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An ever increasing number of companies have at their disposal the same technology and range of products and services. Therefore the determining factor in sales success is increasingly the employment of creative salespeople. A creative sales team will move off the beaten track in search of new business. This management training article looks at the way managers can detect the potential for creativity amongst the sales people they have.
Creativity can mean many different things. The abstract...
•How to Improve the Response Rates of Written Client Questionnaires
Home made market research is being used by an increasing number of businesses. On sales training courses of particular interest to sales people is how they can make use of a home made written survey to question how their customers feel. Such surveys are easy to assess and cheap to carry out. However, the most annoying thing for anybody who has carried out such a survey is the low rate of return. Just a handful of questionnaires get returned and too few people who receive the questionnaires...
•Managing Your Difficult Salespeople
Sales Managers who are faced with the common dilemma described below are given the following advice by management training experts.
Suppose on your sales team you have on your a very talented sales person that you can't do without. The problem is that as a result of their negative effect on other team members, they also represent a danger to the internal peace of your sales force. How would you manage this challenging sales management dilema?
The following list of nine characteristics are...
•Tips on Introducing Computer Aided Sales Information
Many sales managers would love to try out the idea of CAS (computer aided selling), but only 40% of businesses actually have computer assisted sales systems. The planning costs and investment associated with the introduction of the associated equipment can be extremely high. As an indication of the initial investment specialists estimate a cost of between £5,000 and £10,000 per work place (hardware, software, sales training).
Anybody planning on using a computer aided sales information system...
•Tips for Setting up a Call Centre
Any company wanting to gain new clients and improve relations with existing clients has to improve its communication between company and client. Systematically organised telephone service departments, so-called Call Centres, incorporate user areas such as information and enquiry services, order reception, complaint management or hotlines. Large companies already routinely use call centers, but many smaller organisations are now looking at the call centre approach to managing customer contact....
•Tips on Increasing Conference Efficiency Using Computer Aided Meetings Systems
Managing business meetings is a key discussion topic on management training courses because many managers spend a large amount of their time in meetings. Managers would therefore welcome anything that can be improve their meeting effectiveness. Using face-to-face meetings is still very common, but an increasing number of organisations have started to use the so-called Electronic-Meeting-Systems (EMS) for conferences. The experience managers who have used EMS for their meetings is...
•Tips to Alert You of Customers' Price Sensitivity Changes
This sales training article looks at the different stages of the product lifecycle, and discusses some of the key influencers affecting price policy decisions that need to understood by those in a sales or business development role.
The experience your customers have of your product has a decisive influence on their price sensitivity. Throughout the product life cycle, the inexperienced customer will inevitably become product specialists. Th product life cycle is typically composed of four...
•How Customer Satisfaction Can Be Measured
High levels of customer satisfaction is one of the most important pillars of a profitable business. As such it is a key topic often discussed at length on sales training courses. In order to achieve true customer satisfaction and greatd ccustomer relations you need to analyse constantly your relationship with your buyers. The aim of any good customer satisfaction analysis is to provide real answers the following key questions.
How satisfied are your clients, overall, with your performance?...
•How to Manage a Complaint
A customer who complains is annoyed. Annoyance is a negative feeling and breeds dislike, or in the worst case even fury, toward your company. Those involved in telephone sales training know that with every claim for a refund it is necessary for the complaint handler to distinguish between the facts and the feelings.
There is nothing very earth shattering about the facts: a product arrived two weeks late, two services were exchanged, an item was defective. These types of mistake can happen...
•How to Reduce Costs
In view of increased international competition, many companies have concentrated on lowering manufacturing costs. According to management consultants, however, the challenge for sales directors lies in lowering marketing and sales costs. It is not unusual for these to be as high as 40 to 50% of the final product cost and as such is a hot topic on sales training courses. As a result, small improvements can have a substantial effect on profitability.
Marketing and sales costs are normally fixed...
•Tips on Improving Client Relations
Acquiring new customers is becoming increasingly expensive, costing some 5-6 times that of retaining an existing customer. For this reason, more and more industrial and service companies are starting sales training programmes aimed at improving their customer relations. Loyal regular customers represent an incalculable amount of capital - even in this poor economic climate. What possibilities are there to improve customer relations? Here is a 5-step programme:
1. Make your key account clients...
•What To Look For When Selecting A Sales Seminar
Many organisations continue to invest in their sales team on the basis of giving everyone a slice of the sales training cake by allowing all of their sales people to attend a seminar. Whilst actual sales skill development can not happen in a seminar situation (they are simply too large and are, therefore, effectively a lecture rather than genuine sales training) they can form a useful tool in the motivation of salespeople. However, if you simply send everyone in the team to the seminar and do...
