Sales and Growth Strategies
Hiring Sales Professionals
Your sales force might be good, but are they great? In most companies, a third of the sales force is less than desirable so an improved sales selection process is vital to hiring salespeople who will more effectively execute the strategies.
True Sales Professionals Are Product Agnostic
Aug 20th
I believe that it is completely unnecessary for sales professionals to be familiar with a particular industry or type of product/service in order to sell effectively. In fact, the first thing I think when a sales manager, business owner, CEO, etc. tells me that the sales people they hire needs to have experience or have "a very good understanding" of their industry or product, is that they don’t have a clue about what a trained professional salesperson really looks like. It screams out to me that they don’t follow a sales system, and without a system, their sales methodology is probably to have their people "show up and throw up" – the stereotypical features and benefits spiel.
Yes, the salespeople should know what the typical concerns and pains are for prospects in your industry, but that takes a week, not a career to figure out. Why do you suppose it is that a new salesperson that doesn’t know a thing typically does better than when he/she goes through "sales training" and becomes knowledgeable about the product/service they sell?
The last thing I want my salespeople to do is prescribe a product or service and assume the prospect’s needs before asking a lot of questions to arrive at a solution the prospect is comfortable with based on their needs and desires. Also, I don’t want my salespeople educating our prospects. I’ll leave that to my competition.
To test my point, let’s do a little exercise:
- Your salespeople should discover what is important to the prospect about <enter your product here > .
- Your salespeople should ask the client why they didn’t already buy <enter your competitor’s product here>.
- Your sales people should ask what it is that frustrates the prospect about poor quality or service <enter your industry here > .
- Your sales people should ask "why not just do nothing about <a problem your product/service can solve>?" .
If you could safely replace the italicized bracketed words with your own, then it just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or product/service you sell. A real trained sales professional understands the process, and when he/she knows they can fill a gap, closes the deal by bringing in the person with the encyclopedic knowledge about your company’s products/services or the support material to prove it.
Note: the chameleon image is supposed represent a salesperson that can blend in with the surroundings. I didn’t know what else to use 
Image from Wild Herps
Base Salaries – Tie it to Activity
Mar 31st
I hope you don’t think a base salary for salespeople is merely a kind act on your part to help your new hire through until they hit stride. And as altruistic as you are, I hope that it isn’t merely a way to alleviate your concern that your new hire would have no motivation at all without some sort of salary. Good points. However, so many CEO’s waste the opportunity to use a base salary as a way to gain momentum for their new hire.
By now I hope you know your metrics – you know, how many dials to contact, contacts to appointment, appointments to close, etc. For a new sales hire, the most important thing you should be concerned about for the first 90 days is activity – i.e. how many dials, or door knocks, or networking events, etc. And because you’re paying a base salary, you need to leverage your kind act and tie it to their activity. You need to make it perfectly clear, up front, that their base salary is tied to a certain level of activity. 90% of your activity = 90% of base. Any problems?
Use the base salary for all it’s worth! Eventually your new hire will run into sales. And because you’re tracking the activity (see “You’re using Track-It sheets, right?!“), you’ll start to see patterns where they need improvement and the areas where they can be trained.
Why Everybody In Your Organization Is a Salesperson
Mar 13th
I say it all the time – "LIFE IS SALES" – meaning that all of us is selling something whenever we communicate with somebody. That’s probably no new news to you. However, you’d be surprised by the CEO’s that I know that, in addition to hiring salespeople that can’t and/or won’t sell, hire their executives, customer support people, even their receptionists that have terrible sales skills – and I believe they are leaving tons of money on the table, among other things, because of this mistake!
Am I saying that everybody in your organization needs to be able to prospect, find pain, negotiate contracts/pricing, and close the deal? Well…. yes, but not at the same intensity level as the full-time salesperson. However, every person should be able to gently ask questions to get the real problem and carry that through to a solution, be it a customer, vendor or fellow employee. Every person should have great listening skills to make whoever they are dealing with feel important. Every person should be keeping their eyes and ears open and looking for ways to help.
You’re using Track-It sheets, right?!
Feb 9th
One of best ways to do something your competition isn’t is to use a Track-It sheet that records you and/or your sales teams activities. Here are some activities I recommend you start keeping track of:
- Goals review – at least once a day
- SalesMind – 8 minute affirmations to reduce negative scripts (call reluctance, money tolerance, etc.) – at least once a day – contact me to learn more about SalesMind
- Dials – how many times you just dial the phone
- Contacts – how many times you talk to the decision maker
- Appointments
- New opportunity
- Referrals given – a great way to get referrals is to give them!
- Referrals received
- Yes/Close – agreement to do business, a sign up, a free trial.
- No- no’s aren’t bad. Get through them!
- Blog post – make the world better and market yourself at the same time
- Email opt-in – get people on your ‘touch’ list
Advantages to Tracking Activities
Setting up Track-It sheets allows you to design you and/or your sales team’s time for success. Then, you use it for accountability. If you notice you’re not getting the results you wanted, just look at the Track-It sheet. Did the necessary amount of effort go into closing more business?
Another reason why tracking activities can be a benefit is that it can show you the problems of why more new business isn’t closing. For instance, if the dials to contact ratio is solid, i.e. 10% for cold calling, but appointments are way low, you know there is a problem with asking for the appointment. Then, by recording the sales calls, you’ll be able to determine what you and/or your sales reps are saying that may be affecting the prospect negatively.
For Sales Managers – Tying Salary to Activities
Are you paying your salespeople a base salary? I hope that the Track-It sheet is tied directly to the base compensation. For instance, whenever I pay a base salary to a salesperson, the expectations are set right up front that the salesperson is expected to keep their Track-It sheet on their desk at all times and they need to mark all activities and results. Furthermore, in order to get their base compensation, they’re required to turn their Track-It sheets in as proof of their activities. If the salesperson only does 75% of the agree upon activities required for success, in many cases dials, the salesperson only get 75% of the base. No muss, no fuss.
