Key Factors in Managing the Sales Process

Business development in today’s market environment can be quite challenging…and opportunistic.  If you know “where to put your shoulder” before you push, it is not only possible to succeed in generating business, but you are likely to exceed the goals you have set.

Once you clearly grasp your mission, aligning your processes and tools becomes extremely effective.  Identifying which tools to apply and how to apply them, plus teaching your sales team how to effectively use them, can be the difference between 20% of your sales team attaining mission goals versus the needed 80% attaining the goals.  To boost your company’s bottom line, let’s look at 5 critical sales tools and processes that would yield better performance for your team.

Preparation 

Researching, strategizing, call planning…The first step to success is to thoroughly outline your goals, then consider the customers’ business situation and what “hurts” they have that require your solution.  Your team should then plan on how to engage with the specific decision-makers, with a focus on talking about that customer’s hurts.  Your sales team should plan on how to emphasize the customer’s hurt and to connect the company’s solution to how to fix the hurt. After each win-loss, you should review the sales process to see who prepped adequately, and who did not, and what you may be able to improve on for the next time.

Talent Selection & Development 

The knowledge, skills, and abilities of the person selected to join your sales team looms large in the success of that individual and in your perceived performance as a leader.  Your process of talent selection must begin much before the interviews, with your outline of the Job Profile/Job Description.  The goal is to hire those people who will measurably assist the team to attain the mission.  If the team or individuals need their knowledge of processes or use of sales tools to be elevated, then you should invest in training.  Have the right talent doing the right thing at the right time.

Marketing & Messaging 

Your prospective customers need to know that your company’s solutions can fix their hurts.  As a sales manager, you need to engage with the Marketing Team to develop a credible and effective marketing strategy.  The execution of the marketing plan by marketing and your sales team should be centered on identifying the customers hurt rather than just informing the customer base that you have a product available for an unidentified hurt.  The mission-aligned messaging should set you apart and bring exposure to how your product will fix your customers’ hurts.

Optimize Your ROSI 

ROSI is Return on Sales Investment…i.e., how much value is your company realizing from investing in you and your sales team?  To optimize your ROSI, you need to spend your budget dollars on those actions that you have considered will be the most productive…for example: adding a sales rep, or decreasing expenses per rep.  Or the investment into a new tool that you have determined will improve the productivity and win-rate of your team.  The point being that you can justify/rationalize the reasons to invest into that action and you have a good handle on how that action will return measurable gains to the company.

Effective Sales Tools

There are numerous sales tools that assist teams to increase their sales productivity…as well as those that produce little to no additional sales.  The area to focus on in the “new normal” economy is analytics.  The practical application of business intelligence is growing rapidly, and your competitors are very likely using, or planning to use, analytics to beat you in this market.

There are many tools that can utilize business intelligence that assist your sales team to discover customer hurts and will also pre-qualify the opportunity, and provide coaching instructions to the sales rep to put them on a more productive pathway in their sales process.  Some sales tools are very simple, such as a call-planning app, or a time management app, etc.  The trap to avoid is to have your sales team become Professor Gadget, and keep rotating the next “shiny object” through their daily execution of the sales process.

TIGI Challenge to Win 

TIGI’s Challenge to Win program assists sales teams to measurably increase their sales by optimizing their sales mission and aligning their talent, processes, and tools to that mission.

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