“Dare to be….12 business tips from an FBI hostage negotiator”
Find out how to get the deal you want in negotiations – without turning into Donald Trump.
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Find out how to get the deal you want in negotiations – without turning into Donald Trump.
Click this link to view the article
Click the following link to see the full 8 page PDF ISSUE+5+-+Cognisi+-+v20.1
In this article I want to give a counterbalance to the negative and accentuate the positive – I want to encourage you to Celebrate Success more often and with good purpose. All the research and evidence shows that improving employee recognition has a direct impact on your bottom line, less absenteeism, lower staff turnover, better productivity, greater team work, less clock watching, more commitment………… So Why wouldn’t you want to re-balance the scale (at least a little bit) toward developing positive employee recognition activities.
Following on from my recent newsletter “Dare to be….Vital sales Data Every Business Should Know” I thought I’d present some more further research into “Why Sales Teams Fail And What To Do About It.”
Research conducted into 2,663 companies in the U.S. and Europe by Sales Activator Company partnered with Nightingale Conant identified some startling statistics:
Sales are the lifeblood of any business and if any of the below statistics are a reflection of your business then it’s important to redress the problems and stop wasting £000’s, losing revenue, wasting valuable time and start winning new profitable business.
Start with a clearly defined sales process
The research identifies a clear problem that I see with many of my clients – Many salespeople are left to their own devices (one of the attractions for many salespeople) and as a consequence they don’t work in a structured manner, they are trusted to choose the activities that will produce the biggest and quickest wins. They are often not very strategic in their prospecting (focussed on price) and frequently become very inefficient preferring to “look after” existing accounts rather than qualify and work on new ones. They are often focussed on “selling” product feature and not “solutions”. They are impatient for wins so they are often very poor at administration (CRM systems; call reports; professional well written proposals; territory planning etc.), and are very poor at following up and building relationships with key target clients (60% of clients buy after having said no 5 times yet 44% of salespeople give up after the first no, 22% after the second no and 14% after the third no)
What goes wrong with each salesperson differs with each individual but the net result is the same – poor sales, de-motivated people, wasted time and money.
The key to redress this is to develop a sales process based on proven a Consultative Sales Process which has clear step by step activities and outcomes; clear understanding of what materials to be used; a qualification process; the issues to be discussed and resolved; goals that should be achieved. Once this has been understood, defined and written down, then the process can be managed and only then can progress be properly measured, results monitored and problems addressed.
If you think you have a good sales process, can I suggest that you ask each member of you sales team the process they go through from prospecting, market/customer research, to initial meeting, key questions, objectives of meeting, dealing with trials, quotations, pricing etc. I think you’ll be amazed at the variance in answers you get (if you’re one of the 18% who have a robust system then you no longer need to read this part of the report)..
If you need to develop a structured sales process consider the following:
Skill Development is Critical to Success
Finding and nurturing great talent is key to business success in every part of a business and none more so than in sales. Selling is, in my opinion, a hugely difficult thing to do well and requires a very wide skill set and demands great creativity and knowledge. However, modern business demands quick wins almost form day one so the days of 6 month induction programmes have gone. People and sales development have to be conducted in smaller bite sized chunks.
Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between £ spent on training and ROS. So it is important to have a sales training process and the following should be considered:
Make Sure Salespeople Are Doing Enough
I see it all the time – salespeople not doing enough. Not enough telephone calls to make appointments, not enough face to face meetings, not enough demos, not enough prospecting, not enough effort in administrative tasks, not enough planning.
Many salespeople have a problem with how to allocate time between servicing existing clients and generating new ones and like most of us they do the things they like doing rather than the things that need to be done.
It’s much easier to talk to an existing client with whom you have a good relationship, it’s easier to be seen working on existing client problems than facing the fatigue of cold calling and the frequent rejection that the process incurs.
We need salesmen to work smarter not necessarily harder:
Deal With The Sales Gremlins
As with most things your state of mind is key to success. “If you think you can, or you can’t – you’ll be right”
This is key to a lot of my coaching and is equally important in the field of sales. Dealing with self-limiting beliefs will effect sales performance. If salesmen lack belief in themselves, their products, the company, the service offer, they will unconsciously transmit their attitude to their prospects in a variety of subtle and overt ways.
If salespeople don’t see the value in what they’re offering or believe the price is too high they will not be supportive or to act in the clients best interest (the key to consultative selling).
Self-limiting beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling – salespeople who believe that price is key tend to get more price objections. Salespeople who believe you have to be “the life and soul” tend to talk too much and not listen enough. Sales people who need to be liked often don’t ask the difficult questions that is needed to identify the prospects compelling reason to buy – fearing rejection and a breakdown in relationships.
To avoid these problems:
Spend time managing and nurturing the life blood of your company – Sales
The research shows that too many managers (particularly true in many SME’s that I work with where the owner is also the Sales Director) do not allocate enough time to sales management
It is often quicker to do things yourself than spend the time training/coaching/mentoring or showing others how to do it. But that is a dereliction of your role as leader/manager. Sales are too important to not find time to manage this vital function.
The sales manager’s role is to become a leader, developer, to be a resource for help not a do-er.
If your sales manager is doing too much selling and not enough developing the are going to limit the future success of your company. All businesses are only as good as the people employed and if the sales team are not being directed and managed properly then your business is suffering, is being inefficient and you are losing £000’s of revenue and profits. One person cannot make up for the shortfall in others ……… If they are the manager they need to manage and lead.
We’ve all been in boring meeting that ramble on, have no sense of direction, have no end product and meander of subject. Poor meetings cost money, waste valuable time, deflate morale and often don’t actually achieve anything positive. But this state of affairs is not compulsory.
I’ve collated 10 Basic “rules” that should ensure a good meeting and provided 21 extra ideas to make them great.
Implementing my basic rules and consider including some of the improvements will help you avoid “death by meeting” – enjoy!
For many companies there is a perception that customers are obsessed with price and that their competitors are more than willing to “race to the bottom” and win new business by going low on price. It is true that in the global economy, the financial crisis, cheap Asian competition and the internet have resulted in downward pressures on price and for many the response has been one of reluctant resignation. If this sounds like you then maybe you should consider a different type of price negotiation because there is another way.
For many industries the iceberg represents a good analogy where the tip of the iceberg (typically 15% of the total) represents the price and the part below the waterline (85% of the total) represents all the hidden values.
To avoid being hammered on price it is important that your sales team answer the question “why should I buy from you?” by focussing their answers on non-price responses. They need to give a value based reason. They need to understand the 85% of value that is typically unseen and below the waterline.
I come across a lot of businesses that intellectually appreciate the need to have measures of performance yet in reality only pay lip service to implementing a formal measurement system. In many instances measures are limited to basic financial measures or they produce data for data’s sake with no link to action or process/continuous improvement.
To keep things simple and to provide a laymen’s interpretation of KPI’s, I think that it’s easier to consider two types of measure that are important and should be measured. These will directly help any business define and measure progress toward their organisational goals:
Result Indicators – these are financial and non-financial measures that give an overview of past performance and communicate how well the management have done in achieving annual objectives and strategic targets (turnover, financial ratios, stock levels, margins, new customers, average sales value, hits on the web site etc.)
But because you can’t “manage” results it is also important to measure activity and performance, hence the need to measure KPI’s:
Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) – these are what managers should be focussed upon in their daily working lives. Actions in these areas determine the success in achieving the results/goals that most businesses are ultimately focussed upon.