Simple Sales Tracking Blog

January 24, 2012 • 12:59 pm 0

Which Type of Salesperson Are You?

There is an old quote which we can adapt that goes –

“There are three kinds of salespeople – those who make things happen, those that watch things happen and those who are wondering what happened.”

It’s an oldie but a goodie.

In fact there are generally two types of salespeople I come across in my business.  The first are what I would characterize as “improvisers” – they seldom do any preparation and rely on intuition and instinct to carry them through.   They approach every sales interview as an adventure and while they still make sales they tend to be very inconsistent.

The second type are the “systemisers” – these are the professionals and they have a sales plan which includes activity targets and strategies to insure consistency and more importantly predictability in their results.

The systemisers are characterized by pre-sales planning and follow through during and after the sale.  This of course leads to repeat sales to existing clients and referrals to new prospects.   Typically they have lists of the most common objections/conditions they strike with prospects along with the answers.  They also have prepared questions that help the prospect to uncover potential needs if they exist and they have strategies to advance the sale.

So we have two types of salespeople who achieve different results.  Each one follows a pattern, one unstructured and one structured.

Where do you see yourself?

Most systemisers have developed their skills through training and practice – there is
no such thing as a “natural born salespeople”.

Zig Ziglar – Author and Sales Trainer extraordinaire in his best selling book “Zig Ziglars Secrets” says he’s travelled the world and seen that women have given birth to boys and given birth to girls but had never seen that a woman had given birth to a salesman.  He goes on to state that he had seen salesmen die so draws the conclusion if they are not born but die, then obviously between birth and death – by choice and by training – they become what they decide to become, namely trained professional salesmen.

Key Message -   You can become whatever you decide to become as long as you are willing to put the time and effort into the training required and follow the disciplines learned.
Action Steps –

1. Make  list of all the problems that your solutions and products overcome for your prospects
2. Make a list of all the issues associated with each of these problems
3. Develop questions around each of these problems and issues that will help the buyer to focus their thinking
4. Once this list is developed put each of these questions in order of logical sequence

Quote:
Failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , , ,

October 19, 2011 • 11:03 am 1

Are Great Salespeople Great Talkers?

I was guest speaker at a meeting a few weeks ago and a chap I was chatting to was telling me that after 18 years of having 3 women in the house now that his daughters had left he was having to learn how to talk again!

My thought was he must have been a very good listener which brings me to the subject of today’s article.

Sales is about listening to understand the buyer needs.

The old stereotype of great salespeople was that they were great talkers and had the “gift of the gab”.  In today’s sales environment studies of behavioral characteristics of the top salespeople consistently show these people listen “more constructively” than their average counterparts.

Constructive – Construction = building.  Listening constructively means to listen for things upon which to build your questions and solutions on.

Great salespeople ask great questions and actually listen for the information the prospect is giving and then use this information to build the next question.

This is the key to formulating the best solution for the prospect as it helps us to get a grip of the prospects core issues, needs and motivation.

Most average salespeople haven’t planned their questions and instead of planning their next question are in fact impatiently waiting to talk about their solution.

A study published by RainToday.com found that 74% of 200 purchasers surveyed at companies across America said they would be “much more likely” to buy from a salesperson if they would just simply listen to the buyer.

Next time you are out at a function be it at Chamber event or a party and you meet someone new, take note of who does most of the talking and more importantly your reaction to this person.

I believe we are more attracted to people who are genuinely more interested in us – it comes back to our basic human nature.

I think it was Mark Twain who said “A bore is someone who opens his mouth and puts his “feats” in it”

A good rule to follow is “be more interested than interesting”

The only person who can tell you their real need is the buyer.

We will look further at what makes an exceptional salesperson in my next article.

Quote of the Week:

“You can listen a buyer into a sale faster than you can talk them into one”

Unknown Author

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , , , , , ,

August 30, 2011 • 3:14 pm 0

Forward your Emails to Simple Sales Tracking

Your communications with prospects and customers is likely to include sending email messages. Until now, you’ve been limited to using either Notes or the Outlook plugin to track those email communications.

Now, with the new Messages feature, you can easily forward any important email message to Simple Sales Tracking and have it automatically included in
the new Messages Tab.

Additionally, if an email address is recognized as matching an email in any of your Sales or Contacts, an association between the two is created.

How To Get Started

First, make sure that the “Enable Messages Drop-Box” check box is selected on your Admin page. Then, generate your unique email address in your Settings.

