How to Improve Sales Performance

One of the biggest challenges of selling today is the drastic increase in the cost of making visits.  Despite other sales methods such as telephone marketing, direct face to face contact between the sales person and the client still remains the most effective way to success.
 

Many managers often try to offset the increased costs by motivating their sales people to greater personal effort and this is often their aim for in-house sales training.
 

After interviewing more than 2,000 sales people from over 200 firms, market researchers Barton A. Weitz, Harish and Mita Sujan propose a rather different strategy: sales people should not work more, they should work in a more customer-oriented way. The product must be presented to each customer with a made-to-measure strategy. This has an advantage over large-scale campaigns which do not respond flexibly to the desires of individual customers.
 

Sales managers should motivate their team to get to know the customer better and to try out new sales strategies. The following nine points should help to increase sales success.

1. Teach your sales people to categorise clients more effectively. It is advisable to keep several basic strategies ready for each client type so one can then adapt to their individual buying desires more effectively. It is not only the external characteristics like sex or age that should serve to categorise clients, but above all, the characteristics of behaviour which can be quickly observed. Does the client, for example, want a friendly atmosphere of discussion, or do they attach importance to a cool and professional atmosphere?

2. Continually provide your sales team with general information regarding the market.  This information will help them to categorise clients’ general buying interests more effectively. For example, a car sales person has to know the significance of a car’s sportiness or environmental acceptability for his clients.

3. Include the company's best sales people in sales training sessions. With the involvement of the best sales people, training courses can be developed on a made-to-measure basis with the objectives of one’s own company in mind.  In collaboration with outside experts, you can also track down the reasons for sales success which you may not have been aware of until now.

4. Make sure that working environment is fun.  In so many organisations, a great deal of stress is laid on external incentives such as money and promotion, so-called extrinsic motivation. Try to motivate your team intrinsically as well through the way you set a task. Success has to be recognised verbally too, for then it will have a positive effect on the sales person’s self-esteem.

5. Be careful with incentives. Bonuses should never form too big a part of salary, however they should retain a symbolic character. If a sales person gets too dependent on incentives, this will reduce their creativity and their willingness to try new things. Instead, personal supervision should be to the fore as a means of motivation, above all in the case of new sales people.

6. Give sales people feedback that is not only about whether they are working well or badly. If an memeber of staff is only ever informed about whether their performance has been adequate or not, the manager is missing an opportunity to convey their own experience to the subordinate by means of specific feedback. Only conversations like that contain a stimulus to and possibility for improvement, even in the case of sales people who are already successful.

7. Encourage your team to analyse the successes and failures. Only those who think successes and failures through properly will be able to discover the real causes. In order that mistakes are not simply suppressed mentally or failures attributed to the customer, the sales person must also be able to admit them. So, help by asking about the ‘why’ of success or failure in discussions.  Admit that unusual clients are not easy to take, and stress that the correction of mistakes can produce a sense of achievement.

8. Teach your people to help themselves. Sales people need to be creative and independent. Since they have to make quick decisions in the given sales situation, they cannot expect too much assistance from others but must take the initiative on their own. A sales person who is aware of this ability will be more strongly motivated to their work.

9. Create an atmosphere of mutual support. A company has to show its staff that it is interested in long-term cooperation. This will reduce competitive pressure among them and increase commitment to the company’s more far-reaching objectives. Even if many of these suggestions are already familiar and have also been partially put into practice, there could still be a lack of awareness of their importance for the company.
 
The success of such strategies and sales training programmes can rarely be expressed in terms of an immediate increase in sales results, however in the long-run continually rising productivity due to these improved practices will benefit both the company and employees.

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