Are you hitting or beating your sales target or quota? If not, are you blaming the market, the customers or your competition? If you are making your target are you taking the credit for yourself rather than giving it to any of these factors? Regardless of actual sales performance, success or a lack of it will be due to a combination of things. Key within these will be the sales person and their approach and skills. A significant challenge in achieving sales success is that there is no let up! Month on month you need to keep getting orders. No market is constant. There are many variables changing and a lot of organisations, and individuals, do not adapt their sales approach to suit the current situation in their market. What I want is to encourage you to look at your sales approach and offer some thoughts about how you might change it to improve your chances of success.
Whether you are in a sales role yourself or are responsible for sales within your organisation, you need to think about how you are approaching sales. Most of the time people connected with sales are good at paying attention to the “what” – i.e. what the figures are. They forecast them, they report on them, they analyse and discuss them especially when there is a shortfall! (How much time is spent analysing sales success compared with missed targets?) Not enough is spent in looking at “how” the sales were achieved, or not. This is crazy as the “whats” are an outcome of the “hows”. This is going to consider the “how” of your sales approach with the intention of delivering the “what”. Continue reading ‘You May Be Taking the Wrong Approach to Selling!’ »