Build a competent sales function – 3 things to know.
By Andrew Aitken: Business Coach at GROW
As a business owner, chances are that you already know how to sell to your customers. You’ve built a successful business off these sales skills and are now at a stage where you have (or plan to have) a team of people to take over this role from you.
For your sales team to successfully take over this role and drive the desired sales results, you as the business owner (and your sales manager) need to be able to scale them up properly through sound sales management and in particular, the management of the following:
- Getting the Right Sales People: You want to attract and recruit A-Players into your sales team and build a culture of accountability amongst these A-Players.
- Accurate Prediction of Sales: You want to ensure that you can forecast whether the team will have positive sales results in the future. Where you can see trouble looming, you need to be able to take advance action to avoid problems.
- Getting Consistent Sales: You want your sales team to build a consistent flow of sales into the business and avoid the trap of peaks and troughs of sales numbers from one month to the next.
A superior quality sales management capability will achieve the above results by building in the following elements:
- A Sales System, on a best of breed technology platform, to help manage the sales function in the business
- A Sales Process (or processes) to streamline your and/or your team’s sales activities
- Sales skills required by all sales people for effective selling. These include:
- generic sales skills like asking good questions, objection handling skills, and so on
- strong product knowledge
- understanding of the sales processes and the sales system.
This is how to build a competent sales function.
