Mansfield Sales Blog

Sales Strategy 101: Top 5 Ways to Lose a Sale

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When I ask sales executives, "What is your biggest challenge?" I hear a lot of different answers. One of the most common answers is "getting more high-quality leads." Very often, however, we find their company already has many sales opportunities that are being missed. Focusing on fixing these sales leaks vs. getting more leads can result in larger sales gains.

Top 5 Ways to Lose a Sale

1. Not recognizing a prospect. The number one way companies miss a sales opportunity is when they fail to recognize a prospect. Someone doesn’t forward an inquiry in a timely manner or at all. A sales rep doesn’t ask the right qualifying questions. Or a hundred other ways that organizations fail to connect with a prime prospect in time to make the sale. The Fix: Take a look at your sales process for handling inquires, make sure your sales reps are properly trained to recognized a prospect, and make everyone in the company who has customer contact part of your sales team.
2. Lack of planning. Planning gives you the best possible opportunity to reach your prospects with a timely sales presentation. It also enables sales reps to manage their most valuable resource, time – booking the right number of appointments so that they can spend enough time with each prospect to make the sale without ignoring valuable leads. The Fix: Make sure that you are not stretching your team too far and are properly staffed, consider expand your capabilities by working with a sales outsourcing company, determine if you have all the sales management tools you need to properly plan and track sales leads and discover any planning gaps.
3. Poor first impression. You only get one opportunity to make a first impression. If you leave a bad first impression, you shouldn’t expect to be able to ever convince the prospect that it was the "wrong impression". The Fix: Put yourself in the customers’ place and look in the mirror – literally and figuratively – and be critical.
4. Not knowing enough about the prospect before your meeting. Knowledge of your client and their market, and how your product can solve their problems, is essential to making a sales presentation that addresses your prospects needs and concerns. Taking the time to learn about your client before you meet can be the difference between sales success and failure. The Fix: Invest your time in doing research, make sure that you have access to the necessary sales support resources.
5. Not really listening to the prospect. The Fix: Make sure to actively listen to your customers, ask open-ended questions that give them the opportunity to talk about their needs and concerns, encourage them to be open with you.

What do you think is the #1 way to miss a sales opportunity? Contact us for help with your sales performance.

Sales Strategy 101 - Hiring and Retaining Top Salespeople

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Research shows organizations that spend more time recruiting high-caliber people earn 22% higher return to shareholders than their peers. Ponder for a moment the last sales person that you hired. After you selected them, did they work out as intended or did they turn into somebody totally unlike what you thought when you interviewed them? The most important aspect of any business is recruiting and retaining top sales people.

Hiring is both art and science. Refusing to improve this vital process will almost always guarantee you will be spending money and time hiring the wrong people. Here are several reasons why traditional techniques are inadequate:

• The majority of applicants exaggerate to get a job
• Most hiring decisions are made by intuition in the first few minutes of the interview
• 2 out of 3 sales hires prove to be a bad fit within the first year
• Most interviewers are not properly trained nor do they like to interview applicants

5 P's to Help You Improve Sales Team Hiring

1. Prepare - Prior to the interview make sure you understand the key elements of the job. Develop a simple outline that covers the job duties. Screen resumes to gain information for the interview. Standardize and prepare the questions you will ask each applicant.
2. Purpose - Talented sales people have more choices and job opportunities to choose from. The interviewer forms the applicant's first impression of the company. Not only are you trying to determine the best applicant, but you also have to convince the applicant this is the best place for them to work.
3. Performance - Identify the knowledge, attributes, and sales skills the applicant needs for success. If the job requires special education be sure to include it on your list. Identify the top seven attributes or competencies that the job requires and structure the interview accordingly.
4. People Skills - The hardest to determine, as well as the most important part of the process, is identifying the people skills a person bring to the job. Each applicant wears a "mask." A good interviewing and selecting process discovers who is behind that mask and determines if a match exists between the individual and the job. By understanding the applicant's personality style, values, and motivations, you are guaranteed to improve your hiring and selecting process.
5. Process - The best interview follows a structured process. This doesn't mean the entire process is inflexible without spontaneity. What it means is, each applicant is asked the same questions and is scored with a consistent rating process. A structured approach helps avoid bias and gives all applicants a fair chance.

Hiring and retaining a great sales team isn't easy. We can help you with this all-important process.

Photo credit: I Don't Know, Maybe

Sales and Marketing Alignment - A Key to Sales Growth

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Go back a couple of decades and you will find that most companies had a unified Sales and Marketing function. Today, even in mid-sized companies, the Marketing function is often separated from Sales. Marketing is the "keeper of the brand" and creates "sales support materials" but really doesn't actively engage in "selling".

How did this happen?

