Fire Some Customers for more Profitable Revenues

Business media is rife with the importance of acquiring more (and more) customers. And marketing largely develops general messages that broadly appeal to many prospects. The dot com boom popularized the notion of getting eyeballs without accompanying revenues. You combine those and end up with a large number of irrelevant users and unprofitable customers. You need neither of those unless you are an academic, hobbyist or a charity. Instead, choose your customers. Let’s talk about prospecting, weeding your current customer list and nurturing the ones you want to keep.

Why You Should Be Cross-Selling

Closing ratios vary across companies and industries, but for the most part average salespeople close about one deal in four to new prospects, and great salespeople close about one deal in three. That means there are really only two ways to get more sales. You can increase the number of leads you go through, because one in three of 500 prospects is a bigger number than one in three out of 100 prospects. Or you can turn your attention to existing customers and work on your cross-selling and up-selling.

Pareto Analysis Step by Step

Pareto Analysis is a statistical technique in decision making that is used for the selection of a limited number of tasks that produce significant overall effect. It uses the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) the idea that by doing 20% of the work you can generate 80% of the benefit of doing the whole job. Or in terms of quality improvement, a large majority of problems (80%) are produced by a few key causes (20%). This is also known as the vital few and the trivial many.

In the late 1940s quality management guru Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. Pareto later carried out surveys on a number of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

“How Much Does That Cost?”

A natural question customers always ask is, “How much does that cost?”  Unfortunately, too often sales people answer incorrectly, responding with, “The price is……….”

Cost and price are very different!  If we answer with our price, we’ve immediately transformed the conversation into a pricing discussion.  The end of this conversation is always the level of discount you’ve provided.  We totally miss the opportunity to really talk about costs when we shift the conversation to pricing.

The biggest thing sales leaders overlook: SALES!

Dear Jeffrey, I’m a big fan of your weekly column, especially the one about making sales vs. measuring sales activity. Brilliant! It describes my situation to a tee. I'm an outside salesman who spends countless hours filling in itineraries, CRM notes, and reports. I had the biggest ever increase in sales last year by far, yet I have been told at times I didn't make enough calls that week. Very frustrating. Thanks for any advice you can give me.

 My first piece of advice is: Get your boss fired as soon as possible. Get a real boss, leader, coach and helper, and your sales willdouble.

You seem to be doing the right thing – INCREASING SALES, and having the best year of your career. What else could a manager want? Sounds like it’s your manager that needs to make more calls and increase his activity.

Let me address sales leaders...

8 Steps to Effective Sales Methodology Implementation

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that a sales methodology can dramatically increase the sales effectiveness of your entire sales organization, significantly increasing your sales revenue. The bad news is that not all sales methodology solutions are implemented well. There are few distinct topics in the world of the Sales VP that raise such polarized views as the effectiveness of sales methodologies. Sometimes the very phrase ‘Sales Methodology’ is enough to make Sales VPs reach for the Pepto-Bismol. On other occasions, sales leaders can point to successful implementations that delivered consistent revenue increases, and improved sales effectiveness.

How To Be Super Confident About Selling

Sales managers often tell their salespeople that the best time to make a sale is right after they’ve just made one. While I can’t prove a statistical correlation between closing one sale and then, quickly thereafter, closing another, I can tell you that it makes sense to me. There is no doubt that after making a sale, salespeople typically experience a significant increase in their level of confidence. And it would be logical to believe that amplified self-confidence would make it easier to sell.

Of course, the opposite holds true as well. A salesperson in a slump finds it harder to sell than ever! So, if confidence has that much impact on sales success, how can a salesperson increase his or her sales confidence?

 Here are six things you can use to increase your sales confidence (or the sales confidence of someone you manage): 

Sales Manager Commission Structure

Compensating a good sales manager is critical to ensure that you keep talented people onboard. The sales manager “plans, directs, or coordinates the actual distribution or movement of a product or service to the customer,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The manager is also responsible for the recruitment, training and management of sales staff, the establishment of sales territories and targets, and overseeing the reporting of sales achieved to senior management.

Basic Salary

10 Musts for Selling to Multicultural Buyers

The segment of foreign-born home buyers is growing at a fast pace, but many of them may not know the furniture is not included.

In California, home builders have learned the hard way not to assume that buyers from other countries know that the home price doesn’t include furniture.

In the wake of lawsuits from disappointed home buyers, builders have been putting plaques on their homes: “Furniture not included in the price,” diversity consultant and real estate professional Michael D. Lee told attendees at the International Builders’ Show session on secrets to selling to the multicultural buyer.  

What Your Sales Manager Should Never Have to Manage

Your sales manager should never have to manage your activity. Your self-discipline, your goals, and your personal ambition should provide the motivation for your activity. If your sales manager has to look at your activity then you are doing something wrong.

5 Steps to Identify Qualified Leads

Not everyone on Earth is a prospect for your product or service. If you're pitching to people who truly don't need or can't buy what you have to sell, you're wasting your time. So take a few minutes to qualify your leads before launching into a full-bore sales presentation.

Are They the Decision Maker?
The very first thing you should find out is whether the person you're talking to is authorized to buy from you. In B2B sales you may need to seek out a purchasing person, the department head, the office manager, or even the company owner. In B2C your prospect may need or want to share the decision with a spouse, parent or significant other. 

6 Plans a Sales Team Needs

Handing every salesperson a lead list and a phone and expecting them to produce isn't enough. Any sales team needs some support from above in order to function competitively. Does your sales team have all of the following plans in place, along with a thorough understanding of each? If not, it may be time to make some adjustments.

