Your Sales Team Is Missing These 3 Things
In spite of the fact that all departments in the business work together, the sales department is the revenue center while the rest are cost centers. Without a good sales team, all the other efforts would go to waste. There are qualities that are necessary for the sales to hit the set objectives and bring the revenue. Unfortunately, most marketing managers only look at prior records and the presentation when hiring members of their team only for the team to fail in hitting their targets. If your business is in the same dilemma, these could be the three things that your sales team may be missing.
Passion and motivation succeeding in your industry
A track record of success does not guarantee that the members of your team have the passion for driving your sales volumes to higher heights. Many are times when a salesperson leaves a highly successful sales team in a company and joins another industry only to realize that he or she does not have the motivation he had.
Is the team engaging the management in dealing with the challenges it meets in the field? Are members going out of their way to reach new markets and serve the existing clients? When given a chance, do members challenge some of the procedures adopted by the company? A team that is passionate about selling in your company will do all that is asked above.
A team may be passionate but lack the motivation to improve performance. How do you reward the highly performing members of the team? Do you meet the promises you make once the team has hit the target? How do you handle the team when business is bad? Your approach in dealing with such factors has a bearing on the how motivated your team is and eventually the performance.
Sale coaching
It is wrong to promote sales leaders on just their performance. While it is important to have a high performing sales team leader, it is important to have leaders that will coach the team. According to CSO Insights, companies that coach the sales are likely to exceed their sales expectations and attain their revenue projections better than companies that just meet the expectations or are below expectations. In their 2015 Sales Management Performance Optimization Study, they found the rate of success of such firms in reaching their goals as 97 percent to 87 percent to those that conduct average coaching and 93 percent to 83 to those that are below average in their sales coaching. The sales coaching involves assessing the skill gaps, developing coaching plan impacting new knowledge in the teams and observing the performance based on the new skills.
Selling products based on price instead of value
There is so much talk about selling value in the marketing field but, there are a few people that know how to go about selling value to the clients. Unfortunately, the ability to quantify and present value to the buyer is the only way to deal with price rejections.
For the sales force to sell value, they must understand the benefits that the buyers will get from the product and what it costs to come up with such solutions. The process of identifying and quantifying value becomes even longer when dealing with business-to-business markets. This is because the benefits should be in line with the buyers’ business objectives. Moreover, it must be important to all the constituents of the business buyer decision-making groups such as end users, managers, stakeholders and their customers.
Companies must invest in corporate sales training to teach the sales teams what others aspects of their solutions they can promote besides the price and functionality. Some common values include durability, reliability, speed, cost-effectiveness, and portability among others.
According to Sales Readiness Group If your team is not selling value, there is no way it is going to charge a premium for your services. Moreover, it will lose many sales opportunities to price rejection.
Impact your team with the three qualities and watch the rise in productivity and revenue.