According to Huthwaite research, you can improve your sales performance or the performance of your sales team if you:
- Choose Behaviour: Identify specific actions you believe might tie in with sales success.
- Watch for that Behaviour during Sales Calls: how often does the behaviour happen? Keep track of the statistics.
- Divide Sales Calls into 2 groups: successes and failures. (Obviously, this is subjective, depending on how you define success.) Then, you will have two groups: one with the behaviour and sales success and the other with the behaviour and sales failure.
- Analyse Frequency Differences: if the successes outnumber the failures then the Behaviour likely is a factor of sales success.
In theory, that's a simple way to go about analysing and improving sales process.
In practice it isn't.
For example, Huthwaite uncovered some surprising things:
- Most of the closing techniques taught do not work.
- Closing techniques which work for small accounts will actually lose you business as the sale grows larger.
- Open and closed probing questions may work for small sales but they won't work for bigger sales.
- In major sales, objection-handling skills will contribute little to your sales effectiveness.
- The benefit-from-feature approach to selling can be very successful for small sales but it will fail entirely with larger sales.
At Spirited, we recommend a TARMARVALPRODA process, summarized as follows:
- Identify your company's Target Markets (typically 2 to 4 TARMARs)
- Identify the specific Value Propositions linked to your Target Markets (1 VALPRO for each TARMAR)
- Confirm your company's Unique Selling Proposition, also known as Differential Advantage (DA)...and sometimes called Distinct Advantage
- Set Marketing Programs for each of your Target Markets
- Set Sales Programs for each of your Target Markets (to maximize success these must be perfectly aligned with your Marketing Programs)
- Set roles for and assign your Sales people in a manner that ensures their individual skills align with the requirements of selling to the different Target Markets
- Set SMART sales goals for each sales person
- Establish clear sales process, using multi-media communication [writing, audio-visual, etc]
- Train your sales people regularly: help them understand how sales activity meshes with marketing activity and your company's goals. Repeat your sales training messages using different perspectives and communication media.
- Establish sales-performance reporting process (Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Vital Sign reporting)
- Do that sales-performance reporting in groups and one-on-one: as you do it celebrate lessons learned (whether they were learned through failure or success). Be specific. Don’t accept ambiguity.
- Ensure your sales department has a Can-Do Culture
Link to TARMARVALPRODA
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rickbaker.ca ·
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rick baker ·
"Your sales success isn't an issue of what you know; rather, it's the result of who you are! Who you are is the sum total of your knowledge, values, ethical standards, self-beliefs, emotional and spiritual strengths, and other things known and unknown." Ron Willingham ‘The Inner Game Of Selling’, (2006)