We need to focus on activities, as sales activities equal sales success.
“You can’t be in the right place at the right time doing the right things, if you’re sitting here!”
Years ago, I saw this message on the wall of a corporate company. It captures the essence of what we need to do as salespeople. We need to be out building and maintaining relationships. We need to be out servicing our customer’s needs, and we need to be out making sales.
The most successful sales professionals that we dealt with had one thing in common…. THEY DON’T WASTE TIME! They make sure that when they’re working, they’re busy with the appropriate activities. These activities relate to being active in conversation concerning satisfying the needs of their customer.
Addressing these needs means to identify, research and provide the solution to a client’s problem or a desire which they are often not even aware of. If you can do this effectively, the sale will follow. You have to do this for every one of your existing customers! Then you have to do this for the potential customers and leads in your pipeline.
Balanced approach
You have to keep a balance between attracting new customers and retaining the ones that you already have in profitable relationships. The fact is that you can’t have an attitude of “I don’t have to do prospecting”, nor can you ignore retaining customers. Even if you have an established customer base, you need to have a flow of new customers into your base invariably to replace the ones that you lose along the way. You also have to be able to make repeat sales to existing customers, and if you can’t, maybe it’s time to look at your product lines.
All of these truths culminates into necessary activities that form part of the sales process. These activities are directly related to the sales which a salesperson achieves or does not achieve.
Coaching approach
If you have someone in your team that is consistently not achieving sales quotas, then the answer is to be found in exploring the sales activities done. The solution is almost always in either too little or ineffective activities.
Our core focus when we designed and developed our system was to provide these insights to sales managers so that the whole approach changes from management to coaching your team to excellence. We know that beating the salespeople with a stick because they are not achieving sales quotas does not contribute to a healthy work environment or increased sales for that matter. All of us do need some coaching in the areas we need to improve. Hence, the Sales Game.
If activities equal sales, then we need to keep an eye on the quantitative and qualitative values of these activities and work hard to improve both, as a team. If we can improve these two aspects of our sales drive, we can achieve extraordinary results. But we need to be diligent and coach pro-actively. To monitor activities more frequently during the month to ensure arrival. We also need to work on our motivational skills with our teams, and we need to make them the champions of the steps in the sales process. You will only achieve success if you succeed together.
If you want to learn more about how we do this with Accrete, make contact now.
