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Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith Become an Author

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Sales professionals due to quotas and goals always seem to push their sales skills through their actions (behaviors) specific to achieving the goal to increase sales around and during these times:

* Beginning of the year
* End of the year
* End of each quarter
* End of each month

During the days to weeks leading up to these critical dates, the behaviors of sales professionals can be observed generating a lot of motion and activities. However, these actions may be contributing to their confusion and their inability to increase sales.

What happens for many sales professionals is that they are living in a state of confusion. They simply confusion motion with progress and activity with results as my colleague and friend Doug Brown has said so often.

Motion is any action. Picking up the phone and dialing anyone is a motion. However, progress is directed motion toward a goal in this case sales. Calling a qualified potential customer (follow-up) is directed motion.

Activity is a set of motion actions grouped together. An example would be calling a list of qualified potential customers and leaving voice mail messages. Results are the outcomes of directed motions. Knowing how many appointments were scheduled is an example of a result.

Confusion is probably due to a lack of one of more of the following:

* Vision
* Values
* Mission
* Sales Plan
* Marketing Pan
* Customer Loyalty Plan
* W.A.Y. S.M.A.R.T. goals
* Dashboard indicators
* Poor communication between management and sales team

When sales professionals confuse motion with progress and activity with results, the organization suffers not to mention these hard working sales people. To reduce this confusion is a team effort between:

* Executive team
* Middle management
* Sales department
* Sales team
* Individual sales professional

Of course, many teams do not function at their full capacity because their talents are not properly identified and not integrated specific to the entire team.

Sales Coaching Tip: If you want to increase sales, then make sure you have removed the confusion. Invest in a performance appraisal that can assess your sales professionals and overall sales team. By taking such action, you will realize greater sales results.

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