This next set of posts is going to focus on leveraging your sales tools and programs to train and ramp up new initiatives and new hires. We will also dive into the relevance of using these tools to continually educate sales people on the process developed to best manage leads, activity, and your pipeline. With so much to cover where I think it is most important to begin is with helping your team define the difference between selling and non selling activities.

So often people assume that selling activities involve communicating with prospects and customers, and non selling activities is everything else. While I agree that selling activities include communication, what most sales people forget is it also includes the strategic and tactical steps needed to ensure that those communications produce the desired results. Without goals and assessment, a high volume of sales rarely come to fruition.

So let us splice activity into the two categories:

Selling:

1. Calls
2. Meetings
3. Some E-mails
4. Web presentations
5. Reading of account history for pre-call planning
6. Studying notes and determining the next objective
7. Creating goal questions for meetings
8. Reading account history for gaps in knowledge
9. Determining value proposition for a customer
10. Crafting value propositions based on customer requirements
11. Meetings with your team of superiors on a specific account

And now your non selling activities:

1. Updating notes in CRM
2. Updating accounts and pipeline in CRM
3. Weekly team meetings
4. Weekly forecast meetings with superior
5. Trainings
6. Reading e-mail
7. Working with support on issues
8. Customer service calls
9. Delivering reports to management
10. Setting up your activity for any given day
11. Designing and writing non selling e-mails

With Web 2.0 tools jumping into the market, many of your non selling activities can be reduced if not eliminated. Landslide, a product I recommend, offers a VIP assistant who enters data for you. This means your reps can make a phone call or send an e-mail to your VIP and have activity, accounts, pipeline, contacts, or anything else in the system updated. Landslide calls their system a “Workstyle Manager” because their focus is on the rep not the customer. This time saving tool not only frees the rep from tedious non-selling activity, but also increases the likelihood that reps will properly update information making it more valuable later in the process.

They also have built the entire sales process, including media and training into the system, so you can send items like, data sheets, email templates, and testimonials directly to the contact. Rep’s can review trainings or best practice documents relative to what they are trying to accomplish, reducing their dependency on others and speeding up their ability to deliver. Also, they have WebEx built into the system so you can immediately get people into meetings for web demos and collaboration. This can cut away much of the time wasted on non selling activity, but also improve and intensify the selling activities.

Web 2.0 also gives the new wave management power tools for educating and delivering information. Many of my team members, old and new, read my blog for educational purposes. I also am networked on LinkedIn, and on Skype or free to chat on IM 24/7. This allows me to share my knowledge with my teams in friendly and more passive modes. Sometimes the boss can be daunting, even when the intent is to be helpful. Social networks and blog posts are softer ways of getting information to your more timid reps.

Back to the control of a new way of managing data. With cleaner and more common data management, and a defined sales process with training, meetings inevitably become more focused, which tends to make them shorter and of greater value. A final parting shot is that when people feel they have resources in the proper place, they ramp up much quicker. Empower your reps and teach them to stand on their own two feet, or at least the new Web 2.0 abilities.

Tags: , , , Ask the Coach, blog, business consulting, closing, coach, learning, management, marketing, mentor, Pipeline, Prospecting, Qualifying, sales, sales coaching, sales consulting, sales management, sales training, selling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 am and is filed under Customers, Landslide, SFA, Sales Process, Sales Training, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.