Improving Sales Performance

Are you:

• Not meeting sales targets?
• Lacking sufficient sales to build your business?

Common Symptoms

You may be noticing one or more of these symptoms:

• Sales, marketing and fulfilment teams that seem unable to work together
• Initiatives designed to boost sales regularly underachieve
• Price rises do not stick
• Customers churn too frequently or you don't know at what rate they churn
• Days sales outstanding are higher than budgeted
• Customer acquisition costs are too high or you do not know what the costs are
• Prospect conversion rates are too low, or you do not know what level they are.

Root Causes

These common symptoms of underperforming sales organisations usually have one or more of seven root causes.

1. Sales leaders do not have the emotional intelligence to lead their teams effectively.

Sales success and IQ alone do not make for a successful sales leader. Sales leaders' behaviours and their ability to respond to the emotions of their followers have a great impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of a sales team. Putting the right people in the right job is not mater of seniority or rewarding sales success.

Measuring people's emotional intelligence has proven to be a much more successful filter of successful sales leaders than previous sales success and IQ.

2. Poorly defined goal, strategy and tactics.

Without a clear, time based, memorable goal expressed in numeric terms, sales people will interpret the organisation's goal or invent their own goals. Either way, a sales team with differing goals is the result.

Without agreed strategy and tactics, different sales people will create their own strategies and tactics, requiring different types and levels of support from marketing, sales support and fulfilment.

3. Insufficient skills to develop and execute a sales strategy and tactics.

It takes sales development - skill and knowledge of target segment's business and buying processes - to successfully create a sales strategy and tactics. Often, sales tactics are created in the absence of information about a segment or a specific customer's buying process. Sales tactics created this way usually under perform.

Whilst the strategy and tactics may be clear, if sales people do not have the competence required to execute the strategy and tactics, the results will be that of gifted amateurs rather than sales professionals.

4. Poorly defined targets and performance indicators.

Performance indicators are often substituted with what really are targets. For example, quarterly sales budget numbers. Whilst targets ate important, the levers to pull when they are at an unacceptable level are usually not clear and they lag any action taken by up to three months.

Robust lead and lag performance indicators are required to effectively manage a sales force and a sales pipeline.

5. Toleration of poor performance.

Performance management which is not insistent, persistent and consistent results in whatever performance leaders tolerate. High levels of tolerance give rise to indifferent performance levels across the sales force.

A recruitment, induction, coaching, and appraisal system combined with a reward and recognition system built on data and observations is necessary to consistently and persistently manage sales people's performance. A well understood counselling process is a necessary adjunct to build an insistent performance management system.

6. Roles and workload splits between sales, marketing and fulfilment which are unclear.

It is not just that job descriptions are sometimes not clear, it is that marketing is confused about its role with regard to sales and sales is confused with its role with regard to marketing.

It is not marketing's role to simply build brand awareness unless that is the tactic required at the stage of the product/brand life cycle to start the process of getting qualified prospects. Marketing's role may well be more practical in getting qualified names to sales.

Sales and marketing must together determine what role each has to play in the tactics to be used with the customer segment being pursued with the specific product and brand mix being offered. Fulfilment must be consulted to understand the implications for cost and lead times.

7. Poorly defined and commonly understood sales processes.

If strategy and tactics are understood, poorly defined sales processes can still derail the best efforts of a sales leadership team.

Determining who is responsible, who is accountable, who needs to be consulted and who needs to be informed about a sales process helps keep control and minimise risks of providing poor service in a sales process.

For example, selling a gas fire place needs to have a qualified installer consulted and a gas supply company informed. The sales person and the installer are jointly responsible for the safe installation of the fireplace and the sales manager is accountable.

For advice on how you can overcome these root causes and realise your sales potential, please contact us.

Want to increase your retail sales conversion rate? Download our Retail Sales Training Toolbox - Helping Customers Buy.

Want to measure your sales pipeline? Download our Sales Pipeline Calculator tool.