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Developing a Proactive Sales Strategy

Guest post by: Dr. Rick Johnson

Article Overview: In today's economy customers have less time to meet with you and they are much more skeptical which results in anxiety, stress and feelings of frustration on the part of your sales force. This leads to a reactive mindset instead of a proactive mindset. A sales person's mindset is powerful and it has a direct impact on self-esteem, levels of expectations and ultimately leads to poor performance, call reluctance and an attitude of complacency. Opportunities are missed and relationship equity with many customers may suffer.

Developing a Proactive Sales Strategy

We have been through and will continue to go through tough economic times. This has created challenges for our sales force that many have never experienced before. These challenges will continue throughout 2011. Developing a proactive sales strategy is absolutely essential if you are going to gain market share during this business environment. To just make do with existing resources with no proactive developmental sales strategy is a formula for failure.

In today's economy customers have less time to meet with you and they are much more skeptical which results in anxiety, stress and feelings of frustration on the part of your sales force. This leads to a reactive mindset instead of a proactive mindset. A sales person's mindset is powerful and it has a direct impact on self-esteem, levels of expectations and ultimately leads to poor performance, call reluctance and an attitude of complacency. Opportunities are missed and relationship equity with many customers may suffer.

Check the Attitude of Your Sales Force

If you or your sales manager suspects that you are becoming reactive instead of being proactive with your current sales strategy, ask yourself these questions.

• Does prospecting meet with reluctance on the part of your sales force?

• Is your sales force on the defensive when dealing with prospects or even existing customers?

• Is your sales force simply reacting to incoming inquiries instead of proactively generating new opportunities by finding the customer's pain and offering solutions?

• Does your sales force spend most of their time calling on the same unqualified pipeline hopefuls without any results?

• Does your sales force feel that prospecting is a waste of time?

• Do you hear a lot of whining about the economy?

• Does your sales manager have a structured coaching process for your sales force?

To be truly proactive and follow best practice involves focus, process, discipline and accountability. The sales team at most companies consist of all the individuals involved in the sales/marketing channel that serves the end user. Ideally, it should be a coordinated network, with strong alignment of individual activities with focus on objectives, process for continuous improvement, discipline toward utilizing best practice throughout the sales process and accountability for performance at all levels. Treating dealers, retail outlets, big box or direct customers as partners, rather than customers, means that you must be interested in what they are selling, and how they make money and not just how much they buy.

The Proactive Strategy

Creating a proactive sales strategy includes planning sales growth, profiling targeted accounts, executing account strategies and using objective feedback to continuously improve performance and drive accountability. Proactive selling is the process of selecting high potential customer accounts to receive intense sales focus. Goal setting translates that high potential into achievable numeric objectives, i.e. revenue and margin growth. That's the basis of proactive selling.

An account action plan ensures that the sales person is proactively pursuing sales growth and that there is a solid basis for expecting account goals to be met even on those accounts that are classified as prospects. By monitoring these action plans, both the sales manager and sales person can manage activities rather than wait for results. Creating a proactive sales strategy is not a complex process. It is built on best practice sales principles. However, commitment on the part of the sales manager and the sales person is essential to success.

Where Sales Professionals Go Wrong...

Unfortunately a few traditional sales people do certain things, and fail to do others that quickly erode these important factors. Although most sales professionals believe they have some sort of "system" or "selling strategy" , many in fact are unknowingly following a system dictated by the prospect and find themselves in "reactive" or response" mode. Most sales people will admit that they don't always challenge the norm and ask open ended, pointed questions. Although they know what should be done, or what could be done to turn the tables, they fail to do so. Why?

Somewhere during the selling process sales people end up going down a rabbit trail due to being in the reactionary mode. In other words they lose focus, discipline and have difficulty getting back on track. This is where they begin to sell reactively instead of proactively. It takes a solid sales instinct to avoid this pothole. The moment they fall into a reactionary mode and forget about finding the real pain and providing solutions is the moment that the game is over. Upon hearing that first objection, obstacle or barrier they resort to being defensive as they anticipate additional questions that outline the reasons why the customer won't buy from them.

Objections are Opportunities

A sales person with a proactive mentality welcomes these objections as opportunities to further explore the areas of the customer's pain. Sales representatives with the proactive mindset are successful today because they gain the majority of their targeted customers business. They manage the relationship and continuously build relationship equity because they are always looking for opportunities to provide solutions and opportunities for the customer to generate more profit for their business. That's what proactive selling is all about. It's not about the sales person's success; it's about the customer's success.

Proactive selling is about value and how your customers are going to make a profit. You can no longer just sell yourself and expect everything to fall into place. Customers are facing the same economic forces that you are. You must bring every resource your company has into play and leverage those resources to create competitive advantage by offering solutions and opportunity for the customer to meet or exceed their internal expectations.

Learn to really listen to your customers. Let them talk and when there seems to be a pause in the conversation resist the temptation to start talking again. Chances are good that the customer has more to say. The quieter you are the more they will tell you. Listen long enough with a few strategically placed questions and the customer might just tell you exactly how to gain more of their business.

The Economy is the Economy

The state of the economy is a fact. How you feel about that fact and what it means to you personally is a belief. Your beliefs have a major impact on your attitude.

Beliefs that drive sales behaviors are the keys to the development of a proactive sales strategy. If you believe that this economic crisis can provide you with opportunities than your attitude will drive proactive behavior.

During economic turbulence, salespeople must be problem solvers able to generate solutions for customers in their time of need. Therefore, they must possess a great deal of knowledge about the customers' business. They must actually define what those needs are because the customer may not know, nor take the time to explain if they do know. Customers want you to have the knowledge and intelligence to comprehend and analyze their problems before showing up at the door. Customers will listen and buy from the salesperson that finds the "pain" and takes it away." This is the platform for a proactive sales strategy.

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Article Tags: call reluctance, complacency, frustration, proactive sales, sales strategy



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