If you work in sales management, you’ll live and breathe your team sales targets. Agreed at the start of the year, it seemed stretching but achievable. Six months on, yes, you’re on track and feeling positive. The team is motivated. You’ve got your strategic plans in place for the second half of the year, and you’re all focused on the goal for final delivery of targets.
And then it happens…
Re-forecasting. Changed targets. You’re suddenly asked to deliver more than you expected. It’s enough to knock the most motivated of us back a bit. But it’s a fact of life, and you need to deal with it.
The status quo has changed
Our advice? Accept it. Changing targets can be a fact of sales, accepting it is absolutely the first step needed in re-planning the next six months. Change is inevitable in today’s volatile workplace, and, as cited in the often-used change model by Kurt Lewin, acceptance is the first stage in understanding. Challenge the need for change, and you’re making it more difficult for yourself to implement the positive actions that you must to move forward.
Your team may be up in arms. It’s your job to help them accept the need for change too. Only by understanding why it must happen can you refocus people on the revised objectives.
Delve into the metrics
As part of the process of change, you need to understand whether it’s possible to deliver what is asked, with the resources you have. One way to help you with this is to examine how your metrics need to change to enable delivery of a higher target.
To make short-term changes, there are two things to examine – the quantity and quality of the work. For example, if you measure conversions, how much higher does the rate need to be? If salespeople are making four appointments a day, how many more do they need to achieve to increase sales? Depending on where you are now, both of these may have a positive impact – or neither of them may work. If your team is already filling every minute of every day, asking them to make more appointments is futile.
Examining your resources
When looking at your team, you not only need to consider whether you have the capacity you need but also whether you have the right skillsets in place.
If you feel there is additional capacity in your existing team, you can tap into that and extract the higher work rate you need. Implementing incentives is one way to go, rewarding the salespeople for delivering more. If you don’t have capacity or are missing key skills, this is a longer-term issue for the organisation. But that doesn’t help you right now, with six months to make an impact. Here’s where outsourcing may help.
The beauty of outsourcing is that it lets you implement more resources, at short notice, for a set period. The outsourced team will have one focus alone – to help you achieve your goals. And you can focus then wherever the gaps in your own team may be. For example, they can work on generating genuine opportunities, with the qualification completed, so that your team can improve conversion rates.
Many agencies will say they can supply such outsourced professionals – but a note of caution. The types and quality of these companies and the staff they can provide do vary, so research carefully. And be clear about the type of role you need to add to your team. We have compared two types of outsourcing options here in our blog – telemarketing vs business development – which may help.
The bottom line is that a change targets halfway through the year is never fun; however, with careful management, it needn’t be as problematic as it initially seems.
Published: 13th November 2019
There’s nothing worse than taking a business call and realising very quickly that the person on the other end is simply ploughing through a list of questions sounding like a robot. Regardless of your input or feedback, they are going to get to the end of that list, whatever it takes! Every question seems to be read in a monotone voice, making it impossible to engage with them. And unfortunately, it’s a common occurrence. But surely there is a better way to structure a sales call.
Should I dispense with a script?
Whilst a fixed set of questions will not get you far, neither will a totally unstructured call that ends up being a waste of everyone’s time. So no, we would not recommend a totally unscripted approach. But we do suggest you move away from the idea that a script is a rigid device.
When you turn on your TV or go to the theatre, what you are seeing is, of course, scripted. But you don’t tend to register it as such, because any actor worth their salt will bring the script to life in the way it is delivered. And the writer will have structured it in a way that sets a scene, tells a story and draws a conclusion.
You can take the same approach with your sales calls. You just need to find a structure to work to.
Getting the structure right
There are various different ways to structure a sales call, and you can test out different ones until you find the one that is most effective for your organisation and your target market.
Here at Intelligent Talk, we find a combination of two methods works well.
The Inverted Pyramid method helps you to prioritise the information you want to impart, and in what order. Originally a tool for journalists, it is just as useful for spoken conversations. Think through the information you want to get across in your call and where in the pyramid it should sit before you pick up the phone
The other method we like is PASO. This is a tool that marketeers have used for years and works on the basis that resolving ‘pain’ is a key motivator for most people. Focus in on the problem that your target is having. Then turn the knife. Make it hurt just that bit more! At that point, you present the solution that will make that pain disappear.
Asking questions
A key tool in the armoury of any sales call is to ask open questions – and crucially, to really listen to the response. The reply you get will give you information on where to take the call next. So your structure needs to be flexible, enabling you to be responsive to the answers you receive.
