book.chapter Vision

An inspiring vision fuels sales, blending a bold yet achievable dream with core values and strengths, articulated in simple language, to drive a united, strategic pursuit of success. Have a coach mindset A compelling vision paints a vivid picture of what your company will resemble down the road. It needs to inspire risk-taking to achieve ambitious goals. An engaging vision also provides perseverance when adversity strikes, as it inevitably does. Growing sales generally necessitates expanding your salesforce. You must recruit the right people and motivate them to sell. The key to sales growth is always hiring the proper sales manager to lead and coach the team. An excellent sales coach who focuses on developing sellers is essential. Three common sales coaching pitfalls are: the owner doubling as sales manager, thus shortchanging coaching; appointing your top salesperson as manager, resulting in losing your best producer; and expecting your star sales rep to still sell full-time after becoming the sales manager, shortchanging their team development duties. To boost sales, adopt a coaching mindset aimed at winning a championship. Acknowledge you can’t do it alone and diligently recruit talented salespeople and managers. Putting the right people in key roles is truly the secret to success. Set poor free It's vital to openly rank salespeople monthly using clear metrics. Meet individually to discuss the rankings and figure out what behaviors influence their position, positive or negative. The top 25% likely drive over 60% of sales; the bottom 25% under 6%. Yet most time gets spent assisting lower performers rather than enabling top talent. Instead, set reasonable minimums for each person based on experience and territory. Allow a fair timeframe to meet these standards while providing weekly feedback on progress. Release those consistently underperforming as they likely won't improve; this frees up time spent trying to boost low producers. Have the mindset that if they don't meet numbers, sales isn't their strength so they should find an area to better apply their skills. The key to consistency is measuring performance, then promoting or releasing people accordingly. It's rarely the people you release that cause misery but rather those you retain that haven't earned their spot. Recruit top talent Always keep a list of 10 to 15 impressive salespeople you'd like to recruit, even from outside your industry or company. Court them constantly whether you have an opening or not. Develop a written profile of your top performers' attributes and share it internally, offering a $10,000 finder's fee to any employee who helps recruit someone fitting that profile. Pay $2,000 when the new salesperson brings in 10 deals, another $2,000 after 20 more deals, and the final $6,000 after 30 additional deals, effectively paying the finder's fee from the revenue the new top salesperson generates. Maintain the mindset that you are always recruiting top performers with the right attitudes. Specific sales knowledge can be taught later, but hire first and foremost for the right attitude. Bring top salespeople on slowly, but be quick to part ways if they underperform expectations. Train continuously A strong training program for a sales team will include hands-on coaching where the sales manager actively works with salespeople in the field. This coaching should be a mix of making joint calls on live prospects, having salespeople ride along while the manager makes sales calls, and coaching calls where the salespeople sell and the manager observes. Each call should end with a debrief to point out what's going well and what needs improvement. Sales managers should spend at least four hours each month making actual sales calls with their team. Role play is also important, where salespeople act out what they do and get critiqued. Like professional athletes, salespeople should spend more time practicing than actually selling to customers. Managers can run weekly workshops for salespeople to practice their pitches and skills before using them on potential customers. The goal is to increase both the quantity and quality of the sales team. More salespeople will sell more, but training through coaching and role play will improve their skills. Make success guides To build your own personalized success guide, ask your top salespeople to provide a list of the 10 to 15 objections they hear most often. Write down the best responses you have heard that address each objection. Also document what you think your competitors' responses would be. Once assembled, distribute this guide widely amongst your team. Have salespeople repeatedly practice responding to the listed objections until the answers flow smoothly and naturally. Try to include a unique perspective in each response that competitors are unlikely to provide. The guide should also cover compelling features and benefits of your offerings so salespeople can automatically answer "why should i choose you?" questions. A company that takes building and refining such a success guide seriously could potentially increase sales 20 percent or more. When operating without such a guide, you metaphorically "fly by the seat of your pants" and risk facing turbulence.