Why Upskill Your Sales Team

Do any of the following scenarios seem familiar to you?

Your salesperson brings in a consistent flow of new customers each year but somehow that increase is not reflected in your revenue which is stagnant.

Your salesperson has a very high rate of close when getting in front of people but does not hit the target number for closed sales you need.

Your salesperson takes a large number of meetings, but they do not seem to convert to sales at the rate you would expect.

There are several reasons for these scenarios. In many businesses each member of the sales team is expected to handle all the sales functions from business development through to close and then to account management.

The sales process is made up however of multiple functions, business development (finding the leads, building the pipeline), sales (closing the business), and account management (up-selling, cross-selling and gaining repeat business), all of which require different skill sets. It is very rare that one person excels at all these functions. You may find that your salesperson is great at closing but is not creating enough of a pipeline to have the volume of meetings needed. Conversely, they may be great at setting up a large number of meetings but closing a small percentage of them. You may also find you have a high churn rate; you win a large amount of new business but do not keep their custom in the long term. These are reasons the above scenarios exist.

Salespersons often can be grouped into one of these three categories, Farmer, Scout or Hunter.

The Hunter is the classic salesperson, they live for the chase and are great at pursuing and landing new clients for you. They hate doing cold calling to get leads so that is pushed to the side and once the new client has been on-boarded tend to move on to new pursuits not giving them the attention needed.

The Farmer likes working with existing customers and growing them. Farmers are more detail-oriented, more motivated by perfecting the customer’s experience, more attuned to the little touches that keep customers loyal to a brand. They are excellent at relationship building. They prefer working to grow their existing books of business rather than going after new leads.

The Scout enjoys the detective work, finding the right person in the right target company that makes a great Prospect. They are often uncomfortable trying to bring the Prospect over the line as they are not as good at asking for the buying decision. They may also not be as good at overcoming objections and so get stopped short of the goal.

If one were Dr Frankenstein trying to build a sales monster, I would incorporate pieces of each of these types of salespeople in order to make one formidable salesperson.

If like most small businesses, you cannot afford to have a dedicated person for each of these separate functions you should assess your team to see which strengths and weaknesses each member has and work to up-skill them.  It is also a good idea when building your team to try to have members that supplement each other rather than duplicate skills.

Make sure they have dedicated time for each of these activities otherwise the salespeople will tend to spend too much time on the area they excel while avoiding those activities they either do not enjoy or find they are the least confident in undertaking. Make sure they do not always leave that one process for last and therefore may not get to it on a regular basis. Its human nature to put your effort into what you feel you can succeed at and thus good about yourself. By ups-killing and making them more confident in their job they will feel better about putting the effort in to all the functions.

 

It’s at least as important to invest in your team’s success as it is to invest in new equipment or developing new product lines. According to Master Messaging “Most companies think that investing heavily in product development, recruitment, and marketing is the key to success. What they don’t know is that their sales force has a bigger impact on whether or not they reach their goals. Training your sales team to communicate value in their prospecting conversations can help your company generate new business opportunities, translating into huge returns for the organization. The better trained they are and the more learning opportunities they get, the better results they can offer! Sales training offers many benefits, especially when it’s incorporated into the sales process, recruitment, on-boarding, and employee/customer retention.”

 

A well-trained, well-rounded sales team is your organisations best asset in bringing in new business and expanding your existing business. Invest in them and it will pay you back many times over.