Driving Sales Beyond

4 Sales Tactics To Put Your Salespeople Back In Control

We recently posed this question to the LinkedIn business community, “Which challenge in today’s market most overwhelms you / your sales people?”

• 44% of the respondents said that their customers’ loss of business weighed heaviest on their sales teams.
• 18% said that customer focus on price most overwhelmed their salespeople,
• While another 15% cited the customer’s lack of vision as the main culprit.
• Finally, 12% targeted the salesperson’s workload as overwhelming.

Business “Gold” (AKA Good Sales Strategy)

 Some experts say “gold” is the best investment you can make these days.  From the comments of our poll respondents, it appears that a good sales strategy is “gold” as well.  Sales strategy – clearly communicated to the sales team – can help them regain control in the sales effort, and navigate today’s murky economic waters with a purpose.  Here’s a sampling of comments:

1. Help The Sales Team Apply Effort Where It Matters - “Salespeople have to be reminded to focus on what they can control,” says Mike O’Reilly (GM, ITW Construction), “Sales leaders have to help their salespeople identify where they can win today.”  O’Reilly points to businesses that will benefit from the Economic Stimulus Bill.  To leverage this new reality, sales leaders can guide their people to identify accounts that will benefit from that bill and work with those customers now to help them plan how they’ll score wins once the stimulus dollars roll in.
2. Help The Sales Team Guide Their Customers To Look Ahead - “We have had some limited success with discussions on how clients are preparing for when business turns around,” says Jay Wysocki (Regional Program Manager at CEI).  Strategic selling may require that you teach your salespeople how to lead such discussions.
3. Help The Sales Team Practice Extreme Resourcefulness  – “A client of ours sells 25% of its production to the auto industry here,” said Flavio Veiga, a business acquaintance of mine from Brazil, “The auto industry simply stopped manufacturing cars in November, December, and half of January.  Nothing the salesmen could do would make a sale.  We [created], along with the salespersons, actions to be implemented with the procurement officials such that when they buy again, they will be more likely to buy from this company, instead of from their main competitors. Sure enough, the government reduced the tax on automobiles, sales increased, the factories started producing again, and our customer is happy again.”
4. Help The Sales Team Recall Its Role – “It’s easy to act like a victim in this economy,” O’Reilly added, “however, we did not hire salespeople to be ‘victims.”  We hired them to be ‘difference makers.’”  O’Reilly’s advice reminds us that market leaders emerge in any economy – good or bad.  

The Bottom Line
We pay our salespeople to work around obstacles to discover and pursue available profit opportunities that coexist with market challenges. “Of course the loss of business has to be a concern,” responded James Harsche (Sales Rep, Port Supply), “but this is what we train for, to help turn that around.”  

Share Your Golden Insight
Today's market presents unique challenges for sure, but I've found that unique challenges often translate into unique opportunities.  What has crossed your mind lately about competing in this market?

Vision, Mission & Values: 8 Tips For Activating Your Company’s Big Ideas

Few would argue that guiding ideas like your company vision, mission, and values are critical to providing purpose, direction and motivation.  In our recent informal LinkedIn poll of business professionals, for example, only 3%  of the respondents saw company vision, mission, and values as anything less than “very important” to the sales effort.  

A full 96% are convinced that these guiding ideas are essential to success.  I happen to agree with Bruce Edwards, the Executive VP at West Marine who stated, “Mission and Values are the roadmap that define the rules of the game and the ‘endgame.’”

Use it or lose it
Having the “essentials” and using them are two different things though.  Here’s the challenge:  research from the Ken Blanchard Companies tells us that company-endorsed ideas tend to lose their strength as they move down the organizational chart.  What appears clearly motivating to those at the C-level often appears foggy and vague to frontline employees like the sales team.

Chuck West, Program Director for Sales and Sales Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison summed up the value of guiding ideas when he said, “They are very important only if they are written with enough specificity to be actionable.”  In other words, their “execution-ability” reveals their value.  Good, working ideas are those that people, at all levels in the company, can translate into actions.

From mere words to actions
David Christensen, VP at Time Warner Cable commented "All employees want to know where their company is going and what it stands for and how they fit into the mission.”  Here are eight ideas we’ve gleaned from our work with leading distributors that can help you activate your company's ideas  on a daily basis.
 

1. Open and close meetings by briefly restating the idea you want to reinforce.  Regular repetition emphasizes its importance. (Do you remember reciting The Pledge of Allegiance at the start of a school day?)  Don’t bother though, if you’re just repeating words.  Genuine, heartfelt sincerity truly matters.  Anything less can do more harm than good.
2. Refer to the ideas as guides when others bring problems to you.  Ask them for example, “What do our values say about this?”
3. Openly refer to the ideas when setting priorities and use them as your guide when you need a tiebreaker.  You might say, for instance, “Option ‘C’ most closely aligns with our mission.  Let’s go with it.”
4. Point out to others how their actions support your company’s guiding ideas.  By connecting the dots for them, you plant the connection seed in their heads as well.
5. Formally recognize those who find ways to “activate” company ideas, even if the recognition is simply a short mention in a newsletter.  You’d be surprised how many people make it a point to read regular recognition blurbs.
6. Invite others to recognize activation of company ideas in their co-workers.  One company we know invites people to nominate others who demonstrate company values.  This puts everybody on the prowl for the ideas you want to reinforce.
7. Intentionally examine how your actions support the ideas.  By privately referring to the ideas often you’ll soon see how they drive your personal actions.
8. Connect the testimonials of satisfied clients to what your company stands for and share that connection with others.  Soon they'll be making such connections on their own.

 
Share Your Ideas

These are eight ideas, but I know there are more.  Share your ideas as to how leaders can activate their guiding ideas throughout the sales organization.

And, please participate in our latest LinkedIn poll where we ask – “To what degree does your vision and values direct your sales reps behaviors?