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9 Ways To Improve Sales Performance

Although face to face selling with direct visits with customers is the most effective method of selling, the cost of making these visits continues increase. Companies continue to explore other method of selling, which unfortunately are generally less effective.

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 Weitz, Harish Sujan and Mita Sujan propose a rather different strategy. That salespeople instead of working harder for longer, they should work in a more customer-oriented way. The product or service must be presented to each buyer with a made-to-measure sales strategy. This has an advantage over large-scale campaigns that cannot respond flexibly to the requirements of individual customers.

Managers need to motivate their staff to get to know customers better and to try new sales approaches. The following nine points will help to increase sales success.

1. Develop salespeople's ability to categorize customers more effectively. It is advisable to prepare several sales strategies ready for each customer type so they can then react to the individual buying desires more easily. It is not only factors such as age or sex that categorize customers, but also, above all, the behavioral characteristics that can be easily observed. For example does the customer, like a friendlier atmosphere of discussion, or do they require a cool and business-like atmosphere?

2. Continually provide the sales staff with information on the market place. This information will help them to categorize their customers' general buying interests more effectively. For example, a car salesperson has to know the significance of a car's sporty appeal or environmental acceptability for his clientele.

3. Include the most successful salespeople in training sessions. With their involvement the training programs can be tailored to meet the company objectives. You can track down reasons for sales success in collaboration with external experts which you were may not have been previously aware of until now.

4. Make sure that work is fun. In many companies, great stress is laid on external incentives like money and promotion - that is to say, so-called extrinsic motivation. Try to motivate your staff intrinsically as well through the way you set a task. Success must be acknowledged in person so that the salesperson's self-esteem is enhanced.

5. Take care with 'incentives'. Commission payments should not constitute a large part of a salary. They should have a representative character. If a salesperson gets too dependent on incentives, this will reduce their creativity and their will to try new things. Alternatively, personal supervision should be to the fore as a means of motivation, above all in the case of new salespeople.

6. Give your salespeople feedback which is not only about whether they are working well or badly. If an employee is only ever informed about whether their performance has been adequate or not, then the sales manager is throwing away the opportunity to convey their own experience to the subordinate by means of specific feedback. Only conversations like that contain a stimulus to and possibility of improvement, even in the case of salespeople who are already successful.

7. Encourage your staff to analyze successes and failures. Only those who think successes and failures through thoroughly will be able to discover their real causes. In order that mistakes are not simply suppressed mentally or failures attributed to the customer's unwillingness, the salesperson must also be at liberty to admit them. So, help by asking about the 'why' of success or failure in sales discussions. Admit that unusual customers are not easy to take, and stress that the correction of mistakes can produce a sense of achievement.

8. Develop individual problem solving ability. Salespeople need to be creative and independent. Since they have to make quick decisions in the given sales situation, they cannot expect too much assistance from others but must take the initiative on their own. A salesperson that is aware of this ability will be more strongly motivated to their work.

9. Develop a spirit of collaboration within the team. A firm has to show its employees that it is interested in long-term cooperation. This can minimize the pressure of competition between employees whilst improving company commitment and it's business aims.

Many of these suggestions may already be familiar and may also have been partially put into practice; however there could still be a lack of awareness of their importance for the company. The success of such strategies and training programs can rarely be expressed in terms of an instant increase in sales; however, due to these practices productivity will increase over a relatively short time scale which will be of benefit to staff and the business.

Article Source: http://www.fresh-article-directory.com

Richard Stone (richard.stone@spearhead-training.co.uk) is a Director for Spearhead Training Ltd who are specialists in providing management and sales training courses to improve business performance.