Now any time you want to forward a message to Simple Sales Tracking, include the unique email address in the CC or BCC of the message.

Note: Currently storing of email Attachments is not supported.

Filed under: New Features , , , ,

August 23, 2011 • 8:40 pm 0

Are There Natural Born Salespeople?

A question I am often asked is “Are there natural born salespeople that we should be looking for?”

My answer to this is there is no such thing as a natural born salesperson. There are salespeople with the “gift of the gab” who make good sales but they tend to lack consistency in their results.

Contrary to popular belief, the best salespeople aren’t the best talkers, they are the best listeners.

The best salespeople, the consistent high performers, are those who have been trained in the best sales practices and then supported through management.

A vast amount of “sales training” is focused on product or technical training rather than specific sales skills development.

This tends to produce product focused salespeople who use the classic show and tell sales presentation. Typically the presentation goes something like this –

The salesperson looks around the prospects office and finds some item of interest and begins a discussion on this, much to the annoyance of the prospect who has had the same discussion with a hundred other salespeople and hasn’t got time to waste with the usual so called rapport building techniques. They then ask a few self serving questions to uncover a potential need, then launch into a product/technical solution based presentation.

A study of over 500 buyers from the fortune 1000 companies showed that salespeople jump in with a

solution before the real problem has been uncovered. This happens in 63% of sales interviews.

Sales like any other business activity is a process and needs to be systemized to ensure consistency in the results.

Exceptional salespeople have a planned approach to selling not canned and follow a process.

McDonalds doesn’t hire staff and then challenge them to figure out how best to do the job. Instead they work on the basis there is a best way to take an order, greet a customer and put a burger together.

In sales there is a best practice too.

Like assembling a cheeseburger, sales has a process. Firstly to identify your prospects, next to get a referral to them, then establish trust, uncover their need, if they have one, present a solution, and ask for the business.

Selling is very simple but not easy!

Imagine sitting on a plane at HB Airport waiting to take off and the captain comes on and says – “this is my first flight in one of these really big planes – I’m going to try and figure out the best way to fly this thing”.

Many companies send their salespeople out into the field with great product training and very little if any sales training to “fly by the seat of their pants”.

It is a fact the greatest asset in our businesses is our staff.

It costs businesses just as much money in salary, travel and costs for a poor sales performer as it does for a great sales performer. Therefore we need to lift the performance of all our salespeople to ensure consistency in sales results. The way to achieve this is through using best sales practices and measurement for accountability.

A question I sometimes hear is “What happens if we train them and they leave?” I ask “What happens if we don’t train them and they stay?”

Coming back to what makes great salespeople, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his famous book “Outliers” – “success in any field comes from opportunity and practice”.

Many companies give their salespeople the opportunity to undertake sales training – what makes the difference between good salespeople and the great is the great salespeople continue to learn and practice the skills they have learnt. They say “practice makes perfect” – this is only partly true – perfect practice makes perfect. Therefore sales come down to using best practices.

The first of these is developing a goals programme around what your sales targets are, the obstacles of achieving these, the solutions to overcome these obstacles, a detailed plan of sales activities mapped out over the next 12 months.

We can’t control sales – we can control sales activities.

We will look at this in my next article.

Action Steps –

1. Review your sales targets

2. Break down into monthly and weekly targets

3. Review your Prospecting Plan

4. List 3 actions you could implement this week to move forward e.g. Ask your key clients for specific referrals

Quote –
“Until we learn the formula (process) for success we can’t repeat it”
Brian Tracey

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , , , , , , ,

August 8, 2011 • 2:01 pm 0

Google Map with Every Address

Any Account, Opportunity, Lead or Contact where you’ve provided an address now has a link – which opens up a new window with a pin marking the spot on Google Maps.

Filed under: How To's, New Features , , , , , ,

August 8, 2011 • 2:00 pm 0

Filter Selections Remembered

Something we’ve been receiving requests for lately is to have the filters for each of the list pages, ‘remember’ their settings. Also, if there’s a way to change the default filter settings, which in the past have always been defaulted to In Progress and yourself as the Owner.

With this latest release, you’ll find that each time you visit one of the list pages, your previous filter selections will automatically be applied.

Filed under: How To's, New Features , , ,

July 14, 2011 • 7:38 pm 0

Every Sale has 5 Basic Obstacles – Do you know what they are?

We not only want you to know what they are – but also how to overcome them!

We’ve worked together with Brett to publish our first in what we plan will be a series of sales technique and strategy resources.

