Tweet

Develop an Efficient Sales Team

Guest post by: Joe Ippolito

Article Overview: How do you determine if your sales team's efforts to develop a selling opportunity are a wise investment of their time or a waste of their time?

Develop an Efficient Sales Team

How do you determine if your sales team's efforts to develop a selling opportunity are a wise investment of their time or a waste of their time? If you ask your salespeople for their assessment, they will always tell you they are investing their time.

Most salespeople would rather chase an opportunity that will never happen instead of taking on the difficult task of prospecting for new business. Working on an opportunity, regardless of how dubious, is more desirable than the pain of finding someone new. Chasing a prospect and keeping them alive makes salespeople feel good, stay busy and fill their database with information. It also keeps you on the hook. Is your management approach setting them up for this syndrome?

You expect them to report on a full pipeline of prospects during your monthly sales meetings. And if that's what you want, your salesperson will deliver exactly on that, whether real or imagined -- a pipeline full of suspects that has everyone feeling good about nothing.

As a sales leader, you must equip your salespeople with tools and techniques to assess a selling opportunity quickly and train them how to use these resources to develop the relationship with the prospect. The more quickly your sales people can disqualify a prospect, the sooner you can move on to new selling opportunities. The more time they spend with "tire kickers," the more time your competition spends with the real prospects. When it comes to managing prospects, getting them to say "no" is as important as getting them to say "yes."

The difficult part of accomplishing this approach is that you must train your salespeople to develop specific qualifying criteria and then be able to take the prospect through a structured questioning process.

Mastering these questioning skills will enable you to test for a prospect's commitment to move forward if the sales process gets stalled. Being able to stop wasting your time, and instead investing your time with those who could truly benefit from your product or service might give you a smaller pipeline, but one that leads to more deals. And a smaller pipeline with richer prospects equals a wise investment.

Related Articles
  The 'Being Efficient' Myth In Sales
  Leading Lead Generation & Inside Sales
  25 Ways to become a Great Team Leader
  What Is the Most Effective Quality Within Your Sales Team?
  Time Management Sales Effectiveness
  Team Work
  Sales Management-Coaching the Team
  Ten Strategic Actions To Improve Sales Staff Productivity
  The War to Attract and Retain Sales Talent
  Team Effort
  Employers: How do you ensure you attract the best talent?
  7 Steps to Improve Your Virtual Leadership and Virtual Team Effectiveness
  Motivation Through Teamwork
  Ten Strategic Actions For Commercially Marketing New Technology
  The 3 Keys to Successful Sales Management
  Forming a Successful Sales Team
  What is Effective Time Management?
  Project Managers and Project Management Software
  What should my sales team expect from a successful Sales Coach?
  Sales Training, without supporting Sales Management Training,

Article Tags: Pipeline, Prospects, Questioning Skills, Sales



Related Forum Posts
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing
Don't give up 40%! - Congrats on this milestone Evan... I agree with outsourcing any function that makes the business owner a Front-line worker as this is not best use of your time. I also agree with Louis that 40% is too much to give up. 40% may work if you have surpassed your income goals from the website and after you pay the 40% you are still within your monthly income goals. Would an RFP/RFI (Request For Proposal/Information) to companies like this Website Sales Team be a call you need to make?
LEADERS - L- Loyal E- Eager to learn and serve A- Active D- Delegate E- Efficient R- Reliable S- Smart
Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
Re: Anyone Uses Elance.com? Guru.com? Rentacoder.com? - I've had quite a bit of success on oDesk.com. I've never used Elance so I can't compare. I like oDesk.com 'cos I get to sort thru people (e.g. within a certain bid range) with a single click. I find their help response very quick and I like the oDesk Team software that "providers" must install. This gives me the Buyer more insight as to what I am paying for. The Team software takes screenshots of the Providers screen on 10 min increments so I can see that the person is infact doing work for me.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Attracting Passionate Employees

How To Be A Management Legend

Severance and Separation Agreements

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.