7 Top Tips for Increasing Your Business Sales for 2008
For all of us who have our own businesses, or who have a vested interest in building a successful and prosperous business, increasing sales each year is vital for business growth. It is now the time of year when we review what we have achieved and look ahead to what we want to develop and build. With planning and attention we can figure out what needs improving and how to do it. So here are seven tips to get your sales increasing in 2008:
1. Define your business and sales goals. The only way you are going to get where you need to be is to identify where that is and what it is. Then you need to write it down and communicate it with your management and administration groups and sales team. By committing your goals to writing you are creating a stronger physical focus for yourself. When your team sees the goals written down they take the goals more seriously and believe in your commitment to achieving them. This sets your team onto the same target and improve the success results.
2. Once your business and sales goals are set you are well on track to having the basics of the strategic plan defined. A strategic plan gives direction for all aspects of it and is especially important for having the marketing and advertising messages being consistent throughout the entire business. This empowers the sales team to increase sale income.
3. Set the strategic goals alongside sales goals and share this with the management and sales teams. The vision of the entrepreneur needs to be made into concrete examples for the managers and sales team to take specific actions against so the strategic goals can be met. This will keep everyone working for the same goals and going in the same direction. It helps individuals in the team make daily decisions against a known set of criteria and goals so they can make the right choices.
4. Give everyone in the business who answers phones sales scripts. I have worked with businesses where someone in administration accidentally gets a customer enquiry and have no idea how to appropriately talk with the customer about the business only to harm the customer relationship. With all staff being trained how to talk with customers and direct them to the best person to help them, customers are well cared for and the reputation is enhanced rather than harmed. Sales scripts for the sales team helps individuals get over objections and keeps a consistent marketing message being communicated about them.
5. Know where the money is by tracking and measuring daily actions. If you are not measuring results how can you manage results? You know that if you are not measuring the results from marketing and advertising efforts you are flying blind with knowing where to best spend you budget. The same goes for the sales team. Track so you can measure sales, number of sale leads, customer calls, appointments, meetings and contacts like newsletters, cards and emails.
An email newsletter going out to key segments of your customer database has a greater sales impact than calling one small customer, so assign weightings to efforts and look to have regular actions from across the spectrum in your weekly reports. The repeated small actions of adding customers to the email newsletter database make the sending of newsletters valuable so make sure you count the small actions as well as the big actions.
6. Look after your customers with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and you will increase sales. A good CRM system will let you know really useful information about individual customers as well as reporting on customer segments. It will also empower you to promote a consistent and professional message to your customers with every contact they have with the business so credibility and trust is built. Part of a CRM system is also keeping track of privacy requirements and lets you stay within the law while presenting an ethical business that is valuable to the customer.
Systems are empowering because they make it easier to keep it going in the same direction and promoting a consistent message for both marketing and business values.
7. Review your sales training approach. Has the sales approach been getting you the results that you want? The traditional approach of closing sales is generally aggressive whereas the selling method that wants long term relationships with customers, listens to customer needs carefully so the best solution can be offered and where customers bring business to you can radically increase the profits of the bottom line. Looking at your sales team’s approach, methods and tools can let you achieve changes that increase your sales significantly.
With these 7 foundation tips for increasing sales so from here you can set the ground for exponential growth for 2008.
Belinda Stinson is the designer and owner of http://CreativelyBelle.com – a popular costume jewelry and earring holder store.
See Belinda’s designs at www.CreativelyBelle.com/design and join the free newsletter for new designs, sales news and business articles.
The Top Five Traits of a Successful Salesperson
If you’re looking for a successful salesperson to hire — a salesperson who not only CAN sell but WILL sell — look for a salesperson with PRIDE.
PRIDE is an acronym for 5 characteristics that will help ensure that the salesperson you hire will get the job done for you and make the revenue results you desire a reality.
PRIDE stands for:
*** Proven
*** Respectful
*** Innovative
*** Decisive
*** Enthusiastic
Proven
Proven refers to the candidate’s track record. Have they delivered results? More importantly, who else says so besides them? As you know, resumes can be fact, or they can be fiction. How can you tell the difference?
