Resolving Issues
As a trainer, we want to work with others to quickly resolve solutions to problems. But, many times, it is difficult to resolve issues when you don't know HOW TO solve the problem! In the day-to-day sales function, problems and conflicts arise all the time. How do you handle these performance issues?
Problems and conflicts can develop from inconsistencies and errors in your sales strategy, process, tools, technique, behavior, or attitude. It could be a problem resulting from the actions or decisions of a customer, team member, sales manager or senior staff leader! (And you thought they were perfect, right?)
You should monitor situations for potential problems and challenges. You should then develop associated contingency plans. "Take an active interest in the success of a solution and monitor the milestones in the plan."There are several areas to watch out for when resolving sales performance issues.Be ready to offer some solutions to these problems when training sales professionals.
Strategy
Strategy must ensure that daily sales actions are converted to high performance results.
- Are you identifying sales priorities against daily business goals?
- Where is the team going? Are they mapping out their daily activities in advance!
- Do you know what prospects and customers need your attention today?
Be specific about your daily sales objectives before you start your day!
This will prevent wasting valuable time prospecting which can be the most challenging psychological task in maintaining a funnel of qualified leads and new business sales.
- What is the prior sales performance for that week or month?
- Is this years performance metric being surpassed?
- What prospects or existing customers are you calling on today that you believe will qualify for your attention?
- Is the relationship worth your time?
- Will it satisfy your revenue target in the time you need it to?
Processes / Tools
Make sure that you are standardizing your sales process during training so that all representatives have a duplicable system can be benchmarked, measured and evaluated to develop best practices.
- Is your CRM or contact management software working for you?
- Does the team enjoy using it?
- Do you need to redesign it to prevent lost opportunities?
- Is it up to date?
- Are you using it to prepare for daily execution?
- Are you able to monitor your sales teams ability to acquire customers, penetrate the market and retain existing customer relationships?
- Are you aware of how your products and services are fulfilled once you close the account?
- Can your team Up Sell during the point of sale?
Competency
What happens when your sales team is not performing and not meeting their sales quota or the sales management begins to stress from pressure to perform?
- Are you prepared to deal with proper interventions that will resolve that stress?
- Can you resolve these issues with behavioral assessment training?
- Are you identifying key performance indicators to prevent escalations?
Consider developing a training class that teaches first line Managers how to coaching and leadership skills through behavioral assessment, questioning and self-discovery team building.
There are bound to be some slight behavioral and elevated incidents that may need to be addressed with workplace interventions and coaching.
- Are you monitoring and benchmarking team's performance with Key Predictive Indicators (KPI)? Be prepared to have a training needs analysis when delivering sales training.
- How are you conducting this training? Make sure you are identifying the need for investigating a problem.
- Is there a need for specific sales training? You will need to gather informative data and analyze it to make a decision on the best training to deliver at any given time and make sure it is directed to the right audience!
- What Best Practices are you teaching and developing?
- What are the learning objectives? Be specific about exactly what the sales professional will learn to do and what they will be expected to perform successfully.
Take a look at Blooms Taxonomy Learning in Action Wheel and the Wikipedia -Here you will find solutions to designing specific learning objectives in your sales training that ensure performance standard results. This can help you in benchmarking of your sales teams performance.
Measurement
Is your current sales training aligned with your sales performance issues?
Consider learning how to calculate the impact of your sales training with ROI Analysis.(Return on Investment).
Jeff Hardesty, President of JDH Group, as sales improvement expert has given the industry a good example of how to calculate sales training performance.
Use an ROI Analysis to determine the impact of your sales training for:
- Customer Acquisition
- Contract closings
- Sales activity
- Sales effectiveness and improvement
- Market testing
- Market strategy
Jeff Hardesty states that "As a sales management leader, methodically discovering sales issues first and then running 'Quantitative' sales performance numbers to check for feasibility, worthiness, and return on sales training investment will differentiate you from the pack.
