Conquering Some of Today’s Sales Challenges
Some of Today’s Sales Challenges
Your company has researched, designed and built competitive, innovative and compelling products.
Money and effort has also been spent on marketing and communicating the product benefits…only to soon discover that it is difficult to sell because your competitor releases a similar product shortly thereafter.
The last thing you want to do is do anything out of complete desperation or that is overly drastic…such as dropping the price or losing the sale.
This is just an example but these and other similar challenges confront your front line sales organization daily.
What to do in these and other scenarios? How to differentiate and stay ahead of the pack?
Differentiation through Your People and Communications Delivery Methods
Your biggest differentiator is your people and how they interact with their clients.
If your people are not prepared to face these tough scenarios and work through them with your clients, then you will have difficulty growing your business and holding onto your key sales drivers, the salespeople (who will end up quitting).
How to work through this? Some examples:
Front line telephone sales need specific skills that outsell the competition
Salespeople need to create customer value by cross-selling and up-selling
Sales needs to have high impact sales conversations with the customers
They need to present the value proposition in the right manner
How do you ensure that the skills are applied and properly utilised?
The team needs to be motivated and management needs to be aligned. Reinforcement also needs to be applied.
Motivation and Management Alignment Programmes
Examples. To enhance the sales team climate you need:
Interpersonal and team communication
Management needs to motivate the sales team, lead change and build the right team
Management needs to run effective performance appraisals and provide motivational feedback
Leadership needs to be developed through sales performance coaching, coaching the disengaged sales staff, and leading the sales team to success.
Reinforcement Methodologies
Without reinforcement, you lose the skills you have learned quickly. You need to treat learning and development with a five stage process to ensure business results always follow initiatives. Result: each initiative translates to measurable execution by learners which produces concrete business results. As follows:
Align the learning to desired business outcomes and target behaviours
Involve all in the design of a holistic learning experience
Deliver using the right tools and practicing 80% of the time using realistic scenarios
Embed through active support and reinforcement through direct managers
Form learning groups to act on barriers that impede performance
Lead with your people and ensure the skills they learn are embedded and utilised.
Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore
Tags: People Skills, Performance Management, Relationship Management, Selling Skills