A person who has been successful producing results should be able to provide you with third party proof. Have the candidate bring in their sales awards, including plaques, trophies and pictures from the trips they’ve earned. Have them show you the stack-ranked sales reports showing their name at or near the top of the field.
More importantly, what do their customers have to say about them? Can the candidate produce testimonial letters from their customers, indicating they were satisfied with the buying experience? Candidates should be able to furnish written recommendations proving that they were able to deliver tangible results.
Respectful
Salespeople should approach being Respectful from two positions. First, they need to be respectful of others. Careful listeners, these salespeople would never be regarded as pushy because they take the time to hear their prospects out. They keep their egos in check, remembering that everyone can make a valuable contribution in their own way and that other team members deserve respect, too.
Second, your salespeople need to respect themselves. Expect them to have a quiet confidence in their own abilities, and a strong desire to use their time, talents, and skills to produce optimal results. They’ll respect their health, physical needs, and family commitments, and as a result be refreshed, well-balanced, and ready for work each day.
Self-respect allows salespeople to be assertive, ensuring that they won’t allow themselves to be used as a doormat by prospects who want to waste their time or abuse a relationship.
Innovative
An Innovative salesperson is a problem-solver. They’re able to quickly assess a prospect’s situation, and then come up with an approach to help the prospect accomplish their objectives. Reactive salespeople need not apply. Proactive salespeople spontaneously look for ways to do the job better, to improve on past successes, to show better results even faster than before.
Innovative salespeople are easy to manage, because they don’t require instructions. They’re pretty much point and shoot; give them an objective to aim for, and they can creatively approach obstacles and move past them.
Because they are innovative, they tend to look at the world through fresh eyes, and hence have a good sense of humor. A willingness to be playful and funny is a good clue that you’re talking with an innovator. Good news! Your buyers would prefer to do business with someone who can make them chuckle and lighten up their day.
Decisive
A Decisive salesperson can make up their mind. They have effective critical thinking skills that allow them to rapidly size up a situation and decide how to best approach it. Decisiveness is truly important for a salesperson, for how can they expect the buyer to make a decision when they can’t make one themselves?
Decisiveness is often related to owning a clear set of key moral values. It’s easy for salespeople to consistently do the right thing when it’s clear to them what the right thing is. You want decisive salespeople who know when to walk away from a bad deal, and can separate good prospects from the time-wasters.
Enthusiastic
Enthusiastic salespeople have become a cliche for all the wrong reasons. Enthusiasm must be more than an induced rush spawned by a rah-rah motivational pep talk. If you want enthusiasm that lasts, you need to find salespeople who are eager to help your customers.
You want salespeople who are excited about what they do and how they do it, so their curiosity is stimulated and they are inspired to continually learn on their own. Enthusiasm comes from believing that you can make a difference, that you can improve someone’s situation when they do business with you.
Enthusiastic salespeople are motivated when they understand the strategy that will help them succeed, when they have access to all the tools they need to allow them to do their job and serve the customer, and when tactical training is available to allow them to skillfully serve the customer as well as the company. Enthusiastic salespeople have every right to believe they can win. And they do.
Hire a Compete Package
From the salesperson’s perspective, PRIDE is about feeling good about your job. It’s about believing in yourself and your ability to deliver. It’s about enjoying yourself, helping the customer, and making the most of your God-given talents and abilities. It’s about recognizing individual contributions and abilities while respecting the value of the team. When you hire salespeople with PRIDE, you, your salespeople, and your customers all win.
Copyright 2007 Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson works with selling organizations to convert sales trouble into double and triple digit performance breakthroughs. Visit http://ConsultativeSelling.com for a simple definition of Consultative Selling and more sales insights.
5 Top Tips For Being The Best Sales Person In The Team
I was working away and listening to the radio this morning and ended up stopping and taking notes on what the businessman Gerry Harvey of Australia’s Harvey Norman had to say about what makes for a great sales person.
