Uncategorized

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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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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Talent Acquisition

Why Top-Performing Sales Managers Build a Bench

Building a sales team, filled with salespeople who do the work is the goal of all great sales managers.

It really does happen. I’ve seen many dozens of sales teams run by great sales managers. The majority of their salespeople are producers.

Years ago, I had a conversation with one of the smartest entrepreneurs I’ve ever met that sticks in my mind.

Tony Renda, Sr owned a group of 13 radio stations. Tony had started out in sales management, as so many great entrepreneurs do.

Every one of his 13 stations was a top billing station in their market.

He told me his secret for building great sales teams in his stations.

He said, “When I visit my stations I always ask the sales manager to show me his bench. Does he have a list of sales applicants he’s recently interviewed? Is he proactively looking for new sales talent and does he have a system for building a team? If not, he’d better shape up.”

It’s sad but true that too many sales managers look at sales hiring with dread. It’s the thing you do when you HAVE TO, not as an ongoing strategy for improving.

Tony said, “If there had been a system like yours when I was a sales manager it would have made it so much easier. Your system does all the work. All the sales manager has to do is write a good ad and run it and your Advanced Hiring System does the rest for them.

Today there is no excuse for lack of continuous improvement in sales departments.

Remember the definition of the job of sales manager. “Recruit, train and motivate a sales team.”

Recruit comes first. It is the most leverageable of the functions of sales manager.

Training and motivating are important. But if you don’t have the right salespeople on your team, you are “Brick Polishing.” And in case you don’t know, you can polish a brick from now until doomsday, but it will never get shiny. A weak sales hire will never get strong.

The Advanced Hiring System AAPS Profiler Sequence is in use in more than 2000 companies. We’ve put together a short survey to help you decide the quickest way to improve the quality of your sales team. Take the survey to find the best way to build a great sales team for your company.

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