Sales Excellence

Introduction

Who’s it for?

Want a better sales performance and the extra sales that go with it – share this programme with your sales team and see how they can step up their performance and job satisfaction as they implement the process and ideas that deliver sales excellence.

Our view is that selling is one of the last really exciting jobs left in modern society. The mix of planning, organising and reaching the moments of truth when success depends on doing the right thing at the right time. Just as not everyone can be a successful explorer or mountaineer – the same is true of salespeople. To be a successful salesperson requires professionalism, study, knowledge, self-discipline, resilience and a lot of hard work.

‘Selling is the management of buying’ is a really good way to describe the process. This means that salespeople do selling things so that customers do the buying things. This may sound very simplistic but think about it for a moment. The real dramatic impact of this definition of selling is that since only customers do buying things, the objective of every sales call must be to describe what the customer will do as a result of the call, not what the salesperson will do.

Without measuring customer action as an objective of their sales call, salespeople get into the habit of describing what THEY will do in the call – for example ‘I will present our new product line to this customer’, ‘I will get to know xxx’, ‘I will demonstrate’. But to manage buying salespeople must set objectives that define what the buyer will do as a result of the salesperson’s efforts. The focus must be on buying actions NOT selling actions. Selling is the management of buying – ‘I do specific and necessary selling things, to get the customer to do specific and necessary buying things.’

The high performing salesperson will follow the principle of selling managing the process of buying by establishing a specific measurable Customer Action Objective (CAO) for each call. Some examples:

Call 1: The customer will describe the company’s diagnostic needs, identify the decision maker for the equipment purchases, indicate the budget status and give me an appointment to demonstrate our equipment’.

Call 2: The customer’s potential users will use my equipment in a demonstration and verbalise their need/ desire to buy the equipment. The decision maker will give me an estimated quantity and purchase date.

Call 3: The customer will sign our order form and give me a purchase order for the required quantity of our equipment.

In this example the high performing salesperson knew exactly what they wanted the customer to do at each stage and from every call. They had a multiple call sales strategy that moved the process forward stage by stage. They had an overall sales goal and sales objective, indicating at each stage what they wanted the customer to do. This allowed them to place a measurable sales objective for each call. They knew where they were going and how they intended to get there, they could measure therefore along the way whether they were on track. In this series we will guide you, step by step, on the things that you, or your salespeople need to do to achieve sales excellence.