Five Tips for Sellers in 2021
SALES SUCCESS comes in many forms; most often noted by revenue growth. Creating value (revenue) is a dynamic, competitive and challenging proposition… which requires effective market engagement.
Here are five tips for sellers in 2021 so that you can drive SALES SUCCESS in your territory this year:
Clarify your target contact. Your value proposition and sales process likely has a limited set of decision makers. For example, do you know which role invests in sales training? Typically, it’s a sales executive with the title of VP Sales. As best that you can, isolate those personas / roles / titles into a very limited set.
Focus your prospecting almost exclusively on those contacts. In the sales training example, if the seller focused exclusively on engaging VP Sales in priority markets, the impacts of the focus would be tremendous. Imagine having 2-3X the number of significant exchanges each week, just because you decided to focus on your true decision maker? It works.
Reverse engineer your Comp Plan. Whether you work for yourself or a company, you have a business model, selling cycles and metrics. Do the math to reverse engineer how you get paid. Ie, Goal is $1M in revenue, with average deal size of $100K. Your metrics show that only one in three opportunities will actually close, that it takes ten leads to create an opportunity and that you typically need to make fifty calls to uncover each lead. The math shows us that in order to hit $1M revenue goal, you’ll need ten deals. Based on the close rate of “one-in-three,” ten deals will require thirty opportunities, and each opportunity requiring ten leads. You need 300 leads and you need fifty calls to acquire each lead. That’s roughly 25 leads a month and you have to make fifty calls to get a lead. There’s 21 business days in a month. You need to be making 15 calls in the morning and ten calls in the afternoon - everyday. That’s tough news. But the good news, is that IF YOU DO THAT, YOU WILL HIT YOUR NUMBER. It’s called “WORK” for a reason.
Refine your work plan. Improve your material regularly. Be inspired by others. Evolve your message. Listen for market feedback and adapt. Your metrics will get better. The work will become easier and more rewarding.
Persist with gratitude. Look, you can approach your work scenario with a miserable or positive attitude. As the late, great Zig Ziglar once said: “Positive thinking won’t accomplish anything, but it will make everything better.” Work the plan and persist with gratitude. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
If you are a professional seller, embrace the work. Being bold in the market and handling rejection like a leader is not always easy, but that’s the call of a seller.
Visit www.EmpoweredSalesTraining.com to download the free sales guide: The Top Reason Sales Professionals Fail on the Phone.