Our Articles on Communication
- One way to get that urgency instilled in your remote staff is to set the same mindset and standards for them as you do for your on-site employees. In a sense, you’re then melding your office and virtual environments and making them a unified whole
- One way that technology becomes lost is through employees or staff who “pretend they know” when in truth they don’t know. They may actually believe they know everything already and as a result, aren’t able to learn anything new. This is the kind of person who will max out—they will hit a ceiling as far as what they can do and produce operating with that mindset.
- Another way that technology can become lost is, interestingly enough, when the necessity to solve problems disappears or is greatly reduced. Exterior agencies, such as the government, slip in and solve various issues for an organization or for an individual. No matter how problems are solved exteriorly, however, no real forward progress or innovation is made without it being propelled by necessity.
- One more way that technology can become lost is through the utter inaction that resulted from the pandemic. Through the worst part of the lockdown, people were sitting home, and businesses reduced their services, hours, and delivery. Pandemic restrictions caused inaction in the general society.
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Demanding Standards for a Call Center
Will outsourcing to a call center improve customer service?. Increasingly, today, companies are looking at call centers as an alternative to in-house customer service. The question is, will outsourcing improve your customer service? The answer: only if you guide it there.
To start with, you must demand the standards of a call center, standards that will equal or exceed the ones you require of your own customer service.
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The Call Center is an Extension of Your Team
In our first blog this month, we discussed the necessity of setting and enforcing standards for call center agents. Now we go one step further and examine the fact that when you hire a call center, you should consider it an extension of your own team. Most companies will set standards for their own team as regards to customer service. It, therefore, makes sense that a company would want to hold agents in any call center it hired to the same standards.
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Once standards are established for a call center, as we discussed in this month’s first blog, it becomes a matter of constant calibration of call center agents to those standards.
In general use, the term “calibration" means to determine or check the accuracy of an instrument against one that is known to be accurate, or against a specific measurement. An example would be calibration of thermometers in incubators holding premature babies—making sure the correct temperature remains constant. In this case, it simply means listening to calls and correcting and adjusting an agent to the standards you have already set, if required.
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A major aspect of guidance for a call center is full commitment from both sides—the company and the call center. What does this full commitment look like?
All too often that commitment on either or both sides is weak. The company is tentatively hiring the call center, not sure if such a relationship will work, and ready to pull the plug at the first doubt. If the company is not all-in, it won’t necessarily take all the needed actions to make the partnership work.
- In the last blog, we covered creating an excellent staff experience to attract new staff and keep the ones you have. But desperation and compromise in hiring will eventually kill that StaffX that you’ve worked so hard to create.
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There are people who have lowered their working standards throughout the pandemic. Here at SELLability, we’ve witnessed this ourselves with companies that are having increasing trouble finding competent staff.
It’s an issue that, right at the moment, is sweeping through the whole society. Job market standards are being lowered so that hiring can occur. But doing so only results in a lower standard throughout the business community—a new, lower standard.
How do we solve it? -
With this month’s blogs, we’ve laid out all of the necessary changes that you should make to set and maintain standards, so that standards are raised throughout the business world. There is much to do!
Now that you’ve seen what you must do, we’ll say this: don’t wait! - The real problem you’re up against is that business production—and even living itself—has sunk into a lower level that has become “the new normal.” At first, when you’re trying to push urgency, you’re going to be up against that lower level that people have now accepted as routine. If you take even a casual look around, you’ll see that this lower level has become a cultural phenomenon.
- The primary thrust of your message should be to instill (or re-instill) a sense of purpose in the recipients of your PR messages. What are your buyers trying to achieve with your product or service? How will your products and services help them do that?
- The wrong way to create urgency is to wait for some exterior force or event to create it for you. For despite everything that’s taken place in the last year, nothing has been enough to create the urgency needed to bring us back to pre-covid productivity.
- You are not out of your right to demand that someone be productive. Push and demand they do. Ensure that they feel it’s important and get them interested in what they need to do. The best executive can get his team to work no matter the situation. Real morale is created through productivity.
- When Marketing and Sales realize their kinship and start to work more closely together, the inevitable results are higher closing ratios, smoother sales presentations, better leads created by more on-point advertising, and happier (and wealthier!) salespeople.
