For many people, a meeting with their financial advisor is either one of two experiences. Either their portfolio looks good and they are feeling confident about being able to accomplish their financial goals. Or their portfolio looks terrible and they are worried about what to do to rectify the problem. Either way, the financial advisor does not let you leave the meeting without first discussing your current goals and motivations, your current situation, key milestones moving forward and when you need to hit them, and laying out a plan to make sure you accomplish what you are setting out to do. What he does not do is say "let's just wing it and see where the market goes." If having a plan and building the right structure and foundation works in your personal life, why aren't you creating the same thing in your professional life? What are you doing to make sure you and your sales team will be successful and accomplish your goals? Why would “winging it” even be an option for you? Why would you leave the growth of your company to chance?
I know what you’re saying to yourself right now, “But I already do really great at sales and we’ve grown revenue fast doing what we’re already doing. Why can’t I just go out there and find some good sales people and tell them what I do and have them do that?”
Here’s the problem with this approach. While you may be doing a lot of good things that have helped you grow and perhaps grow quickly over time, you are the owner/president/CEO of your business and have what we call a lot of “non-transferrable” skill sets right now. You naturally close some deals just because of your title alone. You are what I call a “wing-it” star – you have become really good at selling over time based on skill sets you have developed and the experiences you’ve had, but if someone were to ask you to take them through a process of what you do to close a deal, you would not be able to articulate it in a way that would be easy for someone else to understand it and apply it consistently and with similar results. On top of that, you may not know the difference between effective training and coaching of your people to get them to do the right things and apply it consistently to achieve desired results. You think you should just go out there and find people “like you” to sell. Can I share a secret with you? There isn’t another you out there for you to hire and train.
What are the things you need to put in place so that you overcome these challenges and have the right structure and tools to support your people?
- An effective hiring and onboarding process that uses the right criteria to find strong sales people that can sell in your environment.
- A sales process that is milestone-based, that produces consistent effective, results, and your people can be held accountable to.
- Pipeline tools and metrics that are aligned with your sales process to ensure that your people are effectively applying the sales process and truly qualifying opportunities. You want your sales revenue projections to be accurate and not based on guesswork, right?
- Sales KPI’s and metrics to ensure that your organization is on the right path to achieve its revenue goals and to course-correct quickly when you fall off the path.
- Daily sales behavior plans and metrics to drive new opportunities and revenue into your organization.
- Weekly checkpoints with your people to hold them accountable to achieving their weekly behavior goals to keep them on the path to achieving their sales goals and personal goals.
How do you measure up when checking off the list of the items above? How effective are the tools you have in place right now?
Don’t leave your company’s future sales growth to chance. Set your goals, build a plan, and make sure you have the right structure and tools in place to make your growth predictable.
Need help setting up the sales structure and tools mentioned above for your organization? Contact one of Lushin’s sales consultants at the link below and they’ll be happy to reach out to you to have a discussion on how to help you.