Probably we need to assemble a team of MBA's to study this phenomenon for a couple of years and present their findings to uncover the truth. But allow me put forward a theory – it started with the systemization of Marketing at Harvard and other leading academic institutions. Great and important work that really helped elevate brand management, but also started to separate Marketing from Sales.

Does it matter who did it? Not really. The real key is to fix the problem.

Jumpstarting Sales Growth

Breaking down the barriers between Sales and Marketing is one of the fastest ways to refocus your organization on what matters and jumpstart sales growth. In most organizations this is not an easy task but a determined CEO can make it happen. Here are a few examples of successful efforts.

• Just get them to talk – honestly: One CEO I know decided that he would call regular Sales and Marketing meetings. He didn't engage in any formalized Sales and Marketing Integration process. He just worked to foster communication and dialog between his two departments. He held Sales and Marketing Team meetings every week and focused the meetings squarely on a discussion of disconnects and missed opportunities – and how to solve these problems. He mandated honesty. Some of the meetings were tense; a few were almost out of control. After several weeks, however, the meetings started to become productive. Realistic plans for change were developed. The Sales Team started to feel like they had a voice in the entire process. The Marketing executives got credit for actually doing some things right and became less defensive about change. Over time, the meetings evolved from problem-solving sessions into a way to brainstorm sales growth strategies and to synchronized efforts. It didn't solve all the problems, but it helped.
• Exchange student: What is the fastest way to connect Marketing to Sales? It may be to make the key marketing executives actually sell something. A CEO faced with a struggling division did just that. He took his VP of Marketing and put him on the phone, selling the division's services to small business owners. Much to the VP's dismay, he was assigned to the task for a month and given a sales quota. After a week or two, the VP’s perspective started to change. He learned that the division’s lead generation program had significant gaps and he re-evaluated his vendors. He also discovered that it was hard to sell the division's service, that the company lacked a clear competitive advantage. The experience not only built a new respect for how hard it can be to sell, but it also inspired him to reconfigure the service offering and build in meaningful advantages. The division continues to struggle but the refocused sales and marketing program have started to make a difference.
• Shared goals, clear roles: Every CEO knows that success is almost impossible without common corporate goals and strategies that are understood. But it is equally important that the roles and responsibilities with Sales and Marketing are well defined and properly interconnected. Usually there are clearly written job descriptions neatly filed in HR and quickly forgotten. Sometimes outside venders have formal goals. But rarely does anyone take the time to make sure that all the key players know what their roles and responsibilities are, and to eliminate any gaps or gray areas. One large corporation has solved this. They hold quarterly Sales and Marketing conferences to make sure that everyone is on the same page. All of the key members of the Sales and Marketing team are included – both internal and external. Many companies hold similar meetings but what distinguishes this company is that they always spend the first session on making sure that there is clarity and agreement about goals, roles and responsibilities. Then they move on to planning the upcoming sales effort. Everyone knows what they are expected to do and what they must accomplish to achieve the sales goals.
• The sales presentation is useless: A consultant was hired by a CEO to develop a sales training program. The consultant first learned about the company and sales process. Not surprisingly, she discovered a disconnect between Marketing and Sales. The Marketing Team had put together tools and presentations for their sales team that bore little resemblance to the actual pitches given by sales. The sales team didn’t support marketing’s program and they quietly developed their own pitch. As a result, there was a disconnect between the benefit statements, key concepts, and core message in the company's advertising and sales support materials vs. the sales presentation. Clients and prospects were confused, and sales lagged. The consultant went back to the CEO with a proposal to help the company integrate its sales and marketing efforts. Sometimes an outside consultant can identify and help solve these problems more effectively than internal staff.

Is there a Grand Canyon between Sales and Marketing in your organization? We can help.

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10 Ways to Lose Valuable Sales Leads – Without Even Trying

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One of your greatest assets is qualified sales leads, but many sales leads get lost. No one responds, because no one notices, or they end up in the wrong place, or no one has time. There are thousands of excuses, but the result is the same, sales are lower than they should be.

Every company loses some qualified leads, no matter how well they manage their leads. But some companies lose sales leads in very basic ways – that can easily be avoided.

Here are 10 ways we have actually seen otherwise well-run companies literally leak qualified sales leads.

