales by looking at why you lose deals (if you have the ability to change the circumstances).

I have seen so many sales managers when put on the spot by management, over an underperforming sales team, do not understand the dynamics themselves. If the sales manager does not understand the internal dynamics then any solution that they come up with is just an educated guess.

So the short answer is. The way to plan on how to size your sales force to produce the anticipated revenue number is to understand your sales force and what are the key leverage points you need to work with to meet your company’s sales objective.

The most important background piece on this is to make sure the rest of the management team understands and agrees to the commitment that THEY need to make to take the company from point A to point B. A sales team can fail because of lack of commitment from the entire management team. It all comes down to a sales team needs a plan, the larger the team the more details and resources need to be spelled out. A good sales team needs lots of support, leadership and management to function at its very best.

Your Company's Sales Alignment

Early on the last day of the quarter, one of my top sales reps brought to me a large order from a Fortune 500 company. I congratulated the salesperson and asked them to book the order for the quarter. They told me that they could not book the order because our controller would not sign off. I visited the controller with the sales order in hand; at the time we had a policy that any orders over a certain dollar level required the controller’s signature. The order would have placed the sales rep into a bonus situation, and the order just by circumstance would push the quarterly results for the company into new territory. The controller looked me in the eye and said, “I am very busy and I am not going to drop what I am doing so some salesperson can make their bonus.” To settle the order booking issue we had to go to the top of the organization to establish the company’s priorities.

Not booking the order would have sent several poor messages to the sales team;
1) There is no sense of urgency for sales success in the organization,
2) Success of an individual that benefits the organization is not important, and
3) Sales is not a respected contributor to the organization.

Usually the sales team is the lifeblood of most organizations. The sales compensation plan is a key element to motivate or demotivate people on that team. 99% of salespeople are not looking for a “hand out”, they are looking for a pay package that makes sense, has a reasonable chance for attainment, and is linked to the overarching objectives of the organization. Treat your people like adults and you will get more of their attention at crunch time. Increased attention equates to increased sales.

I recommend you taking an inventory of your organization, and taking note if everyone is aligned behind the success of the sales team? If they are not, what is the reason for this condition to exist, and what impact is it having on your success? Selling is challenging enough without having people in the organization that are not supporting the sales objectives of the company.