Nine Ideas That Can Help Sales Supervisors Achieve Improved Selling Success From Their Sales Team

One of the key challenges of selling is the drastic increase in the cost of sales visits to prospects and customers. Despite new sales strategies, including e mail marketing, direct contact between a sales person and the customer remains by far the most effective method to achieve sales success. Many sales managers attempt to offset the increased costs by motivating their sales team to a lot more personal effort. However, having interviewed more than 2,000 salespeople from over 200 organizations, the American market researchers Barton A. Weitz, Harish and Mita Sujan propose a different approach: sales professionals shouldn't work more, they really should work using a more customer-oriented strategy. To attain a customer-orientated approach sales managers should encourage their staff to get to know each and every client better and also to try out new selling approaches based on customer types. The following nine sales management training pointers should help you to increase the selling results of the sales team you manage.

1. Teach your sales people to categorise their clients much better. It's advisable to keep different basic selling strategies ready for each and every customer type so you can then adapt to their individual buying motivations all the more effectively. It's not only external characteristics, such as age, that should serve to categorise customers, but, above all, characteristics of behaviour which can be noticed quickly. Does the customer, for example, want a friendly atmosphere for discussions, or do they attach importance to a cooler and more business-like environment?

2. Regularly present your sales team with general details about your market place. This sort of information will help them to categorise customers' general buying interests better. Thus, a car salesman has to understand the significance of a cars "sportiness" or "environmental acceptability" for his clientele.

3. Include the company's best sales people in management training sessions. With the involvement of your very best sales people, training programmes can be designed on a made-to-measure basis with the desired goals of one's own business in mind. In collaboration with external experts you can, also, track down reasons for sales success which you were not mindful of until now.

4. Ensure that the work is enjoyable. In many businesses, great stress is laid on external bonus schemes like money and promotion - that's to say, so-called extrinsic motivators. Try to motivate the staff intrinsically as well through the way in which you set a task. A successful conclusion has to be recognised verbally as well as financially, for then this will have a favourable effect on your sales professional's self-esteem.

5. Be cautious with incentives. Bonuses must never form too large a part of income, but must retain a symbolic character. If a sales person gets far too dependent on incentives, this could reduce their creativity and their will to consider new things. Rather, personal supervision really should be to the fore as the method of motivation, above all in the case of new members of your sales team.

6. Offer the sales team feedback which is not simply about whether or not they are working well or badly. If an employee is only ever informed about whether their performance has been satisfactory or not, then the sales manager is throwing away the opportunity to deliver their very own experiences to the subordinate by means of specific feedback. Only conversations like that include a stimulus to and prospect for improvement, even in the situation of sales people who're already effective.

7. Encourage your staff to evaluate successes or failures. Only individuals who think successes or failures through completely will be able to discover the true causes. In order that mistakes are not simply suppressed mentally or failures attributed to your client's unwillingness, the sales person must also be at liberty to admit them. This being the situation, help by asking about the "why" of results or failure in sales discussions. Admit that unusual customers aren't easy to sell to, and stress that the correction of sales errors can create a feeling of personal achievement.

8. Educate your staff to help themselves. Sales people have to be resourceful and independent. Simply because they've to take instant decisions in a given sales situation, they cannot count on too much assistance from others but must take the initiative on their own. The sales man who's mindful of this and has the ability to act will be more strongly motivated to their job.

9. Create an atmosphere for mutual assistance. The business has to show its personnel that it truly is interested in long lasting cooperation. Having good co-opperation can decrease competitive pressure among the staff and increase commitment to the organization's more far-reaching targets.

Even if a number of these management training suggestions are actually already familiar to you and have, in addition, been partially put into practice, there could nonetheless be a lack of awareness of their importance for your organization. The success of these kinds of strategies and training programmes can rarely be expressed in terms of an instantaneous increase in sales figures, but rather in the long-term continually increasing productivity resulting from these practices which will, ultimately,l benefit both your business and its staff.

