Drive Sales Performance with Top Gun
I
t’s no secret that better leads create more excitement for a sales team. But it takes more than leads to make a sales team really perform at its peak. According to Steve Osborne, the CEO of Top Gun Sales Per- formance, it takes “a system of support and
reinforcement that drives sales mastery.” Keeping that mantra in mind, the company helps sales teams sell more and sell more prof- itably in many ways. Top Gun helps reps and managers develop the skills needed to sell. It helps develop presentations and other materials necessary to sell effectively. Top Gun has the pro- cess and technology to ensure skills and materials are used to maximum advantage. Finally, Top Gun can take over such critical elements of the sales process as lead generation or inside sales, allow- ing a company’s highest-value salespeople to be as effective as possible. To improve skills, Top Gun uses a blended train- ing approach combining online and instructor-led lessons. This is followed by constant reinforcement every few days on mobile devices. “Salespeople are organic; they get better each day – not all at once,” Osborne stresses. “Most companies train people every six months for a few days. Training is just an event whose effects erode quickly.” But, with Top Gun, sales managers can rely on a whole suite of ongoing support. The company can teach specific skills, but
prefers to identify all the skills necessary to perform well at each company and then improve these skills in all sales reps. Osborne emphasizes it is essential to improve coaching and first-line managers as well. “If they don’t have skills, tools, and motivation, training is not nearly as effective as it should be.” Top Gun works with execs, sales managers, and salespeople to develop the most effective sales materials for each product and market. These can be PowerPoint®
slides, tools for improving a cus-
tomer’s ROI on purchasing products and services, or effective illustrations of critical selling points. Uniquely, Top Gun has both a process and its own Web-based system for ensuring managers
know sales reps’ competencies and what they must do to improve. “Think of it as a combination of a learning management system, mobile learning, coaching, and reinforcement,” Osborne explains. Without such a system, it is impossible for an exec with more than 20 reps to even know how good these reps are at each essential skill – let alone improve skills. That’s a big problem for im- proving the overall performance of the sales team. Top Gun gets each company’s best sales practices out to the sales force quickly and effectively. If companies want to conserve the time of sales
reps, Top Gun can take responsibility for generat- ing high-quality leads or doing inside sales. “We increase revenue without increasing headcount,” Osborne says. Top Gun has its own lead data, works with clients on acquiring more lead lists, and can even accompany client reps to trade shows to maximize lead generation. Top Gun’s inside salespeople can handle in- bound calls and proactively make outbound calls. They can pass new leads and prospects to client salespeople or pursue them to close. All call data is entered in the client’s own CRM system. Top Gun is compensated for these outsourced services under a variety of pricing models – from fixed cost to all commission-based. So Top Gun offers the kind of across-the-board help many firms need to sell better. Osborne says his firm is practically alone in backing up these broad performance-improving services with a robust technology infrastructure. This is his Web- based system for monitoring and upgrading sales proficiencies. Clients agree that Top Gun drives sales improve- ment. “My sales team fights over the leads gener- ated by the outbound team at Top Gun because we always know there’s a fish on the line,” says Joe Marez of Insight. And a national sales manager at Panasonic says, “I was expecting this would be feel-good, hooray-type sales training. I rarely walk away with actual tools. I did this time. I have great tools I can use tomorrow.” Top Gun offers just one more way to create Extra Milers on the road to sales success.
SELLING POWER APRIL 2016 | 29 © 2016 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
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