4 Tips to Help Your Team Build Sales Momentum Blog Feature
Steve Bookbinder

By: Steve Bookbinder on August 10th, 2016

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4 Tips to Help Your Team Build Sales Momentum

Sales Tips | Sales Management

Being a sales manager can be incredibly frustrating or extremely rewarding, depending on how the wind is blowing. To make sure your team is continuously headed in the right direction you need to put the wind in their sails by helping them build sales momentum.

Sail on a boat

Here are 4 ways you can talk to your salespeople about building and maintaining momentum:

1. Keep Score

When salespeople get to more leads, calls, emails, etc., they meet more people, learn how to optimize their approach more quickly, and end up making more sales, more often. However, most sellers miss their goals and many never even move in the right direction.

Why?

They spend too much time doing the wrong things. To consistently get the right things done they should begin by simply trying to get more things done.

You’ll need to carefully track the most critical activities that move the needle for your team: prospecting outreaches, customers spoken to, proposals sent, contracts out the door, etc. Then create a scorecard with a daily activity score to reflect the subactions within those categories and establish minimum daily standards.

Tell your team: The day can’t end until you take these actions, get these results, and get this score! You’ll help your team get to more things when you use this different kind of time management system.

2. Future Me

Make sure your team spends time each day helping the future version of themselves.

How many sales will that seller need to close each month/quarter? In order to consistently hit the goal they’ll need 3 kinds of sales to close on a regular basis:

  • the big sale,
  • the existing customer upsell,
  • and everyone’s favorite sale: (the ironically named) easy sale.

The third kind of sale is really easy - at the end. That’s the part where the customer contacts your company! The part before that is the hard part. That’s when the seller is doing personal marketing, combining social media, email marketing, phone prospecting, and networking.

Are your sellers managing their time to fit personal marketing into every day? To do this right they need to consider these questions:

  • Who am I trying to reach?
  • What are they thinking about right now?
  • When they want to know something that’ll make their job, department, or company better, where do they go online?
  • Who do they talk with?
  • Who do they listen to?
  • What platforms, sites, blogs, or videos do they and their peers engage with?
  • How many inbound leads will future me need each week?

Before your team can personalize their personal marketing plans they need to make sure they are asking the right questions. It can take a year or more for some of those actions to percolate into inbound leads. Don’t regret not having your team start today.

3. Speed Dating

Nothing builds momentum like first appointments.

Psychologically the first appointment is a new chance to get things right, to find the right customer, to ask the right questions, and present in the best light. Arithmetically, more first appointments means more sales. Strategically, first appointments minimize the danger of getting too busy with unqualified prospects because having lots of first appointments forces the seller to get right to the qualifying questions.

So what can your team focus on to determine whether a prospect is qualified? It’s not that person’s need or budget, but rather their ability to make a buying decision soon.

Without enough appointments to sift through, your sellers will be tempted to promise everyone they meet a proposal. However, with enough appointments they’ll learn to qualify better and spend time with the right people while nurturing – rather than hounding, stalking, and wasting time with all the others.

4. Crazy Busy

Encourage your salespeople to get a CLEW by being crazy busy, without going crazy.

For me personally, this was the breakthrough. I realized that I need to get to 4 things everyday:

  • Critical things: a prioritized “to-do” list
  • Learning: things that have to be read or watched and understood
  • Exercise: physical activity to get the extra energy needed to maintain a faster pace and help problem solve
  • Writing: things that have to be written

Put it all together and it spells CLEW (pronounced CLUE), which is the report I look at every day.

Your sellers need to focus on the critical things, such as prospecting and administration. They should also continuously be learning more about the industry, what information prospects are looking for, news from your marketing team, and evaluating their own past sales efforts. Writing will help them improve their outreach and credibility in the industry. Set an example by keeping yourself accountable for these tasks as well.

When you share these 4 concepts with your salespeople you will see tangible results. If they try to adopt these principles---or they ignore them – either way, you will know right away. Make sure your entire team adopts them and puts wind in their sails (sales).

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About Steve Bookbinder

Steve Bookbinder is the CEO and sales expert at DMTraining. He has delivered more than 5,000 workshops and speeches to clients all over the world and has trained, coached, and managed more than 50,000 salespeople and managers. Steve continuously refreshes his training content to reflect his latest first-hand observations of salespeople across industries and regions. Through him, participants in his workshops and coaching sessions learn the best practices of today’s most successful sellers and managers across industries. Steve understands that sales is a competitive game. To outperform competitors and our own personal best results, we need to out-prospect, out-qualify, out-present and out-negotiate everyone else, not merely know how to sell. Through his specialty programs in Pipeline Management, Personal Marketing, Great First Meetings, 2nd-level Questioning, Sales Negotiating, and Sales Coaching, Steve trains sales teams to master the skills they need to overcome the challenges they face in today’s world… and keep improving results year over year.

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