- Effective executives always have a bigger picture in mind articulated in the form of a strategic plan. The broad actions listed in the strategic plan are then broken down into smaller more focused targets within a tactical plan.
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Sales Management: Yes, You Have to Manage
This is the part of the job where “being a boss” comes into play. It’s the part where many sales managers either overdo it, acting like drill sergeants, or underdo it because they’re afraid to “act like an ogre.”
There are some things about management that you should fully understand so you’re able to comfortably perform its functions. -
What Attributes Does a Sales Manager Need?
Despite the fact that a sales manager is often promoted from being a top sales rep, a sales manager is not going to succeed without possessing certain skills and attributes in addition to being a great salesperson.
We do believe that great salespeople are not born, they’re trained. This is no less true of sales managers and, like salespeople, they will have to put in the work to become trained. -
Sales Management: Evaluating Your Team with Precision
One of the top challenges of sales management is being able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members.
Unfortunately, for many, it can be a guessing game. Looking over a sales team, one knows that a few reps do great, the majority can go either way—some months up, some months down—and there are those that never seem to make quota no matter what. The truth, though, is that the actual reasons sales reps are not succeeding can be accurately pinpointed.
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Sales Aren’t Happening! Everybody Panic!
There is no greater nightmare for a sales manager than when sales just stop happening!
Without having any clue as to what’s going on, a sales manager will have a tendency to come down hard on their salespeople when sales slow down. Much of the time this translates to yelling and screaming. At the very least it usually means speaking harshly to the reps.
- In order for businesses to rise up from the pandemic environment and survive, they have to be able to find people who are willing to be guided to a place where they’ll reach for more. Such people should be self-reliant, should still have big goals and dreams, and must have been able to continue thinking and operating that way despite the pandemic
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Key Characteristics Needed for Today’s Recruits
So that you know you’re getting someone who will be a genuinely worthy employee, there are five characteristics you should look for in any recruit.
This is obviously a hot topic today. We know this because, at SELLability, we recently put on a webinar with the subject of the “5 Key Points for Recruits.” This webinar was aimed at a particular business sector, and we had over 100 different businesses from that sector show up.
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Your Interview Process Must Change
In taking the five characteristics into account in today’s employment environment, your interview process must change. Before the pandemic, you might have been mainly looking for a person’s experience in the interview.
Today, though, you want to make sure that the person you’re looking at isn’t trying to get a job just long enough to collect unemployment, and then go back home and live off unemployment and stimulus payments.
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Your Existing Team is No Different
As a final note for this month, we want to point out that all of these factors must apply to your existing personnel as well. This means watching out for agreement with wrong ideas of living off unemployment and stimulus payments, looking for the same five primary characteristics as you would in a new recruit, and asking thought-provoking questions of your current employees to see where they really sit thought-wise.
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A company’s core values are what guides them, much like the stars guided ships in days of old. Around those values is formulated the company’s basic organizational structure and policy.
When those values become lost—which can easily happen in a chaotic business environment such as that of today—then the structure and especially the policy make less sense and tend to be less followed. The company then more resembles the chaos around it, instead of a point of stability in which prospects and customers can find relief from the chaos.
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Is Constantly Reacting to Chaos a Good Strategy?
(members only content)Unfortunately, too many businesses are reacting to that chaos, by doing things such as attempting to work their business concept into the pandemic when it does not actually fit.
Suddenly prospects and customers are confused by their messaging, as it is completely shifted from where it always was before. That kind of shift will not gain them a response and might even lose them long-term loyalty.
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2021: The Year for Reconnection
To start with, this reconnection needs to be made with your own products and services. What does that mean? Newly, take a look at your existing products and services, especially those that have sold well. Commit to research and development of these products and services. You not only want to maintain the high standards that you previously set for them but in actuality, you want to take them to a whole new level. You want to “make the best even better.”
- When people are trying to cope with an unstable environment, it is quite easy to get hung up in the past. In our recent past, at the very beginning of this year, things were actually going pretty well. The economy was rolling nicely along, many companies were looking forward to their most successful year ever, and optimism was at an all-time high.
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Refocus on Lifelong Relationships
Part of what we teach at SELLability is to approach every sale as if you are going to have a lifelong relationship with that person or that company.
