Why Your Sales Team Can’t Sell

In business sales is the most important strategy. Without sales there is nothing else. Think about it, we are in business to produce revenue i.e. make a living. To produce revenue, you have to actually convince someone to buy the product or service you produce. The only way to get someone to buy is for you and your team to sell.

So, if sales is such a vital business function, if it produces something as great as revenue, why do we struggle to do it? Interesting question. There is just something about the word “sales” that makes people cringe. Something about sales that has them conjuring up images of sales people who are sleazy, aggressive and pushy.

And that is a shame, because as Zig Ziglar used to say, everyone is in sales. As a business owner or team leader you know that to be successful you need every member of your team to be as passionate and committed to the sales process as you are. You not only need them to want to sell, you need them to be good at it.

Sales in some form or another remains in the top 10 concerns of CEOs and business owners. Things like meeting consumer demands, standing out among the competition, and increasing bottom line results. Getting your full-team motivated and onboard with sales one of the major challenges CEOs face today. And while you can’t actually motivate anyone to sell, you can create a culture that embraces sales and inspires every member of your team to take action.

So why can’t your team sell? Well it may not be for reasons that you think.

4 Sales Strategies To Inspire Your Team To Take Action

1. Lack of Financial Acumen – getting your team to sell without understanding the why is like telling you to quit eating french fries without understanding the health benefits. Face it, we would all live on fried food, sugar and alcohol is we did not understand the fatal risks of doing so. So, if you want to inspire your team to take action then they need to understand the why. You need to increase their financial acumen. They need to understand how you make money, which products or service lines you want to grow, and how their actions impact the revenue stream of the business. They better your team understand how you make money, the better sales decision they will make when it comes to selling on price, choosing the right prospects and negotiating deals.
2. Don’t Know How – believe it or not, no one is born a salesman. Sales is a skill that needs to be taught and consistently learned. Too often as leaders we just expect that people know how to do it. We think it is not rocket science to understand how to do things like get past the gatekeeper, ask the right questions and close the deal. We may not think it is rocket science, but to most people it is. Not understanding what steps to take when selling is one of the major reasons people are resistant to sell. If you want your team to be inspired to sell, then you need to invest in showing them how to do it.
3. No Sales Process – in other words no strategy or “set” way of doing it for your company. To be successful at sales you need more than skill you need a process. A sales process is systematic series of steps that lays out exactly what needs to be done to turn a prospect into a customer and a customer into a champion. A sales process gives sales people the map of how to sell, what behaviors to focus on in order to be successful. A sales process breaks down the sales cycle making it less complicated and more achievable.
4. Lack of Leadership – yep, you knew that was coming. If your team can’t sell you do not have a sales issue, you have a leadership issue. It all starts and stops with you. To sell and sell successfully, people need to be led. They need someone willing to share the sales vision with them, invest in their training, layout the process and hold them accountable. More often than not, when a team cannot sell or won’t sell the biggest issue is lack of sales leadership.

There you have the 4 Big Sales Strategies You Need To Inspire Your Team To Take Action. Put these strategies into place, and let me know your impact. Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on inspiring your team to take action. Sales is the life blood of any company, the more you can do as a leader to inspire sales the better positioned you will be to succeed no matter what this economy des.

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