10 Steps for Getting More Sales from your Team
Posted by Ron Snyder in Sales planning | 0 comments
If you want to make more money, you need to look at how you are harvesting the opportunities
within your key accounts and across your sales territories!
Research shows that World Class Sales Organizations performed 25% better on key sales metrics by using sales planning methods like these:
- Using specific criteria to define a strategic account
- Having a method for deciding on opportunities to pursue
- Allocating the right resources to pursue large deals
- Being highly effective at advancing opportunities
- Leveraging the best practices of top performers
(Source: Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study)
Sales organizations can maintain top performance by consistently developing and effectively executing sales plans for all of their accounts, opportunities and territories. Salespeople who handle account planning well are 41% more likely to achieve quota, according to the TAS Group.
If you sell in any of these types of settings, then doing a better job of sales planning will translate into higher sales:
- You manage proactive selling – as opposed to responding to inbound calls and requests.
- You are involved in complex selling – your sales process touches at least two buying influences.
- You are in a competitive selling environment.
- You are first to market with an innovative product/service – you need to convince people that your approach is better and you need to plan out how to penetrate the market.
How can you make the shift to more effective account planning and territory planning?
- Establish a company-wide focus on account planning, opportunity planning, and territory planning and execution, which includes having templates for each rep that reside in your CRM system.
- Explain to your team why this focus on planning is so important and how it will help them achieve their objectives. Identify accounts from which the team could have brought in additional opportunities with better planning.
- Identify the types of accounts that need account planning and/or that should be incorporated into a territory plan.
- Train the team on how to use the account/territory/opportunity planning templates.
- Require everyone to create some starter account plans or include a few accounts and opportunities in their territory plan.
- Within a few weeks, review these account/territory plans with each salesperson.
- A week or two after that, review the progress on these account/territory plans with the whole team. Encourage group feedback to help everyone be even more effective.
- Continue building more account and territory plans as you work with your team on their accounts.
- Build regular plan review meetings into your monthly/quarterly calendar.
- Reward successes and encourage the team to regularly share best practices.
With planning templates and methods in place, you and your team will bring in more opportunities and consistently earn a greater share of your accounts’ spend. For more insight on effective sales planning, go to:
Contact us for a free 30 minute consultation on how to improve the effectiveness of your account planning and territory planning: 650-508-0622 or [email protected]
Tags: sales management, sales planning, strategic account management, strategic account plan, territory planning
