Archive for the ‘efficient’ Category
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
Most sales team have a “sales process”. This is a set of steps they take to help the customer make a good decision about their products and services. It typically goes from suspect stage to close stage of the sales cycle. Often these sales processes are written in a very salesperson focused way. They seem to have the goal of “closing” the customer and the worksheets and notes associated with each step are carefully guarded and most certainly never shown to the prospective customer.
In this approach, a sales process is something done TO the customer instead of WITH the customer.
What if salespeople took a different approach and invited their prospective customer into the process? What if salespeople re-wrote the sales cycle steps with the goal of helping the customer make the best possible decision for them? Maybe it is called a Decision Process instead of a sales process?
When a company hires a consulting firm, the consulting firm typically has a process they use on each engagement to understand the customer and then suggest and execute solutions to meet their clients needs. These solutions are typically repeatable based on the diagnosis. This is much of what salespeople do, but salespeople differ in the fact that they try to keep their process a secret.
Having a tried-and-true, repeatable process builds confidence in customers. Salespeople might want to consider sharing their process and invite the customer to take each step with them. They could share their reports and forms along the way. Along the way, making sure to stay true to their promise of helping them make good decisions and then, together, document and demonstrate it throughout the process. This builds confidence and trust in the salesperson and the process.
To build trust, move an opportunity along a decision process with your customer. They will get on the offense with you instead of on the defense against you.
Sales Managers , To get sales team meeting agendas on this topic and many others, subscribe to Meeting to Win. We’d love to work with you and your team!
Tags: CRM, customer meeting success, customer meetings, move deals, sales process, transparency
Posted in Account Management, CRM, best practice, customer meeting, efficient, opportunity, performance, sales consulting, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas | No Comments »
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Sales cycles have typical steps. Customer like to take certain steps to make a decision and salespeople take certain steps to make a sale or help their customers make good decisions. Salespeople can accelerate the decision process by strategically examining the sales cycles for opportunities to add efficiencies. The benefits of doing this exist for both salesperson and customer. Customers need solutions and making efficient decisions on which solutions to purchase must be in their best interest. Salespeople benefit from getting to a go/no-go decision sooner, also. They either get to start helping a customer or, at least, realize they aren’t the right solution and can move on to the next one sooner. I am not suggesting that anyone rushes through an important decision process, I am simply suggesting a regular examination of the sales cycles to look for ways to improve the decision process and begin solving problems faster.
To do so, first list out all the steps a salesperson and a customer make to get to go/no-go on your solutions. Jot down the timeline and if there are pre-requisite steps for any of the steps.
Now, carefully examine if there is an opportunity to:
- Consolidate any two steps into one step.
- Eliminate an unnecessary step altogether.
- Simutaneously conduct two or more steps.
List out the benefits to the customer for making the decision with this new sales cycle. Then, make sure that you and the customer are clear on the steps both would like to take to help the customer make an informed yet timely decision. Stay two steps ahead with both understanding what the steps are, who should be involved and what decisions they should be able to make along the way.
The sales cycle is an important process where important decisions are made. Running it as effectively and efficiently as possible is in everyone’s best interest and a salesperson’s responsibility. Enjoy accelerated sales cycles with this simple exercise.
This week’s Meeting to Win sales team meeting agenda is Consolidate to Accelerate. Sales Manager who subscribe to the sales team meeting agenda service will receive a 60-Minute agenda that will lead their teams through an examination of their own sales cycles. Each participant will leave with a new plan for one live deal in their pipeline. Join our subscribers by signing up to get your weekly sales team meeting agendas from Meeting to Win.
Tags: consolidate sales cycles, CRM, customer meetings, existing customer, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, winning in sales
Posted in Account Management, CRM, agendas, customer meeting, efficient, opportunity, sales activity | No Comments »
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Your products and services – or solutions – meet very important needs of your customers. The more your solutions directly impact their ability to do their business more effectively, the more powerful and important your partnership becomes. Salespeople can hitch their solutions to the most important wagons with a little focus on the right needs.