The first, entitled “Every Sale has 5 Basic Obstalces – Learn What They Are And How To Overcome Them”, is available now to download from http://5salesobstacles.com/

You’ll have the option to download it immediately and even download the first chapter for free.

Filed under: Company News, Sales Techniques and Strategy

May 22, 2011 • 4:31 pm 0

What Is Your Prospecting Plan?

We talked about “Farmers” and “Hunters” last time and how many salespeople fall into the comfortable role of farming their existing clients rather than bringing on new business.

This occurs largely due to a lack of a clear step by step plan on how to go about prospecting. Many salespeople make the excuse they are so busy servicing existing clients they don’t have time to prospect for new ones.

A recent study of over 500 companies in the UK would tend to support this argument. They weighed the influence of 73 different factors in successful selling.

What would you expect the number one cause of low achievement in sales to be?

  • Low motivation?
  • Personality Problems?
  • Inferior products or service?
  • Poor training?
  • Overpricing?

Wrong.

This survey pinpointed the number one cause of low achievement in sales as poor time utilization due to lack of planning.

This considered it comes back to us as the salespeople to plan our time to maximize our face to face time with prospects and clients.

A client I worked with recently in professional services was able to delegate 11 hours of low value work he had got into the habit of doing. This effectively gave him another 7 appointment slots in his week which could be used for –

  1. First appointments with new prospects
  2. Follow up appointments
  3. Existing client appointments
  4. Centre of influence meetings

All key components of a prospecting plan.

Another constraint that can impact on prospecting is the sales manager or business owner overloading the salesperson with other duties.

What we need to think about is in the wide range of activities we do in our business – manufacturing, accounting, HR, risk management, sales, research and development, quality control etc. Out of all of these only one – sales activities – brings in the money.

There is an old saying – “Without the sale no-one gets paid”

Another one for us to think about is – “Unless you are talking to a prospect or a customer you are unemployed”

So back to our prospecting plan – our first step is to have a clear picture of the type of prospects you wish to target, for without this you will waste precious time hunting the wrong game.

In our training we develop a prospect profile which describes in generic terms what a good prospect for our business would look like. This helps us to clarify which type of clients we wish to target and helps our centres of influence to better understand who they should be referring to us.

We will look at the next step in my next article.

Quote of the Day: Clean out your prospect funnel. Put your current prospects through a sieve. The biggest mistake salespeople make is they call on the same useless prospects over and over. If you have not been able to get anywhere with a specific group of prospects, move on and find new prospects. Being persistent is good. However, if you are spending too much time on fruitless leads you will just burn out. After a shepherd’s herd has eaten all the grass in a specific pasture he knows its time to move on to a new pasture. If he does not move on his sheep will starve. Move on if you are not getting anywhere with old prospects and come back at a later date. Larry Duca

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , ,

April 6, 2011 • 1:12 pm 0

How Many Sales Interviews Are Your Team Doing?

Recently I was questioning a sales manager about the number of new sales interviews each of her sales team did each week.

Her answer was that a week probably wasn’t the right duration – more like a month.

When I asked how many they were doing a month the answer was that they would be lucky to average one a month each.

The explanation for this she said was that they were busy sorting customer problems, building the relationship, doing pricing/proposals, delivery services or installations.

My thoughts were she didn’t have salespeople; she had very expensive mobile customer service reps disguised as salespeople.

This is a problem I see in many businesses I work with – the sales teams getting bogged down in the admin and low payoff areas of the business.

There are two reasons for this –

Firstly the company is under resourced which means the salespeople must be “jacks of all trades”. While I understand not all businesses can afford to add adequate support staff to take on the extra duties that could be delegated by the sales team, the questions I asked the sales manager were –

1. What was an average client spend over 12 months Answer: $6000

2. What was the average conversion ratio of your salespeople? (Most businesses guess around 80%, in fact conversions for most companies run at around 35-45%, say we work on 50%)

3. How many extra appointments with new prospects could your sales team do if we took away one activity, say quoting? Answer: 5 new appointments per week

If they converted half of these that would be 2.5 extra sales per week or $15k if we translate these into dollars or $780k over 12 months
Quite a compelling argument for freeing up your sales teams time!

The second reason is a lack of confidence in the actual salespeople themselves usually due to a lack of sales skills/systems. Interestingly enough I often see this lack of confidence in very experienced salespeople who have fallen into the role of “farmers” over the years.

