Are you 100% confident that you have successful sales process in place that is actually adhered to by all your sales staff? Do you believe it is possible to get the whole sales team to participate on improving your sales methodologies?

Do your sales people know how to answer the phone effectively and do all of them master perfect email communication with customers?

If any of the above questions are difficult to answer, then you need to improve your sales process, so that:

• You know what you do really well so that you can repeat that success
• You are able to pinpoint why sales are lost and ensure you avoid those mistakes in the future
• You can clearly identify ways to have all of your sales people perform to the best of their ability
• Your sales team know how they can achieve fair targets and they will start performing better
• You are able to put in place a sales process and methodology to really improve your win rate

While being able to bring in leads from your marketing is great, in order to earn money for your your business, you need to go even further and convert these leads to real paying customers.

Therefore we need to make sure every enquiry that comes in is handled in a professional manner leading to a face-to-face meeting after which you will get the business.

By having a good sales process, you will be able to ensure that all of your team can repeat best practices to ensure success. You will also have a record of what went wrong with those sales or leads you failed to win.

Sometimes it is good to base your sales process on a proven template. However, it is important to remember that you know your products best. The key elements you need to incorporate are those we have already discussed when creating your marketing messages:

• Who is your target market?
• What problems does your product solve or what needs and desires does it fulfil?
• How do customers generally put a value on these capabilities?
• Who is the final decision maker within your potential customers?
• Who are the influencers of a buying decision within your customers?
• How do customers evaluate your products?
• Do your customers have a budget in place?
• Who is your competition, how do you deal with them?

Even though you may have designed the best sales process in the world, too often there is a disconnect between sales, marketing and customers, which leads to disharmony and many prospects turning to your competitors.

You probably know already that if you can get the whole sales team to consistently follow best practices, your sales revenue will increase dramatically.

The one common trait that all successful sales people seem to share is that they seem to hate and are particularly bad about paperwork, but who cares anyway? You care and so do your customers. If sales people find it easier to prepare a proposal and mange their time based on a system that you give them, they will use it.

However, the most important factor of all in getting sales people buy-in to any new sales process or system is to ask them to help you design it. If they feel they have created a process that makes their life easier, and enables them to earn more money – they will use it. And you all win.

Now think what needs to be done to have the process you’ve just designed introduced in your company. Outline your plan.

You can use the following hints:

• Ask sales people what they are doing currently
• Ask customers what could be improved  from their point of view
• Search for an online/offline sales software that would make it all transparent and easy to use
• Start paying commissions to sales people based on the data they enter into the system
• Etc.

We all know that Eskimos primarily use snow to build houses. How then could you sell them more of something, which is abundant and free? But what if you had a type of snow that did not melt in the summer, yet still had the insulation properties of snow in the winter. Do you think you could sell that to the Eskimos?

This is a great proposition; we can actually solve three problems at once. The first problem being that their houses melt in the summer. This means that they need different forms of shelter, like skins, in the summer months. The second problem is that the skins are not as warm as their igloos are in the winter. The third is that they are probably fed up with building two houses a year – especially when they could build one that lasts for twenty years.

Click here to learn more about Sales Strategy in Ireland.

Technorati Tags: sales strategy, sales strategies, selling snow, selling, selling irelan, selling snow to eskimos