In the book Emerson's Essays, there is a section on "Law of Compensation", which can be summarised simply as "give more, get more."
This is what most salespeople try to do, so they end up working harder when they could be working smarter.
This begs the question, are your sales activities deciding your strategy or is your strategy deciding your sales activities?
Developing A Consultative Sales Process:
From the Sales Director's perspective, developing a consultative sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do. This is just as appropriate for internal and totally reactive sales teams as it is for external pro-active ones. This outline includes the activity and calls they must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the documentation they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.
It's only when such an outline is in place that sales management can be in a position to:
* Monitor the sales force's activity, progress and results,
* Assess issues as they arise and take appropriate action,
* Redirect individual sales effort efficiently.
Although many organisations appreciate the importance of being customer-focused and talk in vague terms about their "consultative sales process", surprisingly few sales leaders invest the time and energy required to develop a formal sales process - a process that is at once detailed and resilient enough to guide their salespeople and permit effective management of their efforts.
Overcoming Implementation Intertia:
Even when a consultative sales process has been developed, understood by sales managers, written down and circulated, it's often not enough. No matter how brilliant, a sales process will only be effective to the extent it is followed and used by frontline sales staff. And this is where most organisations fall down: overcoming inertia - among managers and salespeople alike - and implementing the process.
The hurdles that must be cleared in order to get people throughout the organisation to actually implement it are enough to cause Sales Directors to tear their hair out. But a select few, of the very best, have found some innovative strategies that have enabled them to achieve the Holy Grail:
Sustained sales growth achieved efficiently, reliably and by design - is your organisation one of them?
Today's News: At last!! My good friend and the author of the "2007 Top Sales Article Of The Year" Keith Rosen, is finally on the 2008 leader board - coming up on the rails again - you can catch his excellent piece here
We had some severe technical problems over the w/e: This site and JFC were taking up to two minutes to load, so we must have lost a lot of visitors - if you were one of them, please accept my sincere apologies, this is only the second time in three years that our ISP has let us down - oh, and the two JF Uncut posts were pretty good
Tomorrow: A very special guy, and possibly the most innovative member of the Top Sales Experts team
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