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Sales Training America is a world class sales training and custom development training company specializing in sales training and sales skill development of our client's sales force. At Sales Training America we help our clients improve their sales profitability through the development of their sales management and sales efforts through SalesForce.com implementation. Sales Training America offers both public (open enrollment) sales training classes well as the development of customized sales systems and sales classes for Fortune 1000 companies across United States and Canada.

Are you one of the many corporations now focusing on core sales activities while implementing SalesForce.com while outsourcing non-core functions in response to intense competition?

If you are, Sales Training America can help there too. If you simply want to outsource some of your sales or sales management training or if you want to redefine yourself completely to survive mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, downsizing, or corporate restructuring we can help you.

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Sales Training Tips:

Eight Sales Class Practices That Ensure Your Sales Success

We have never needed to improve sales productivity more than we do in this dreadful economy. For decades, businesses have embraced  productivity and cost controls in operational functions like manufacturing and distribution; programs like Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and LEAN are thriving all over the map. Except in the sales department. We suggest that sales organizations can benefit dramatically from adopting some basic principles of productivity management, simple business techniques that lower costs, improve customer profitability and retention, and reduce sales-person turnover.   This article explores the eight key practices that contribute to productivity. Each practice can be either a contributor if it is in place, or an inhibitor if it isn't.

Practice #1: The Prospect Profile

If you don't have a documented prospect profile then you may be lengthening the sales cycle and driving your team to pursue under-qualified or unprofitable deals.
 
Sales people probably spend more time prospecting and qualifying than they do anything else. Sales people who have a documented prospect profile can qualify opportunities more quickly and with greater accuracy than those that have no such guidelines. The basic prospect profile includes standard factual data, such as industry sector, number of employees, annual revenue, and so on. The most effective profiles go beyond these facts and include more qualitative characteristics that describe buyer motivation, trigger events, corporate values and other psychographic elements. 
 
Practice #2: Clear Targets and Incentives for Acquiring New Customers

New-customer acquisition is clearly an element of sales success. In fact, it's the reason your sales people spend so much time prospecting and qualifying. Contribute to productivity by setting clear goals for acquiring new business, and provide incentives. When setting new-customer targets, establish goals for revenue from new customers, and also establish separate goals for numbers of new customers.

Practice #3: Clear Targets and Incentives for Retaining Current Customers

No matter how important it is to acquire new customers, it costs a lot more than retaining current ones. If you are not giving your sales people specific targets for retaining current customers, your productivity is in jeopardy. This practice ensures that sales people will invest effort in keeping the customer happy, and encouraging them to buy again. You need to know if your team is losing loyal customers, and figure out a way to win them back.

Practice #4: Clear Targets and Incentives for Developing Current Customers Through Up-Selling and Cross-Sell

If your team has a goal of retaining a specific number of current customers, give them an additional goal of cross-selling and up-selling those customers. Maintaining the current contract is great, increasing the size of the current contract is better, and adding additional products or services is best. But unless you assign those targets specifically, sales people may not perform at maximum productivity.

Practice #5: Available Sales Support Resources for Labor-Intensive Low-Return Activities (Database Cleanup, Proposal Generation, Collections, Dispute Resolution, Etc.)

Sales people have many demands on their time. One hour of opportunity time can cost as much as $1,100 or more based on calculations we have conducted with our clients. Tasks like database cleanup, email marketing campaigns and past-due collections cost sales people many hours but contribute very little to their sales success. Forcing them to manage these tasks is a false economy. It is far more productive to delegate, outsource or automate these tasks as much as possible, even if it might stretch your budget to do so.

Practice #6: Require Sales People to Take Adequate Downtime

Stressed, tired or burned-out people take twice as long to do the same tasks. And they tend to use poor judgment. So contrary to conventional wisdom, if you encourage your team to work extra hours, you are inhibiting their productivity. Don't simply tell them to work smart and take vacations. Demand it.

Practice #7:  Create Performance Metrics that Cover the Sales Process from Beginning to End.

The classic way to measure sales performance is that of revenue produced or performance against quota. This is a weak indicator of effectiveness of efficiency. It comes too late in the process to correct the situation. Figure out ways to measure the sales process from the very start, and at critical milestones along the way. Define the stages of the sales process, and give your people specific targets for each stage in a given period of time. For example, consider adding number of prospects qualified, number of prospects who request a proposal, number of prospects who negotiate the terms and scope of the proposal. When sales people reach each of these key milestones the probability of a win increases. You can also figure out where the process stalls. The use of end-to-end metrics is a major contributor to productivity.

Practice #8: Useful Methods for Managing Nonproductive Sales People

Figuring out who is productive and who is not.  A sales person may be nonproductive because he is the wrong person for the job, or because he has little clarity of expectations, inadequate or insufficient coaching from his manager, or encounters operational obstacles beyond his control, which impede his performance.  The most popular methods of dealing with nonproductive sales people may not be the most productive.  These include firing the sales person, more product training and more sales skills training.  These methods are relatively high cost and produce relatively low benefits.  Some other practices tend to be lower in cost yet produce significantly better returns.  These include providing more qualified leads to sales people, clarifying and documenting their performance expectations, and improving the management, leadership and coaching skills of sales managers.

Source: Ellen Bristol link

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