•How To Manage A Negotiation
Do you enjoy baffling your opposite number with facts, figures and "uncontrolled" emotional outbursts? If you plan on building up a long-term relationship with your business partner you should give up tactics like these. There are four ways of introducing a more accommodating negotiating practice as taught on a good management course as follows:
Separate person from situation
Negotiations can quickly change from discussions about technical points to conflicts between personalities. If you...
•How To Use Indicators As Planning Instruments
With the escalation of planning and control in sales, becoming increasingly important as planning instruments of management are diverse sales indicators. Effective planning is now a core subject on all good management courses. The results of 316 European sales managers surveyed testify to this.
Economic data considered when planning sales include: Industrial indicators 41%
Purchasing power indicators 39%
Retail trade indicators 30%
Number of inhabitants 28%
Wholesale trade indicators...
•Tips For Continuous Management Development
The suggestion that we gain all the understanding we need for our potential careers in our early life is now entirely obsolete. The length of time for which understanding is currently valid is continually waning and learning new things has become a daily challenge - even for managers. Modern management training encourages continuous learning right the way through our working lives.
Learning by talking and listening. Your working day as a manager is filled with communication. You not only talk...
•Identifying Potentially Successful Sales People
The most successful sales people are those who see themselves as entreprenuerial region managers. In an independent and constant method they profitably exhaust the region potential. In order to do this they need to gain widespread knowledge of their sales region clients and also be able to carry out good PR work. Are your sales people equipped and in a position to do this? Do not be frightened to sound out the knowledge of your sales people. Use the following checklist to identifying sales...
•Tips For Developing Strategic Alliances
When sales alliances are successful
Sales alliances are one of the new organisational answers to the increasingly difficult work of sales in the high tech field and other dynamic markets. This is an increasing area of interest for those attending leadership training courses.
Under the umbrella of an alliance, the field sales operations of two or more businesses co-operate as sales partners.
As you may well imagine, this kind of collaboration is not without its frictions. Whether or not it...
•How To Use Quality Management In Sales
In the production industry, everyone is by now familiar with terms such as 'Total Quality Management', 'Quality Circle' or 'Right First Time'. With increasing competition in the service sector, responsible managers are gradually realising that strategies such as Deming's 14 points are also applicable in the service industry.
Some sales managers shy away from implementing the quality programme, maintaining that selling is totally different from production and is therefore not covered in their...
•Tips For Managing Problem Solving Meetings
Problem solving and managing meetings form part of the core management skills covered by any good management course.
The two main attributes of good problem solving meetings are that participants make many viable suggestions and that there is agreement on the best idea. There are, however, certain preconditions for conference success.
Keep the number of participants low (8 to 12 people). Sales executives are often afraid of speaking in front of a large audience.
Do not conduct these...
•How To Implement Incentive Schemes
The implementation of an effectual incentive system for sales staff is a subject repeatedly requested on management training courses.
You are planning an incentive campaign for your sales team in order to win back a lost share of the market. The sales competition should give your salespeople the requisite motivation boost. The aim of the campaign (gaining at least one new client a week) and the participants have already been established.
The criteria on which the sales people are to be...
•Tips For Improving Team Work
Several businesses have a sales team of which others can only dream at their disposal. These teams are steadfast, stimulated and successful, even when it is necessary to work with limited budgets and under time pressure. A major theme throughout all good leadership training courses is team spirit which has many benefits.
Even the famous French army general and military strategist Ardant du Piq knew what worked better than the principle "order and obedience" - "a mutual social control which...
•The Challenges Of Selling Capital Equipment
How to sell high value capital investment products and services to customers is an increasingly popular sales training subject.
Two significant problems for your customers, are presented when making capital investment and high tech purchase decision:
The technologies on offer differ widely. Their development is uncertain and often in fits and starts.
A change between two alternative technologies is, as a rule, associated with high costs.
Which potential suppliers are taken into...
