All Entries Tagged With: "salespeople"

Beat Back Sales Training Apathy

The inevitable has happened. As you’ve been training your salespeople, it’s crept in slowly but surely. A yawn here, a daydream there. Before you know it, everyone within a one mile radius has a thousand yard stare. Worst of all: it’s happening to you too!

Sales training apathy can get the best of anyone, sales trainer and salesperson alike. Here are some practical and effective ways to beat back that glazed look and get back to being focused.

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Sales Training Drivers is committed to your success in sales. We want ALL of you to access the BEST strategies that show  “how” to develop high performance selling skills.

Decision Makers LOVE Me!

Building relationships – Partnering Up Pays Big

People prefer to do business with people they like! How do you do that? One of the most rewarding aspects of great sales training is teaching others how building great relationships with prospects, customers and their client referrals.  This article is about building relationships.

Wanted-Sales Leadership

Wanted – Sales Leadership

Many salespeople seek to grow into management positions. However, many of these same people don’t act like a leader or a manager in their day-to-day activities. Effective sales leadership and requires a salesperson to understand who they are and what they stand for while consistently exceeding revenue quotas and customer satisfaction expectations.

Once a salesperson understands who they are, and they consistently exceed the sales expectations, they begin to influence others in a more impacting manner. In other words, they are in tune with their clients, their own company, and more importantly they know what they stand for. In short, they begin to exude leadership — leadership at the corporate edge. As a leader in the future they must understand how to synchronize sales processes with marketing messages while providing top-notch services. All of this requires them to be fully engaged with individual buyer processes — and displaying leadership to buyers as well.

Achieving consistently high sales productivity requires a hands-on approach that is engaged and aligned in a common organizational direction. Sales, marketing, and services professionals must understand their personal and organizational goals and how to achieve them.

They must invest their time in the right accounts and the right activities. Growth efficiency requires skilled and focused leadership. It also requires leaders who can mobilize their team members, employees who work for them, and even their own management teams to achieve a common goal that meets the strategic and financial goals of the firm while providing the absolute best service and support to the customer.

Future salespeople will be asked to lead, no matter what position they hold in their sales organization! Their position, at the corporate boundary, will require it. Once salespeople fully embrace the High-Character, High-Leadership paradigm, they must understand what is required by all these critical stakeholders and be a solid rock of product knowledge, subject matter expertise, and consultant.

What Makes Successful Salespeople

What do sales coaches need to know in order to help their salespeople succeed? More importantly, what does a complete, well-rounded, super-star sales professional do anyway? Surely, if you cornered one of these high-performing sales professionals at a social event and asked them what they actually did as a sales professional, there would be more to it than “I help people.”

What exactly is it that salespeople DO anyway? I’m talking about what they actually do, not what their company does or what their value proposition is, but what THEY DO day in and day out as a sales professional?
To be a complete sales professional, their daily activities should be in support of creating customer satisfaction and loyalty. What are these daily activities?

I have analyzed the outputs and deliverables of thousands of sales professionals. I found that these tasks can be grouped into eight key areas. The idea is to help them become highly competent (i.e. superstar) sales professional through helping them:

1. Manage Themselves – highly competent salespeople keep their personal life in check. They stay healthy. They set goals, they make plans for your future. They keep their finances in order. They find stress-reducers.

2. Manage the Sales Cycle — The highly competent sales professionals seek out continuous comprehensive training and education to support their sales process. You should also be able to initiate, plan, and execute a sales process in order for your product or service to be assimilated into the buying organization. There are many systems out there to choose from.

3. Manage Opportunities – Highly competent sales professionals understand how to identify, manage, develop, and close the right sales opportunities. To do this, they’re experts at opportunity planning, territory management, opportunity development, and closing.

4. Manage Relationships- Highly competent salespeople become a trusted advisor to the buyer only happens when the sales professional is successful at building relationships, communicating, distributing information, and influencing others ethically through collaborative dialogue. Building relationships within your own organization is just as critical. Make sure that you take the time to forge relationships with your support teams, delivery teams, management or any other party that is involved in your sales process.

5. Manage Expectations – Highly competent salespeople continue their relationship after the sale. Providing top-notch service to buyers ensures repeat business and a solid sales reputation.

6. Manage Priorities – Highly competent salespeople understand the crucial elements of managing personal time to achieve ones goals and objectives. Great sales professionals understand that they must define the right tasks for the day or month, prioritize them, schedule them and execute.

7. Manage Technology – Highly competent sales professionals utilize technology in order to maximize personal and organizational effectiveness.

8. Manage Communications – highly competent sales professionals understand their choices in selecting, delivering, and leveraging communications strategies and mediums in order to effectively get their message across.
There are many people that wonder why sales professionals are “harried,” have short attention spans, are always too busy, or seem a “little flustered”. Perhaps by identifying and understanding these eight areas, you have a new found appreciation and an understanding of why?

So the question is, does you sales coaching program help salespeople become better in each area? How can you help them understand which area they are the strongest in? Or which area they are the weakest? A well designed sales coaching program provided by a reputable organization can help sales managers and sales coaches build action steps and coaching programs that help salespeople improve in each area every single day.