Think about delivery
Remember what we said about actors? How you speak is arguably as important as what you say. Think about times you have sat through a presentation delivered in a monotone – you just switch off and stop taking in the content. You need to express empathy with your prospect so that they really feel you understand their issues. Using variation in tone to convey interest and recognition will help you to come across as genuine and passionate about your subject.
In a nutshell, the key to effective telephone scripts is to ensure you are talking about what your audience cares about. Instead of a hard sell, create an environment where the prospect realises you can solve their problem. And condemn that list of fixed questions to the bin forever.
Published on: 30th October 2019
We have to be honest; we come across a lot of companies whose sales process, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain sucks. Now, of course, you’re not one of those……. are you?
But how can you tell if your sales process sucks, and if it does what do you do about it? Let’s take the blinkers off and see what the reality is.
It’s easy to let processes slip
Deadlines are looming, and you’re rushing to meet them. A huge prospect is on the horizon – it feels like a done deal. Or the procedure of going through every step in the ideal process just feels a bit, well, long-winded.
Surely a few shortcuts can’t hurt?
There are some red flags to look out for
A key issue is the existence – or more accurately non-existence – of an effective sales process. If you fail to provide your sales force with a defined process, they won’t be successful.
Do your team think sales are won during the prospecting or closing? Actually, they are won during the qualification process. Having a framework for qualification is a crucial element of the sales process. In our experience, this is the reason why many salespeople struggle. They simply can’t effectively qualify their prospects.
Which brings us to the third red flag. Does your organisation have the data to be able to diagnose success and failures? If you can’t track activity and conversion rate, how can you identify where your sales process is failing.
If we’re honest, not many companies get every step right every single time. But it’s worth reviewing the practices in your own organisation. If things have slipped a little it could be having a disproportionate effect on your close rate. A few tweaks to your methods might deliver dramatic results to your bottom line.
So – what are our top tips to the perfect sale?
-
Ensure you follow every step
As we mentioned above, every salesperson should follow a sales process. There are several established ones, but we recommend Kurlan’s baseline selling method – this video explains it well. It’s a simple to understand process that takes you through the stages of how a sales opportunity evolves, using a baseball pitch as reference!
Whichever process you follow, the important thing is never to be tempted to skip a step. Just like painting an old wall, if you miss out key stages, cracks will appear later in the procedure.
-
Document, document, document
Your CRM system is your staunch ally in your pursuit of sales. But you know that old observation that holds so true – rubbish in, rubbish out. So make sure you document everything, correctly and comprehensively on your CRM system. If you don’t have a CRM system – well, that’s when the red flag of insufficient data gets raised. It’s a subject for another blog all by itself!
-
Stay current
You need to keep your research on your prospects up to date. Organisations change, restructure, evolve on a regular basis. Each time it happens, you need to requalify the steps that may be affected. Retracing your path a little can seem frustrating, but is essential for a positive outcome. Miss out this important aspect, and you’ll find all your subsequent work is a waste of time.
-
Your easiest sales will be to current customers
And that’s why it’s so important to get the post-sales service right. It’s just as essential, perhaps even more so than all the work you did to get the sale. To grow a business effectively, you need a solid base of loyal, repeat customers, over whom you can layer new clients, who in turn become part of that bedrock. If you lose business soon after winning the sale, you are constantly trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
So maybe it’s time to look at your sales methods and check that they are effective and that your team are following every step. If not, it’s time to do some coaching and training. We’ve got a checklist that could help as a reference and a starting point.
If we can leave you with one thought, it’s to focus on the processes rather than the outcomes. Get those processes right, and all the team following them, and the outcomes will look after themselves.
Published: 22nd October 2019
It is October 2019, almost a year and a half into GDPRs legislation release. We have had 14,000 data breaches reported in the first year alone within the UK, and the two largest recorded fines to date being dished out to UK firms British Airways and Marriot totaling £300m in July of this year. It would appear GDPR has impacted data and marketing communication in the UK. But how much of a bearing has GDPR had on marketing and sales activities? And is it affecting B2B marketers and lead generation in the same way as B2C?
Furthermore, what happens with Brexit? If we are no longer part of the EU, do we still need to follow GDPR, which only applies in law to EU countries?
Here in the UK, we are a service-based economy. According to the Office of National Statistics, it’s where over 70% of our GDP comes from, with over 80% of our workers being employed within the various service sectors.