•Conducting A Recruitment Interview
The ability to conduct an effective interview is a skill of all successful managers and is a core subject on most leadership training courses.
Don't make the mistake that many interviewers do, by too much about yourself. The applicant is entitled to do most of the talking - after all, you do want to learn as much as possible about him or her!
Every interview should consist of four phases: (1) contact and introductory phase, (2) interview or information phase, (3) motivation or answer phase,...
•How To Plan For Customer Visits
The success and achievements of sales people, never depends on just a few factors specifically in the case of new customers. This challenge is constantly being brought up on effective sales training. It is this reason, in the context of a recent study, which top sales people were given the opportunity to write down all the activities, which unfolded before and during a sales conversation. Three types of visit were identified:
1. The first visit to a potential new customer
2. The follow-up...
•How To Develop Quality As A Strategy
The "fault-free product" has always been the number one quality aim for many manufacturers. Nowadays with sales training being more focused on quality rather than quantity, the sales and the entire customer service come under the heading "quality". Consequently quality has developed into a company strategy from just being purely a production aim.
What demands does the idea of shifting quality management from production to sales make upon the sales manager? In order to be effectual, build the...
•Causes of Stress For A Sales Team
The countless stress factors field salespeople are faced with in their daily life - they come across traffic, visit difficult customers and are often separated from their families for days at a time. In addition to that there is stress between the sales person and the sales manager, as a result a reduction in performance is almost unavoidable.
In a recent study of field salespeople, scientists have identified possible stress factors and researched their significance for workers. The stress...
•Tips For Retaining Customers
The need for good client relations is very important, especially in the face of the rising costs winning new business incurs, both for industrial concerns and the service industry and therefore forms part of any good sales training. Specialists believe that companies within the service industry could increase their profits by 100%, if they are successful in stopping 5% more clients from going over to the opposition.
Research was carried out in order to establish the cost of one lost client...
•How To Successfully Integrate New Sales Staff
When amalgamating new sales staff into your company, it is important to make certain a high level of inspiration is maintained and staff preservation remains good. When staff attend sales training courses they often talk about how well they feel they were integrated into the company.
What is the point of going to a great deal of effort to recruit new salespeople when you do not then make enough effort to integrate them into the company?
Many new salespeople often get the impression that the...
•How To Avoid Making Rash Promises When You Are Promoted To A Management Position
Many new managers admit, when attending management training, that it is easy to be tempted to make rash promises when you are promoted to a management position. Making such promises early on has proven to be the undoing of many new managers.
A successful area sales manager is promoted to sales chief. Like many of his former colleagues he thought the division of sales areas in his company was fairly "absurd". As a result, on his first day as sales chief he held a meeting with his sales team...
•The Causes of Burn-Out
Increasingly it is common for managers to comment when attending a management-training course that one or more of their team is suffering from burnout. However they are unsure whether this is really the case and if so how they should deal with it.
The search for success can be dangerous. One of your team members who used to be bursting with ambition seems completely exhausted, and is becoming more and more obstinate. Nothing can brighten his mood, he gets no pleasure from success, his...
•The Answers That Successful Salespeople Give At Job Interviews
It is an important skill of any sales manager to be able to identify would be prosperous sales people. This important subject is a hot topic on sales management courses. Following are a series of archetypal questions and the likely answers from both run of the mill and apex sales people.
Job interview: the answers successful salespeople give to test questions
Telephone acquisition "What do you think of telephoning a potential client out of the blue in order to gain a new client?"
Reaction...
•Initiating A Cultural Revolution
If a company wants to continue operating in the market successfully, it has to rethink its management principles, even those of the field sales department. This is a hot topic on many management training courses.
There has been an intensive critical analysis of the changing demands made of managers in the field sales department. One of the issues identified where the causes of the break in the trend of personnel policy lying in four areas:
Technology is changing faster than ever.
Markets...
•How To Deal With Awkward Customers
Every field sales person has at least one particularly difficult customer to do battle with and whom they "would rather be rid of". Many delegates attending sales training courses will often say how great life would be without customers!
Only a few companies, however, can really afford to simply avoid problem cases especially in today's competitive climate. Do not worry it you do not belong to these lucky few, below are some tips for you and your sales people about dealing correctly with the...
•Do Closing Techniques Damage The Client's Trust
Field salespeople are trained in closure techniques. They know how to convince the customer, how to persuade them if necessary and press them into signing.
