Planning who to contact and why is easily as important as getting your activity in order. What most mediocre to good sales people do is come in every morning and blast out a lot of calls to whoever is next on their list. They then take any meeting or follow up call they can get until they have created a great deal of continuing activity. From this flurry comes sales, but unfortunately it is hand and hand with an exuberant amount of wasted activity.
What coaches teach great sales people to do is plan their contact by value and objective. Sales champions do not just make calls and meet with contacts. Sales champions make the calls and have the meets that produce results. This means knowing who you are calling before you make the call. This means listing out your objectives and reviewing them before you meet with your contact. Most of all it means spending the time to know what you are doing before you do anything.
Now I know this seems like a tall order for your reps, and a tall order for you to train them. Let’s break it down into smaller and easier chucks to administer.
1. Take a look at you customers, and a specific rep’s customers. What is similar about these contacts? How did the sales process align? What triggers made these contacts become customers? Now build a few statements that show the common denominators.
2. Take a look at your pipeline and rate the quality of your opportunities from A through D. Now when I say quality there are multiple factors beyond probability to close. One is the initial value of the sale, another could be the long term value. Also consider things like the company’s size and reputation. These are all critical and this process should take some time. If you rush this, you will not have true rankings.
3. Now take 1 and 2 and find your best opportunities. These are the ones that align with who you have sold to and who in your pipeline is valuable and worth your time. There may be a huge company that is just like five that you have closed that is only at the beginning of the sales process that requires five times more energy than something that is small and out of focus that is near closing.
Once you have completed this activity, it is imperative to list out your objectives for your next contact with each. Write out ans visualize your objectives. Read them aloud and listen as you do. I know this can seem cheesy, but all of these methods of communication trigger different parts of your brain. Them more you wrap yourself around something the clearer it becomes.
Finally, stay proactive in your activity and your communication. This might not seem like it is part of planning, but oh it is! If you do not act in a proactive manner you will let some of these habits slide. One slip takes you down and then it is twice as hard to get back up.
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