Everyone's a salesperson
Your best salespeople aren’t necessarily your salespeople. In fact, anyone can be a salesperson or at least spread the message about what your business has to offer. To take a very simple example, what happens if a potential customer winds up speaking to someone in IT support? That person should at least be able to point them in the right direction. To this end, everyone in your business should know what the company offers and what the business’s key messages are. Give everyone the skills to identify opportunities and know what to do if they spot one. Not all great sales ideas come from salespeople.
Energise them
Create physical energy and excitement in the place they work. Apart from at the very top end, salespeople thrive on buzz and there is nothing worse than a sales department that has the vibe of an accounts department. You want people jumping up when they’ve completed a deal and you want chatter going on at all times. People feed on the atmosphere around them and it helps them to give good phone.
Reward them
“For managers,” says Jonathan Bunis, COO of Espotting, “it’s very important to be relentless with rewards for excellent execution”. You cannot, he says, reward at the end of the year or even the quarter. Do this and the relationship between good performance and recognition becomes nebulous. Salespeople have ‘immediate satisfaction’ personalities. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with a bit of theatre. “I once went to a meeting in Chicago. One guy there was a salesman doing a particularly brilliant job. As we sat there the CEO walked in with two Brinks Mat heavies and dumped $45,000 in cash in front of him. It sat there for the whole meeting and I’ve never seen a better example of motivation.”
Give them goals
There’s nothing worse than having your sales team shooting at a fuzzy target. “One of the prevailing truisms in my experience” says Bunis, “is the clear and unquestionable clarity of the goal for a sales rep.” They must know what is outstanding, what is very good, what is average and what is poor – and it can often be as simple as a whiteboard with targets on it. ‘They need to be goals that the team and individual buy into and understand” says Bunis, “as long as that’s the case it almost doesn’t matter what they are”.
Make targets realistic
“Many companies such as ours,” says Ross Hugo, the MD of holidaylets.net, “have to keep abreast of the fact that their market is cyclical”. So, in this case it would be ludicrous having the same targets in February and March which is as busy as June by which time most people have already made vacation arrangements. On a more general note, set targets too high and commission-based people will be demotivated; set them too low and you’ll be paying out stacks of cash. “Each month,” says Hugo, “we have to sit down with the team and agree realistic targets based on what both parties think is achievable.”
Use a variety of approaches
Make sure you approach prospects in a number of different ways. Probably the best is to ask existing prospects for referrals: there is nothing like the dropping of a name known to both parties to break the ice. You may also want to use direct mail, telemarketing or even partners with businesses who are after the same target but with whom there is no conflict of interest. Exhibiting and or sponsoring events that your prospects are likely to attend can work well too.
Get it write
Everyone agrees on this. Nothing puts off a prospective client more than a simple error that has been overlooked. Normally it is a spelling mistake. However, a simple transposed i or e can undo the good work of a dozen hard phone calls. It not only looks sloppy it does nothing to engender belief in the quality of your product(s). So try and create a culture where people proofread each others’ letters. A series of ready-made templates could be set up. Either way you’ve got to eradicate it. Clients know theirs no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.
Do your presentations represent you?
Take a look at your presentations. Are they well designed pieces of communication – or are they covered in old logos and 071 phone numbers? Have they been designed professionally or just evolved ad hoc over the years? What do they say about your brand? Even the best salespeople need good tools.
Check the chemistry
Not everyone gets on with everyone else. This is as true of salespeople and customers as it is in other areas. “As I expand my sales team,” says Paul Brett MD of Powerdesk, “I will be hiring a variety of personalities for this reason”. Moreover people are good at different things: some people may be great at cold calling and opening accounts; but they may not be the best to necessarily maintain these relationships. Sometimes you might actually want to work contrary to this. If, say, a negotiation isn’t really going anywhere or a relationship is going flat, you may want to send someone more abrasive or challenging in to stir things up a little.