In a perfect world, your company would provide all the sales training you need. In reality, most salespeople have to take responsibility for their own sales training and either request the training they need from a sales manager or find another way to get it. However skilled or experienced you may be, you still need to constantly hone and improve your sales skills if you want to succeed. Here are some ways to keep that improvement going.
Study Every Day
Each day, set a time to read some useful sales-related material. The time can be a mere 15 minutes per day, and the material can be sales books, blogs, websites, social media sites – as long as it has something new and helpful. When you find some practical idea, write it down. You can sort these ideas into two lists: one for tips that you want to start using right away, and another for ideas that you can't implement yet but will try in the future. For example, if you find a great idea for submitting sales proposals but don't have any proposals pending right now, put it on the future list. Then, the next time you do have a proposal request, you can try it out.
Track Your Performance
Keep a running list of your sales metrics. This information will not only tell you how well you are doing, it will usually point out any areas where you particularly need work. For example, if your cold calling numbers are high and you're scoring plenty of appointments but you're not turning very many of those appointments to sales, you are clearly having trouble closing. You can now focus your efforts on improving your closing skills.
Trade Tips With Others
Other salespeople can be a tremendous source of sales knowledge and techniques. If you're fairly new to sales, then you'll definitely want to learn from your team's experienced members. Ask one or two of the best salespeople on your team if you can listen in on their cold calls and/or come with them on appointments, then take plenty of notes. If you're a more experienced salesperson yourself, you can exchange ideas with other salespeople on your team. You might even set up a group that meets regularly for the purpose. Even better, combine this with a referral group and you can kill two birds with one stone.
Set a Monthly Goal
Every month, pick a specific sales skill and focus on improving it. Ideally, pick something that you can measure so that you'll be able to tell objectively if you're getting better. For example, if you're working on your closing this month, you should know whether or not you've improved just by examining your ratio of closed sales to appointments. If you have identified a weakness already based on your metrics, that can be your focus area. If not, pick something that you haven't worked on in a while. Even if you think you excel in a specific area, you should still work on getting even better. If you stop training altogether in one area, eventually you'll find that you've gotten stale. Don't wait until that happens to improve yourself.
Ask Your Customers
Customers can be surprisingly insightful about your sales skills, or lack of them. Truths that are completely eluding you can be blindingly obvious to the customers you sell to. So take the time to ask your customers what they think of your approach, and how they'd like you to change it. You can also ask them what kinds of approaches they see from other salespeople – you may well pick up some really helpful pointers that way. You shouldn't take every customer comment to heart, but if you hear the same thing from several customers, that's a pretty big warning sign.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
Study Every Day
Each day, set a time to read some useful sales-related material. The time can be a mere 15 minutes per day, and the material can be sales books, blogs, websites, social media sites – as long as it has something new and helpful. When you find some practical idea, write it down. You can sort these ideas into two lists: one for tips that you want to start using right away, and another for ideas that you can't implement yet but will try in the future. For example, if you find a great idea for submitting sales proposals but don't have any proposals pending right now, put it on the future list. Then, the next time you do have a proposal request, you can try it out.
Track Your Performance
Keep a running list of your sales metrics. This information will not only tell you how well you are doing, it will usually point out any areas where you particularly need work. For example, if your cold calling numbers are high and you're scoring plenty of appointments but you're not turning very many of those appointments to sales, you are clearly having trouble closing. You can now focus your efforts on improving your closing skills.
Trade Tips With Others
Other salespeople can be a tremendous source of sales knowledge and techniques. If you're fairly new to sales, then you'll definitely want to learn from your team's experienced members. Ask one or two of the best salespeople on your team if you can listen in on their cold calls and/or come with them on appointments, then take plenty of notes. If you're a more experienced salesperson yourself, you can exchange ideas with other salespeople on your team. You might even set up a group that meets regularly for the purpose. Even better, combine this with a referral group and you can kill two birds with one stone.
Set a Monthly Goal
Every month, pick a specific sales skill and focus on improving it. Ideally, pick something that you can measure so that you'll be able to tell objectively if you're getting better. For example, if you're working on your closing this month, you should know whether or not you've improved just by examining your ratio of closed sales to appointments. If you have identified a weakness already based on your metrics, that can be your focus area. If not, pick something that you haven't worked on in a while. Even if you think you excel in a specific area, you should still work on getting even better. If you stop training altogether in one area, eventually you'll find that you've gotten stale. Don't wait until that happens to improve yourself.
Ask Your Customers
Customers can be surprisingly insightful about your sales skills, or lack of them. Truths that are completely eluding you can be blindingly obvious to the customers you sell to. So take the time to ask your customers what they think of your approach, and how they'd like you to change it. You can also ask them what kinds of approaches they see from other salespeople – you may well pick up some really helpful pointers that way. You shouldn't take every customer comment to heart, but if you hear the same thing from several customers, that's a pretty big warning sign.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
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