Hitting your quarterly sales goals can be an arduous task. If you don’t have the right mindset, process and tools, the consequences can be downright spooky.
Here are five things that scare most sales leaders and if you are experiencing the same problems, what you can do about it.
Without an understanding of value and differentiation, your sales organization doesn’t have the ability to articulate the benefits of why a prospect should do business with you. As a result, your prospects have no reason to buy from you over your competitors. Here are some ways to tell if your sellers are struggling with your value and differentiation message:
If you answered yes to any, or all, of the above, you need to create value-based messaging for your sellers to use, and go to work using it consistently throughout your company.
Ask yourself:
Without a repeatable sales process, you don’t have the ability to qualify, advance, and close opportunities consistently. Are you experiencing these chilling occurrences on a regular basis?
If so, it’s a good indication that you’re lacking a repeatable sales process. To create one, consider these questions:
By building a process from these answers, you’ll begin to see an increase in qualified leads advancing through the sales funnel.
Without a sales planning process in place, your sales leaders lack the ability to coach your sales team on leveraging potential opportunities within their territories. You can’t hope to achieve increased sales and overall business growth when these hair-raising problems happen frequently:
The good news is that you can ward off the spirits of poor sales planning with… good sales planning. Spend some time determining:
when you improve your sales planning process with this kind of a focus on building your sales pipeline, you’ll enjoy higher quota attainment, healthier pipelines and more cross-sells and up-sells.
Perhaps one of the most horrifying sales problems of all is the inability to recruit, hire, develop, and motivate sales talent. The result is a tangled web of organizational nightmares such as:
Fortunately, you can escape this snare by building a foundation for a strong sales hiring process. Ask these essential questions:
When you hire people based on clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and behaviors, you’re able to hire talent that understands your expectations, demonstrates “best-in-class” behaviors, sets development goals and mentors others without being asked.
Each one of the four points made above are important by themselves. But without the ability to drive their use on your team, your organization will experience alarming frustration with:
Begin working on adoption and reinforcement of a holistic sales process by asking yourself these essential questions:
By finding a way to implement company-wide sales transformation, you’ll quickly begin to see improvements in overall alignment and the ability to set and meet higher sales goals.