Building a Championship Sales Team Tracks
Building a Championship Sales Team By Marc Wayshak, author of Game Plan Selling
Joe runs a mid-sized manufacturing company with nineteen salespeople. The sales team is a mix of long-time veterans and newcomers. Sales have been fl at for the past eighteen months, even though the economy has improved. Joe is constantly frustrated with his ineffective attempts to get his team to prospect more. He tries to show them how to sell more effectively, but they continue to fall back into the same old habits.
Joe knows that his team can and should be selling at least an additional $5 million in revenues. He feels stuck.
Does this sound familiar? Joe’s is one of the most common situations encountered. Companies often underperform because they have not systematically built a sales team. Follow these fi ve steps to develop a championship sales team of your own:
1. Re-evaluate the strategy: There are three key ways to increase sales: fi nd more customers, make larger sales and sell more frequently to existing customers. Do you have a strategy that addresses these three areas? More important, are you focused on selling to your ideal customer? Companies are often trying to sell to everyone, but all of the serious rewards come when they focus on selling to their sweet spot. In Joe’s case, his salespeople are calling on any and every prospect they come across, indiscriminately. He needs to clarify for his team exactly where they should be focusing their time and efforts in order to increase all areas of sales growth.
2. Assess the existing team: It’s critical that you know your sales team, inside and out. How many A-players, B-players and C-players do you have? How does your existing team feel about your organization? How should you manage each salesperson according to his strengths and weaknesses? For example, Joe knows that he has only three A-players, eight B-players, and the rest are C-players or worse. He is spending most of his time trying to improve the latter with little to show for the effort. Rather, he must more deeply understand the strengths and weaknesses of each team member and be willing to replace some of his under-performers with
www.NATM.com
new recruits. Both online data-driven assessments and on-site evaluations help to drive this activity.
3. Develop a hiring process: Mid-sized companies rarely have a formal hiring process. Most of these companies are waiting until they desperately need a new salesperson. Then they will cull through some resumes and set up a few face-to-face interviews, only to hire the most acceptable of the lot. But hiring is the most critical part of developing a championship sales team! It’s time to create a formal process that involves assessments, phone screens, consistent interview questions and role- plays. Right now, Joe has no hiring process and hires people based on his gut in interviews. As a result, he has struggled with a number of miss-hires over the years. He needs to formalize this process and remove his gut from the equation as much as possible.
4. Train consistently: A suggestion here and there does not count as consistent training. In order to develop a championship sales team, it’s critical that you invest a lot into training that team. This means conducting regular trainings to reinforce the most critical selling concepts. Every salesperson needs to be on the same page in selling technique. In Joe’s organization, each salesperson sells in his or her own way. They are all over the map in terms of effectiveness. Joe must either develop or bring in an outside selling system for everyone in the organization to follow.
5. Create accountability: Most mid-sized organizations are only tracking their salespeople’s sales numbers. But what about their day-to-day prospecting activities? How many calls are made, referrals asked for and meetings set up? By holding your salespeople accountable to their daily prospecting activities, you can track what their pipeline will be in the future, which is the most important indicator of future sales. Up until now, Joe has only reviewed sales numbers at the end of each month in order to hold his salespeople accountable. This leads to his sales team feeling frustrated and without a
November/December 2015 53
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68