Improve sales team performance. As a business owner, chances are that you already know how to sell to your customers. The problem is this knowledge sits inside your head, making it difficult to transfer this knowledge to your sales team. To get the knowledge out of your head and into a place where other people can learn from you, you need to develop a sales process.
As ‘boring” as it might sound for many entrepreneurs, it is extremely useful to understand the benefits of working to a process in business. This applies to any part of the business, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is very applicable to sales.
Think about it this way:
- If you do the same task a different way every time, you can expect a different outcome every time. It becomes difficult to predict whether the outcome will be good or bad.
- But if you do the same task the same way every time, the outcome becomes very predictable, and you’ve laid a platform for systematic improvement. By making one small tweak to how you do the task, you can see if you get a better, or a worse, outcome. You can then keep all the tweaks that improve your outcome and drop the tweaks that make it worse.
So how do you use a sales process with your whole sales team?
- First get your sales process defined.
- Then consciously start to roll out the process to your team.
- Coach and support them to change to the new process.
- Be patient and be persistent to help ensure that the change sticks over time.
NB: when defining your process, don’t fall into the trap of micro-managing steps. Work out just the macro steps. You’ll then tap into the experience, training, and skills of your individual salespeople.
Tips for continued implementation and improved results
- In your weekly sales meetings, pick a step in the process and encourage dialogue and conversation about that step.
- Encourage those who have mastered a particular step to explain what they do to those who are struggling with that step.
- You may find that this dialogue produces a recommended refinement to the step. Each time you discover an incremental change that improves the outcome, you can share these incremental improvements with the whole sales team. This uplifts the whole team to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness.
If you need help defining your sales process, or want to talk about getting your sales team to adopt your process, get in touch with us here. We’d be happy to pick up the conversation with you.
Written by Andrew Aitken, Business Coach at GROW