IS YOUR SALESFORCE PREPARED TO PRESENT YOUR COMPANY IN A PROFESIONAL WAY? (PART 2)
Companies that achieve total market domination often rely on a team selling approach to help them leverage all of their selling resources when they compete for major accounts.
Step 5: Identify how and where your sales managers are spending their time.
Sales managers have four sales management duties: training, coaching, motivating, and evaluating.
Training – Helps Salespeople Improve Selling Skills
Sales managers must provide their sales team with all of the information that it needs to represent its company’s products or services in a professional way. Not every sales manager is a great teacher. Nevertheless, your sales manager must ensure that every sales representative on his or her team has the knowledge that is required to succeed on the job.
Coaching – Provide Incentives for Reaching Sales Goals
Coaching means monitoring each sales representative to improve their selling skills. Many managers rely on weekly sales reports and monthly or quarterly commitment calendars to help them track the performance of their staff. These tools are invaluable with less experienced or geographically dispersed field representatives.
Motivation – Provide Incentives for Reaching Sales Goals
Sales motivation means ensuring that each sales representative is professionally and personally committed to making their bestselling effort for themselves and their company. The key to motivation is to maintain a positive, supportive attitude toward your staff. If you follow the Golden Rule, and remain straight, honest, and fair, your staff will reward you with loyalty and their bestselling efforts. Compensation plans that do not motivate performance, unrealistic or unreachable quotas, and other negative sales incentives should be banished.
Evaluating – Define Goals and Measure Results
One of a sales manager’s most challenging jobs is evaluating the performance of his or her staff. Many sales managers are reluctant to provide feedback to their sales representatives. But if a sales manager does not give his or her sales representatives feedback, they will not know how to improve their skills.
Step 6: Define your sales manager’s objectives and key results
Every sales representative and every manager in your company should complete an objectives worksheet. The worksheet can be a formal document that sets parameters for revenue performance and other objectives that are used to determine its employee’s compensation.
Step 7: Adopt a specific selling methodology
Sales managers can improve their effectiveness by mastering a selling technology, and then introducing it to their sales force. Building on a common framework of selling skills makes it easier for a sales team to communicate more effectively and to work together to resolve problems and move business forward.
Step 8: Evaluate your sales training program
Developing your company’s sales personnel’s selling skills is the key to maximizing its sales team’s selling efforts.
Step 9: Evaluate the systems that you have in place for goal setting, motivation, and personnel appraisals.
Your company’s planning and reporting systems provide the infrastructure for effective decision-making.
Step 10: Evaluate your sales recruiting process
Finding the right salesperson to represent your company’s products requires careful planning and thoughtful execution. The first step in the recruiting process is to define a job requirements checklist that reflects your “ideal” candidate’s pervious work experience, educational, background, technical skills, personality type, and managerial potential.
JOB REQUIREMENT CHCKLIST
| Educational Background
High School College/ Graduate Technical/Trade School Professional Certification/Training Sales Training |
| Work Experience
Sales Experience Outside Sales Sales Support Experience Commission Sales Remote territory Sales Route Sales Major Account Sales International Sales Joint-Market Sales |
| Specific Industry Experience
Direct Competitive Sales Experience Knowledge of Customer Base Knowledge of Territory Existing Customer Relations |
| Product Knowledge/Presentation Skills
Verbal Skills Writing Ability Telemarketing Skills Cold call Skills Foreign Languages Skills (Oral/Written) General Product Knowledge Technical Skills Analytic Skills Organizational Skills Office Skills Computer Skills |
| Management Skills
Sales Management Experience Product Marketing Experience Other Management Experience Previous P & L Experience |
| Personal Traits
Honesty Loyalty Work Ethic Persistence Confidence Intelligence Creativity Problem – Solving Abilities Empathy/Listening Skills Professional Appearance |
| Other Qualifications
Desire to Travel Conversational Skills Relevant Hobbies (Example: Golf) Other |
After you have completed your job requirements checklist, you can create a success factor matrix, which will help you determine whether different job candidates are well suited to your specific selling situation.
| Success Factor Matrix | Candidate’s Profile |
| Company size/ Culture | Likes informal environment.
Enjoys support and structure of large company. Likes simple product story. Challenged by complex technical information. |
| Products | Enjoys personal side of selling smaller companies.
Enjoys complexities of major account selling. |
| Customer Matrix | Needs frequent sales.
Motivated by commission. |
| Sales Cycle | Needs frequent sales.
Enjoys landing large orders. |
| Compensation | Security oriented.
Motivated by commission. |
| Potential for Advancement | Wants management experience.
Career supervision.. |
| Level of Supervision | Needs supervision.
Likes to work alone. |
| Personal Needs | People oriented.
Task oriented. |
After you have completed your success factor matrix, you can develop a job description for your open position, which you can use to help you recruit and screen potential job candidates.
Part 3 continues in the next article
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