How do you transfer your drive and passion to succeed to your sales team?
Does this sound like you?
Perhaps you are a founder or owner of a business. You’ve committed everything to build this business. In the beginning, you wore multiple hats in your effort to do whatever it takes to survive – hoping to succeed. Among the hats worn, you were the primary driver of sales because you knew without sales there was no chance to survive.
Eventually, your passion and drive to win begin to pay-off. You survived and the next step on your journey was to move towards success, so you hire your first salesperson to help you grow your business. You do your best to transfer your knowledge and passion to this new rep and then turn them loose to grow your business so that you can focus on other areas of the business that need your attention.
Time goes by and your salesperson is moving the business forward, but you need to expand and add more salespeople to the team. So, like most business owners, you promote your sales rep into a sales management role and task him/her with hiring more salespeople. Your new sales manager eagerly accepts the challenge and begins to build the sales organization.
"How do you get others to sell with the drive and passion you had when everything was on the line?"
As time goes by and you begin to realize that something’s not right. The new sales team members are not meeting their goals. Salaries and sales expenses increase but the results do not follow. You may find that salespeople are selling less profitable products or services which impact margin or that sales are inconsistent, and your Sales Manager is requesting more support from marketing or claiming that your product is not priced competitively enough for the sales team to meet their goals. You find yourself spending more time and energy reacting to events than proactively leading your business forward. What do you do?
Unfortunately, this story is all to common in small to mid-size companies and is the result of two critical mistakes.
Mistake #1 Despite your best efforts to train and equip your new salesperson, no one is going to sell with the same passion and drive that you had because their survival does not depend on it.
Mistake #2 Promoting your salesperson to build your sales team simply because they had experience selling your product or service but without the experience necessary to build a sales organization.
At AcSELLerate, we work with business owners like you to correct these mistakes. Our goal is to build a sales organization that exceeds expectations allowing you to make proactive business decisions to accelerate your growth.
Step #1 - The first step is to build a Sales Playbook for the company. A Sales Playbook is a guide for how you want your salespeople to grow your business. It’s taking your drive and passion and formalizing it into a process that others can follow.
Step #2 - Once you have defined how you want your sales team to sell, the next step is to make sure they execute the plan. Our sales and coaching program works directly with your team to make sure they are executing the plan to meet your objectives. With clearly defined performance metrics and regular training and accountability meetings, we focus on prioritizing their activities and maximizing the efficiency of their execution – resulting in sales reps that exceed expectations.
If you believe your sales organization can do better – let’s talk.