7 things you can do immediately to improve your sales results

In 30 seconds

The What

1. Define your value proposition

2. Link everyone's roles to "how we sell and service around here"

3. Make sales about helping your customers achieve their goals

4. Remove non-sales related tasks from salespeople's activities

5. Automate non-revenue generating activities

6. Recruit salespeople with the right character and attitudes

7. Let sales managers be leaders and coaches

The How

1. Develop your sales strategy and go-to-market plans

2. Do sales market segmentation

3. Audit your sales processes

4. Review your KAM strategies

5. Review you sales selection protocols

6. Assess your sales team

7. Train and coach your team regularly

In 2 minutes

It can be pretty easy to sell in good times; however, it’s the test of any business and its leadership team as to how they sell in tough times.

This is when you don’t want to be relying on luck to get you through. This is when having (or putting in place) a sales system will make a huge difference in helping you sell better.

So where to start??

Here are 7 things we can do immediately and 7 ways we can approach the improvement of our sales operations:

THE WHAT

1. Define an easily understood and relevant compelling reason for our prospects to buy from us, rather than a rival – our value proposition
2. Incorporate sales into our value chain – across the whole business – linking everyone’s roles to “how we sell and service around here”
3. Shift away from making sales about achieving financial goals and instead toward selling solutions to help our customers solve problems and achieve their goals
4. Reward salespeople by removing non-sales related activities from their activity mandate
5. Introduce effective governance that automates critical non-revenue generating activities in sales
6. Employ and develop salespeople with the right character and attitudes rather than solely sales or technical experience
7. Give sales managers the freedom to be leaders and coaches rather than super-salespeople

THE HOW

1. Review and develop our sales strategy and go-to-market plan
2. Analyse our market segments and undertake targeted segmentation to find viable market segments, sub-segments and even micro-segments
3. Audit our sales processes and protocols to make sure they support ethical and effective selling practices
4. Review our Key Account Management strategies and overall sales practices
5. Review our sales selection protocols for both salespeople and clients
6. Assess the knowledge, skills, and mindset of our sales teams
7. Train and coach our sales managers and salespeople regularly in small bit size chunks of learning that are relevant and applied to their world

So instead of falling into the old trap of relying on a ‘Point Solution’ (you know, that one thing that promises to fix everything – the one thing that sounds too good to be true because it is), let’s take a more holistic approach to running our sales team and operations; one that is underpinned by strategy, process, people and culture.

Remember, everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, founder and MD of Barrett

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