All previous research in this area has focused on which are the best closure techniques and how they function. A team of sales training experts raised concerns on whether these closure techniques could also have a negative influence.
They questioned 237 industrial buyers on this subject. Six different closure techniques were researched:...
•Using Benchmarks To Optimise Sales
Good sales management courses cover established means of improving existing structures and business such as Performance Comparison.
Are your salespeople achieving enough? Is the company geared towards optimising business? Are you using the right sales and presentation techniques? Are your competitors way ahead of you?
Benchmarks will help you answer these questions. They enable you to compare your performance with that of other companies.
In principle, a benchmark analysis can have two...
•Using Data To Manage Your Sales
Every sales manager needs figures. Most successful managers of field sales organisations who attend a management course are directed more or less by hard prescribed numbers. The less successful organisations either work with the wrong figures or alternatively with too many figures.
In view of the confusing amount of data with which most managers work, it is no wonder that so many problems arise in so many places or work.
You can implement figures efficiently in your work place with the...
•How To Improve Service Using Total Quality Management
Total Quality Management (TQM) has made its mark in the manufacturing procedures of many companies and has had a lasting effect: products have never been better quality than they are today. This fact is helped by effective management and is covered on good leadership training courses.
However, suppliers continue to leave the quality of services to chance or to the level of commitment and care of the individual salespeople.
The following example of a garage illustrates how you can introduce...
•Tips For Giving Great Presentations
Formal presentation skills training should, we suggest, be included as part of every managers personal development plan. Managers at all levels, not just executives, are increasingly likely to have to speak in public. Whilst most managers can pull off a passable performance a little bit of appropriate training can develop them into competent and engaging presenters. The key tips and techniques in this article will also help make you a better presenter.
It has been said that the three golden...
•Tips For Understanding Media Information For Advertising
In order for your company's products and services to be best placed when advertising on a radio station, there are certain things you need to look out for. Spending the advertising budget wisely is a hot topic for managers attending management courses. Radio advertising is still an effective way of promoting, however being aware of how to interpret the numbers when examining a radio station's media data is a must. High values for the following categories: previous day's audience, regular...
•The Mistakes of Sales Managers
Often, a large percentage of company profits is eaten up by the salaries of salespeople. Alternatives to personal selling are often called for due to variable gross margins despite increased turnover.
More often than not, it is the management who are at fault and not the salespeople. The reason for this is simple; The increase in popularity in people wanting to attend a management course, is a direct result of Management styles and methods not in keeping with the times.
The six most common...
•Customer Run Meetings As A Training Tool
A key component of a balanced approach to sales training for the sales team is the customer run meeting. Sales Trainers recomend that the sales managers run such meetings regularly. The meeting allows your sales people to hear directly from your clients and find out what they really like - and what they do not like. If you are going to organise a customer run meeting there are a number of important points for you to follow in order to make them successful. These points are described below.
1....
•How To Understand Your Customer's Natural Style
New sales people often ask their sales training tutor, "Why do I need to learn more than one sales approach?" or "Why does my approach work well with one client, but leaves the next disinterested in my product?" The answer given to such questions by the tutor is: "It's to do with your customer's personality!" Selling, they will be told, is the art of persuasion; it involves the sales person persuading their potential customer that what they are offering meets the customer's needs best. Every...
•A Case Study On Measuring Customer Satisfaction
The important thing in customer satisfaction, sales training experts tell us, is not how good a company thinks it is, but how good the company's customers think it is. Customer satisfaction is not just about having good individual products and services but is about everything the customer associates with the company. Where the customers judgment differs from the company's own assessment there is obviously room for improvement.
But, before any improvements are made the company must understand...
•Getting Customer Care Right
Central to all sales training courses is how the sales person can give good customer service. But if you are not in sales, the principles taught still apply to you. Your company will have "values and mission" statments and these will certainly contain statements relating to your company's approach to customer care. Thus, every line manager, irrespective of the team they manage is reponsibile for ensuring these key customer care principles are understood, and acted on, by all of their team....
•Why Customers Object
Sales people, according to sales training experts, should try to work by appointment, so the prospect has set aside time in their diary for the salesperson's visit. This will allow the sales process to be followed. That is, the call should be opened well, probing questions asked by the sales person. Then the benefits of the product or service presented, using excellent visual aids, which are in perfect condition. Finally the sales person should ask for the order... Easy!
