Knowing what drives sales performance, and identifying which levers to use: knowing when, where and how to act - these are the keys you'll find in this article!
The engine is slipping - make sure you repair the right parts!
Have you got your sales strategy right?
How do you coordinate your marketing and sales resources to meet sales targets? How do you generate leads? Is the customer and prospect portfolio well segmented? Do sales reps know who to visit first? How often? On which product(s)? Do they know who their margin customers are? Defining your sales strategy helps to align and direct team efforts in a coherent and effective way, maximizing ROI and reducing the risk of missing out on interesting business!
Do you provide real business support to your teams? Not during the meetings. Before.
If the answer to this question is no, you're going to burn out your team! Today, the ability of a sales department to implement a lead generation system is an integral part of the bottom line! Today, direct prospecting activities (outbound), which are proving less and less effective, are gradually being replaced by attraction activities (inbound). Your website, thanks to lead generation, breathes new life into your team and prevents them from burning out.
How is the sales action plan defined in your company?
The sales action plan is the operational translation of the sales strategy, applied to the teams. It's a roadmap built around three axes:
- Volume of activity (for each salesperson), i.e. number of appointments, telephone contacts, proposals, sales...
- Activity orientation, i.e. matching efforts with priority segments (hence the importance of customer segmentation!).
- And finally, the quality of the activity, i.e. the means by which the conversion rate is ensured.
What if it came from you? Honestly?
Do you have a strategy, a marketing plan, a CAP, and the results just aren't there? Then the most frequent cause is a lack of application in operational implementation. Sales performance also depends on the active, constructive role played by sales management: putting all this to music, keeping the engine running and keeping an eye on where and when to act. With managerial tools, simple, up-to-date scorecards, frequent exchanges and a supportive attitude, he or she ensures that the team keeps moving forward!
What is the current level of each member of your team? Not in absolute terms, but right now.
To be successful, every salesperson on your team needs to have three optimized "energy stores" to stay in a positive dynamic.
- First, expertise: your offer, your products, your company, but also your market, your competitors, your customers...
- Secondly, business skills: i.e. mastering sales and negotiation techniques, being able to adapt your 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 team atmosphere and spirit, and the company's sense of purpose and ambition...
How is customer information structured to enhance performance?
There's a lot of talk these days about data, and if this subject concerns the general public, it also applies to your customer portfolio! Upstream, information enables you to build your sales strategy more effectively, to refine your individual knowledge of each customer, and downstream, to manage your actions. It doesn't matter whether you're starting out with an Excel spreadsheet, or whether you're looking for a fully-fledged CRM tool: capturing, organizing and exploiting customer information is essential for sales performance!
Finally, do you have a high-performance support system?
In a way, this support is the back office, the set of resources deployed to help 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,...
- Marketing professions, including specialists in digital, research,...
- Customer service, to maintain the quality of the relationship, but also to feed back useful information to maintain or develop sales with your active customers...
Sales performance is therefore based on a set of 7 levers that make up a system. Here we can see how they fit together, and how a failure affects the whole.
An 8th lever predominates over the other 7: do you know which one?
....... What is your own dynamic beyond your role as facilitator? If you look at your own functioning like a doctor looks at 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 your way more easily.
But sometimes there isn't enough time to step back and take action on all the levers. Kestioenables you to orientate your 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, download our White Paper: HOMO SAPIENS COMMERCIALIS: the salesperson in the digital age.
You can also read about our innovative approaches to supporting leaders, managers, project managers and sales people in startups and SMEs through this change:
