This is not way to plan for success and it is certainly not way you would run a football team!

We call this ‘management by hope’.

So why is sales function not producing return on investment required?

We couldn’t attempt to address all reasons but listed below are some snapshots of what we have seen over recent years.

·The detail of sales function is seldom understood at board level. The belief that if you simply ‘do more’ you’ll get result is frighteningly common. No attention is paid to ‘doing more’ of ‘what’, or to ‘whom’. ·The direct sales plan is not integrated into marketing and business plan and disconnect is apparent. ·The sales management team is usually rewarded for achieving short-term revenue and profit goals with little measurement of qualitative and quantitive parts of job. ·Structured up-skilling and ‘leader & coaching’ programmes seldom exist. ·Apathy and low work rate within sales organisation. (The drumbeat is too slow.) “If Bill hits his targets and only works 4 days per week, why do I care if he plays golf every Friday?” No thought is given to how much more Bill could achieve, how this would effect his motivation and indeed, how his targets were set! ·Lack of a ‘sales culture’ and excitement ·Lack of recognition of true professional selling ·The introduction of internet and e-mail has given salespeople another excuse not to make contact with customers and cultivate their network

We are in danger of seeing standards of sales performance reduce year by year unless we take action now.

So what are our choices?

It’s very simple really……………Organisations can continue in same vein and leave sales results to chance, just hoping things improve……. or they can take action.

How to change?

It is not possible to cover whole spectrum of sales issues regularly facing Managing Directors but here are a few checklist items that you could take action on now.

·Ensure your sales propositions are articulated and clearly understood by salespeople and your customers. Your customers must really understand business deliverables of your products and services and implications of choosing an alternative. ·Ensure you have a leader of sales who really understands sales function and allocates time to managing it properly. Forbid them to be in office for more than a small portion of working week. ·Prepare open questions that establish needs and wants of your customer and then relate their needs and wants back to your products and services. ·Prepare a ‘person specification’ template to ensure standards for existing and new people are met. ·Be sure you know how you want salespeople to spend their time. ·Introduce a professional selection and retention programme for all new and existing salespeople. ·Use outside expert resources where appropriate to plug skill, knowledge and experience gaps within your own organisation. ·Plan, manage and measure quality and quantity of sales effort taking place and compare this with pre-agreed required activity to achieve result. ·Immediately introduce ‘bottom up / top down’ planning to check credibility of your revenue plan ·Link forecasting systems to quantity, direction and quality of activity required rather than just to historical sales results ·Know and understand how your sales team stacks up against competition

So where do you start?

·Start with a thorough review of your sales organisation. The people, procedures, processes and current performance and highlight areas for immediate, medium and long-term improvement. This can be done very quickly and at quite low cost ·Build a programme to manage change and improvement by introducing standards and key performance indicators and ensure salespeople and management ‘walk talk’ ·Where necessary, for fast, expert advice, appoint an external organisation that has a proven track record of implementing change and improving sales performance.

Do not think you can fix these issues by sending your people on a training course. You’d be better off taking your team for a ‘fun day’ and you’ll change no more. Remember football manager who works with his team, shares his experience and improves their skills at coaching ground? While training might be helpful in short term, there is no substitute for getting ‘on pitch’ to play and being observed in real live situations.

It takes a brave executive, especially a Sales Director to admit they need outside help -- but all sportspeople have a coach who is continually improving performance so why should it be different for your sales professionals?

Conclusion

A 10% improvement in sales performance will make a vast improvement to profitability of a company and in most companies this is very achievable. However, it does require an investment of time, and some money. It requires people to stop some of unproductive things they are doing now, and, instead, spend their time focused on what is truly effective and productive.

“The definition of insanity is doing same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Benjamin Franklin

At some point, whether you’re ready or not - things must change.

Analysis

Guide your visitor to sole and obvious conclusion that your market offer is a worthy purchase. If your product doesn't have competitive advantages, then your research and planning on stage of product development has failed and I would advice to stop promoting that product. It has little or no future at all. The analysis part of your sales letter is important. The buyer should not be "pitched" with your promotional advertising or selling advices, s/he must be presented with objective facts that would help her/him to see obvious benefits of your offer. While almost all yelling about stressing benefits not features, product/service benefits are not enough in today's world of marketing. 99.9% of businesses would tell that their market offer is best in whole Universe, saves thousands of dollars and months of time. You should prove that it is true with facts and clear arguments, no marketing fluff. In this way you will much easier gain people's trust in your product.

Action

Ask or even demand for taking an action. The action you want is a closing a sale itself or having autoresponder course, visitor's sign up may be second satisfactory action. Popular way to do this is to create a limited tme offer, stressing importance of making a purchase right now! Guide reader to click on order link by reminding product biggest strengths, mentioning an unconditional iron-clad money back guarantee that should waive remaining doubts and then point to shortage of time for decision making process. Explain, if needed, ordering process in details, as it may be disappointing to lose sales due to buyer confusing caused by your complicated ordering process.

P.S.

Use it as a summary of your sub-headlines. "PostScript" is also very often scanned for "relevancy". Describe with its help main benefits of your offer; repeat guarantee terms and/or other.

Sales copywriting advices

* Identify yourself with your potential buyer. Write your copy from customer's point of view. What does s/he want, feel and think? Your copy should be addressed to personality in clear to your target market way. * Try to be cheerful, positive and optimistic. People are attracted by joy and positive mood. They also want to feel like you, so they associate your positive attitude with your product. At best your writing style should contain an intrigue, provoke curiosity and excitement. * Don't forget to address to people's emotions. Textbooks are boring to read because they don't have a bit of author's emotions. Your task is to make your prospect feel way you do. * Provoke curiosity to read further. Visitors should be kept excited while they read your sales copy. Excitement may play role of final buying or non-buying verdict. * Refer to losses reader will suffer if s/he turns your offer down. It is proved that people are afraid of losing opportunity. Everyone wants to be with winners, not losers. You can take advantage of it. * Try to avoid any assumptions about visitors' origin, religious identity etc. Your claim or joke may be faulty interpreted and you will convert "almost a client" to "an irritated visitor". Even if you deliberately want to select some particular group of people, it is better to clearly state from very beginning. * The final advice is to be honest, even at sacrifice of correct marketing strategy. My own viewpoint is that it is better to have 7 sales than 10, but enjoy clear conscious.