Not enough new business coming? Sales drying up? Not making a satisfactory impact when in front of prospective clients?

If this is happening to you, consider your sales effectiveness and your sales efforts from these two angles:

1. Missed sales opportunities.
2. Lost sales opportunities.

If market conditions are right, and you have good products or services, then you may want to take a look at your own efforts. Your poor sales efforts may be due to:

Missed sales opportunities: Put simply, missed sales opportunities are all about a lack of prospecting activity. If there is little or no prospecting for new business in new and/or existing accounts you will not get sales. You cannot lose sales if you’re not there to get them in the first place.

Remedy: Develop a prospecting plan and get out and see and/or speak to more people in your target market on a regular and consistent basis. Prospecting requires sales people to establish contact with people who might buy your products or services. Whether it’s phone prospecting, face-to-face prospecting or group prospecting, inbound or outbound, nothing gets sold until salespeople get in front of and/or talk to potential buyers. Prospecting is… The identification of new business opportunities in new or existing accounts!

Lost sales opportunities: You can only lose a sale when you are engaged in a sales conversation with a prospective viable client. (A viable client is someone who has the willingness and ability to buy from you, the authority to make a decision and a genuine need for your product or service offering).

If the client is viable and you lose a sale, it is most likely due to your lack of capacity to convert a sales opportunity into a sale – and sales revenue. This is usually due to poor selling skills and techniques such as having no logical sales process to follow, poor questioning skills, inability to relate to and empathise with your customer’s situation, making poor recommendations, etc.

Remedy: Get trained in a proper evidenced-based sales process that teaches you how to sell well. More than 90% of sales people follow no logical process when selling. They fly by the seat of their pants. Sales people need clear sales communication models, questioning skills, a process to match client needs with their products and make effective recommendations, and skills to secure client commitment and close a sale.

I hope this helps. Happy selling.

I don’t know about you, but when markets start to tighten or when things feel a bit uncertain, instead of cost cutting and bunkering down, I have found that you need to do precisely the opposite. You need to invest in your sales efforts with good strategy, sales training, good sales management and good sales coaching.

I have experienced selling in tight markets over the years and found these times to be some of my most successful sales years. Why? Because I took advantage of everyone else’s pessimistic approach as they sat around complaining, and I got out there and learned how to survive and thrive in tight markets. While you may hear others saying things are bad and they can’t make any sales, you know there are still potential clients out there who need your help/products/services.

Beware where your thoughts take you and whom you listen to. We have a saying at Barrett: “Watch who you let near your mind”.

In tight times it is too easy just to cut costs at any expense. Cutting costs on your sales efforts by not training and coaching your sales staff or investing in sales support resources just sends you further backwards.

Here is what some of my close business contacts, who hold senior sales management roles in large public companies, had to say about cost cutting at the expense of their sales teams and sales efforts.

They are lamenting the current fad of the career CEO and their gangs who come in for three or four years only and whose only strategy to drive up the share price is to cut costs. Their experience is that these CEOs show no signs of investing in the development of the businesses or their people.

These senior sales managers stated that they have repeatedly asked for and received no investment funding to develop their sales teams for over two years. One of these managers has moved from one public company to another only to find exactly the same issue, despite promises to the contrary when they were being interviewed for the job.

They have put their economic cases and research evidence to senior management about how important it is in this day and age to invest in developing sales teams so they can be competitive and fit in the market place. They have stated that their “competitive edge” is their sales team, not their products or pricing any more.

They stated that developing their teams helps them attract and retain more and better quality customers, make more sales and attract and retain good staff. Just like a sports team, these senior sales managers know that they and their teams need regular training and development to leverage their skills and talent in the market place.

But their requests continue to fall on deaf ears. In my contacts’ opinions, they see their respective CEOs and their gangs only thinking short term with no eye for the future and “cost cutting” as their only maxim.

They admit they are in despair. Here is what they shared with me about their sales teams:

• “Management refuses to invest in people. My sales people are demotivated and many are wanting to leave except they won’t because they know the company is paying (bribing) them more than they are worth in the market, so they’re all waiting for the ‘package’ – how can I run a sales team like that? Sales are stagnating. Staff engagement is really low across the whole business. It’s depressing.”
• “As much as I am out in the field with them and coaching for better performance (which they really appreciate), they know that senior management have no interest in their future well-being or development. My team wants to be better and would love more training on current sales practices but they know they won’t get it here. I am at great risk of losing my team.”

