If you want to boost your sales dramatically, there is no single tactic to help you. Not buying a CRM. Not investing in online advertising. Not starting a new sales process. You can only boost sales dramatically by developing a genuine system, by integrating all of your tactics into a dynamic whole.
And that is so much easier said than done.
So let me offer a couple tips that will make it easier to do.
FIRST, you must make sure that your tactics, whatever they may be, are tied directly to your sales strategy. Don’t have one? Tackle this before you spend any money on tactics. Seriously. And please don’t tell me that your strategy is a bunch of outcomes. Growing by 10% percent is not a strategy. It’s a dream result. And you cannot “do” a result.
If you have a sales strategy, you are then able to prioritize which tactics will move you closer to your definition of success. You can choose what to do – and what not to do – wisely.
SECOND, put your tactics into four categories. The categories are:
- Skills (the behaviors that you bring to sales conversations)
- Training (the process and product knowledge that you bring to sales conversations)
- Tools (the resources that you bring to sales conversations)
- Insights (the special information that you bring to sales conversations)
The obvious conclusion here is that if you need to boost your sales, make sure you are leveraging from all four categories. But the extra comment I would add is that you work to integrate all four categories. Integrate them into a dynamic whole. Make sure your tools increase your skills, your training enhances your insights, and so on. This is one of the biggest “fails” that I see consistently.
Just yesterday, I had an old colleague tell me about his last national sales conference a few weeks ago. It was for a very large company and the meeting was in Las Vegas. And it sounded like two days of pure torture. It was the classic revolving session format – go to this room to learn about program X, go to this room to learn about product line Y. And the amount of time spent effectively teaching people how to integrate this knowledge dump with their other sales tactics? Almost zero.
Keep moving, folks. There’s nothing interesting to see here.
My guess is that they are going to have a decent year because they lowered their expectations to the point that “hitting plan” will now be achievable. But certainly not anything dramatic.
As they say in South Africa… shame.
I mua. Onward and upward.
By Tim Ohai
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