Anyone who is building their own business knows that being good at sales is vital for growth and success but many are daunted by doing the selling.
Gerry thinks there are far more people out in the world that would be great salesmen and saleswomen but just don’t know that they are because they have not given it a go.
He told the story of employing a young woman straight out of university after completing her degree, achieving at extra curricula endeavours and ready to start her corporate life. Gerry said he would take her on, mentor her weekly as long as she did what he said and that she would have to start on the sales floor for a year. This she initially baulked at but agreed to.
She was assigned to a store with some of the best sales staff of the company and with months she was top of the sales and had Gerry and the store manager stumped how a young person with no sales training could beat other experienced and talented sales people.
So they checked out her method and it was the same tried and tested way that Gerry developed for himself. Like him, she had figured out how to sell the natural way. So how did she do it? Easy, by:
1. being genuine with customers so people feel comfortable.
2. listening to what the customer is saying so to figure out what they want, why the want it and what needs looking after as this makes it easy to offer the right product (or service).
3. good communication skills so customers understood the information being given to them and felt heard. This also includes approaching people to offer service and being available to help.
4. reasonable product knowledge level – knew enough to answer questions and when to get more information but not too much so that customers were inundated with too much information.
5. looks people in the eye so comes across as honest and reliable.
People become customers when they trust what you, what you say and the product meets their needs. Being pushy creates distrust, being genuine and listening builds trust.
So you can be a successful sales person without formal training, just by being open and genuine with customers. The key is in putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and treating them as you would want to be treated – honestly, openly and kindly.
Belinda Stinson is the designer and owner of http://CreativelyBelle.com – a popular costume jewelry and earring holder store.
See Belinda’s designs at www.CreativelyBelle.com/design and join the free newsletter for new designs and sales news.
Sales: Nature Or Nurture?
Salesmen tend to perpetuate the myth that you either have a knack for making sales or you don’t. They make out that it is a dark art that can only be mastered by an elite few. Like most myths this has a tenuous link to reality but is of course complete fiction. So what is required to become a good sales person and can it be achieved through sales training?
Attitude
How do you sell snow to the Eskimos? Well successful salesman and author of Success through a positive mental attitude W.Clement Stone stated that, “Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – not the attitude of the prospect.” The attitude of the salesman is crucial. You may think this is obvious – it is! But how many times have you met a salesman that half-heartedly attempts to push a product that they obviously have no belief in.
Knowledge
Alongside having a salesman with a good attitude, “People like to feel they are buying of their own good judgment as a result of the information the salesman has given them”. This would suggest that it is vitally important that your salespeople are knowledgeable and impart their knowledge without pressing the customer too hard.
Integrity
Okay sales people are not renowned for their integrity. There are numerous horror stories of door-to-door salespeople that fleece lonely OAPs in an attempt to relieve them of some of their pension. It goes without saying that a salesperson using these techniques will not only go to hell but will eventually be caught out by their customers when they don’t receive what they are promised. People respond to honesty. It is perfectly admissible to highlight the flaws in your product and if you help the customer find the right product for them (even if it is not yours) they will appreciate it and come back to you next time.
Learn about the customers
It is another overused cliche that good salespeople know their customers. Cliche or not it is a fundamental aspect of being a salesperson. You have to know what your customers want. This is why search engines such as Google have been so successful. They listen to what the customer wants and provide results for their search. Salespeople should do the same. Sadly taking time to listen is often overlooked by salespeople. Woody Allen alluded to this in Love and death 1975; “There are worst things than death. If you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean.” Sadly salespeople are often too keen to talk about themselves and as a result miss out on a sale.
Training
It can’t be taught they’ll say. But of course we all know good sales techniques can be taught. Motivation, Communication and Financial Awareness can all be developed by sales training. When this is mixed with high levels of determination and desire to sell a super human salesperson will be born!
Shaun Parker has been a leading salesman for all of his life. He uses his many years of experience to run sales training for salespeople of all levels of experience. To find out more please visit http://www.righttrackconsultancy.co.uk