Every chapter of my book Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth ends with the section Take Action Now. Here are my actions for sales.
We put an extraordinary amount of effort and worry into the outcome of sales—the revenue it generates. Sales success comes from focusing on the activities that lead to the revenue we want. The only way to determine the activities that work is to discover and document your successful sales process.
People sell to people. Only by active listening and coaching can you help your sales people achieve higher performance. Use these challenges to help you focus on the sales activities and conversations that will generate revenue:
- If you don’t have a formal sales process, lead a project in the next month to extract the best practices from your top sales people. Use this to create and implement a sales process in the next 90 days.
- Create measurable sales activities that must be completed in order to move an individual deal ahead and measure these activities over time.
- In the next week, listen to at least five sales calls with your sales manager, providing feedback to the sales person and your sales manager.