1. Customer Service Roadblock: A buyer wants to make a purchase from a company. The first number she finds is a toll-free customer service number. When she calls and asks for a number to talk to a sales rep, she is informed that this number is not available. The buyer goes online and finds another company to fill the order.
2. Online Form Goes Nowhere: The buyer finds a beautiful website, reviews the promotional copy and is interested in placing an order, but she has some questions. She completes the online form requesting more information. The form goes to someone, somewhere, but there is no response. The buyer gets bids from 3 other companies.
3. Secret Phone Numbers: The buyer wants to contact a company to get a bid. She goes to the company’s website and discovers that there are no phone numbers listed. She calls toll-free directory assistance and finds that the company does not have a toll-free number. She moves on.
4. Unanswered E-Mail: The buyer sends an email to the address listed in a business directory inquiring about the company’s products. The E-Mail is out of date and goes to an unattended E-Mail account. No one ever responds.
5. Phone Message Gets Buried: The buyer calls the company’s sales department and leaves a message. The receptionist promises a sales rep will call back but the message gets buried on someone’s desk. No one every calls the potential buyer. It is found 3 months later in a pile of paper on the former sales reps desk.
6. Phone Tag: Everything seems to be working right. The potential buyer calls the sales department and gets to the right person. The sales rep takes the information and promises to call back with a quote. But the sales rep fails to get complete contact information and only has a mangled email address and a phone number. A game of phone tag ensues and the buyer does not get the bid in time to consider it.
7. Territory Questions: The buyer contacts the company and requests a bid. No one is sure who "owns" this account and the request goes unanswered. "I thought it was his account…"
8. Too Many Cooks: The buyer contacts a large corporation about a complex RFP. The order involved products from three divisions. No one is sure who should respond to the RFP and it goes unanswered.
9. Wrong Rep: The buyer contacts the sales department and is directed to a sales rep. Unfortunately, this rep does not have expertise in the products the buyer is interested in purchasing. Rather than pass this lead on to someone qualified to handle it, the rep tries to respond and is completely ineffective. The buyer selects another company’s products.
10. "I'm Too Busy": The buyer contacts the company and is directed to the #1 sales rep. He takes all the information and has a great call. The buyer is predisposed to purchase from the company. But the sales rep is really swamped and never gets back to the buyer. He’s just too busy.

What are your sales do's and don'ts? We can help improve your sales results.

Photo Credit: Zach Klein

How Good is Your Sales Team? Should You Consider Sales Outsourcing?

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As product and service differentiation becomes more difficult to achieve and competition intensifies, effective sales channels are vital to growing and defending your market share. Many companies face growing pressure to reduce field sales investments and to produce more with less. With ever increasing resource constraints, sales leaders have used external cross-industry efficiency benchmarks to fully assess the performance of their field sales staff, to validate their resource allocations and to determine if strategic outsourcing of some sales functions is warranted.

Three factors play a critical role in sales force performance:

1. Sales team size
2. Resource allocation to target markets
3. Sales team productivity

In order to optimize sales team size, validate resource allocation, and evaluate overall sales team and individual sales rep productivity, it is essential to establish valid benchmarks. Most companies measure the success of their sales force based on sales results – revenue growth, actual sales vs. plan, average order, order frequency, close rates and so on. And this makes sense, until you really examine it.

If the benchmark for a sales team’s success is beating last year’s performance, how do you know if that is the right goal?

What if your sales team was inefficient last year? Wouldn’t a sales goal of a modest increase over last year just be asking your sales team to be a little less unproductive? On the other hand, if you have the most productive sales team in the industry, do you need to put programs in place to make sure that your competitors don’t steal your star performers? And are there functions that can be more cost-effectively achieved by external partners? Should you consider outsourcing some sales functions?

Establishing effective sales performance benchmarks

For a truly informative benchmark, compare your team to leading competitors across your industry. In addition, benchmark internal productivity measures [cost per qualified lead, cost per sale, revenue per sale, and so on] to outsourced supplier results. Benchmarks can help you and your sales management team identify gaps and determine where to focus efforts to improve sales productivity and accelerate sales growth.

The most common sales productivity gaps

• High cost per lead OR low cost per lead with a low close rate: This usually indicates a gap in your company’s lead generation process. A review of your marketing strategy and lead process is in order.
• Low close rate: Investigate carefully to identify the root causes. Are the leads really qualified prospects? Are there gaps in the sales process? Is your company at a competitive disadvantage in service delivery, pricing or other significant factors? Is your sales team properly trained and managed? Is there a gap between your marketing message and the sales presentation?
• Sales growth from existing accounts lags the industry: Determine if your sales and service teams are doing what it takes to maximize the profitability of existing accounts. This gap usually indicates that your clients’ needs and expectations are not being fully met. The root cause could be a real product/service gap or it could be a poorly constructed sales presentation that overpromises what your company can deliver.
• High customer attrition rate: High rates of customer loss are the most troubling problem. Quickly identifying the cause and increasing customer retention rates is the single fastest way to increase sale revenue.

How do you address misaligned strategy and/or poor productivity in your sales team? These are some of the questions we address directly when we join forces with you as a sales partner. Contact us for more information about sales outsourcing.

Photo Credit: CPX Interactive