Prospects want to be educated. They want to make the best decision either because it's their own business or because they don't want to lose their job.

It is the duty of a sales team to educate prospects at all stages of the buying journey - from initial delivery of educationally-focussed collateral to engaging in conversation or debate late on in the process.

Educating prospects is crucial and should be something that the team as a whole understands the importance of.

To increase the number of useful touchpoints with prospects, educationally-focussed collateral documents are a must.

These are not brochures or advertisements, but useful documents that help customers to their goals in relation to the services that you offer.

If you regularly help your customers to their goals, they will turn to you to help them do it. The right kind of collateral is crucial in helping you to become a useful ally of your prospects.

Overboarding is a strategy that I developed myself that helps to build strong relationships using the power of gifting.

When working closely with prospects to create a solution for their need, just at the right point, overboarding can be the difference between success and failure.

What is overboarding?
Simply giving something of value at the right time in a sales relationship. This could be a book on the prospect's hobby, or a research document you create based on the exact issue that they are looking to fix.

Overboarding done by each member of a team on every suitable prospect creates rapid sales growth.

When was the last time a member of your sales team emailed a prospect asking for their help?

When was the last time a member of your sales team asked a prospect for a comment on an industry matter?

emails do not have to be sales-focussed.

Simple, very short (3 sentences max) emails that engage the prospect in a non-sales fashion can build great relationships.

Your team must be doing this.

People often shine in a particular area of their sales role. It is of great importance to the business that this knowledge is not isolated in one brain. By turning people into a ‘champion’ for particular skill sets, the business uses its resources wisely.

But, being a champion is not enough. Regular demonstrations and talks by team members to the rest of the team will spark conversations and ideas in others that will help with turning more prospects into customers.

Team members should be allowed to choose topics that they feel comfortable with, and that others can learn from.

Training should never be about sales skills, but about the technical aspects of a role such as improving how to use a product or service. Do not confuse training with sales coaching. They are a very different thing altogether. Training is something that can be done in groups or individually to suit each business.

After firstly creating a question model for the sales team to operate from, frequent training is required to consistently instil the importance of questioning prospects.

Monthly question recitals, discussions and practice should be set during office hours - free pizza at lunch time usually does the trick.

See more information in the 'Sales Question Model' matrix:

http://app.darwinmatrix.com/sales-questions

In most cases, coaching should be done one-on-one, especially with staff that have been at the company for more than a few weeks.

Usually, people will have one key deficit, that if they spent time improving, would have great effects on other areas too. For example, if someone had an issue with their questioning techniques, once they had used them to great effect in a few calls, confidence would be improved, which would then affect their overall performance.

One-on-one coaching is crucial so people can learn at their own pace.

The word 'hope' is often used by salespeople when a deal is yet to 'come in'.

Salespeople, 'hope' that it comes off. But great salespeople follow up a proposal or meeting with extra material, useful items and so on.

As a sales manager, you should ban the word hope completely and teach salespeople to never 'hope' a deal comes in again.

Red, Amber, Green.

Simple. Sales teams all around the world respond to simple indicators.

A team member knowing that they are Amber for meetings this month and that their colleague is Green is cause for them to work harder to keep up.

This can be done digitally as part of a gamification strategy.

Even better than a digital display is the use of physical traffic lights that sit on each salesperson's desk.*

*This is something that I have successfully implemented using Raspberry Pi computers and programming.

If a prospect has two companies vying for their business and has seen the face of one salesperson, but not the other, they are 2:1 more likely to choose to work with the salesperson that they have seen. This is something called preferential attachment.

It is important that each member of a sales team's face are seen by as many prospects as possible on a continual basis.

From email signatures, to 'face cards' (a desktop standing version of a compliment slip), to business cards and shared blog posts, faces are a great way to improve sales.

Helping a sales team to understand that prospects need to KNOW, LIKE and then TRUST both them and your business is crucial.

By understanding this, salespeople tend to take less shortcuts, knowing that this will end up in less long term success.

Understanding the world of Bob Burg and his book, 'The Go-Giver' is crucial for each team member.

Sales Gamification is largely nothing more than digitised 'target and KPI boards'.

However, most sales teams do not have even the most basic way of showing how they compare against others in the team. An individual revenue target on a whiteboard doesn't cut it.

A digital board - something simple like Google Sheets - that compares each team member's KPIs and revenues gives several causes for conversation between team members every day.

And those conversations are a great way to self-manage and motivate the whole sales team.

Much like a boxer, if a salesperson is not 'on their toes', bouncing around the ring, they are going to suffer.

An extremely important part of a sales manager's role is to ensure that each one of their salespeople is on their toes, ready for the next meeting, product change, complaint, lost client, contact moving job and any other curve ball that may come their way.

Flat-footed salespeople often get knocked out by the smallest of punches.

A combination of information in the cells of this matrix and good old fashioned man management will ensure that even the most difficult of employees is kept on their toes.



Keeping salespeople on their toes is YOUR responsibility - stretch their minds and thoughts in frequent bursts.