“Farmers” is the term given to salespeople who spend the majority of their selling time managing existing clients and selling to these clients and slowly get out of the habit of prospecting and selling to new clients.

These “farmers” have become busy looking after the relationships they originally gained through prospecting.

The lack of confidence to go out and prospect for new clients generally stems from a lack of a step by step plan on how to prospect.

The answer most sales managers and business owners offer on how to prospect is “go knock on enough doors and you will get the business”. This is known as “cold calling” which is defined as: “calling on a prospect who may not know you and isn’t expecting a call”.

Some companies believe sending a letter then ringing helps to warm the call up. In my opinion the only advantage of this type of approach is that it may save the salesperson a little time.

Cold calling is a punishment for not having a prospecting plan.

We will look at this in more depth in my next article.

Quote:

There’s no magic to it, and you don’t need a lot of natural talent.
What you need is a disciplined organized approach to selling.
If you have that, you’ll outperform the great salesman
who doesn’t understand the process every time.
Selling can definitely be learned.

Steve Bostic

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , , , ,

March 15, 2011 • 1:26 am 0

Are you a Rocket Scientist or a Salesperson?

Recently I attended a business function where one of my clients introduced me to a business consultant.  Upon hearing I was a sales trainer the consultant related how he had watched a couple of dvds on sales training over the Christmas break and decided that perhaps he could add sales training to his portfolio after all as he said “its not rocket science”!

I was most disappointed to hear this as I have been waiting for the call from NASA for some time!!! 

But in fairness I have to agree that selling isn’t rocket science, it is very basic.

I always say -    “selling is simple – but not easy”

Sales in a nutshell comes down to –

Identifying your Prospect

Gaining an Introduction

Uncovering a Need
(If they have one)

Showing the Return on Investment

Asking for the Business

Delivering the Service

Follow Up and Support

Regular Contact

So if you want to launch your sales to new heights in 2011 you will need to jettison some of your unproductive practices that do not directly contribute to one of these areas.

We know that most salespeople on average only spend 90 minutes per day in face to face meetings – the rest of the time is spent gliding through the myriad of other jobs that they are tasked with.

A breakdown of where a typical sales rep spends their time would be -

Sales administration:  16%.  This includes any administrative work directly related to a sale such as entering information, writing reports, filling out order forms, pricing up jobs, quoting and writing proposals.

One way to lessen sales administrative time is to put an expert network in place.  Sales reps spend a lot of time tracking down answers to customer questions – finding the right person to answer the question,
sending emails, exchanging voice mails and so on.  Consider delegating the most time consuming tasks such as pricing and proposal writing.

Sales preparation:  16%.  This includes all the time spent preparing for a call, including research, preparing a meeting agenda, putting together a presentation and so on.

Waiting: 11%.  This includes time spent waiting for a customer, whether in the customer’s reception, on the phone, or in the customer’s office while he or she attends to another matter.

Travel and travel-related waiting:  21%    This category is just what it sounds like – the time reps spend in a car, on a plane, sitting in traffic or sitting at the airport.  To decrease the amount of time reps spend travelling or waiting to travel, look at how you might use telemarketers to interact with customers.  Face–to-face contact is great, but save it for when it adds the most value.   Territory planning can have a huge effect on reducing travel time.

Other administrative tasks:  10% – This is a catchall bucket for time-spent doing everything not included in the other categories. It includes everything from filing expense reports and time sheets to getting a cup of coffee.

Selling:  25%.  If you can decrease the time your reps spend doing other things, they theoretically should have more time to spend selling.  So put systems to work for you and watch this percentage grow.

How do these figures compare to our sales week?

If we are to propel our sales into lunar orbit then we need to delegate any task that is not related to business growth.

The beauty about selling is the sky is the limit when it comes to business growth.

So to help your sales to soar this year, spend more time face to face with great referred prospects – after all, it’s not “Rocket Science”!!!

Action Steps:

1. Identify all tasks that take up more than 30 minutes per week
2. Plan to either eliminate, delegate or outsource within a month
3. Block times for face to face meetings in your weekly planner
Quote:
                                                             Sales isn’t rocket science
                                                                                        Unknown Consultant

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy , , , , ,

About

Simple Sales Tracking is web-based sales CRM software for the tracking, analysis and forecasting of individual and team sales pipeline and contacts.

Built with simplicity at its core, focus is kept on key sales tasks, while eliminating unnecessary ones, helping to ensure buy-in of the entire sales team.

Go to SimpleSalesTracking.com

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