Issue 1
A Poorly Defined Sales Process, which Dilutes Sales Revenues
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A DISCOURAGED SALES FORCE DIMINISHES SALES EFFICIENCY
When their efforts don’t pay off quickly enough, even fully capable salespeople tend to get discouraged. They may spend longer and longer hours struggling to meet their sales quotas, working less and less efficiently all the time. Feeling increasingly powerless to influence prospects, they may also begin to press for a sale in ineffective ways—for instance, by arranging full-dress product presentations to prospects who they have not even qualified or who haven’t yet agreed that they need the solution being presented. Or they allow prospects to milk them for information without getting a commensurate commitment first.
The details of what goes wrong differ for each individual salesperson, but the net result is always the same: a discouraged sales force, diminished sales efficiency (i.e., wasted investments of sales time and resources that fail to produce high quality sales) and, consequently, increased cost of sales.
The bottom line? Sales never result efficiently and with maximum revenue unless the sales process is continually and closely managed. And before the sales process can be managed, it must be manageable.
The Sales Transformation Survey by Accenture on December 2003 found that a critical need today is to move a sales force away from its traditional focus on selling individual products and services and move it towards selling complete solutions.
Such a strategy can lead to a higher level of engagement with business customers. Yet 28% of executives say that their salespeople are not adequately focused on solution selling and too focused on selling products.
DEVELOPING A CONSULTATIVE SALES PROCESS
From the perspective of Sales Directors, developing a consultative sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic, and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do.
This outline includes the activity and calls they must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the materials they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects, and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale to make their sales approach maximally effective.
It’s only when such an outline is in place and has been vetted by the experience of top performers that sales management is in a position to (1) monitor the sales force’s activity, progress, and their results (2)
assess problems as they arise, and, when necessary, (3) redirect individual sales representatives’ efforts efficiently.
Although many organizations appreciate the importance of being customer-focused and talk in vague terms about their "consultative sales process," surprisingly few sales leaders invest the time and energy required to develop a formal sales process—a sales process that is at once detailed and resilient enough to guide their salespeople and permit effective management of their efforts.
OVERCOMING IMPLEMENTATION INERTIA
Even when a consultative sales process has been developed, understood by sales managers, and written down and circulated, it’s often not enough. No matter how brilliant, a sales process will only be effective to the extent it is followed and used by frontline sales staff. And this is where most organizations fall down: overcoming inertia—among managers and salespeople alike—and implementing the process.
The hurdles that must be cleared in order to get people throughout the organization to actually implement it are enough to cause Sales Directors to tear their hair out. But a select few of the very best have found some innovative strategies that have enabled them to achieve the Holy Grail: sustained sales growth achieved efficiently, reliably, and by design.
Here are some of the ideas that have worked for them.
SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS
● INVOLVING CUSTOMERS
One of the most effective strategies of successful Sales Directors is to get customers involved by ...read more >
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