I just finished up a 10 part series on how to be a better sales manager. Whew! It’ll be a while before I try anything that ambitious again. Here are links to all the posts in the series.
1. Listen
4. Take the micro out of your manage
9. Connect with customers on every level
10. Bring out the best in everyone
We had lots of good conversation around these topics, but what did I miss? What ideas have helped you become a better manager?
Content Marketing from Word Sell
- How to Be a Better Sales Manager, Part 3 – Be the Director, Not the Star
- How to Be a Better Sales Manager, Part 8 – Embrace a System
- How to Be a Better Sales Manager, Part 5 – Focus on Results
Interactive Marketing from Northbound
- Social Media for Business - The Big Picture (Straight North)
- How to Write a Press Release (Straight North)
- 10 Ways to Add Fresh, Persuasive Content to Your Website (Straight North)
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The key to turning your organization into a world class operation is to put into place the policies and procedures that made every single person perform like a top producer.
When I worked for billionaire Charlie Munger I discovered the secret to doubling sales and proceeded to double the sales of nine different divisions, all within 12-15 months of taking each of them over.
Top producers go after only the biggest possible clients. Top producers write effective sales letters. Top producers follow up with a vengeance. They send constant promotional pieces depicting more and more benefits of their product.
Most importantly, they never let rejection slow them down. In fact, when rejected, top producers become even more determined. If you can hire nothing but top producers, than you probably do not need to read the rest of this. But if, like me, you’re having a constant battle trying to find star talent, than you can follow the formula in this article and dramatically increase sales performance across the board. Even your top producers will perform better using this formula.
You can get profound results in your business if you work on it (rather than just in it) only one hour per week. As long as that one hour is designed to be proactive and you’re committed to improving the process incrementally.
If today, you started working on how you get appointments, for example, and you looked to, once per week, make that skill just a little better, within ten sessions (ten weeks) you can have a profound improvement.
In most sales organizations, the sales are ad-hoc, with everyone running around doing what they think is best and the management setting very little or no minimum standards of performance.
For example, what is your standard for what type of account your salespeople should go after? Have you worked “on” this aspect of proper targeting? What exactly are they going to present? What are the top five strategic objectives you want to achieve from every interaction with every buyer (seriously, have you sat down and talked about that, planned that out? Practiced it, role-played it and polished it to a fine luster?)
Let’s take “getting appointments.” Every week, the sales reps should work on their activity level, who were they targeting, what were they saying, what tools did they have? etc…
For example, we came up with seven elements of what would make someone want to meet with our sales reps? How many of these have YOU developed? How to close more sales? How to find the best buyers? These are all part of a formula for creating the ultimate sales machine. Then you role-play the with your sales team, constantly improving every little word, every sentence. Done right, they will enjoy the process.
One company worked on this for twenty weeks, just one hour per week and went from getting three to four appointments per week to 30 appointments per week with the exact same sales team. We just kept adding more and more ideas and incentives and strategies for getting appointments and each week, made everyone a little better at it. In the “role-plays” we came up with a come back for every put off.
And here’s the kicker, all of the meetings that this company got appointments with were all what I call “Dream” prospects. Dream prospects are the big accounts or players. So many companies chase 10,000 clients, when 100 HUGE clients would change their lives. But they lack the devotion it takes to penetrate huge clients. I’ve personally sold more than 60 of the Fortune 500 my services, and most of them at the CEO level. There is no executive that won’t get to know exactly who you are if you go after them every single week.
Now let’s work on the client sales call itself. What’s the first thing you do when you walk in? What’s the second? What are your methods for establishing a little rapport? What are the exact questions you’re going to ask and why are you going to ask each one of them? What are you looking to do for every question you ask? A top sales manager doesn’t leave any of this to chance.
Then the presentation. What are all the strategic objectives you are looking to accomplish in every interaction with a possible client? How will they be met? What do you want the next move to be? What would be ideal and then what are the five layers of alternatives below if you can’t get the “ideal” thing to happen?
The more you can systematize the sales process, the more you can rely on excellent selling going on in your organization.
Another important tip for you: Make your weekly meetings mandatory. That’s how you get real progress. Since each session takes you deeper and incrementally builds upon the previous session, everyone must be inn every session. Use teleseminars or conference calls so even if a rep is sick they can attend. I tell my staff that there’s only two reasons they miss a weekly sales meeting: Dead or dying. No doctor appointments, no dentist appointments, etc… Make the sales meeting at the same time every week, usually Monday at 4:00 and just tell everyone to plan everything else around that time, because at that time all you’re going to be doing is working on the business.
The full formula: Take every aspect of the sales process and bullet it out. Then work on it until you’ve given yourself at least five alternative ideas for reach area. For step one: “Getting the appointment,” we have twenty ideas full spelled out. For “strategic objectives in a meeting with a client, ” we have 14. That’s why we outsell every competitor we have by a wide margin. And if you’re not sure what to work on, here’s the best possible tip I can provide: Ask every person to tell you two things: “what’s going great and what needs improvement.” Plenty will come up that you can work on.
could you please share with us your twenty ideals for setting appointments?
thankyou so much