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A crucial part of the sales process is the establishment of trust, and one foundation of the establishment of trust is the establishment of a lifelong relationship. - Training is a vital part of maintaining and increasing your success as a salesperson. Many times, because we are so busy, we will say things like, “Well someday I’m going to train. Yup, going to get to it at some point. Next year, I’m going to get right on it.” The fact is, there is no time like the present. Now is the time.
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Waiting…for Prospects to Change Their Minds
One version of “waiting” that a salesperson can engage in is waiting for prospects to change their minds.
Let’s have a look at the sales process in a bit of detail and see how a salesperson could possibly arrive at that conclusion. If a salesperson is waiting for the prospect to change their mind, they never made it to the Agreement step, the step where the prospect firmly decides to buy, and voices that decision.
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Waiting…for Prospects to Call You Back
One version of “waiting” that a salesperson can engage in is waiting for prospects to call them back. It is a symptom of only one thing: you have not created trust with the prospect.
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The first step of the sales process in which you actually interact with a prospect is the Contact and Interview step, and it is in this step that trust is created. We can always tell when this step has been skipped or skimped on because there is the evidence, every single time: no communication back.
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Waiting…for Sales to Close Someday
It has been said that “Good things come to those who wait.” But the actual fact of the matter is, good things come to those who go out and make them happen.
This leads us to our topic for this particular blog: Are your salespeople waiting for sales to close?
Beyond the fact that this is a surefire way of watching your business slowly go down the drain, it is a very lazy approach to selling. Your salespeople should be actively leading sales through to closes, wherever and whenever possible. Waiting will never make sales happen anywhere.
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The Worst Enemy of Sales and Closig Rates
(members only content)It has been said that “Good things come to those who wait.” But the actual fact of the matter is, good things come to those who go out and make them happen.
Which, believe it or not, leads to this question: What is the worst enemy of sales and closing rates?
If you guessed “inactivity” you would be right. Motionlessness. Doing nothing and expecting something to happen. -
Don’t Underestimate What it Will Take Coming Back from Covid19
We have been through a major enforced business downturn with the covid19 lockdown. While some companies have been able to maintain and keep going, far too many others have had their business cut down, and are now having to revive themselves as we go back to work in a restricted environment.
All of us are having to look at what it will really take, through sales, marketing, and delivery, to bring ourselves back up to pre-pandemic levels.
- When this pandemic hit, most of us thought the lockdown would be over within a month, two months at the outside. Here we are, though, 6 months later, and while things are (very slowly) opening back up, we still have a long way to go. And it is almost as if some of us are back there in March, simply waiting for “things to get better.”
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In looking back over the year and looking forward to the end of the year and even into 2021, we have had to face down many challenges, and we will have to face down more.
As we have discussed in our recent articles, it does not look like things will get back to normal anytime soon. We are all going to have to continue to put in the effort that is well above average.
Now, let us take a step back. What about you? -
On top of the pandemic having brought most of the year to a standstill, we are coming into the time of year in which many companies, in normal times, go ahead and position themselves for a business slowdown.
You will hear the excuse often, especially in B2B sales: “Things are slow during the holidays.” Or you will hear a common variation on this same excuse: “Unless you’re a seasonal product, you just don’t do well throughout the holidays.”
Here is a question: Why can’t you just ignore all these excuses? -
One serious barrier to finishing the year strong is the incredible amount of misinformation in our current environment. Turn on the news on TV or check out the news stream on your phone. It is the same everywhere: you will see the news that everything is a disaster.
But switch the channel, or access a different news site, and you will see a feature that says things are coming back to the same point they were before the pandemic began.
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How Technology Gets Lost: Losing Valuable Staff
In reacting to the pandemic and the shutdown, many companies strayed from the routine activities that caused them to win in the first place. This resulted in the successful technology of their operations—simply put, how they did things right—becoming lost.
The first way that this occurred stemmed from businesses losing valuable long-term employees. Unfortunately, they took all their invaluable skill and knowledge with them as they left. -
8 Reasons your Sales Reps will not Consistently Follow your Company Sales Process
(members only content)I am very often asked about the value of the sales process or the CRM (customer relationship management) system because of the fact that most sales people just don’t follow or use either one. While some of the time, the problem can be your company’s sales process itself or how your sales process is incorporated into your CRM system, there are 8 very key reasons why they fail! The eight key reasons are:
Our Videos on Communication
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Using Statistical Analysis to Manage Your Sales Productivity
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