10 Point Plan for Consistent Success with Your Sales Organization

Questions that help you prepare your sales organization to finish BIG for this year

Buyers are asking tougher questions before making a purchase. Here are the top questions Selling Power Editors provided to help you prepare your sales organization:

1. Do you thrive on change? If your company's rate of innovation is slower than normal for your industry, you can't expect forward momentum.  Customers are always looking for new ideas.  If they can't get them from you, they'll get them from your competition.

2. Are you committed to ongoing improvement?  The more you improve as a company, the better you can help your customers improve their business.  Remember that the more customers improve as a result of your sales effort, the better your bottom line.

3. Are you stretching your abilities?  If your salespeople don't stretch their abilities, you'll see a stretch in your company's liabilities.  If your team's sales goals are not stretched, your cost of sales soon will be.

4. Are you removing all barriers to buying?  Some companies are able to close sales and deliver goods and/or services within days.  Are you willing to improve your sales performance to a similar world-class level?

5. Do you aggressively exploit technology? The purpose of technology is to save time for the customer, manage relationships for the sales team, and help management improve the organization.  Is your information technology truly designed to serve people's needs?  Are you fully using your Mobile CRM?

6. Is everyone motivated to win?  People come to work to win, not to lose.  Winning demands that the heart is involved in the job.  If salespeople love what they do, sales managers will love the results.

7. Do you measure and reward top performance? Winners expect results, not excuses. Result seekers are scorekeepers.  Set competitive rewards linked to the levels of achievement.

8. Are you managing meaning?  Rethink, resell, and renew your company's mission.  If your salespeople can't explain the company's mission, you cannot expect them to get the job done.  Once your sales team knows the why the how will be easy.

9. Are you failing forward? If nobody makes a mistake in your organization, it's a sure sign that you're not growing.  Use failure as an opportunity to learn.  If you want to triple your success ratio, you have to triple your failure rate.

   
   

10. Are you creating trust?  Do your customers place much trust in your company? The answer will be in direct proportion to the amount of repeat business.  How much trust do your salespeople place in your company?  The answer will be in inverse proportion to your turnover.  Do the right thing, and you will create more trust.

Structure and operation are two concepts that apply equally to companies and individuals who want to achieve consistent success.  Here is a shortlist of attributes from studying consistently successful people.

Five Attributes of Consistent Success