In our first blog this month, we advised that both individuals and companies should promote their way out of this anxiety. Anxiety causes a person or company to withdraw—and promotion is an organization’s way of reaching out, which is the opposite of withdrawing. Not only will you feel better, but once you have really been promoting, you will begin to start seeing leads once again, and having opportunities roll in the door.
So now we come to this question: What should you do once you have promoted, and business is picking up again? The answer: You should refocus your sales team.
Understandably, during this pandemic, your sales team has been through a considerable amount of confusion. Many of your salespeople probably are not feeling super-confident right now. To plant their feet firmly back on the ground and get them fully moving again—or refocused—you need to get them back to the basics of what works. For your salespeople, those basics are contained within your sales process.
After you have been promoting for a while, you are going to start seeing an abundance of leads. For a salesperson, that means prospects. In sales, a lack of prospects creates anxiety—if you have been there, you know. Once they have a good number of prospects coming in, that anxiety is going to disappear.
Now you need to remind the salespeople of how they win—and remind them that they win through the precise application of a sales process. At SELLability, through detailed research, we have found that every failed close or lost sale was due to the lack of a reliable and accurate sales process, or a failure to follow that process.
During this pandemic, you may have seen that your salespeople suffered from a lack of motivation. In most books and articles about selling, experts discuss the importance of sales mindset and motivation. We feel the same way, with the difference that, at SELLability, we have found that motivation is tied directly to results.
What does each stage of your sales process end with? A result! (If it does not, sign up at SELLability so you can evaluate your sales process). That result should lead to the next stage of the sales process, through all the stages to a close. If your salespeople are successfully bringing prospects through each stage of the sales process to a result, that result will provide ample motivation for them to carry on and do incredibly well.
Motivation is only sustained if you are getting results, and each completed step of the sales process is a result that will keep the salesperson motivated.
The moral: get your team refocused back on the sales process, so anxiety is non-existent, and they are totally motivated.
And by the way, we only have a few months left of the year. Get that sales team refocused—we have got to get going here!
