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Sales Best Practices During Pandemic

A near complete shutdown of the economy is an unprecedented event. This did not happen during the great depression, not as a result of any world war, nor ever before as a response to a contagious illness. But here we are. Focusing on the important big stuff and developing some best practices will go a long way to helping your sales organization survive, if not thrive, during the pandemic.

The World is Closed
Photographer: Edwin Hooper | Source: Unsplash

A solid sales team is important to any business. We typically devote most of our time to helping companies build great sales teams. If you’re in need of building your team, click HERE to learn more about what we do.

We do, however, talk with some of our larger clients about issues outside the scope of our sales recruitment coaching. I have included some ideas on best practices during a pandemic that we have discussed over the last few weeks.

  • Focus on customer relationships. Retaining your base of regular customers will prove lifesaving for your business. Of course you need to get new business and your competitors who are not focusing on their customer relationships might well be a good target for getting it. Strengthen your customer relationships to make them a tough target for your competitor.
  • Adjust your pitching process. Adapt your offerings to address specific pain points of your prospects. They likely have more time now and perhaps product demonstrations or free trial periods might attract interest. When things return to normal, these prospects might want to keep a valuable product you’ve introduced.
  • Offer flexible terms. Money is tight for most businesses, likely including yours. Minimizing the pain of more drains on cashflow will not only help your prospects, it will also let them know you’re trying to shepherd them through the current environment.

Selling is a challenging profession even in good times. COVID19 is making it an increasingly tricky game. Helping your sales team develop new best practices will go a long way toward recovering the ground lost to the shutdown.

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Interviewing

Sales Recruitng: The Intelligent Interview Sequence

It amazes me that so many sales managers think they can wing it in a hiring interview and get a quality salesperson.

Will not happen.

If you’re not prepared with the right attitude and the right questions you will waste your time and waste the applicants’ and only if you get darn lucky will you hire a quality performer.

Just because the applicant passed our profiles and has years of experience in you industry does not mean you hire them.

Yeah they definitely have the heart in the blood of a salesperson if they passed both AHS profiles: CORE Values and CORE Styles, but heart and blood don’t mean much if they won’t take consistent directed action.

Your purpose in the interviews to find out about that.

You can screen them like crazy, spot the faker and sales wannabes and get rid of those people right off the bat, but if your interview is weak you’re still going to end up with a team full of duds.

Our Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence is where you find out whether your application has taken their powerful talents and actually achieved something.

Most people squander their natural Talent. This is the norm. Thoreau said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I say, the sales personality is more likely than others to squander their talents and skills.

Selling is hard work, good salespeople who work hard use their natural talents to put themselves in situations to find business.

Weak salespeople use their natural talents to sell you in the interview and after they are hired they’ll continue to do it –selling you on how hard they’re working.

You’ve seen in before dozens of times it you’ve been a sales manager for a while.

Our Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence requires 3 to 4 separate interviews. People say, 3-4 interviews that’s crazy. No it’s not crazy.

You’ve got to outlast them.

Interview 1 is a throw away. They’ve got their guard up. Interview 2 you still don’t get high quality information. But by the third and fourth interview the applicant tells you things they only share with people that they have a relationship with.

Your goal is to discover whether they have stick to it ness, follow through and the ability to overcome adversity.

Can handle setbacks? The good news is you can keep those three to four interviews to a total of 2 hours if you do all four.

Most interviewers waste time with stupid questions like “Tell me about yourself? or “It says on your resume you hit 200% of quota at XYZ Companny.”

Don’t waste your time. Ask questions that are in the Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence. Be friendly but don’t sell. You just want the facts.

And that’s how you hire quality salespeople who’ll pick up the phone and do they work.

We’ve put together a short quiz that helps Sales Managers figure out the best way to hire quality salespeople. Click the button and take the short survey. It will take you less than a minute to complete. And based on the average deal size we’ll give you our recommendations on the best way to hire salespeople who do the work. Go ahead and click the button now and see for yourself what we’d recommend you do to hire quality sellers,

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Uncategorized

Hire Salespeople By Keeping a Journal Will Make You More Money

Let’s face it, when it come to hire salespeople is like crawling around in the dark for most managers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I was lucky when I first started at 25 as a Sales Manager to hire salespeople. My boss, Mike, told me that training was secondary to sales hiring. He taught me that if you hire a lousy salesperson, all the training in the world will not make him great. He’ll just be a well-trained lousy salesperson.

He also taught me that if you want to get great when you hire salespeople, you have to keep records. For me that morphed in keeping a journal — well actually two journals. I’ll talk about the second journal in a minute.

But first in the management journal it is important to track which candidates you get with each ad. In this way, you know which ad pulled winners. (And which one pulled mostly duds.)

You also then track how your salespeople do at regular benchmarks. My benchmarks are 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years. At those dates I jot down the level of productivity of the salesperson.

In the Advanced Hiring System, we have incorporated this journal into the sales hiring system. (We’re looking out for your career here.) Plus we want to make it easier foir you to see how well you’re doing with the system.

If you follow this very simple system, you’ll improve every time you make a sales hire.

The second journal, well, that is a personal journal. Life is tough and having a record of your thoughts is invaluable. Being able to look back at notes I made 40 years ago are the most powerful self-improvement tool.

If you’d like to know more about tracking candidates click the button below. We’ve put together a short survey that will help you improve your sales hiring strategy.

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