Even when driving in cities, we know we can all get lost. By the same token, we can chart misguided courses to sales success even when we are familiar with the methods needed to get sales wins.
The trick to becoming a good sales person or manager is recognizing these wrong turns as they take place and correcting them, like when using the CDIM™ Discovery Framework. Here are four ways you can change course and turn your lagging sales strategy into a successful one.
Get Insights from your customers
Beginners Perspective
We often lack the perspective needed to evaluate things objectively. That's OK! This ingrained perspective usually results from intense focus and years of industry experience.
At the same time, our failure to recognize glaring issues can be a major contributor to sales strategy failures. Break out of this perspective by asking the opinion of people who matter most: your customers. Their feedback can often let you know where you went wrong — or in the case of happy customers, what factors made the difference.
The insights gleaned from customer opinions can form the foundation of your investigation into sales strategy problems and your impetus for future strategic changes.
Consider Improving Your Corporate Culture
Boost Employee Morale
Poor performance can often be attributed to lack of motivation, inadequate training, distractions and other by-products of an unstable corporate culture. Look within your own organization for weak links, mostly from a policy perspective but also in terms of the people who carry the weight.
After observing, try to identify improvements that can boost employee morale and facilitate effective, realistic, positive changes. Many times, improvements to workplace culture can trickle down as happy employees engage more effectively with customers.
Improve Lead Generation
Lead Qualification Practices
The problem with your sales strategy may not always be your employees- it could be the people they are trying to sell to. Just like a Texan won’t likely need a snow shovel anytime soon, trying to sell to the wrong prospects usually ends up in failure.
Improve your ability to generate leads, and more importantly, improve how you score those leads and transfer them to specific account managers. By keeping your sales pipeline organized, you can at the very least track variables and pinpoint sources of complication that lead to lost sales.
Look for an outside opinion
Get Inspired
Going back to resetting your perspective, we do not always have the tools we need to change within our own head. Sometimes, it takes inspiration from others to bring us back to our senses.
To get this perspective change, consider looking to competitors first. As you learn about their process, you may get ideas for improvements to your sales strategy that you had not thought of before. For instance, maybe others utilize a more data-based, automated follow-up process?
You can then look for ideas from outside consultants and workshops. At 2Win! we offer workshops on sales strategy that helps decision-makers assess their current practices and make dramatic, rapid improvements. You will learn how communication and informed conversations can revolutionize your sales process.
So, whether you get help from us or from somewhere else, never be afraid to change your sales strategy when it cannot produce the results you want.
2Win!
