Investing in saleseducation

You are actually investing when spending money for education in sales.

It will save time.

You and your sales staff will make the close more often so you will make more money.

The experience of the educator most often differs from what you yourself have and that’s a good thing since then you will both look at a specific sales situation and draw 2 conclusions and more often than not they are closely related.

Then you tell your sales staff how to handle the situation and the educator will say almost the same thing but with a different words and approach and that will give the salesperson 2 sides of the coin and 2 ways of approaching the customer and to close the deal.

As a seller you will always be faced with closely related situations where one word in the right place will close the deal and the other will close the door behind you.

Then you will try out the different methods and see that both work but in different ways and that way you will close more deals and get a bigger commission and a happier boss.

Your sales staff will also appreciate the gesture that their employer (you) are making by investing in their personal and professional growth. That will make them more content and hopefully more glad that they work for you and make them stay longer with your firm.

Good sellers are always looking for the next challenge and that usually means changing employer. Investing in them will make them stay longer and you will make more money by having them here.

What kind of sales education should you then invest in?

Only the closing kind?

How about looking at sales as a chain and concentrating on the weakest link in it. for me the sales process starts with the knowledge of the product /service and then goes on with: booking, meeting, revised meeting /closing meeting, contract, delivery of product /service, follow-up of delivery, follow-up on usage and outfall of the purchase, customer satisfaction, add-on sales et cetera.

So if you don’t know for sure what is the weak link start a sales growth program that will under a year or 2 years will address and develop and enhance all these points. You will be surprised what a difference it will have for your sales force when they are involved and together with you will actually make all parts better and the end product more attractive on a competitive market.

Confidence in one self and ones product/service is A-Z in my book.

Get nitty gritty with all the details and invest in outside help on the parts that you would like a second opinion you will in the end invest in sales education and further enhance your appeal as a company both as employer and seller of products/services.

In good times and bad times

Oh no a recession is on the way, crisis after crisis and on top of that some more credit crunch.

So what do when you have a sales team that goes more and more negative by the minute,hour and day.

Selling is all about being open and listening for opportunities that present themselves and if you are a goal oriented salesperson you will create the opportunities yourself.

So with a team that is on a negative spiral you need to break that trend quick, decisive and no nonsense.

You can look at it this way (from past experience).

Trying to avoid contacting customers:

No at this time a day they are doing x. ok but most are not doing x and that’s who you will end up talking to if you are out there.

No one is interest this week since there is a major sport event (olympics, soccerfinal, mma final, etc). So then we should perhaps sync our Calender with every major sports event to avoid wasting time? maybe even get a tv here to the office?

The Customers (very few) who actually are referring to the event taking place will be saying so instead of no im not interested.

Stop making excuses of any kind to not contact customers. You have to make this clear to the team in no uncertain terms. period.

So how about the recensions and “bad times” if everyone is actually having a bad financial time there would be Zero contracts!

But in good aswell as bad times there are contracts coming in. So someone must be selling something even when it’s not easy.

That someone should be members from your sales team.

The sales team will have to work harder to get the contracts but in doing so they will enhance their repertoar and sharpen their skills and as long as you are adamant that the contract is out their they will only get better and better (or be forced to quit).

You should really consider to take on more members to your sales team since the good ones out there will be looking for the very few companies that has the spunk and backbone to invest in their sales teams in bad times and you can make some really good recruiting now.

The other side of the coin is add-on sales to the customers that you already have. Nurture them and take very good care of them since bringing a new customer in when its bad times will cost you dearly as opposed to keeping the existing one. (in good times it will cost about 5 times more to take in a new as opposed to selling the same amount of products/services to the existing one).

So your deal here should be:

There is only a different set of opportunities here now than it was before and I will adapt and use those to make more money than before!

Goal or behavior oriented

What is the purpose with your sellers visit to the customer.

If you ask them at the weekly sales prep meeting they will something like this week i will close this and this and meet x new customers.

But in the reality that follows (the week) they usually don’t think on this at all.

Most sales reps just focus on activity since that is what the boss is most concerned with (in reality the boss is concerned with a lot of things but especially the lack of contracts).

If you are big on activity and have a lot of meetings with customers you will be perceived as a hard-working sales person. If you don’t sell as much as the stars is just factors beyond your control and easily shunned into a corner.

This should be a big warning sign for you as the employer since your sales will drop slowly over periods of time until they are very clearly substandard.

Riding shotgun with your staff is the job of the head of sales or you as the owner if it’s a smaller company and will be very educational in how,when and why your seller reacts in certain situations. But what is the key factor you should look at?

Is the seller going in to the meeting with a clear agenda to sell your product/service? If asked certainly if not asked they usually havent thought about this at all.

So what the difference?

A goal oriented seller will always try to steer the meeting towards points that they want. they do checks to make certain the customer gets what they are selling and manages the questions as opportunities to get more insight in what the customer really wants out of the product/service to buy it. Then the goal oriented seller will use this information to try to close the deal in this meeting or if it’s a more complex sell at a later meeting. but always doing everything at the meeting with the goal to close the deal.

A behavior oriented seller will be clueless on how to manage the meeting and will mostly present what they have to offer and leave it at that and if the costumer reacts and ask questions they will be responded to and then the meeting closes since there is nothing more to talk about. the seller will away and hope to get the contract next time.

