WHAT IS THE TRUE COST OF HAVING UNTRAINED SALES STAFF?

Placing a great salesperson is easy – placing a great salesperson in THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT isn’t plain sailing.

Read our guest blog from Mike at Persona Sales Training and understand why having bespoke sales training for your staff is the best option.

Finance Director: “What if we spend all this money training salespeople and they leave?”

Sales Director: “ What if we don’t and they stay!”

In the last few years of working with both large and small companies, what observations can we make in terms of really increasing sales and profit and cutting costs. Any of which you can choose to consider or dismiss…

Understand or calculate the real cost of sales failure/turnover

What are the components?

• Slow or negligible performance from start date
• Decline in business from established people
• Down – Up curve in replacement/new start
• Never reaching real targets
• Low average Order Value/ High discount/Little or no up-sell
• Loss of customer base
• Little or no new business wins

There are others I’m sure but for one of our customers we estimated upwards of £250K minimum [yes, I’m being conservative!]

Contributing factors to unrealised sales potential

There can be many however we should consider 4 key components for successful high performers:

1. Comprehensive product knowledge and competence to desired level before they start
2. Modern sales/helping customers to buy competence – learned and practised to start level
3. Total competence in Planning and managing sales activities with special focus on Prospecting and pipeline management
4. Motivation and Attitude assessment [including profiling] – will to win and self -improvement/desire to learn

The rush to employ the best of what we have seen or somebody else’s Farmer, Plodder, Account manager usually fails. In the world of today it’s time to develop and grow your own successful team with a systematic one-year flight plan.

Sales Essentials for today’s UK market

Here are some winning key skills/competencies we believe essential for the B2B market:

• Development of well qualified prospect list [clear conversion metrics]
• Great forecasting competency based on key win probability factors [including Gutometer] – translated to CRM
• Initial meeting process/agenda – How we help people to buy!
• Story – telling to get prospect focus and perspective
• Value translation skills and techniques
• Real knowledge of integrating financial solutions in a process and their use in cost justification and the business case
• Prevention and management of No Decision and Stalled outcomes – the REAL competition
• Absolute ability to justify differences in price/value [for Up-Sell and dealing with other suppliers!]
• How bundling up can be a winner
• Prospecting – yes, we’ll say it again! All our clients start from not enough prospects leading to desperate activities by all!

There are others I know but if we’ve rung some alarm bells maybe it’s time to look at how to take step forward to long term increased effectiveness?

The Sales 2.0 real cost and effectiveness on sales results

We still haven’t found one B2B customer who can sit back and rely on marketing/e-shots/google/twitter etc. to fill their sales pipeline…

Lest we forget “People buy from people they like” and “For their reasons – not ours!”

Think back, didn’t all your great sales start with a relationship first?? Let’s just get better at developing a great relationship where they see you as an asset and a partner. Then you help them through a process to buy the very best solution…

For more information on recruitment or sales training please contact us on info@thcrecruitment.co.uk