THE THREE BEST WAYS TO CONSISTENTLY DRIVE HIGHER SALES RESULTS. ">
To succeed in sales, one of the very first principles is designing your business model around a scalable, holistic sales approach. In short, this consists of building on three things:
- an effective sales process;
- the appropriate team members and
- well suited KPI’s in place.
But before you set off on this task, there is one other that needs to be completed first - the Segmentation Strategy. Determining and understanding your buyers’ profiles, their behaviours and their expectations during the buying process.
With clearly defined buyer’s profiles, you would have a better idea of the skill sets needed to sell to them. And once they have been appropriately categorised, they can be assigned to the ideal salespeople who will apply the company’s perfected sales strategy for a higher success rate.
This three-legged principle is the best-proven way to consistently accelerate sales and here follows my discussion around it.
1.Define Your Sales Process
If you want to measure and fully manage your sales based on the process, you need to go further than simply defining the different stages and the activities attached to it. First, research and recognize the stages and activities that are best suited to your business. Then define the individual steps that need to be performed within each stage and stipulate the tools that sales reps can apply to manage their prospects. Additionally, you would need to keep the process aligned with future projections and an automated CRM system while generating data that shows the percentage or likelihood of finalising a sale within each stage.
Keeping track of these details enables organisations to identify more opportunities for closing the deal within each stage and to efficiently predict and measure their outcomes.
2.Hire the Right Salespeople
Any good sales strategy requires the right salespeople to drive the business. To find out if a candidate is a good fit for your company, you must start by outlining a specific set of expertise you require for the job. In general, I would recommend hiring someone that meets at least five of your stipulated competencies.
Remember to look for the strengths that will be compatible with your buyer’s profiles and have a proper debate with your candidate about the specific sales experience you’re after.
On top of his/her experience, also look for that chemistry or “je ne sais quoi” in a candidate. The right person will have the ability to get other people excited too.
To further help you narrow down candidates, set up an objective scoring system and, in this way, assess each candidate as thoroughly as possible.
3.Measure and Improve Performance
The number one challenge in sales management is the performance of the team. To conquer this, it is important to have a system in place for measuring your organisation’s key performance indicators or KPI’s.
KPI’s are, however, never a one-size-fits-all and instead of persuading you that a certain set of KPI’s is the best, it is advisable that you define the right set of metrics for your own team according to your own company goals.
By categorising them into overall performance or achievement, the pipeline flow and some productivity metrics, sales leaders can identify weak spots and
take the necessary actions to help their teams be more effective.
When combining the right process, the right team and the right way to measure and improve your sales, you will be well-positioned to accelerate sales and
build a scalable and repeatable model.
Predictable Success can examine your sales processes and deliver an accurate roadmap after determining where you’re on track and where you need a course correction. Predictable Success can provide a cost/benefit analysis and expert recommendations to improve your sales performance on every level.
