Knowing the drivers, and identifying which lever acts for commercial performance: knowing when, where and how to act are the keys you will find in this article!
The engine is slipping, make sure you repair the right parts!
Have you established your business strategy?
How do you coordinate your marketing and sales resources to achieve your sales objectives? How are leads generated? Is the customer and prospect portfolio well segmented? Do sales people know who to visit first? How often? On which product(s)? Do they know which customers have margins? Defining your sales strategy and sharing it allows teams to align and direct their efforts in a coherent and efficient way, maximising ROI and reducing the risk of missing out on interesting deals!
Do you provide real business support to your teams? Not during the meetings. Before.
If the answer to this question is no, you will burn out your team! However, the ability of a sales department to set up a lead generation system is now an integral part of the result! Today, direct prospecting activities (Outbound), which are proving less and less effective, are gradually disappearing in favour of attraction activities (Inbound). Your website, thanks to lead generation, breathes life into the team and prevents it from burning out.
In your company, how is the sales action plan defined?
The sales action plan is the operational translation, i.e. applied to the teams, of the sales strategy. It is a roadmap based on three axes:
- The volume of activity (of each salesperson), i.e. the number of meetings, telephone contacts, proposals, sales, etc.
- The orientation of the activity, i.e. the adequacy of the efforts with the priority segments (hence the interest of having a customer segmentation!).
- And finally, the quality of the activity, i.e. the means of ensuring the transformation rate.
What if it came from you? Honestly?
Do you have a strategy, a marketing plan, a CAP and the results are not forthcoming? Then the most frequent cause is the lack of application in the operational implementation. Commercial performance also depends on the active and constructive role of commercial management: putting all this to music, keeping the engine running and being attentive to know where and when to act. With managerial devices, simple and up-to-date dashboards, frequent exchanges, and a supportive attitude, they ensure that the team moves forward!
What is the current level of each member of your team? Not in absolute terms, but now.
To be successful, each salesperson in your team needs to have three optimised 'energy stores ' to keep them in a positive frame of mind.
- First of all, the expertise: its offer, its products, its company, but also its market, its competitors, its customers,...
- Secondly, business skills: i.e. mastering sales and negotiation techniques, being able to adapt one's know-how and interpersonal skills,...
- Finally, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: driven, of course, by remuneration, but above all by recognition, a taste for challenge, the atmosphere and team spirit, and the company's sense of purpose and ambition...
How is customer information structured for performance?
There is a lot of talk today about data and if this subject concerns the general public, it also applies to your customer portfolio! Information allows you to build your sales strategy more efficiently, to refine your individual knowledge of each customer, and to manage your actions downstream. It doesn't matter whether you start with an Excel spreadsheet or a CRM to have a real tool: capturing, organising and using customer information is essential for sales performance!
Finally, do you have an efficient support system?
This support is in a way the back office, all the resources implemented to help the marketing and sales teams concentrate on their core business. There are 3 main types of support:
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- Sales administration, with order management, invoicing, follow-up, etc.
- Marketing professions, including specialists in digital, research, etc.
- Customer service, which will enable you to maintain the quality of the relationship, but also to provide useful information to maintain or develop the level of sales among your active customers...
Commercial performance is therefore based on a set of 7 levers that constitute a system. We can see here how they interlock with each other and how a failure impacts on the whole.
An 8th lever predominates over the other 7: do you know which one?
…….YOU! What is your own dynamic beyond your role as facilitator? If you observe your own functioning like a doctor observes a patient's body: are you more "Head" (analytical), Heart (emotional and relational), Hands (directive) or Feet (running, running, action, action!)? Identify your own functioning with hindsight and objectivity and the other 7 levers will go in your direction more easily.
But sometimes there is not enough time to take this step back and act on all the levers. Kestio The Kestio systemallows you to orientate the actions precisely and at the right pace, to ensure that the engines are running smoothly, within the overall vision of the system!
To find out more, you can download our White Paper: HOMO SAPIENS COMMERCIALIS: the salesperson in the digital age
You can also consult our innovative approaches to support leaders, managers, project managers and sales people in start-ups and SMEs in this change:
