Achieve Your 2012 Sales Goals!

 Management, Sales  4 Responses »
Dec 102011
 
7,440 Views   


Achieve Your 2012 Sales Goals!

If you need to design a business plan to successfully initiate a business… Shouldn’t you do the same for ongoing sales success? If so, what would your measurement of sales success be? Tough question isn’t it? Let me help with a comprehensive sales success plan.

2012 Sales Success Plan

1. Targets and Goals
You have to put some thought into what and where your time and energies should go.

Personal Income: Put some real thought into this. Don’t put some obscure number here to impress others. This is the starting point to insure your numbers are accurate and attainable to achieve your personal income goal.

Sales Bookings: What do you need in new leads , new appointments, new presentations and/or proposal deliveries, and of course sales closings per month to hit your personal income target?

  • What would your average 30-day running sales pipeline need to be to achieve these goals?

Vertical Market: What vertical markets should you focus on? What worked for you before might not work with the current economic conditions.

Top 10 Companies: Pick 10 companies that you want to focus on. This is above and beyond normal activity. Closing a percentage of these would create a very successful year.

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Understand the Opportunity and Become Lucky!

 Employment, Sales  No Responses »
Dec 092011
 
3,769 Views   


Understand the Opportunity and Become Lucky!

How do you feel about your sales career so far? Do you feel exploited, disappointed, or even depressed with your current situation. When you took your job, at first, did it feel like an opportunity to get ahead, get to that next level, but now it seems less than. On the other hand, possibly you feel you’ve never really received any breaks, any opportunities, in your career. You’re stuck with a job… a means to an end for a paycheck.

Candidly, I believe everyone has had some sort of “break” or “opportunity” presented to them at some time in their lives. In some cases multiple times. So why do some of us feel we’ve had none? The answer is actually pretty simple. We don’t fully understand what an opportunity is! Let me explain.

Perception of Opportunity
Here are two typically negative experiences where both of these people didn’t see it that way. Why?

    Example 1: After letting a sales person go she commented to me that she felt thankful for the opportunity I had given her.

    Example 2: After closing a business the parent of one of my employees wanted me to know that their son had felt thankful for the opportunity my company had given him.

It’s much more than just seeing the “glass half full”. These two understood what most don’t. Any experience is an opportunity if learned from and taken advantage of. I have found this to be true in my personal life as well.

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Are You Leading by Example?

 Management  3 Responses »
Dec 042011
 
3,186 Views   


Are You Leading by Example?

Connecting with my manager network this last week a recurring theme transpired. Managers of sales teams all over the country were frustrated with the reaction and response their sales members were having to the economic challenges. In almost all cases their salespeople were not making any real changes – participating in new ideas and/or offerings – but were actually “hunkering down” to weather the financial storm. They had offered their groups new types of training as well as new offerings to broaden their appeal and success. Most didn’t take them up on the offer. Why?

Our nature, typically, is to blame others for our failures. “I am not selling because of what others have done to the economy right? I have no control of this… so I’ll wait until things get better and then do what was successful before.” What if the recovery takes years or even decades?

“Don’t manage – lead change before you have to.” – Jack Welch

Management is not exempt from this either. As a manager it is tempting to blame our sales teams and not look in the mirror. Are we wrapping our arms around “doing things different” or are we really “hunkering down” and doing the same things we have always done? I was. Don’t get me wrong… I was training, supporting, and doing my managerial duties to the fullest. Or so I thought.

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The Sales Power of Self Expediency

 Sales  No Responses »
Dec 032011
 
7,554 Views   


The Sales Power of Self Expediency

A common trait of top producing sales professionals is their understanding of self expediency. It’s like they have an internal alarm that goes off at certain times and/or under certain conditions. This is different than how to build expediency in the sale. This is expediency in goals and performance.

Setting goals is great but in just doing that they’re worthless. There has to be some action. For action to take place there has to be motivation. Ultimately motivation needs some sort of expediency.

Self expediency has to be a call to action. A call based on a threshold set by you. You know what your activity should be to be successful. At the very least you’ve been told what those numbers are. Yet month after month the average sales person doesn’t invest the time to hit the activity for success. Why?

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Sell and Forget a Business Suicide

 Business, Management  6 Responses »
Dec 012011
 
2,877 Views   


Sell and Forget a Business Suicide

I just purchased a used mini-van for my wife a couple of weekends ago. She needed an automatic due to medical issues and was in Seattle for the operation. I had a week before I needed to get the vehicle to her. The mini-van needed detailed, rear bumper repaired, leather and heated seats added, and floor mats. I paid what they asked and was pre-approved. Pretty easy sale. While signing the papers I was asked to take the vehicle now and then bring back later. I resisted as this was inconvenient and unnecessary. I just wanted to pick it up when all the work was finished. Ultimately I was convinced to take it now.

As I was signing the paperwork I asked the manager who was going to be held accountable for making sure that all the items that needed to be done would be scheduled as I would be leaving with the van in a week. Looking a little confused at the question he eventually assured me my salesman and/or he would do just that.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” -Jeff Bezos

Monday, Tuesday, nothing scheduled. Wednesday I dropped by because the temporary tag had expired. I had never bought from a dealer where they didn’t provide the plates. I was told that I needed to go during business hours and do this myself somewhere else. Starting to get frustrated… I asked where we were on getting the add-ons scheduled which he replied he would try to get the mats and bumper fixed Friday.

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About Chris Lott
Chris Lott My name is Chris Lott and my passions are business mentoring, sales training, technical sales, management, and social media marketing. I am widely recognized for my efforts in the telecommunications, data, and sales success industries.

After years of motivating and training sales organizations I thought it made sense to share my experiences with others. Thus SalesBlog! was born!   Read more

 

 

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The easiest way to contact me is through email using my contact form. You might also DM (direct message) me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn. My Voice number is (208) 724-7029, and you can occasionally find me on Skype as r.chris.lott.
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