6 Tips to Help Keep Your Sales on Track

Every business owner or salesperson needs to continually add new customers and increase sales in order to grow their business. So, it is important to have a well defined sales process to enable you to build consensus with prospective buyers at each critical juncture during the selling process to improve sales results.

Having a well defined sales process will help you improve close rates, shorten sales cycles and enhance the profitability of each sale. Here are some tips to help keep your sales on track:

Call on decision makers. 60% of a salesperson's time is spent in front of people who can't buy or will never buy their products or services. So, identify the key decision makers and influencers very early in the sales cycle, and work directly with them to improve your success rate.

Know where you are in the sales process. Think of your sales pipeline as a production line where raw materials (leads) go in at the top, and the finished product (sales) comes out at the end of the assembly line. Define the sales process at each phase, and the next steps in the sales pipeline, to help keep new projects on track and moving forward to closure.

Have a fallback plan. You are the most vulnerable right after the prospect has given the verbal approval, so keep your guard up. Have a fallback plan to cover all contingencies in case a pending sale starts to unravel prior to contract, and move stalled projects up or out of the pipeline in 30 days or less.

Work on balance, grasshopper. Balancing opportunities and risks in each category of your sales pipeline is critical to improved sales performance. This will help you minimize gaps between sales closings, and enable you to more effectively allocate resources to new projects where needed.

Stay the course. On average, 48% of sales people never follow-up, and only about 10% make more than three contacts with a prospective buyer. However, 80% of sales are made on the 5-12 contact. So, stay engaged with the prospect through closure to improve your win rates on new proposals.

Ask for the order. "We miss 100% of the sales we don't ask for" - Zig Ziglar quote. Be prepared to close the sale at any point during the sales process when the prospect shows clear signs they are ready to buy.

Selling is a continuum process, so it is important to have a clearly defined sales process in place to help keep your sales on track. This will help you effectively manage sales cycles for each opportunity, while improving close rates, and enhancing the profitability of each new sale.

Good luck and good selling!

COPYRIGHT © 2010 John Carroll

It's Time for Conversations Not Just Connections

Can we talk?

Ten years ago that would have been a ridiculous question, but today in a world that is dominated by "drive by" communications, it has become much more challenging to have a simple conversation.

When was the last time you sat around the dinner table as a family or with friends and just talked; talked about nothing in particular but just had a conversation? Are you finding it more difficult to get your telephone calls returned, or to get responses to your emails these days? Or, to get someone to take 5 minutes out of their busy day to speak with you?

In this modern era of voice mail, email, text, chat, IM, tweets, etc. we have relegated conversations to sound bytes, 140 characters, or the 30-second elevator pitch. Rather than conversations that enable us to help build long-term enduring relationships, our communications have become more sterile, computer-generated and impersonal. The focus in our society has shifted to pushing information to others versus true interpersonal communications and getting to know the other person on some level.

We constantly hear the term six degrees of separation, and assume we are now closer and that technology has somehow brought us all together. However, most people I talk with feel more disconnected and farther apart than ever when it comes to communication with friends, family and the outside world. In reality, we are bombarded every day by thousands of messages from various sources, and as a result take little time to just talk with each other.

For example, when voice mail and email were first introduced, they were intended to enable us to never miss a call and to enhance our ability to communicate with a broader audience. Overtime, however, both services have evolved to selective communications vehicles. We now determine who we choose to communicate with, and which telephone calls and emails get returned. This is a great solution for avoiding spam, but do other important conversations get lost or neglected as a consequence?

Personally, I am not a fan of the 30-second elevator pitch, or drive by communications. I look forward to the personal touch and to people interaction in my communications with others. If you, too, prefer conversations and building relationships not just connections, then here are some suggestions:

1. Spend less time on the 30-second elevator pitch, and more time one-on-one getting to know the other person. This should be your first priority at all networking events.
2. Routinely schedule breakfast meetings, lunches and after-hours events with family members, friends, business associates, etc. No agenda required, just to talk.
3. Make time for family dinners and those great conversations about nothing in particular.
4. Get to know at least one new person every week, and take time to really listen to their story.
5. Find a way to communicate more face-to-face or via the telephone versus by email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
6. Be sure to turn off the cell phone, laptop, PDA, pager, etc. and just enjoy the conversation!

If you miss those leisurely conversations around the dinner table, then bring them back, and make time for the people who are important in your life. The holidays are a great time to start.

If you have an opinion or any additional thoughts on this subject, please let me hear from you.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 John Carroll