Sales Management

Here are a few things to think about when you are influencing your sales team to produce results in their approach to sales this year:

• Are you clear on what the strengths and values are of each of your sales team members?
• Do you have a clear understanding of where their challenges are in being successful?
• How good are your people in building relationships as sales is really about relationships.
• What type of follow up system do they have in place?  Many times it takes up to seven to eight follow ups before someone shows an interest in doing business with you.
• How organized are each of your team members? How do they track their prospects, clients and pipeline of business?  Do you use a user friendly contact management system like Sales Console? Is there an opportunity to offer training around this?
• Do you keep up with the trends of your industry and embrace technology to make everyone's job easier and more efficient?
• Are you aware that your staff is equally important as your clients? 
• How do you keep fresh with new ideas, new learnings, new business opportunities?
• 80% of business comes from 20% of your clients.  How often do you meet with your clients to find out what's going on with them?  What is new? What would they like to see differently? Where are there areas of improvement?
• Are you aware of the generational differences of your team and how this impacts how they are successful? How do you bridge the gaps between generation?
• Do you embrace new ideas that team members may have that would help you bring in more business?

All questions are food for thought. My advice to you is take the time to think over all or some of these questions and implement new ways of doing business to keep it fresh.