Jul/090
Sales Professional Time Allocation
Time is money!
All sales professionals have the same amount of time to sell (24hrs/7 days a week)? How they spend their precious time can make a big difference.
According to a survey conducted by CSO (Chief Sales Officer Insights) only 35.7% of the average sales person’s time is spent in face to face selling. Arguably the most important use of a sales professional’s time allocation.
Certainly there are other tasks: administration, quote preparation, generating leads, meetings, etc. that require an expenditure of time.
Are you aware and monitor where your and your team’s time is spent? Do you condone where the time is spent? Do you coach sales professionals to increase valuable face to face selling time?
One obvious area to examine is the use of technology (CRMs, laptops, cell phones, webinars, etc.) to reduce manual processes, thus increasing face to face sales time. www.nealabc.com
Jul/090
Know Your Customer’s Perspective
Most entrepreneurs, CEOs, and sales managers focus internally on their products or services and try to figure out how to make them more appealing to a customer.
This product “pushing” mentality, at least from the seller’s perspective is not in concert with today’s consultative sales approach. Customers want to engage in problem solving vs. product flash.
As a result, knowing your customer from their perspective is the only perspective that counts.
Management needs to help their sales professionals understand customer’s wants and needs both present and future. This requires more of an inquisitive approach, asking more probing questions and understanding the customer’s entire business proposition.
This macro view allows specific products or services to create more value when connected to the customer’s situation. www.nealabc.com
Jul/090
Microsoft CRM Mobile Expressed Released – Mobile Sales Force
Expand your sales team virtually and sell more with this new feature that comes with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. www.nealabc.com Try it FREE for a month in our hosted CRM offering.
Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a new feature that enables users to access Microsoft Dynamics CRM data from a mobile Web browser on a Web-enabled mobile device. This feature must be installed on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server, and can work over the Internet if Microsoft Dynamics CRM is set up for Internet-facing deployment, or within a company intranet. It is available as a free download for English versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Once installed, users can view and modify Microsoft Dynamics CRM data from a web browser on their device.
Jul/090
Microsoft CRM Forrester Reports
Forrester summarized Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the following:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Over the past five years, Microsoft has established itself as a major
CRM player thanks to deep capital investment, a formidable strategy, and strong branding. The
product is strong in SFA, internationalization, and usability. Arguably its greatest strength is
its native Microsoft Office user experience. The solution is set up to look, feel, and function
like Outlook. Sales analysis tools, opportunity management, and setup and configuration
capabilities are the application’s key SFA strengths. The product also is available in multiple
deployment options and is attractively priced below many of the alternative products in the
market. The solution is built on the Microsoft .NET framework and integrates seamlessly with
other Microsoft productivity tools, like Office, Outlook, and SharePoint.Where the solution is weaker, however, is in support for eCommerce and industry business
process support. The product does not possess deep industry vertical capabilities, and offers
minimal partner relationship management (PRM) capabilities natively, forcing buyers that
want deeper PRM capabilities to augment the application through integration to BLUEROADS.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is best suited for organizations that are Microsoft-technology-centric
for their business applications and technology
You can download the full Forrester reports if you want read all of the details:
Jul/090
Listening the Lost Sales Skill
The two most sought after skills for sales professionals today are their ability to listen and ask intelligent questions.
If you want your sales team to differentiate itself from the competition help them listen more effectively and improve their skill to develop penetrating questions that reveal a customer’s “real “ concerns and needs.
This does not require years of experience merely a mind shift in sales approach and some basic sales training. www.nealabc.com
Jul/090
Closing the Sale is Not All or Nothing
In his book, Give & Take, Chester Karrass discusses negotiating skills and strategies and one of his quotes I find particularly insightful, ”if you can’t get a steak get a sandwich!”
Sometime sales professionals view the sales process as an all or nothing game. Developing relationships through small wins takes time; however, it can pay big dividends in the long term.
Review this concept with your team to see if they are walking by a sandwich ( trial orders, one time specials, limited engagements, scales down services, small margin items, etc) these sandwiches create the foundation, trust and face time to selling the steak. www.nealabc.com
Jul/090
Sales Management: Make a Commitment to Continuous Improvement
It is axiomatic in any endeavor that we must practice to make perfect, the problem with most of us is we don’t know what needs to be improved or how to improve it.
So it is with most sales professionals.
To overcome this natural tendency NABC recommends four simple steps:
Assessment +Training +Accountability = Continuous Improvement
1. Get an unbiased third party or an assessment tool to diagnosis areas of improvement.
2. Establish standardized training methods to address the concern.
3. Make sales professionals accountable to employ new methods.
4. Measure results for continuous improvement.
Sales professionals are more likely to follow management’s lead if senior management demonstrates commitment to continuous improvement and establishes the ongoing training and accountability process to make it stick.
Integrating these steps routinely in sales meetings will underscore management’s commitment. www.nealabc.com
Jul/090
Sales Fear of Failure
The fear of failure can become a cancer to sales professionals, teams and organizations.
Avoiding failure can be a dangerous limitation for many sales professionals. Although most people understand failure is inevitable in the sales process, it is often a taboo subject.
As we try to keep failure to a minimum, we often hold our cards too closely and become rigid in our approach. Normal enthusiasm, perseverance, productivity, creativity, and confidence slowly erode. What happened?
There are many reasons; however dealing with this frequent phenomenon is the responsibility of sales managers and senior management.
Are you in touch with each member of your sales team? Are you truly coaching them for success or merely reminding them their not hitting their goals? Are you training and modifying behavior or simply acting as an accountant counting beans after the fact?
Sales professionals need nurturing and coaching to help them through the difficult times (failure) that all sales people experience.
I encourage you to introspectively examine your sales coaching and training protocals to ensure you’re getting the optimum performance from your sales organization. www.nealabc.com