Whether you are large or small, do not fall into this trap. The short, medium and long term consequences are lethal. Be prudent with your dollar, for sure, but don’t kill off the source of your revenue stream.

Regularly invest in your sales team’s development. It doesn’t have to be full blown training programs (although these are helpful on at least a yearly basis). It can be as simple as getting in an expert guest speaker at your sales meetings or giving special executive coaching sessions to your top sales performers to make them even better. It’s what keeps us healthy, fit and motivated.

If you are thinking of using external sales consultants, coaches or trainers to help you improve your sales efforts, I recommend you assess them using the following criteria:

• Do they have experience and a proven track record working with companies to create high performing sales teams?
• Do they know what makes great sales people great?
• Is their sales training content relevant and up-to-date for today’s competitive market place? That is, are they incorporating sales process, sales planning, influencing, developing meaningful business relationships, emotional self management etcetera into their training?
• Is their training methodology designed to develop sales teams to deliver your sales plans consistently?
• Can they show specific evidence of improving sales results in businesses?
• Does their methodology ensure that you can build a sustainable sales culture over time?
• Are they able to translate complex initiatives into practical, tactical road maps you and your people can use immediately?
• Do they ensure that you can measure the right sales metrics so that you can then manage by them?
• Do they have proven competency based approach which leads to observable behaviour change at all levels?
• Do their consultants, coaches and trainers all have industry-based commercial and sales experience?
• Do their coaches and trainers have relevant industry-recognised qualifications in coaching, facilitation and assessment?
• Do they have experience in sales culture and process transformation across industries?
• Do they help you make more money than the cost of having them in your business?

It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in today’s market.

Products/solutions are often quite clearly defined and a salesperson’s ability to negotiate price and value-added services is limited in today’s market.

We are now finding some companies are setting prices for their sales teams with no room for negotiation, thus eliminating price negotiations altogether.

(Not always a bad thing if you ask me, given all the pricing discounts I have seen sales people giving away unnecessarily over the years.)

So what is a sales person to do now?

We are consistently hearing in interviews with high performing sales managers and sales people that the ability to positively influence the client is a more critical competency than the skill of negotiating. This has direct relevance to the emotional intelligence (EI) area of managing others emotions.

The emotional management of others is the skill of influencing the moods and emotions of others. A sales person’s ability to:

• Influence a prospective customer to say ‘yes’.
• Overcome a customer’s reservation towards a new product.
• Help a client feel enthusiastic about a product they recently purchased.
• Plan with a client how to best engage their ‘economic buyer’.

These are critical to success in business today.

In addition, we are finding that:

• Accurately reading the client, gauging their reactions and then adjusting your own style is also being highlighted as a key competency of high performing sales people. This is relevant to the EI competency of recognising emotions of others, emotional reasoning and managing others emotions.
• Building relationships and trust is also critical. For the past three of our major corporate projects in assessing “sales force fitness”, it has been cited as a key point of competitive difference. The ability to build trust-based relationships is influenced by a number of EI competencies – emotional self awareness, emotional awareness of others, ability to influence others’ emotions and emotional control.

Ask yourself: “How effectively are my sales people perceiving, understanding, reasoning with and manage their own and others’ feelings.” These skills are cornerstones to successful selling, as emotions are an inherent part of why people buy and why they do not.

Stop for a minute and reflect: What is your view of selling? Has your perception of sales changed over the years?

Your answer is most likely ‘yes’ if you are a customer or salesperson in business to business (B2B) sales. But not if you are a customer of retail. More about that another time.

Today’s changing B2B and high-end B2C sale practice styles are an adaptation to the environmental forces. The change towards people-centricity is evident in a number of organisational functions, in particular the sales function where there has been a significant shift from product-focused selling to relationship selling.

To serve their customers better, in ever more competitive marketplaces, companies feel compelled to reorganise their sales force around markets rather than products.

Findings from the Sell Like a Woman research project found that companies realise they cannot satisfy every customer and instead focus more on serving well those whose needs and expectations they can meet, in return having kept an ongoing customer and built up a good reputation.

After all, most businesses these days acknowledge that keeping an existing client is easier than acquiring a new one, especially with decreasingly less product differentiation, brand loyalty and information exclusiveness.

The perception of sales is improving within companies because the very nature of sales is transforming; only part of sales is about making a sale.

The position titles serve as good indication. “Sales representative” has changed and diversified into more co-operative titles such as Account Manager, Relationship Manager and Business Development Manager. All sales, but with more of a partnership focus to build their customers’ business.

