How to Help Your Sales Team Hit Their Goals

Not hitting your sales goals? Are you pulling your hair out trying to figure out what your team is doing wrong? Then stop looking at the macro, and break the sales process down into its component parts. In order to improve your company’s sales performance, try revisiting the basics.

While it might seem like a paradox, now, more than ever, is the time to focus your sales resources to fewer, more-qualified prospects. The first step is to analyze whom your salespeople are targeting, and refocus them as necessary. Time is the most precious asset of a salesperson and time wasted on prospects that aren’t a close fit to your ideal customer is money down the drain. Every company should have a profile of its best customer–those who need what you sell, and can afford it. Try to identify at least five characteristics of the best customer. For example, if you’re selling IT outsourcing, your ideal customers might be businesses located in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, with between 5 and 20 employees, have no chief technology officer, have been in business for at least 3 years, and are growing.

To ensure that your salespeople are targeting these prospects, define filters or create fields in your CRM system for each criterion you feel defines an ideal customer. For each opportunity, have your salespeople enter either yes or no. By periodically analyzing the data in aggregate, and by sales rep, you can quickly determine which salespeople are calling the types of prospects you want them to and which ones aren’t. Not only does this discipline help you keep your salespeople focused, it also forces them to think hard each time they consider engaging with a particular prospect, which ensures a healthier pipeline. Then, take it a step further by performing periodic, random audits of the data; prospects that look perfect may be too good to be true.

Next, ensure that your sales process is actually being followed. Your company should have a formal sales process or system that your sales team follows as they’re working deals. The structure and common framework of this process or system ensures that salespeople don’t inadvertently sabotage themselves by skipping necessary and critical steps involved in advancing opportunities towards closure. It also provides you and your managers a means of diagnosing, and then addressing, performance problems. Of course, simply having a sales process (like simply having a CRM system) won’t be of any use to you if you don’t insist that it be followed. The best way to get salespeople to adhere to the process you’ve adopted is to convince them of the benefit and value to themselves of doing so. Then, have one-on-one pipeline review meetings (weekly or ad hoc) during which you have the salesperson tell you what stages of the sales process they’ve successfully gone through, where they are now, and what their plan is for getting to the next stage.

Now that you’ve gotten your team to follow the sales process, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start assessing the nitty-gritty elements of selling—the activities your salespeople are doing day in and day out. Then, observe what’s working well and what needs improvement in the following areas, and coach or train as necessary. In general, for each activity, you can observe three areas: to what extent your salespeople are doing the activity, their technique, and how well that technique is working (proficiency). Let’s dive into each phase of the sales cycle and identify what some of those improvements might be.

Prospecting

Prospecting refers to all those activities your salespeople do in order to identify and connect with those who are candidates to buy your product or service. It is not limited to cold calling, but includes e-mailing, letterwriting, networking, speaking (at business and trade associations, chambers of commerce, etc.), blogging, writing newsletters, sending press clippings, referral-gathering, and so on. The first place to look for areas of improvement in prospecting is whether or not it is being done. Prospecting is not fun, and it is the rare salesperson who is disciplined enough to consistently do the exhausting work of finding and connecting with prospects. If a salesperson is doing the things he needs to and isn’t building the same pipeline as other reps, you’ll need to dedicate time (your own or his manager’s) to closely observing his prospecting activities. Is he making enough calls? What is he saying? How is he saying it? Listen for missteps that are repeated; you’re almost sure to observe a couple.

Discovery and Qualifying

These are the up-front activities your salespeople engage in to determine the likelihood that a realistic opportunity to make a sale exists. More often than not, when a lost deal is analyzed, the reason it was lost can be traced back to inadequacy during this phase—the deal never should have been pursued in the first place. If this is occurring frequently in your business, it’s likely your team needs some training in this area. The focus should be on asking the right questions: ones that determine and uncover needs, that probe deeply to determine the degree of need, and whether the prospect is committed to meeting that need and meeting it now It is also the time for listening critically to the answers to those questions (for more on this process, read “For Successful Selling, Uncover Your Prospect’s Pain”).