However, millions of...
•Recruiting Good Sales People
Leadership training courses often emphasize that success in the market is totally dependent upon the quality of the sales staff. According to popular belief, successful salespeople are aggressive, hard-nosed, extrovert, knowledgeable about their subject and client-orientated; they have a personal aura and a sense of humour.
Being aware of the prerequisites for success is, however, of little use to the sales manager when he is looking for first-class salespeople or trying to build his current...
•The Team Work Approach To Sales Success
Traditionally sales managers have not been primarily concerned with actively pursuing teamwork in their sales team, and as such team working is given limited coverage on management training courses designed for sales managers. Instead, sales managers have focused on learning how to develop the skills of individual sales people. However, with the change in product complexity and the rise in customer expectations, expecting a single person to be capable of presenting solutions to all the...
•Situations When The Manager Should Manage The Customer's Complaint
If your field sales and office sales staff have received adequate sales training they will deal confidently and competently with most customer complaints. This is important, because well handled complaints lead to better business relationships. With such staff the Sales Manager will only rarely have to step in and manage the complaint themselves. The occasions when this is neccessary are described below.
There will, for all companies, be a time when a given complaint is above a certain...
•What Contributes to Sales Success?
? One of the primary concerns of Sales Management is the development of sales talent through targeted delivery of sales training. By doing this the Sales Manager seeks to develop a talented team who can consistently deliver the sales results required. But in sales - as this article explains - talent, however well developed, is no substitute for hard work.
A number of investigations into the reasons for success or failure for people in selling have been conducted. As a rule, these...
•Understanding The Different Personalities
Managers need to influence people so the techniques and principles of persuading and influencing different types of people are core to most management training courses. If these persuasion techniques (sometimes known as "selling") are used consistently by the manager then more of their negotiations will succeed. Training courses teach a number of approaches because whilst one approach will work with one colleague or team member, it could leave another disinterested. Why? The answer is to do...
•How Sales People Can Overcome Objections
Client objections are, as we are taught in sales training courses, part and parcel of a career in sales. Even knowledgable salespeople will get objections from customers. There are three very common reasons for customer objections. These are: 1) the prospect did not understand the benefits of the salesperson's proposal, or 2) they do want to purchase the product but think that they can negotiate a better deal if they pretend that it's not quite right, or 3) the sales proposal itself was not...
•Tips For Successful Delegation
A key subject that should be present on all management training course programmes is delegation. The ability to delegate properly is a characteristic of quality leaders. The principles and practice of effective delegation say that too much as well as too little delegation is bad and indicates managerial weakness! The two most common problems are interferring and doing it all yourself. These issues are particularly common in managers who were previously particularly successful as a member of...
•Removing Fear: The Managers Role
Whilst good management training can take the fear out of managing for the manager, fear is a major cause of problems in the business world and so managers must be able to recognise and manage fear in their own team. All internal company problems, such as unclear goals, endless discussions, broken promises, pressure and resignation, resistance and cowardice, inter-departmental fighting, flimsy decisions and problems of acceptance are, at the end of the day, the result of known or unknown fears...
•Tips For Retaining Good Salespeople
High turnover rates are one of the biggest problems facing the field sales department. There is a worrying upward trend of sales staff changing jobs more frequently. If good salespeople leave the company, you will have to deal with financial losses as a result of breaks in turnover, coupled with the cost of training a replacement salesperson. Staff retention is therefore often a hot topic for people attending a management course.
The cost of recruiting, placing and training the average...
•How To Retain Customers
Customer retention is an important function of the sales role as taught on good sales training courses.
Retain customers and deepen your relationship with them with a firm customer bonding policy. Do not make the mistake of letting one area go. Prepare yourself for two different dangers.
Just one of the two dangers is enough to lose a customer. A more enticing offer from a competitor, promising the customer more than your own offer, will tempt them even if they are not unhappy with your...
•How to Overcome Objections ' A Three Step Process
Even the most experienced sales people have to face client objections as part and parcel of their sales job. Whilst I wouldn't be so bold as to say that you can overcome every objection, the process that follows, which forms the foundation of consultative sales techniques as taught on our sales training programmes, will give you a much greater chance of handling such objections well. And if you handle client objections well you will be able to close more mutually beneficial business for both...