Compensation Plan
How does your compensation plan work? What is it intended to accomplish (e.g. encourage new sales, boost wallet share for existing customers, bring on more high-worth clients)? Does it take into account salespeople who finish way above or way below their quotas? The sales manager and every salesperson on the team should know the plan thoroughly and should get an immediate, clear update when the compensation rules change. 

6 Tips for Managing a Virtual Sales Team

Virtual sales teams have become a common way of doing business. Thanks to technology that lets salespeople work productively from home offices or anywhere else in the world, a good virtual sales team is a win-win situation. Your salespeople get the flexibility and convenience of working where they wish, and you get to build a geographically diverse sales team without needing to sink capital into building official “offices” all over the country – or the world. The tough part is building the right virtual sales team.

1. Choose the Right Salespeople

Most good salespeople are strongly self-motivated, but any virtual employee needs to take this trait to the next level. A virtual sales team often operates without day-to-day supervision, and possibly doesn't speak to another co-worker for days on end. Every member of the team needs to be comfortable with this isolation and must be able to keep producing without a manager standing over his shoulder. 

Pipeline Integrity

The funnel/pipeline is a key tool for sales people and managers to assess performance.  It provides so many insights beyond knowing whether you will make your sales goals.

One of the first things I look at on any new project is the pipeline.  It tells me so much about the organization or the sales person.  It’s one of the most powerful tools available to sales professionals, but too many fail to understand it.

A couple of years ago, I was called into a large technology company.  “Dave, our folks just don’t know how to close!  We’ve got lots of deals, but we aren’t able to move them into closing.  We need help!”   I asked the usual questions, “What’s the funnel coverage?”  The response–”Oh, it’s great–we have a great funnel, we have plenty of opportunities to chase after, that’s not our problem, it’s a closing problem.”

Bottom Line Disciplines for Small Businesses

Set sales goals for your team to improve your small business’ bottom line and manage your deals and clients with the help of a simple CRM like Base.

Being an owner of a small business can be a challenge, particularly when it comes to sales.  No matter what industry or profession you are in, you need sales to survive.  Without sales there are no transactions, no revenue and no bottom line. Sales is your bottom line!

Buyers are everywhere.
What are you doing to help them buy?

4 Ideas for Sales Management Success

Managing salespeople is quite different from managing other employees, and sales managers who transition from outside sales might find that their usual motivational techniques simply don't work as well. For one thing, many of the tricks managers use are similar enough to sales techniques that salespeople will see through them. For another, salespeople tend to be very confident and independent-minded, and they don't always take well to being managed. If you haven't had much luck with managing your sales team, try using some of these strategies. 

Sales Management Secrets: 7 Ways Leaders Sell to Win

Whether you're trying to pitch a product or yourself as a person, selling is never easy. (On the latter point, just ask anyone who has to negotiate daily with a toddler in hopes of getting them to eat their vegetables.) But by mastering the art of the sale, you open doors to new connections and opportunities - and can create meaningful bonds that provide a lasting foundation upon which great things can be built. Just remember that selling is a form of giving: yes, you're giving away a product or a service in exchange for money, but you also want to make sure that what you're giving counts--win-win is the secret to more productive exchanges. Let your clients get to know you and the value you offer--and, by learning to better communicate it, help them understand what they gain from the exchange. Contrary to Alec Baldwin's belief, coffee isn't just for closers, as there's more to making a sale than sheer tenacity (although it does help): Here are seven additional strategies that will help you sell to win. 

12 Keys to Tuning Up Your Salesforce

Many cars today tell the driver when it is time to perform maintenance. Even better, some tell the driver that maintenance is needed in 1,000 miles with updates along the way. It would be great if as a business executive or small business owner, you had this kind of technology at your fingertips. Unfortunately, managing a sales organization will always be a manual effort. Sure, CRMs and contact managers help, but there is no technology that replaces the leadership associated with sales management. Not sure where to dig into your sales organization? Here are twelve areas that will show just how game ready you are.

1. Business Objective. In your capacity, I’ll bet you can cite the objectives of the business easy as pie, but do the key members of the sales team know them? Better yet, do they know the current one(s)? Business objectives change. It is important that those affected by the change are in the know. The business objectives serve as the foundation of the company’s Sales Architects® which is the overall selling system framework. If the foundation changes without reviewing the selling framework, there is a high risk of not achieving the objective. It is the equivalent of constructing a building with the wrong materials, or worse, in the wrong place. 

The Future of Sales Technology

Salespeople are always the early adopters. Here's where they (and you) are heading.

For the past two decades, salespeople have been the early adopters of technology that's later permeated the rest of the business world. Salespeople, for example, were the first to embrace smartphones and CRM was the first viable "cloud-based" application.

Therefore, if you want to know how the general business public will be using computers in the future, you'd best understand the trends that are already taking place within forward-looking sales teams.

To this end, I've been working with sales research pioneer Howard Stevens on a book about the future of selling. We have just completed the chapter on sales technology which (along with other chapters) is available for free on the Chally website (HERE).

Create a Culture of Sales Success

Are you currently doing everything possible to create a culture of sales success?

In order to perform at their best, salespeople need to feel supported and motivated. Creating a culture of sales success lies in a few consistent and actionable behaviors on the part of the sales manager.

Invest in tools that create a competitive edge.
The greatest sales reps are likely to be blessed with an innate gift for selling. Imagine how much more they could achieve with today's selling tools. CRM can generate vital sales metrics, tablet devices can allow them to perform on-the-fly demos, and prospecting tools can turn their cold calls into warm calls. Competitive B2B sales teams are taking active steps to create online sales channels, deploy marketing automation software, and integrate social media into the sales strategy. Ask yourself, "When was the last time I invested in tools to help my team perform more effectively?"