What To Do When Your Team Isn't Selling -- Part One

Read Part Two of this article

Your team isn't selling. What do you do?

How many times have you had to consider this struggle when leading your customer service team or organizing training for your business or organization? This is a tricky subject since it involves a myriad of solutions. For the purposes of this forum, we will break this down into a series of articles to better address each challenge.

In this article, we will consider the strategy of first understanding what strengths (or limitations) our employees bring to the “sales” table, and then discuss how to best lead them to better sales performance.

In order to provide a top-down sales and leadership training strategy that best supports the sales culture of your organization, understand this:

Some (or all) of your team may not have “signed up” for a sales position when applying for this job.

It is always surprising to us when we work with clients how many supervisors are astonished when they realize that not everyone on their team is comfortable (or even aware) of the sales process or the requirement to be actively selling products and services.

For now, let's consider the leadership role at the outset so that an effective training strategy can trickle down from there.

1. The leader or supervisor must have a keen sense of vision when it comes to understanding what he or she expects from each employee, and have a viable program or plan to communicate these expectations to the employee.
2. When outlining the job requirements at the hiring stage, the supervisor has a prime opportunity to vocalize the sales goals of the organization, the sales (and we can use the word “service” interchangeably from here) skills necessary to do this job well, and what sort of support, training, and resources are available to help the employee achieve his or her individual sales goals.

Many leaders (don’t worry, you are not alone here) often have already hired a staff that may or may not understand the strong sales emphasis that you would like them to understand.

If this is the case, let us then create a strategy that will at least bring our team members back to a place where they have a chance of understanding where you are coming from with regard to the sales aspects of their job.

• It is time to meet with team members one-on-one and define what your vision is for the department/organization in terms of sales and to break that down to an individual contribution, starting with the employee in front of you.
• It is here that you can emphasize that selling is really more of a “matching of our company’s products and services with the needs of the client.” This subtle change in philosophy allows you to interchange the words “sales” and “service” if the word, “selling” creates a bit of a panic with your team member.

Life is a little easier when we understand that we, as employees of this organization, simply want to listen to the concerns and needs of our customers and then pair up these needs with the products and services that we offer.

In this same meeting, the leader has the chance to share specific “service” goals and numbers with the employee. This should include:

• Where the business is currently.
• Where it would like to be at the end of a specific, predetermined timeframe.
• The steps to be taken to get there.

Simply put, we want to unite the visions of our sales associates and sales leaders, in the context of providing great customer “service.”

Once the clarity of vision and job roles have been established, we can then move to the next step where we actually create specific “service” skill strategies that our employees can learn in order to help the team and organization grow.

In the next article, we will begin to create a common vocabulary that can be used organization-wide (NOT just for a single training program); develop effective sales models that each sales team member can learn from; evaluate the skills and strengths of team members using assessments like DiSC®; and design a viable “roadmap” that promotes sales accountability and measurement for the team every step of the way.

Read Part Two of this article

For tips to effectively train your people and streamline your organization, and for other solutions to your staffing challenges, visit www.traininginabox.com. Sign up for our free newsletter at www.quicktrainingsolutions.com to make your HR training and development life easier. Corey Nielsen designs and delivers innovative and effective training solutions for businesses through NTG, his business development and training company.

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