•Customer Care Tips
Sales professionals naturally wish to look after their customers well, and part of this is to deal with customer requests in a prompt and efficient manner. Yet such basic sales training principles are often neglected by managers managing non-sales staff. All staff, whether customer facing or not, need to be aware that delays in serving a customer, whether that service is provided on the telephone or via an email response, leads to dissatisfied customers who are likely at the first opportunity...
•How To Bring Sales Staff Turnover Down
A high staff turnover rate is one of the main problems facing many sales organisations. The high personnel costs incurred by constantly needing to provide sales training to new staff and high turnover shortfalls as a result of abandoned sales areas are the results of this phenomenon.
The key to lowering your staff turnover rate is early success!
The reason most sales people give in their notice is because they have not achieved the success they had hoped to, they have not accomplished their...
•What To Do When Redundancy Threatens Your Team
Concerns over how to deal effectively with redundancies has been a key theme at recent managent training sessions. The current unsettled economic situation requires managers to be ready to cope with the challenge of managing redundancies in their organisations. Dismissals damage morale in the whole company, so any redundancies leave their mark on the employees who remain in the company and this must be managed. If it is not managed there are likely to be slumps in productivity. This is the...
•Myths Of Selling
Many cheap training suppliers still refer to out of date sales strategies and selling principles in their sales training workshops and associated training materials. Whilst these strategies strategies and principles may have been successful in the past, they are no longer relevant for the successful conclusion of business today. If you have been on such a workshop then you need to eliminate the following five myths from your beliefs.
Myth 1. Canvassing new clients takes priority over caring...
•Managing The First Three Months In A Sales Mangers Role
Some managers are lucky, they are prepared by their organisations for their new role with appropriate management training. Others are simply promoted into their new position without much additional support. Even with support, the first few months in any new management position can be daunting. For those entering a career as a Sales Manager what they do in the first few months in their new job is also critical to their future success. This is because how you manage during these early days will...
•How to Accurately Assess the Ability of Sales People
Without regular individual assessment, changes in performance that are early indicators of a need to provide corrective sales training will be missed. It is, therefore, inconceivable that any sales manager would attempt to manage their sales department without such assessment as to do so would lead to declining results.
In practice, there are various different methods that can be used, each with different advantages and disadvantages. If you use an assessment system based on indicators such...
•Improving Sales Results by Reorganising the Sales Support Office
Too often the sales support office is manned by staff who are poorly paid and, because they have never received sales training, simply process the orders in a hapazard manner. This old-style sales service department is inefficient and with the current pressures on organisations to maximise sales many companies are looking to restructure the sales support office. Central to this is the transfer of active sales tasks to the sales office staff and in this case study, based on a Sales Manager's...
•Leadership Styles and Success
The elements that contribute to organisational and team success are often reviewed in management training courses . If you examine companies who have experienced great success in recent years you will notice that they have in common a determination to be different from the rest. This determination is communicated by the company leadership and so, as a leader you should routinely ask your self three questions regarding your and your team's attitude to creating value - are we behaving like...
•How To Negotiate With Japanese Customers
Japanese managers prepare for negotiations with their Western counterparts by having intense discussion exercises. But their negotiating style often causes problems for European managers. This is therefore an accepted topic on sales training courses.
This style, says the management consultant and Japan expert Joy Golden, is a result of the extreme cultural and national homogeneity of the Japanese ('Negotiating with the Japanese', in European Business Review, Vol. 91).
Japanese people always...
•Effective Information Management
On a recent sales management training proramme one of the attendees, who had recently been recruited, described how he had asked to see all the reports used in his new organisation. On his desk the next morning he found 23 reports. He understood none of them, nor, according to him, did any of the report writers understood them either! This was bad; all managers need information to manage effectively. Indeed information has become one of the most important resources organisations have. The...
•The Roles Of The Sales Manager At Conferences
Customer conferences offer excellent opportunities for intensifying your contact with customers. As covered on any good sales management course, you can use them to find out how your customers are using your products and services and any problems that have arisen. You can also use customer conferences, which are normally held once or twice a year, to reach occasional customers and integrate them more closely to your company.
Include your sales team
Include your sales department in the...
•What Motivates And Distinguishes Successful Salespeople
Managers attending management training courses often ask about the key motivators of successful salespeople. If they can better understand those key motives, they will be more effective at managing these successful people.
