To improve your team’s sales performance, you’ve got to practise good sales hygiene: keep your sales process, data management systems and sales resource management clean.
It’s the foundation for predictably and continuously hitting your sales targets, and it’s easy to do.
Sales results get better when you identify causal links within your selling process.
A causal link is, “We do this, and that happens.” For instance, “We make 50 extra cold calls per week, and at month’s end we have more viable prospects than the previous month.”
Good sales hygiene facilitates the detailed analysis necessary to identify these links.
Without an understanding of the causal links in your selling process, your results will be left to chance, happenstance and luck.
When it comes to achieving great sales results, luck is a poor strategy. A sound approach is for company leadership to endorse and facilitate the practice of good sales hygiene.
There are several elements required to allow for good sales hygiene: an endorsed sales methodology, a scalable and intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system, easy access to account-specific historical sales data and involved sales leadership.
To maximize the ROI on your sales hygiene initiative, here are a few things to consider.
An endorsed sales methodology: Does the following statement apply to you? “We hire experienced salespeople and let them do their thing. They’re the sales experts.” If so, your sales team is likely underperforming — even if they happen to be hitting planned targets.
Every business function, including the sales interaction, has an optimal execution method. If your 10 salespeople are selling 11 different ways, effectiveness and efficiency are being compromised. You wouldn’t run your finance department this way, would you? Find the best way to sell, and have the whole team use that method.
A scalable, intuitive CRM system: You can only identify causal links in the sales process by comparing sales inputs with results generated.
A good CRM system allows the data to be captured, aggregated, and made useful. Without such a system, your data is anecdotal, incomplete and weak.
Your CRM need not be complex or expensive. It simply needs to allow for the creation of a detailed sales pipeline report based on the deal-specific data entered by your team.
Do your homework, buy one and start using it. For best results, ensure its use is mandatory for all salespeople.
Easy access to historical account sales data: The easiest revenue to generate is new sales to existing customers. They love you already. If it is hard to pull a one-year report showing everything an account has ordered – so you can create a strategy to bring in this revenue – fix this now. Make it easy for your team to build its strategies to identify and close these sales.
Involved sales leadership: Leadership’s role is to teach good sales hygiene to the team, make it easy to practise and check that it’s happening.
Work with management to shape your sales hygiene initiative. Create a coaching plan that outlines a straightforward way to roll it out. Plan how you will anchor sales hygiene in the culture.
Anticipate the concerns and hesitations your team may have when using the new tools. Such hesitation is a natural part of change, and must be managed effectively for true change to occur. Prepare for this.
Optimizing your practices around the sales function is a simple, back-to-basics way to improve performance.
Five out of five sales VPs agree: good sales hygiene promotes great sales results. Here’s to keeping it clean.