Working in sales is not an easy job, and it seems that every year it gets harder, especially for salespeople who regularly travel for business. The one thing that can hold a sales team back from achieving their goals and chasing the best sales possible is a lack of efficiency. Wasting time on the job, either through no fault of their own or through deliberate acts, will end up costing you money, both in wasted pay and wasted opportunities. These eight tips are designed to help you get the best out of your sales team and ensure that they are using their time wisely to invest in their work and get those sales flowing in.
1. Don't Waste Time On The Road
Once this pandemic is out of the way and travel opens up a lot more, it will be time for your sales team to hit the road and get back out there with your clients and customers. For anyone who loves their work in traveling sales, this is an exciting time, and there's a lot to look forward to about getting back out there.
What most traveling sales teams aren't looking forward to, though, is poorly planned routes. If you're serious about making your sales team more efficient, use the proper software to plan sales routes so that your time isn't wasted by using an inefficient route or getting stuck in the tailbacks that always happen at bottleneck points.
2. Make Sure You Have Quality Leads
How frustrating is it to call up or visit a potential prospect that has been identified by your lead generation only to find out that they're not interested in your products or services, and even more, they're annoyed that you've wasted their time? It leaves a bitter taste in their mouth, and they're unlikely to ever convert in the future either.
This is why you must qualify your leads before handing them over to your sales team. Make sure that every lead they are planning to chase up is at least warm and ready to receive the sales pitch. Your team will thank you, and your potential new clients and customers will thank you too.
3. Inspire Your Team With Incentives
Sure, working for a commission is a good incentive, but what happens if that commotion is hard to get because the product or service is a hard sell? Don't let your sales teams get disheartened or feel frustrated when you know the sale is going to be hard work anyway. Work out a way to incentivize your team in other ways to boost morale and encourage gentle competition within the team.
4. Practice Your Sales Pitch
You love your product, your product is the best it can be, and everyone else should be able to see that, right? Not necessarily. In some cases, it's not the product that is the issue but the sales pitch and the delivery. This is why you should always be practicing, testing, and adjusting your sales pitch and key sales talking points to make sure you're covering all bases.
Get feedback from brand new clients on which parts of your sales pitch sold it for them and which parts almost turned them off. Continuous tweaking will ensure your pitch is always at the top of its game.
5. Route Out Sales Barriers
The deliberators and the road blockers are two types of people that every sales team finds the most frustrating to win over. Deliberators will spend ages thinking about reasons why they can't go or it. Is it too expensive? Will it work? Will it provide a return on investment?
Road blockers will be the people who will put a stop to the sale after the initial person has agreed. These people are usually accountants or people in finance decisions who complain it's too expensive, or people in marketing worried about the brand reputation.
It's vital that your sales team know how to identify these sales barriers before they become an issue and route them out to address them before the person or people they're speaking to can raise them.
6. Work To Everyone's Strengths
Your sales team is likely to be masters at working with all different types of people. They will know how to adjust their pitch and even body language accordingly to get the sale that they're chasing. With all that being said, it is important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses within your team and work towards improving the weaknesses and building the strengths.
They say a team is only as strong as its weakest member, but do remember that different people have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, and by working as a team together, you can explore those strengths and support the weaknesses.
7. Invest In (realistic) Goal Planning
Who doesn't love a good goal planning session? If you just groaned at that question, then, unfortunately, it could be what is holding you back. Sales teams are usually driven by success, and even the thrill of the chase can be a driving factor. This is why it's critical that you set out goals for your team to achieve, but it's even more critical that those goals be realistic and supported by evidence and analytics,
There's no point setting a goal of 10,000 sales a week when you've only ever managed 200 sales in a week. Equally, if your goal is to achieve 250 sales in a week, make sure the training and support is there for the team to help them reach that target, and the incentives are also clear for when they do.
8. Give Proper Feedback
Proper feedback is important in every area of business, but in sales, it can be all too easy to focus on the negatives. The "praise sandwich" (also known by less polite terminology) is not a good method for feedback because it's known to be so insincere. Better to sit down with your team and go over what has worked, what hasn't worked, the reasons why things worked or didn't work, and go from there. No sandwiches required.
No comments:
Post a Comment