Richard Stone (richard.stone@spearhead-training.co.uk) is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited ( http://www.spearhead-training.co.uk/ ) a company that specialises in running management and sales training courses. Richard provides consultancy advice for numerous world leading companies.

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How Sales Managers Can Introduce the Concept of a Zero-Mistake Culture in to Their Sales Force

The "zero mistake" principle was first used in manufacturing environments because it's a lot more cost-effective to manufacture a flawless product from the very start than to search for flaws that have emerged in the course of production and then fixing these. The principles of the "zero mistake" approach can be transferred to a sales environment and is, therefore, generally included by sales supervisors in their internal sales training programmes. Zero mistakes in selling means that the sales department's aim is to create a situation where there are no un-happy customers.

It will take a lot of work to build up a zero mistakes culture in sales. The task begins with you, the sales supervisor. As soon as you have recognised the merits of the approach, you need to shift your conviction to your sales people. From there it is really an easy step to transfer this approach to your customers.

Prior to doing anything to change your sales organisation, do a sort of stock-taking. This will involve a number of steps, including:

1. Enhancing your own personal client contacts. Do this by going with your salespeople on customer visits or make client visits your self. Listen and experience first hand what the clients think of you, the product, and the services you deliver.

2. Reviewing the very last complaint through to its conclusion. What future improvements did this indicate to you? What would make clients un-happy and what would make them happy?

3. Looking at yourself. How do you talk to your sales people regarding clients? What exactly is your attitude towards customers? How does your attitude or conduct colour the conduct of your sales people?

Taking stock in this way will show you exactly where you stand and exactly where, as a result, the vast majority of your salespeople stand.

Satisfied customers do not come about just because you send your sales team to the relevant sales training seminars. The basis for building happy customers is creating a working environment which makes it likely for no errors to occur, combined with an appreciation of your client and his/her wants.

Organise the sales process to make it as straightforward and streamlined as you can. Complex official channels for order forms, multiple copies of order information, or vague responsibilities don't create situations condusive to flawless work. Eliminate all the actions between client contact and delivery which are actually not crucial or which do not add to client satisfaction.

Convey your appreciation of the client to your sales team. Top performances in selling always depends on the working atmosphere. When you appreciate the client and their satisfaction is important to you, this attitude will rub off on your sales team. Exactly the same is sadly true of the reverse.

If anything goes wrong, make up for it! There are, sadly, still organizations that force bureaucracy on the clients and insist on the small print. The reason for this is often minimal freedom of decision-making on the part of the salesperson or service representatives. If something goes wrong, the sales person in contact with the client has to possess the desire and also the freedom to compensate for the error in some manner. Your client should feel that:

Everybody in your company has a stake in making certain that every thing goes according to plan with the delivery - even if sometimes a mistake happens. This way the client doesn't have to carry the can for your error.

As an illustration of this principle, consider the following example. Imagine you have delivered on time, but have not delivered their total order. Do not wait until your client contacts you to complain. Make contact with your customer and explain what has happened and apologise for the error. Offer them an alternative: delivery as soon as the goods are available, naturally free of charge, or immediate delivery of a substitute product.

Do build up a consistent follow-up procedure and use it. Each and every client who doesn't go on to order more items from you must be asked "why". This really is the only method to discover possible weaknesses in your sales organisation. You'll be amazed at how much data you obtain this way concerning the market place, the competition plus the customer. Make the data you obtain accessible, in report form, to the sales team and also the office sales team so they can react to this information.

In conclusion, close client relations and constant customer orientation, supplemented with targeted sales training are good ways of achieving competitive advantage and, during situations of high cost pressure, have the further benefit that they do not need a large budget to implement.

Richard Stone (richard.stone@spearhead-training.co.uk) is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited ( http://www.spearhead-training.co.uk/ ) a company that specialises in running management and sales training courses. Richard provides consultancy advice for numerous world leading companies.

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