Sales Success

Sales success is all about how to acquire more customers and grow the revenue or profit each customer brings into the business. One of the biggest challenges facing sales management is how to 
increase the sales selling time. Sales people need to be active in productive sales actions like lead generation, lead nurturing, social selling and closing deals and not dragged into time spent on status
updates to the sales process.


Sales management need to be crystal clear to ensure sales success and be clearly able to answer the number 1 sales question – what sales activities do you want me to do? as it not only defines what sales people are expected to do but also the recruitment process. Lets take a step back before trying to answering this question and ask yourself “what does selling activity mean in your business?”.  Is your primary sales activity definition time spent on lead generation, prospecting or maybe lead nurturing (if you supply leads via marketing activity) , is it sales, new customer acquisition or new deals closed. Real sales success tactics comes from a clearly defined definition and process for what sales activity you want the sales force to prioritize.





The world and activity of the sales person is changing rapidly. Now the main sales channel for lots of companies is via inside sales. Terms like social selling,inbound marketing automation, sales force
automation, customer success agent and the systems supporting the sales process have gotten increasingly more complex. Sales leadership have to ask the hard question, despite all the new sales tools has the actual selling time by the sales team become less important than the sales process?. Some research into selling techniques now show that sales people and sales management focus more time updating the sales process metrics than actual selling time. Maybe its time to go back to basics
and create more time to get the sales team selling!

Decide What Your Sales Tactics Are

In the era of big data and data driven sales models, the sales process in lots of companies has become complex and even less efficient in the quest for information. The outcome of this has seen downward
pressure on the rate sales forces can acquire customers, reduced sales productivity and as already stated shifting the sales thrust from selling time to sales process time.


Surely one of the aims of sales leadership is to maximize the core selling time, lead generation and relationship building activities of the sales team. This may sound rather obvious to any sales leader,
however the reality is that the drive for data insights and sales reports can be polar opposites to the rise of complexity in the sales process. Be ware the sales teams that can over time slip comfortable
into being great sales up-daters versus being great sales winners. Every business has to understand and clarify the scope of their sales team activities along with minimizing the various inefficiencies in the sales process.


As a great sales leader once stated “There are thousands of ways to
kill a sale but only a few ways to win one”. A few examples of ways to
kill a sale include not chasing up on calls, not following up on
customer requests, lack of needs understanding, not establishing a
customer connection, chasing the deal too early, not recognizing the
real decision makers etc. Most if not all of these can be identified by
sales management and addressed with sales training so with some practice
they can be solved.


However the true sales killers to sales success are the issues that
hide beneath the surface that all too many companies and sales managers
do not realize they exist.  We call these “sales weaknesses” in the
sales process which when combined with sales peoples own activity
preferences can act like heavy weights dragging down the sales efforts
and end results.


The work of aligning sales activities with the undoubted need for the
sales process takes effort. Due to the hunger for data and systems,
sales leadership or marketing can be reluctant to change existing sales
habits.  Sales managers, marketing and even CEO’s need to overcome the
common fear re-prioritizing the sales activities will somehow impact
sales revenue or data insights. All stake holders in the sales and
marketing process including finance must work together to prioritize the
expected sales activities from the sales force. Next, sales success
transformations means someone taking the lead to get the senior
management from across the company to sit down, share data, and discuss
what are the prioritizes for the sales process. The switch to sales
success tactics is about sales leadership es overriding any internal
concerns, seeing the bigger customer picture while ensure the focus is
shifted to the best solutions that will boost sales time with customers
regardless of the past.

Note of caution; moving the sales focus and sales teams activities may
mean having to change the roles people are expected to fulfill will
change.



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Sales Success Tactics | Instant Lead Generation For Social Selling