Personal success clearly comes before team performance
Top salespeople are rare. What really distinguishes them from others? Studies carried out by the Gallup Management Consulting Group over a period of 22 years have revealed the following key abilities and talents:...
•Developing Confident Sales People
When making contact with a prospective customer for the first time, it becomes an expedition into the unknown: no salesperson knows what the reaction will be and whether the meeting will be fruitful or not. Fear is the natural response to this uncertainty. Deliver sales training sessions to help overcome these emotions to develop their self-confidence.
To become a successful sales person the first step is to identify this anxiety, admit that it exists and discover how to manage it. Therefore...
•Tips For Managing Sales People
Sales training experts agree when the more experienced mangers on their courses state that you must understanding sales people before you can manage them. Sales people can be difficult to manage. Often more outgoing, active, sometimes even stubborn, these characteristics makes them particularly challenging for less experienced sales managers.
In order to make your management of the sales department easier, renowned sales trainers have tried to develop a typology of personality traits that are...
•How To Lead People
Important topics covered on leadership training programmes are self-discipline, support, trust and empowerment; these are considered the pillars of a modern management culture.
All the pleasant sounding names for reorganisation measures such as "Lean Management", of "Business Re-engineering" have one thing in common: they are frequently linked with personnel policy decisions. Staff are cut back, hierarchies are flattened, responsibilities are redefined, abilities are evaluated.
For some...
•How Managers Use Training to Contribute to Success
Every day brings yet more news of political, social and international business changes that affect all of our lives. Coping with change is possibly the major challenge facing those in a sales management position. Sales training is recognised as the best weapon in your personal management armoury to help you take advantage of the opportunities that such changes brings.
There is an old Chinese curse that says "May you live in exciting times". Exciting, changing time are also times of...
•Fear Inhibits Salespeople's Powers Of Persuasion
Sales management facing customers with more self confidence
Marie Curie, the famous physicist, once said: "There is nothing in this world we need fear, if we only understand it!" Fear is the greatest obstacle to success in sales. Many sales people who participate in sales training courses confess to fear. It prevents your salespeople from making visits out of the blue, makes it difficult to visit potential clients and robs salespeople of their self-assurance during negotiations.
There are...
•Tips to Identify Willingness to Achieve when Interviewing
Whilst delivering sales training can improve a persons selling skills, when selecting applicants for a sales position a willingness to achieve is an important factor to consider. The primary question in any test of an applicant is: is this a person who possesses commitment and stamina? In the increasingly challenging sales role these two important factors are critical to future success.
In an interview, the sales manager must try to form a picture of the applicant through specific questions...
•Management Trends
Almost all markets have great changes currently taking place in sales. As covered in most sales training courses, traditional sales are now losing importance as well as having new work emphases, the new media is opening here to unknown routes to sales, and the sales operation is no longer exempt from new techniques of management like lean and total quality management.
Management streamlining will lead to more decentralisation and individual responsibility.
In the course of lean management,...
•Increasing Sales Efficiency
Are you experiencing a cost explosion in your field sales department? Many managers who arrange sales training complain of the rising cost of their sales force. The following five statements can help you get selling costs under control.
The costs incurred in personal sales are escalating: experts estimate that costs in personal sales have risen by 200% over the last twenty years.
If we look at the real sales active working time of a salesperson, the cost of a client visit in certain branches...
•How To Take Control Of Aggressive Customers
No body gets pleasure from being bellowed at or receiving accusations or allegations. But when a client complains in a rude manner, it should not be taken personally. Delegates who attend sales training courses often grumble about hostile customers and solicit advice on ways to deal with them effectively.
What they really want is your understanding of their position and to motivate you to do something about their problems, even if they do this in a very tactless way.
If you get into a...
•Why Do Sales Managers And Sales People Often Fall Out?
? In 30% of business relationships between salespeople and sales managers the two parties fall out every year and is a reason why mangers want management training. This has encouraged the Business Psychology Institute to carry out a study to examine points of friction and concealed potential opposition areas between sales people and sales managers.
The survey carried out intensive interviews with representatives and sales managers concerning their experiences of working together. The...
•Tips For Selling Complex Solutions
Suppliers of technology are often more concerned with latest developments in technology than they are with their own customers. The effects of a lack of customer orientation is well known by representatives attending sales training programmes: new systems are very often be missed in the market place due to too many, and or the wrong details being presented during customer meetings. Technology suppliers can often have very capable, but difficult to sell systems. This short example of a highly...