They will only get about 10% of the deals compared to the goal oriented seller that’s the difference for you as employer.

So how will you get the seller to go from behavior oriented to be goal focused super achiever?

Upgrade them!

Talk to someone in the know and read up all you can there are very good books on the subject and also strongly consider hiring someone like me to help you out.

It takes training and a keen eye to spot how the changes take place and why and what more needs to be done with this seller. You can change them into a way better seller than they are now by focusing on this only.

Make them lead and take charge and make them close the deal.

Related articles

• Run Faster Goals Suck (leadershipforgood.org)

How to motivate sellers

How do you get your sellers to sell?

Give them a salaries and a car and off they go to new sales records?

What incentives and perks do you use to motivate your sellers?

Easy way out is to do as I suggested in a previous post, only pay them commission (if possible) that is a strong self motivator.

Lets line some other suggestions up.

Praise

perks

More freedom (lets the seller choose when to work and when not to)

Stuff

Holiday / group holiday (sales event )

Better rep car

The almighty salesboard

Seller of the month and year.

That´s the first ones that springs to mind right now. How well and long do they work?

Praise: Can if used and well-meant create a very long-lasting positive memory but will typically fade away when the weekend comes so best applied in the start of the week to get a motivation boost.

Perks: If all sellers are able to achieve the perk i would say go for it. If not it will create envy instead and be counter motivational so let all who work hard to get the perks enjoy them and preferably spread the word that this is indeed for every one then you will get a good boost in sales.

Freedom: excellent as long as the seller keeps delivering and reporting what actual deals is up and coming and what their aim and goal is. (one of the reasons people wants to be sellers in the first place is to get this freedom). How long will it last? Until the seller needs help to pick up activity again. (in some cases it will last for the duration of employment).

Stuff: we all tried to sell like crazy to get those Champagne bottles, Expensive watches and other status items. it works and it will continue to work you will have to set a relatively short time span on it.  Competitions on a monthly, weekly and daily length are the ones that actually boosts motivation and creates ROI. If you have a longer competition usually the salesperson of year xxxx you will only motivate a few and they are don’t need it as motivation since they are so competitive that they will deliver the same result over the year anyway.

Sales event / holiday : Go for and make a big show about it at least a month ahead of the start so all savvy sellers can start to picture themselves on the holiday/event. Same rules here, keep as short as a month if possible to get maximum motivation and hence sales boost.

Better Car: very important to the status focused seller and will keep them very busy if you get them going on the task. set up a goal for every month or just simply put up a sales target and no end date (instead they have to achive the target in a timeframe of consecutive months). In some company s they use only small economical cars but the best seller of the company can choose very freely what to ride in for the coming year.

The sales board:  I liked it as a seller since i was on the top almost every week and as a head of sales even more (as a motivational instrument)! it works and to those who don’t belive in it usually say so when they need help getting their closing rate up. (then help them get higher up on the board and they will in their turn motivate the others.)

Seller of the month and year: I did a simple but nice diploma and printed out 2 one for the seller and one that i had framed and put up on the wall above the sales board. very simple and very effective when pointed at in the right moment.

 

Make it fun, challenging, competitive or what ever that rings a bell and try it out.

Measure how much sales increased over the period to make sure how effective it was and move on to the next and try lots of different things it will make it more fun for you as well as your sales team.

Do sellers need motivation to do a better job?

Yes.

Hiring your salesforce

So you think you are good?

How about hiring some more of you then.

The more people selling your product the more money you would take in.

Only one way of making sure this is true is to only pay out commission for deals done and paid for, otherwise there will always be a cost for staff.

If you pay by the hour then there is really no incitements for the seller to sell anything at all only the risk of getting fired and that can be stalled for some time with excuses to get more free money. (unfortunately you will find that sometimes it’s virtually impossible to get any applicants if you only pay commission. then try a mix of hour/commission.)

So how to get someone to work for you?

Make very sure you know the rules in your country so you don’t end up getting on the wrong side of the rulebook. Usually there is networks of business people already up and running who will and can help you for a small fee to get you up and running.

Use them!

Once you hired someone put it on paper so both parties know what to be expected of the other, and if you have plans on using your new-found seller in other capacity aswell (like going out with the trash, cleaning up in the office e tc.)

Dont.

A seller shall sell and only that, this way you make sure there is no excuses what so ever for low results and if the results are good you will just hire someone who do all the small stuff around you. Your only focus should be in getting the seller to go out and sell as much as you can.

If you do this for the first time you will find out that there is a lot of things that you never thought about concerning your product / service make sure you write them down and address them and use this as a template for training coming sellers since they will usually have the same questions as the first had (unless the issue is a thing you can work on and get out-of-the-way).

For you the product /service is self-explanatory and maybe that’s the case. More often than not however its just that for you but for the seller there are a lot of background information missing leaving them clueless why you do and say somethings about the product /service. write this down to and explain it so they will be on par with you and your way of selling.

So should you hire yourself?

Most do.

Once you see this you can also see that hiring different people with different backgrounds will benefit your company way more since the mix of experiences will be much wider and therefore your sales staff can connect and create rapport on a wider base and close more deals.