Tag: sales efficiencies

Sales

Overcoming the 5 basic obstacles in every sales transaction

As Zig Ziglar said, every sale has 5 basic obstacles that need to be overcome: No need No desire No hurry No money No trust I consider the most important of all the objections is the trust. Everything else will fail if there is no trust established between the sales person and the buyer. One of the best ways to build trust is to listen to the prospect; understand his business, challenges and competition. Show them that you understand their world. Be honest about what your product/service can or cannot do for them. If required, even introduce someone who can […]

Customer Engagement

How to increase customer loyalty? First, Stop annoying them !

Everyone in sales knows the importance of customer loyalty and the importance of repeat business. Still, we go out and make it difficult for the customer to do business with us. Worse still, we downright annoy the customers. I had one such experience with a start-up: myPNRstatus.com. They had a novel idea which they are trying out. You can enter the PNR number of the railway ticket and they claim to send you SMS’s on the status of the PNR (if wait-listed, they claim to send you an update everytime there is a change in the status) and also keep […]

Sales

Measuring sales-force effectiveness

One of the key challenges that I have seen in senior leadership is to measure the sales-force effectiveness. This becomes even more important if we are in an environment where revenue growth is difficult to come-by. So how does one measure the effectiveness of their sales-force. I think there are a few key indicators that show if the sales force is doing a good job or not: Revenue growth: The easiest and the most measured variable is the revenue growth. If the revenue is growing month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, the sales-force is considered to be doing a good job. This shows […]

Customer Engagement

Relevance of our products/services to customers

I received a comment on my previous blog on sales process that if there is no demand for a product/service, improving the sales process might not have any benefit. True. But how do you know if the decline in sales is due to lowering demand for your product/service or is it due to some other reason. My belief is that as long as your product/service is able to solve a key challenge for your customer, the demand for your product/service should not decline. If it still declines, the culprit lies in the process. A follow-up question is, how, when and how often do […]

Sales

Sales process

Whenever there is a decline in sales, what is our first reaction – we try to figure out what is wrong with the market or the sales team or the product/service being sold. We try to come up with new campaigns, discounts schemes or offers. The thought that there might be a flaw in the process almost never occurs to us. And this is exactly what provides us an interesting opportunity to explore. How much improvement in sales can we get by improving the selling process ? Can process efficiency drive sales numbers ? These are questions that are worth exploring […]