•How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
Managers attending sales management training courses often spend a lot of time reviewing how to get their sales people to identify the client's needs and then meet these. For most sales manager's meeting client needs is their number one priority, hence the importance of this toic to them. Ultimately their organisation will only remain profitable if each customer is 100% satisfied with the products and services provided.
Despite this, how many companies really know how satisfied their clients...
•How To Manage A Sales Team
Many companies are reducing the size of their management team and therefore many sales managers who attend management training courses are now running teams with more staff than ever before. The sales manager's key priority is to achieve sales targets. This what he is judged by and it is what he needs to do. The issue nowadays is that he has a larger team that needs support in order to succeed. Therefore the sales manager's role is much more of a facilitator and team leader. However it is too...
•Asking the Right Questions
Asking the right questions is a vital factor to closing sales and forms a key part to a good sales training course.
Salespeople usually focus on securing an order; so closing is their main concern. However, emphasis on the end of the sales process often leads to the preceding steps being neglected or, in some cases, completely overlooked. The fact remains that it is questions which ultimately unlock the sale - so it is vital that they are designed carefully and used in the right sequence....
•How To Profile Your Customers
What type of client are you expecting? Typology helps you to adapt yourself to your client and this ingenuity can be developed with sales training.
Every salesperson coming into contact with clients will have experienced at one point or another that they get on with some clients and not others.
Professional salespeople must, however, be adept to modify to separate personalities and other situations.
The following present three elementary types of client, which salespeople come into regular...
•How to Run An Effective Exhibition Stand
Anticipation runs high at exhibitions and trade fairs. The demonstrator wants to utilize the opportunities on offer at the fair to exploit his company's services and products, to convey client-specific information and to stress his company's status as learned during his sales training.
An knowledgeable visitor, however, wants to obtain detailed information. As he is pressed for time and is under pressure to turn a profit, this information must be transmitted as efficiently as possible.
For...
•Developing A Distributor Sales Strategy
The beginning of this latest period of economic difficulty has brought sales training into the forefront and has marked the start of many business organizations battle for survival: with opponents inundating all their existing markets with discounted prices. This is how one leading producer has responded. They have succeeded in binding their distribution trading partners more closely to the company and in reinforcing their place in the market once more, with a distributor training program...
•Selecting Sales People
Similar errors are constantly made when assessing sales people. The main issue is to make sure that you do not let your feelings for, or against, any of the sales people to effect your conclusions. This is a challenge which managers who attend management training courses often would like to improve. Try to avoid falling into any of the following categories when choosing the suitable candidate.
The Halo Effect:
People who mould their opinion of somebody else on just one (often outstanding)...
•Training Your Salespeople To View Clients Positively
Successful sales people quite often view their customers as the enemy, especially when they first visit. By introducing an easy psychological technique into your sales training this can be altered. For example:
An older sales professional, and a new salesperson are going to visit a potential new client. Up until now the old one has always conducted the sales negotiations and the new one only accompanied him. Now the tables are turned, however, since the older asks the other to visit this...
•How to Motivate Sales People
Every member of a sales team is different and has varied requirements. The different way that they set to work and deal with everyday hurdles can be very varied. Extensive research has identified the most common personality types that are found in a team of sales people. Managers can enhance their motivational skills by allocating each member of the team depending on their personality type. All good management courses therefore cover motivation of the team. Through successful classification...
•Tips To Improve Sales
The main problem facing most companies today selling is the sharp increase in the cost of making face to face customer visits. Despite new selling methods such as telephone marketing, direct contact with customers from salespeople still remains the most effective way to success.
Managers often attempt to offset this increase in cost by motivating their salespeople to greater personal effort.
After interviewing more than 2,000 salespeople from over 200 companies, market researchers Barton...
•10 Ways to Motivate Sales People When Sales Are Down
Sales management requires a special function in times of challenging market conditions and when is business is falling. Many people attending courses in management training admit to the fact that when sales are falling, salespeople have a tendency to slow down and the level of sales drops away accordingly. Therefore, becoming a vicious cycle of events.
So that they break away from vicious cycle and provide a motivation for your salespeople try the following managerial ground rules:
1. Inform...
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