6 Tips from Peak Performing Sales Teams
6 Tips from Peak Performing Sales Teams
6 tips for sustainable business growth and sales success
Have you ever wondered what sets the best salespeople apart while others struggle to make it?
It is just as important knowing the most important things salespeople should do to be successful as well as what they shouldn’t do. Sometimes salespeople develop habits that prevent them from being successful
Well-defined sales systems and processes are an opportunity to create uniform expectations, reward top performers, learn from experience, easily manage employees and delegate roles and responsibilities.
Effective sales processes allow SME business owner to work “on” the business as supposed to “in” the business.
I often hear businesses say they need more leads to grow their business when the truth is this;
The quickest and easiest way to grow is to increase the effectiveness of their sales process and improving their closing rate!
Here are my top 5 sales tips for peak performance:
1. Know your mission
In your day-to-day sales world, it is imperative to have a sense of meaning. Walking into the office, grabbing a coffee, checking your email, and taking your day “on the fly” is not how top sellers get the job done.
When you have a well-defined purpose and a mission larger than yourself, you won’t get deflated when buyers and competitors don’t behave like you want. If you know that your product solves their problem, adds tremendous value then it becomes your moral obligation not to let the prospect buy from a competitor.
Zig Ziglar was one of my favorite sales gurus, who unfortunately passed away in 2012. He believed that a sense of mission is the common denominator among successful people – here’s one of his mos famous quotes below…
2. Have a winning attitude
Sales professionals who feel they’re an unwelcome intrusion in their prospects day will never reach their peak performance until they see themselves as a peer and equal to even C-level prospects.
If you don’t have enough value to offer prospects and clients, that’s a different story—you have to develop yourself and become that sales professional who has immense value and knows it.
Never give up and keep asking yourself, “what can I do better?”
3. Measure your results
If you’re learning to sell, start from the end and work backwards. Knowing your goals and measuring your performance against them (more on that later) is the most important place to start.
How many customers do you or your company need, and in what time frame? How many leads do you need to close that many customers? How many connections do you need to generate that many opportunities? And so on.
Multiply your customer goal by the average sale price of your company’s product to get the amount of revenue you should be aiming for, goal-setting is imperative!
4. Refine your sales process
Selling is all about determining how best you can serve your client. In order to serve them, you have to establish the highest and best need for your service with the client.
An example of a sales process might include the following steps with sub-headings, forms and scripts going into more detail for each step. All businesses need this mapped out and documented to avoid growth pains.
- Lead generation
- Qualification process / reporting
- Rapport building
- Defining problem / need
- Building objectives / outcomes
- Build desire & add value
- Agree on buying criteria
- Scale motivation & investment
- Propose solutions
- Close the deal
Sales is changing rapidly, but some things will always be the same. To get customers, you’ll have to establish their needs and interest in your product, address inertia in their business, and determine a timeline to sell.
The way your company moves through the funnel, however, will be unique. If you treat every sales process the same, you could easily miss something.
5. Build a personal brand
In a crowded business environment, you need to establish a unique personal brand that stands out in a crowd. If you start with a strong identity, you will build a reputation as an industry authority and become a high performing salesperson.
Richard Branson is the most followed man on LinkedIn and nails this perfectly – to learn more from the 10 million follower man check out this article;
Lessons from LinkedIn’s Most-Followed Man by Nathanial Bibby
6. Invest in education…. Training never stops!
Take positive action toward your goals, every single day. Be proactive rather than reactive.
Arm your sales team with the tools they need to be successful and dominate their industry; don’t blame them for poor results, lead them to victory.
Sales training should be constant and consistently being updated and refined with modern technology, case studies and real-life metrics from what’s working in the market place – both in your industry and others.
If you can reduce your sales process with automation then this is a huge area for productivity gains and large improvements in your results. I’m always thinking of ways to add more value to the prospect before they become a client.
Different products call for different approaches. Even if a potential sales partner or rep has a winning track record, you still need to train them in the art of selling your products and services effectively.
Sales is often one of the most under-rated positions within a company and these tips just scratch the surface of the knowledge and resources that are available through professional training. If your business doesn’t have an effective sales process and your sales results are not performing, take action and develop a sales training plan for your team.
Bibby Consulting Group offer half-day sales training workshops designed to empower sales teams to get more referrals, close more deals and build a sales process for sustainable growth. Contact me for more details.
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About the Author
Nathanial Bibby is the Managing Director of Bibby Consulting Group and has assisted over 4,000 businesses across 120 different industries with their sales and marketing strategy.
Bibby Consulting Group are leaders in innovative digital marketing and new age sales systems for business success.