Do You Have Everything You Need to Succeed with Sales?

Sales are unquestionably essential for a business to succeed. No sales, no profits, no customers, no business. It is that simple. Just like gas for a car or oxygen for a human, with no sales, the vehicle, body, or business is lifeless.

Every success-oriented salesperson and every success-driven sales manager looks at his or her results and asks, “How can I (or we) do better?” Similarly, “What sales tools am I (we) missing?”

What Are the Barriers to Sales Success?

Sales success can lead to remarkable growth and profitability, but that requires a careful look at barriers to effective selling along with the development of sales tools to overcome these barriers:

• Difficulty with getting in touch with buyers. This requires going beyond cold-calling and email badgering. It requires social selling and prospect nurturing.
• Difficulty establishing urgency with buyers. This requires helping the prospect evaluate the potential revenue benefits of your proposal as well as providing education on the pros and cons of your solutions. Build trust in the solutions that you offer.
• Prospects may struggle with the price of the product or service. First, make sure you are targeting qualified buyers. Then ensure that you understand their budget requirements.
• Certain stakeholders can’t agree on a purchase. In this case, provide ROI information and the value of the product along with appropriate supporting materials.
• Prospects don’t see the value of the product. This requires trust and sharing information that meets a buyer’s challenges and delivers their needs.
• Competitors win the sale. This means that you need to work harder to demonstrate a product or service’s value and uniqueness to the buyer.
• Sales teams don’t have enough information about prospects. This requires aligning marketing and sales to provide critical information.
• Software sales tools in the CRM system are not available or aren’t working well to help identify and nurture leads. Using the best technology available is essential today.

Strategies and Sales Tools That Lead to Success

Identifying and developing the strategies and sales tools that lead to success is vital. Here are some suggestions for sales managers:

1. Provide the training and mentoring that will help all salespeople. That includes one-on-one regular coaching. Also, encourage and enable continuous learning.
2. Establish a positive and supportive company culture.
3. Make sure that sales responsibilities are well-identified and that salespeople have the right responsibilities that are appropriate to them.
4. Give salespersons the freedom to act.
5. Provide critical information to all salespersons so that they know the products and services to be sold intimately including all aspects of the value proposition.
6. Use technology abundantly. A cloud-based CRM system is essential. It is one of the most important sales tools.
7. Make sure that the system works seamlessly to support the sales team.
8. Find ways to streamline the sales process.
9. Get to know your team members. Understand their unique needs and find ways to inspire them individually and collectively.
10. Drive selling competition by defining clear and realistic goals and finding ways to make the competition fun rather than cutthroat. At the same time, make collaboration important to the competitive environment.
11. Help the sales team create effective sales plans. Support good planning processes.

To Achieve Sales Success, Seek Outside Expertise

As a fractional VP of Sales, James Bellew works with small to medium-sized business owners to build or rebuild their sales organizations. That includes sales strategy, processes, building, establishing, and aligning sales teams and their sales tools to achieve solid sales improvement.