How to Make Salespeople 25% More Productive in 90 Days or Less

You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:

• bad business if you win them (too much trouble, not worth the revenue)
• lost to a competitor
• lost to no decision

If you’ve been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.

You’ve heard the acronyms. BANT, for example: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. There are others. You may have worked with your team to define yours precisely.

Still, close ratios are erratic and deals are unpredictable. Sales people, trying to make quota, have little choice but to spend enormous amounts of time and money pursuing them. They can’t help it if many of the wrong prospects are in their sales funnel.

Right? 

Not right.

Most companies use an approach to qualification criteria that fails in at least three crucial areas. It is:

• Myopic: qualification criteria are driven narrowly by what they need
• Remedial: qualification is used only to correct poor performers
• Static: qualification criteria doesn’t change; yet market forces are continually changing

There is a far more productive approach to qualification than any you have probably heard of. Companies who fail to update this critical part of their sales process will continue wasting enormous amounts of time and money – which they probably cannot afford in this economy.

On Thursday, February 26, we will present a new and more effective approach to solving this problem:

In this webinar, you’ll learn an approach that has achieved some astonishing results:
•    90%+ forecast accuracy where ever it has been used
•    Works at the beginning of the sales cycle, not just at the end
•    Actually helps salespeople sell by influencing their decision making strategy

Rather than being myopic, remedial, and static, this simple new approach increases your company’s vision into customers, enables all of your salespeople to be more strategic, and changes with market forces.

It will lean out your sales funnel and improve the quality of your team's sales opportunities. And that will certainly increase your revenue, profitability, and success.

This will be the Read more

How to Design a Sales Process Guidebook Launch

A Starter Guide on How to Design a Sales Process

Michael Webb and Robert Ferguson demonstrate many years of experience in this powerful synopsis of their approach for designing B2B sales processes, and getting them implemented successfully. This presentation introduces the fundamental principles required for effectively managing and improving any sales and marketing process. This makes a powerful Read more

How to Design Your Sales Process to Help Customers Buy Now

Everyone’s attention these days seems to be riveted on sales.

And rightly so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several people working with a large organization that is very concerned about its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.

No surprise there! The economic crisis affects large and small companies: everyone needs to know where next month’s revenue will come from.

Forecasting sales has always been difficult, but, in a threatening market like this, the problem is compounded by the need to get enough people to buy in the first place!  This is a scary challenge, especially with the state of the sales process in most organizations. Ask yourself:

• How much thought went into the design of your company’s sales process?
• Was your sales process designed for the kind of market we have today?
• Does anyone really care how a salesperson got the business, so long as they actually get it?

If you are like most companies, the answers to those questions are:

• “It wasn’t ‘designed’; someone just sort of did what seemed to work at the time”
• “No”
• “Nope!”

So, with the sales process so much in the spotlight, what are you supposed to do? How can you figure out what changes will have the right effects? How can you get everyone to realize that improving the sales process is the solution?

On Thursday of this week, Robert Ferguson and I will present the first of two initial webinars around design principles and tips you need to make your sales flow like water – and get results fast. Part one is this Thursday, February 19:

“How to Design a Sales Process

For Customer Value and Continuous Improvement"

Guidebook Launch Webinar
Thursday February 19, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/feb-19-webinar

Visit that page now, and register for this unusual and timely event.

Part two will be next Thursday, February 26. More on that event soon.

Michael J Webb
February 17, 2009

How to Design Your Sales Process to Help Customers Buy Now

Everyone’s attention these days seems to be riveted on sales.

And rightly so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several people working with a large organization that is very concerned about its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.

No surprise there! The economic crisis affects large and small companies: everyone needs to know where next month’s revenue will come from. Forecasting sales has always been difficult, but, in a threatening market like this, the problem is compounded by the Read more

“Systemic” Salesmanship is Needed Now More Than Ever

To SPIF! professional members: A few years ago, I asked my son if he had thought about selling as a profession some day. The look on his face could have peeled wallpaper. I absorbed similar uncomfortable feelings about “selling” when I Read more

How Does Your Company Define Salesmanship?

by Michael J Webb (pdf version) Almost every executive I’ve talked to in the last seven years has acknowledged that their sales and marketing operations are a mess. They struggle to find enough prospects, yet many of their Read more

Sales Kaizen Guidebook Launch

Sales and Marketing Kaizen Webinar Series

Improve Your Sales Process in a Way Your Customer Will Love

The tactical and practical guide to improving your sales process. If you have only one chance to get it right, kaizen is the approach you need to use. The approach, and the guidebook, provide a means of identifying the real problems, engaging the team, and generating Read more

How to Generate and Sustain a 25% Increase in Sales Opportunities in 90 Days or Less

Marketing Lead Generation Process Improvement

Michael Webb and Brian Carroll, author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” describe how to identify the causes of not enough sales opportunities, and how to implement a kaizen event that will increase the quantity and quality of leads by at least 25% in 90 days or Read more

Book Review – Introduction to Sales Process Improvement: Gaining More of the Right Customers at Higher Margins and Lower Costs with Lean and Six Sigma

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., $84, 182 pages, June 20, 2005, www.salesperformance.com. Many companies would like to be more scientific about sales and marketing, but fear causing more problems than results. Now, a unique and path-breaking work by Michael Webb enables those companies to apply Read more

How to establish a clear cause and effect relationship between promotional expenditure and sales

By Justin Roff-Marsh Over lunch, a CEO recently admitted to me that his financial controller was using his organisation’s profits to build quite a substantial commercial property portfolio. When I asked if this was best use of his organisation’s free cashflow, he smiled, “How Read more