• Poor qualification process
• In ability to penetrate new accounts
• Failing to leverage existing relationships
• Failing to close
• Poor prospect management
Sound familiar? Many companies suffer from poor sales performers. Without a well-defined process, it becomes difficult to measure and monitor the successful or unsuccessful outcomes of your sales force along with duplicating what works.
PEOPLE
It all starts here… without a clearly defined process in hiring, you will certainly take a chance on hiring successfully. Selection needs to center around required behaviors, skill, past experience, performance, cultural fit and chemical fit to succeed in recruiting top performers. Benchmarking what works for your organization or business is necessary to add the “Right Fit” to your sales team.
Through benchmarking your eagle (an individual within your sales team that consistently exceeds performance objectives) you can duplicate success with measuring behavior levels such as urgency, competitiveness along with skill, past experience, performance, cultural fit, for building on the strengths of what you need to grow and close business successfully.
Behavioral profiling tools outline strengths and weakness within individuals to capture performance and identify behavior in how individuals respond to the sales role. We use these tools within our organization to benchmark sales candidates to fit against identified requirements for individual sales roles. These assessments are taken on-line, generating results that can be used to assist with making a clearer decision on a potential candidate. Always involve more than one person in the hiring decision but not more than three.
PROCESS
• How is your current revenue growth progressing from year to year?
• How do you manage your prospect?
• How are most of your sales generated?
• How long is your current sales pipeline?
All the above are foundational questions in the development of a Sales & Marketing process without a clear process and a system to measure success you are lost in denial and excuses for lack of performance. Understanding what moves the dial up and down in your revenue stream is crucial to staying in the game and making money. Understanding where in your process you are weak and strong will allow you to make better training and marketing decisions based on facts. Your system for managing your prospect needs to be identified and repeated successfully time and time again without this you will have inconsistent results in and out in the field costing you more of your hard earned dollars and time. Understand the process of completing a successful sale needs to be communicated and reviewed by team members so everyone can gain from each other’s experience until success is almost guaranteed. The development of a strong predicable sales pipe line is measured against your ability to read your clients’ pain and deliver results and solutions that take that pain away quickly. Communication is key to discovery ‘Listening’ is what counts not only to your team but your customers’ experience.
PASSION
“If you catch yourself working hard and loving every minute of it, don’t stop. You’re on to something big”
Without this unmistakable drive, it would be extremely difficult to move your business forward with any real results. It takes persistence, courage, leadership, competitive drive along with many other distinctive qualities to maintain a direction and successfully gain ground in today’s business environment. If you are reading this NOW and your passion turned into work PAUSE and ask yourself “What Makes You Happy” sometimes we get caught up working in our business instead of on it…and miss what we are really good at! You know what l mean… What is it that you love to do? Surround yourself with individuals who can complement what you do not have the passion or the skill to perform at your very best… Too many owners hold on to way to much control’ they need to learn to let go’ and mange through systems and process along with great people to create success.
PERFORMANCE
• Lack of passion • Inflexible • Unfocused • Overly dependent • Defensiveness
• Impatience • Poor time management • Low energy • High anxiety
• Negative attitude • Critical of others • Poor work-life balance • Indecisive
It all comes down to this single word, without it we clearly fail. All of the above are common performance barriers so clearly, you need to look at the opposite to attract a winning team. This winning team holds individuals who act with passion and find themselves sharping their skills and defining a perfect process for consistent success. They behave like the athlete who trains and reviews until success is won. They have the intellectual firepower to think on their feet along with values and work ethic that align with the cultural foundations and the experience to add strength to the team. Too many companies pay dearly in performance because they hired based on a resume and the performance during the interview rather than designing a process of measurement that adds value and builds on strength.