Sales – The Good Times and The Bad Times
In sales, the good times are usually when customers are receptive, sales are exceeding plan, bonuses are getting paid, and the sales team is motivated to stay and perform. The bad times are usually when customers prefer competitive offerings, pricing pressure is high, sales targets are being missed, and the sales team’s morale is low. This is when the figure pointing, and sales performance questions usually start. The best sales managers know how to keep their sales team focused in good and bad times.
- Do we have the right sales strategy and sales leadership?
- Who are our ideal target customers?
- Is our unique value proposition compelling enough?
- Do we have a high performing sales culture?
- Do we have the right solution selling skills?
These are the right questions to be asking. When times are tough, it’s up to sals leaders to get the team back on track and engaged. But where should sales leaders start?
3 Steps to Regain a Winning Focus
Here are three steps you can take to keep your sales team focused, especially in bad times.
- Get Strategically Aligned with Your Sales Team
When times are tough, a reset is often needed. Like a project retrospective, things often need to change for improvement to occur. And when it comes to sales, change starts with sales strategy alignment.
Our organizational alignment research found that strategic sales clarity accounts for 31 percent of the difference between high and low performing sales teams in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, and sales rep engagement. Get your sales team together and make sure that your sales strategy is clear enough, believable enough, and implementable enough to get you where you want to go.
Make sure that everyone understands your ideal target client profile, is on board with your unique value proposition, and believes that the sales targets are achievable with reasonable but sustained effort.
It is your job as a sales leader to remove any obstacles to sales success. You will know you are on track when everyone believes that your sales goals are achievable, clear, relevant, meaningful, fair, consistent, accurate, trusted, timely, and transparent. - Focus on Long-Term Results and Relationships
Once your sales strategy is clear enough, your next step is to help your team experiment with new ways to approach prospects so that they are more open to what you have to offer. There needs to be more focus on selling the value you can bring to buyers whose budgets may have been slashed, whose buying preferences may have changed, and whose priorities may have shifted.
The challenge is for your sales team to be more consultative and more customer-centric in their approach so price becomes less of an issue than how what you bring to the table can solve their high priority issues. And you need to understand that the objective is to help your customer to succeed over the long-term, not to close the deal. In fact, research has proven that “down-selling” increases customer loyalty. - Stay Close and Praise Desired Behaviors
One of the keys to maintaining a high performing sales culture is to keep in close touch with your team and recognize the behaviors that create individual and team success. Don’t micro-manage; just be available to act as a sales coach, lend support, and reward progress. Check in on a regular basis to find out how you and the rest of the sales team can help overcome sales objections in the buying process.
The Bottom Line
Both in good and bad times, a sales strategy that is value-based and customer-centric will push your team in the right direction. But the bad times also require paying closer attention to the team’s struggles. It is up to sales managers to keep the team highly focused and engaged. Are you doing all you can to set your sales team up for success?
To learn more about how to keep your sales team focused in good and bad times, download How to Optimize Your Sales Force in the Face of Increased Performance Pressure