The Stats:
48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect.
80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the first meeting. 44% of sales people give up after 1 follow-up.
91% of happy customers say they’d give a referral. Only 11% of sales people ask for referrals.
Through working with our customers on improving their business development and sales processes it’s been our experience that approximately 75% of sales people under perform. 25% of sales people are hopeless because not only are they ineffective they are also unteachable. In short they should be doing something else. We’ve given up trying to understand the reasons owners keep them on in the business but the cold facts are:
They cost a Salary “€’s” + Vehicle Cost “More €’s” + Technology (More €€€’s) = Lots of €€€’s
….most of all they are not delivering so you must do something to change that.
For the rest of your sales team what can you do immediately to increase their productivity?
1. Start a regular sales meeting – Most companies do not have a regular sales meeting
2. Review sales and prospecting activity
3. Break down the targets for your sales team into bit size chunks. Most sales reps do not know how to do this. So you must do it for them and show them how to do it for themselves.
4. Most sales reps do not know how to prospect! Scary but true. You must show them how to do it.
5. Train your people on your products. A no-brainer, right? Wrong! More than half of your sales team will not know all your products and as a result can and will only sell the products they are familiar with. The upshot is that when they know all the products you will see a lift in their sales.
6. Sales people need to know what your “Customer Bulls-Eye” is. They think they can sell everything to everyone. Fact is, you can only make a profitable sale to a narrow segment of your marketplace.
7. Get rid of underperforming sales people, they demotivate everyone else, they are the one apple that needs to be moved on.
If you do nothing else do a few of these simple things and you will see the benefits.