Key to any sales environment is persistence - and crucially, persistence from those who are not naturally inclined to be persistent.



Increasing the persistence levels of a sales maverick can reap huge rewards. Moving them from their typical one amazing day per week to just two can have dramatic effects.



Key to persistence in the main is frequent, short bursts of fun training. One on one, or just two or three at a time for 30 minute refreshers can do wonders on a grey Monday morning.

Short, frequent bursts of inspiration/training/dialogue to stimulate and stretch salespeople's brains can increase persistence levels dramatically - and save you lots of hair pulling time on the sales floor, watching a salesperson shuffling paper.

Don't do tenders...


...unless you do them correctly.

Tenders are a waste of time for 9/10 salespeople. If you don't commit 110% then it will almost certainly end in failure.

Ensuring that executive summaries and pricing pages are better than the competition is paramount, to show that you understand them fully and they can afford your services.

Your tender has to be smarter, neater, understand the prospect more and has to be packaged (yes, packaged) better than the competition when being sent in person or by post.*

*If you're not sending a tender in person or by recorded delivery, don't bother to do it at all.

Referrals

Asking for the referral is a crucial tactic that good salespeople use often.

Encouraging a team to ask for referrals on a consistent basis helps to build a strong skeleton of a client base. However, you can only ask for referrals on a consistent basis if your service is good and consistent itself.

Asking for referrals just after a salesperson has delivered a great job is a key time, especially with repeat customers.

A very useful tactic is to help salespeople create referrals themselves for clients - even if it just means something simple like mentioning a company that they may benefit from contacting. This works wonders and people have a tendency to want to repay the favour.

If, at all, you can have a customer contact the referral in something like an email with the salesperson included, this can lead to much easier conversations with new prospects.

Sales contests are very effective, drive short-term behaviours and build team culture.

By creating simple to explain team contests (never contests for individuals) that are win-win for the business, activity and morale can dramatically increase in a sales room.

What may seem like a huge sales bonus to swallow for a business for sales hitting extra targets can be tempered by ensuring that broken down payments are made during further months where targets are also hit.

Competitions are the #1 way to make a sales team overachieve in the short-term.

With contests, there are no such things as 'slow months'.

Revenue targets alone are not sufficient in producing consistent sales each month. Revenues can be prone to wild swings because of a lack of detailed monitoring of sales activity.

A series of smaller, achievable KPIs will ensure that a team as a whole is making progress each month, giving control to the business in terms of predicting revenues.

By monitoring closely KPIs that include items such as touchpoints, phone calls, meetings, collateral, a solid foundation for consistent success is made.

The sales commission model is the most powerful tool to control the growth of a business.

If we get the sales commission model correct, then almost everything else that the business does, from salaries, purchasing stock, stock management, staffing levels, purchases made and so on, is much improved by it.

Danger (for the salesperson) and protection (for the business) is largely derived from one thing - consequences if targets are not met. Far too many sales teams under-perform because of a lack of consequences should they fail.

If a salesperson in your employ has several of these skills then there is a very high chance of them being successful in the role.

Too few sales managers ever recruit knowing which characteristics that they are looking for. If you have a working 'model' of employees that are easy to manage and successful salespeople, why wouldn't you continue to hire such people?

The creation of a characteristic matrix using the characteristics listed on the cell next to this, comparing each staff member is crucial to building a platform for both management, goal setting and training of a sales team.

This grid serves several uses as time goes on and will help with future recruitment selections.

Perhaps the major characteristic for any person to be a success in sales is their 'coachability'.

If someone, during the recruitment process, shows strong signs that they will not change how they need to/should sell, then these people must be avoided at all costs.

If you have current salespeople that will not adapt to new coaching methods, then you should spend less time with these and more time with those who will.

Questions should be focused on things that will benefit the salesperson and the prospect. The vast majority of salespeople however, only ask questions that help themselves. Big Mistake.

You may have a team of 5 salespeople asking 300 questions per day combined. If those questions are 'ME' questions, then you are wasting a lot of hot air, call time, expenses and salary.

Buying Facilitation is a model created by sales genius and outcast, Sharon Drew Morgen.

When used in conjunction with SPIN Selling methods, it produces a potent confidence among a sales team, breaking down much of the insecurity that can dog salespeople from time to time.

Having the right questions brings great confidence - as well as much reduced sales journeys - and buying facilitation is the paramount sales methodology to adopt to bring sales success.

The more questions asked by salespeople per call or meeting, the greater chance of success. This has been proven over 35,000 sales calls during initial SPIN Selling research.

Open questions, closed questions, questions about family, questions about budget - the more questions your team ask, the more business your team will win.

SPIN Selling was created from the research of Neil Rackham and his company, Huthwaite.

A study of over 35,000 sales calls created principles, structure and rituals that are used by at least half of Fortune 500 companies to this day.

SPIN Selling is an excellent framework to build sales success from. Combined with Buying Facilitation, it is extremely potent.