No matter who you are positioned with in an account, an understanding of the top company goals is useful in the short term and often critical in the long term. In the short term, simply offering a solution they are asking for may be enough to make a sale at a department level. In the long term, much like what we have seen in the past couple of years, spending gets scrutized for one reason or another and any spending not directly tied to the most important goals gets cancelled. Also, salespeople often find themselves in the position of being sold internally by an ally or coach. They have to provide the information and incentive to get their internal ally to fight for their solutions. If that person is armed with the connection to the top goals, the more likely they are to be successful in their interal sales role.
So, we know it’s important, now, how do you do it. Here are some things that you may want to try:
- First of all, start high in an organization. The more effectively you can tie your solutions to their unique company goals, the more likely you are to stay high. Even if you get delegated lower during the process, you still have access higher.
- Research, research, research. Find out everything you can about what the CEO is focused on accomplishing.
- Find out what role your contacts play in the top company goals. For example, pretend your contact is in HR and one of the company’s top goals is the successful launch of a new product for 8% revenue growth this year. How will HR help the company reach this goal? Is it their job to find new sales people? Is it their job to train everyone on the new product? What particular part will they play in this goal? Once you know this you can help them reach their goal which helps the company reach it’s goal.
- Demonstrate how you can help them reach these goals more efficiently. Show how the investment with you gives them the gains they need.
- Once you are in, monitor your contribution and share it in regular reports and communications. Check in often on progress and make sure you stay aligned should the goals get altered.
- Learn to ask questions that get you to the most important goals. You’ll be surprised that often your current contacts actually don’t even know the company’s top goals. You need to learn to ask questions that don’t make them feel stupid yet also help you work toward gathering the necessary information. Simply asking someone “what are your company’s top 3 goals?” may sound like a pop quiz. Use your communication skills to have productive conversations where you both learn if necessary.
Solutions tied to top goals stand the test of time and scrutiny. Get hitched to the right goals for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them “get hitched”, subscribe today.
Tags: CRM, customer meetings, existing customer, motivate sales team, new customers, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda
Posted in Account Management, CRM, communication, efficient, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings | No Comments »
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
2011 Summer Sales Team Meeting Agenda Series = Summer of Experts.
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Summer is right around the corner and the time to start executing your summer selling plan is now. You may have just experienced this on a smaller scale during Spring Break season. Decision makers are out of the office on vacations or entertaining clients at golf tournaments. Spring and Summer can mark tough times for sales professionals who are still trying to move deals forward. The odds of getting all the decision makers involved at the necessary stage are not good during the summer. Each activity gets pushed off until “next week” when someone is “back in the office” and, before you know it, your sales cycles have stretched out. And, salespeople and their teammates are trying to schedule in much needed breaks, also.
It is in everyone’s best interest to keep deals moving through the summer. Customers need solutions, salespeople need sales. The season does not change those truths. So, how can sales professionals enjoy their summer and a few successes at the same time? Here are some actions to take now to close some summer deals.
- Look at your pipeline and determine which deals should be closing during the summer.
- At your next opportunity with your prospective customers, walk through all the steps they will most likely need to take to make a decision on your solution. Together, build a timeline for when these steps should occur based on when they need a solution in place. This will give you both a timeline to work toward heading into the summer.
- With your timeline in hand, acknowledge the challenges of meeting deadlines in the summer months with your customer. Build a calendar that includes everyone’s (salesperson’s team and customer’s team) planned vacations or absences. This way you can stay a few steps ahead on planning.
- Make sure that everyone who will be involved in the decision process understands the timeline and the steps in the process.
- Consider scheduling a regular update call with your key contacts. Think of yourself as a project manager keeping the team on track to make a decision. Each week should move the deal forward.
- Keep your momentum during the summer by working a business development plan. Salespeople have a tendency to take a little break during the summer months. Those that keep up the hard work will gain momentum throughout the summer and into the next selling season. Very often prospects are more receptive during holiday and summer seasons. Take advantage of the lighter mood and begin some great relationships.
- Set clear activity and performance goals for the summer months. It is too easy to go with the flow of traffic if you don’t have a better plan. If those around you have slowed down, it is easy to follow their lead. Build a plan to follow and avoid this slow down.
- Take your own vacation. You’ll enjoy it more if you’ve been proactive to continue adding to your pipeline and moving your deals throughout the summer. Now, go get that break!
Enjoy a summer filled with sales by building and executing your summer sales plan now.
Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win, LLC. Become a Meeting to Win subscriber to receive a new sales team meeting agenda every week. This week’s agenda is We Interrupt This Summer to Bring You…Solutions. As a team, you’ll leave this meeting with a solid plan to succeed throughout the summer. You’ll win and your customers will win. What a great summer this could be!
Tags: CRM, cusotmer meeting success, customer meetings, energize sales team, move deals, pre-call planning, prepare for sales call, sales team agenda., winning in sales
Posted in Account Management, CRM, Summer Selling Season, communication, customer meeting, efficient, performance | No Comments »
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
Being a successful salesperson takes unbelieveable self-discipline. It is a job that requires proactive activity to move forward. At the same time, there are enough things to simply react to that a salesperson can stand still instead of move forward. I am in the process of writing a sales team meeting agenda to help our subscribers identify their anchors and then figure out how to pull them up occassionally so they can move forward into the sea of opportunity that exists for them. I thought I’d share the concept in a blog post, also.
How can you tell if you have anchors? Here are a few questions to answer:
- Have you identified a new problem to solve for your current clients?
- Have you presented new ideas and solutions to help them meet their goals?
- Does your pipeline grow and move at a good pace?
- Have you added new customers, new contacts and new referral partners to your client list in the past year?
- Are your sales growing?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you may need to find and pull up your anchors so you can move forward and grow your business. Anchors are the things you are doing instead of developing and expanding your business.
To get started, think about everything you do in a week to simply maintain, or not lose, your current business. These are your anchors. Examine those activities closely and determine how to use those to grow your business or how to delegate them to a capable associate with different responsibilties (customer service, etc). Anchors can be good sometimes. Occassionally it makes sense to stop, drop your anchor and get ready to move forward again. Just don’t sit there too long.
Now, replace your anchors with business development activities. Your ship will be sailing again before you know it.
Pull up your anchors – the sea awaits.
Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win, LLC. Join our growing community of subscribers for weekly sales team meeting topics in a 60-minute format. Agendas include practical exercises, practice sessions, discussion topics and leadership opportunities. Grow your sales with Meeting to Win.
Posted in What They Are Saying About Meeting to Win, agenda ideas, agendas, blog, discipline, efficient, management tips, meetings, sales activity, sales meetings, sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting ideas | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Real quick – here are two tried and true techniques for moving deals through – or out – of your pipeline.
Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win. Get next week’s sales team agenda by joining Meeting to Win.
For a moment, forget YOUR sales process and map out your client’s buying process (if they have one). Some clients are more experienced at purchasing than others. Ask them, “how do you typically go about deciding which [blank] to purchase?” You’ll know by their answer if you need to adjust your selling process to their buying process or if you need to help them develop a buying process. Either way, you now have a map to your destination – huge!
Then, be the guide. Always make sure they know the next 2-3 things they should do – and when they should be done – as they assess your product or service so “they can make the best possible decision”. Keep them moving toward the destination, also.
Create and follow your map, expect detours, but most importantly, take your prospective client with you. You both have the same map. If one strays from the journey, it can be addressed much more gracefully than if you never confirmed you both had the same trip in mind.
Tags: move deals, sales team agenda.
Posted in Uncategorized, agendas, efficient, sales activity, sales team agenda. | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
For the past 6 months I’ve had the opportunity to witness a salesperson succeeding. Of course, I know many salespeople succeeding, but this story really intrigued me. First of all, this salesperson started a consulting business in their field 6 months ago. They had no brand, about ten thousand competitors and no marketing budget. Oh, and we were in the downward spiral economically.
Flash forward 6 months and this salesperson has more business than they can handle and is now considering adding to their team just to keep up.
I am very impressed with how hard this person has been working and really started to think about the actual keys to their success beyond just hard work. I started making a list of this salesperson’s activities, habits and characteristics and thought it would be fun to share my list in a blog post.
So, here, in no particular order, are my observations or what I am calling “one salesperson’s keys to success”.
- Creative deal and pricing structures. This consultant is in an old industry where they’ve always done pricing the same way. He surprised prospective clients with better deal structures than they’d seen. Don’t mistake “creative” for lower – these are competitive deal structures that are a win for both parties.
- This salesperson is not afraid to walk away from deals. If the deal isn’t in this person’s sweet spot, he actually walks away from it and spends time where he can be more effective – and valuable to his client.
