Are your Salespeople Goofing Off?
Track the Activities of Your Salespeople – without Micro-Management
Do you feel your sales team are goofing off whenever you’re not around to micro-manage them?
Almost every owner of an SME business voices this same concern. In many instances, business owners know what sales targets are achievable. They’ve hit these targets themselves! Yet the salespeople seem to constantly underperform.
But you simply cannot be there every minute of the day to keep an eye on every salesperson. You’ve got an entire business to run! So what can you do?
Adopt the strategy of focusing on activities
You can’t control whether a customer signs a deal or not. After all, the customer holds the pen, not the salesperson. But you can control what activities you do, how well you do them and how many you do.
To over-simplify for purposes of explanation: Let’s say you know that for every 10 people you contact, you close 2 deals. To increase your number of sales from 2 to 3 deals, you now know you need to contact 5 extra people. And you need to track that you’re achieving that increased level of activity.
There is an art to selling, but there is also a science to selling to. By defining a sales process broken into stages, with optimal activities defined for each stage, you can very quickly start to determine how many of each activity you need to do to ensure a certain result each month.
As a business owner, you need to implement a sales system to help keep track of each salesperson’s sales activities. In a few short months, you’ll have enough data about the team’s activities to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and what action to take to help them become successful. You’ll be able to do this without checking up on their every move every second of the day.
Written by Andrew Aitken, Business Coach at GROW
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