One of the survey participants, Debra Templar, the director of Australian Retail Services, who has almost two decades of management experience, really hit the note, which resonates acutely with many other successful saleswomen, when she gave her impression of what is it her clients value the most about working with her:

“They trust me,” she said. “(They receive) value for money. They value expertise. They know I can sift through issues and flag situations they perhaps haven’t seen. I keep confidences. And I get results for them. I make them appear heroes to their people.”

This new strategic, multi-tasking approach to sales (of being a mini CEO) is a complex process of being an attuned listener and communicator and a creative problem solver on the customer level, and understanding or inferring customers’ broader business objectives, while having a sound knowledge of one’s own internal resources and abilities more generally. Those are some of the qualities that distinguish the most highly successful salespeople of the 21st century from the average.

Seeing the bigger picture or “playing god” isn’t easy, especially when no one expects that from a salesperson in the first place. Sales managers more often than not discourage any activities not directly related to selling a product right here, right now, to as many people as possible.

However, as Rosenbaum (1999) found, successful salespeople often disregard manager’s directives and achieve results in ways other than following these primitive and, at a first glance, intuitive rules alone.

In the “olden days” when I first started my business, over 95% of my sales came about through cold calling, which I had learnt to do really well when I worked as a sales recruitment specialist with Morgan & Banks.

At M&B – and in my business – it was very clear that if I didn’t bill anything I didn’t earn anything. So I got on the phones and I prospected to people I didn’t know – that is, cold calling.

This was well and truly before the internet was in mainstream use and I had the privilege of learning how to cold call really well.

But it is a FACT that in an essentially crowded market place of the 21st century, businesses require a series of “push” and “pull” prospecting strategies rather than one simplistic “push” approach to selling such as cold calling.

Cold calling is simply calling on someone who fits into your target market that you do not know and do not have a warm referral to give you an introduction.

However in today’s market, as I and others have found, focusing all your sales efforts on a cold calling campaign puts you at risk of missing many other prospecting opportunities.

I have had to adapt to all the other prospecting methods now available to us. I am not advocating the abolishment of cold calling from your repertoire, not at all. If done effectively cold calling can work, but it is only a small part of a now much wider prospecting strategy available to us.

The very act of prospecting is tactical marketing. In this networked society there are a number of avenues you can call upon to build up your list of referrals and leads to give you access to viable business opportunities.

The average person in the street knows about 800 other people in their network, and for those of us in sales jobs we should have 1000s of people in our network. How big and how warm is your network? Remember six degrees of separation?

Let’s just take banks and other financial businesses for instance. In reality they should hardly ever need to make a cold call. Just look at all the referrals, networking and sponsorship opportunities they already have available to them.

However the question is, are they using them effectively?

Whether you are a small niche player or a large corporate, businesses now need to have a far more integrated approach to generate and build sales leads for their businesses and their sales teams – “Push” and “Pull” prospecting strategies.

This is even more important for SMEs who do not have the big marketing and advertising spend many larger businesses can rely upon. Thanks to the internet, SMEs can really start to build a presence without the big price tag. However it still takes effort.

But first you need to know the answer to the following questions:

• WHO is my target market?
• HOW do I need to make contact with them?

Once you have identified who your target market is, think about all the ways you can reach them and how you can help them reach you. However, make sure all your prospecting efforts have a consistent message, because precisely how sales people position themselves needs to match the positioning of the business and how it chooses to position its solutions.

You could even position your sales people as advocates, business experts, industry supports or niche industry gurus to whom interested parties turn for solutions or sources.

So what push and pull prospecting strategies are available to you?

Let’s define “push” and “pull” first. Pull prospecting strategies are ways your business pulls people (ideally your target market) to your business for your sales people to then follow up on to identify viable sales deals. Push prospecting strategies are ways your sales people go out into the market and make contact with prospective customers — cold calling

Examples of push and pull lead generation modes are:

• Branding and public relations.
• Website and e-mail.
• Events.
• Phone calls and face-to-face meetings.
• Referrals.
• Direct mail.
• Online marketing.
• Blogging.
• Public speaking.

Your pull and push prospecting strategies should ensure that your sales people invest valuable face-to-face or phone selling time with the right people on a consistent daily basis. Going out willy-nilly calling on anyone hoping for the best won’t cut it any more.

You need a clear strategy supported by some market research that gives you the necessary information you need to make informed decisions about how you invest your time and money in positioning yourself with prospective customers, especially if you do not have a big marketing budget.

So now you can also see why I am such a big advocate for an integrated team based approach with marketing, sales and service.