- Cold, hard, disciplined sales activity. This salesperson knows what activity leads to sales results and he does that activity EVERY DAY.
- Manages time effectively. Plans his work and works his plan – seems so simple.
- Does not get slowed down by rejection. He is able to expect some rejection and take it in stride knowing he is that much closer to a “yes”.
- Uses technology effectively. He is very selective about which technology tools to use and which would be “cool”, but just create more work or wasted time.
- Frugal. He is only spending money where there is clear ROI.
- Networking, networking, networking every day.
- Chose a niche and sticks with it. He is turning down business outside his niche. Since he began doing this his traction in his niche is growing daily and his client list has doubled each month.
- He sets attitude rules. For example, if he loses a deal, he only allows himself to “mourn” it for 24 hours. He uses business development activity to pull him out of mourning which turns into new opportunities before the 24 hours is even up.
- He takes care of himself – he works out daily, eats right and even took a week vacation.
- He doesn’t waste time on administration. He set up a system that is efficient and doesn’t spend too much time on paperwork.
- This person naturally has no call reluctance.
- This salesperson has stayed in touch with past clients consistently for 15+ years.
- He is a master at LinkedIn. Daily he is on LinkedIn building and sharing his network.
- He asks for referrals every day – and gets them.
- For some reason, Tuesdays were a discouraging day. This salesperson figured out why (he couldn’t connect with anyone on Mondays and felt no progress) and did something about it. He created a plan to stay motivated on Tuesdays and recognized that the week always improved.
- Extremely and appropriately persistent.
- Knows his ideal customer and pursues ONLY that.
- Faces reality and addresses concerns during deal pursuits. He recognizes when a deal may go south and addresses it with the client before he spends too much time.
- Works a tactical plan. This salesperson knows his strategic goals and then carves out time to create a detailed tactical activity plan. When he gets to his office he “doesn’t have to think”, he just executes his plan.
- He really enjoys his business and his clients. Making them happy and solving business needs genuinely motivates him.
These are just my observations of one successful salesperson. If you are struggling currently, grab some ideas from this list. Duplicate his success using his habits. Happy Selling.
This post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win, LLC. Get weekly sales team meeting agendas and create momentum on your sales team! Visit us at http://www.meetingtowin.com/.
Posted in Uncategorized, best practice, down economy, efficient, management tips, performance, recession, sales activity, sales management, sales tips, tough economy | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
(This winning tip brought to you by Meeting to Win, LLC – www.meetingtowin.com)
Many sales teams are taking a break from investing in new tools – CRMs, on-line sales training, lead sources, Hoovers, etc. Most spending now is on customers, not on ourselves. That may not be such a bad thing. I see it over and over again. The corporate office is looking at the latest bells & whistles for their sales teams. The lastest presentation technology, the latest CRM upgrade, the latest on-line collaboration tool, the latest _________, the latest ________, the latest _________ (you can probably fill in the blanks). They put out an RFP maybe and salespeople come in and share all the great things their _____ can do. All great and probably all very true. It seems the problem comes at the implementation and adoption phase of the project. As new tool is only great when it is used. Too often the latest _______ is rolled out and before it is being maximized, the buyers are off to the next latest ________.
As a sales leader, do a quick inventory of the tools available to you. Do this with your team. Figure out how you can create more efficiencies, drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, eliminate unnecessary work using the tools you already have.
Here is one that applies to a lot of us. Outlook is a tool most of us have. Set up “rules” in Outlook to categorize e-mails that come in. You can color code e-mails based on who they are from, if you are the sole recipient or if you are part of a distribution and so on. You would be amazed at how much less your e-mail controls you once you have these “rules” in place to help you prioritize how you read and respond to e-mails.
Your CRM is a big one, also. Most salespeople don’t use a large percentage of the capabilities of their CRM. What is one way you can use your CRM to help you run more efficiently? Can you mine leads, create a better communication plan with an existing customer, what else?
There are many more ways to maximize the tools available to you. I’d love to hear your ideas, also. Sell more efficiently during a tough economy by maximizing the capabilities of existing tools for you and your team.
Thank you,
The Meeting to Win Team
Posted in down economy, efficient, leads, maximize tools, sales managers, selling tools, tips, tough economy | No Comments »
