Sales Team Meltdown asks…

‘We are a B2B business with half a dozen reasonably good sales people (male & female) … problem is that they are currently experiencing a lot more ‘no’s’ than they have been used to over the last few years. I’m finding its getting them down and in turn making them less inclined to look for new business or even try to close existing customers… it’s a downward spiral… what do I do? (Sales Team Meltdown)

Aaron says…

Firstly, I’d suggest your use of the description ‘reasonably good’ to describe your sales team is not a particularly good sign. What happens in boom times like we’ve just been through is that ‘reasonably good’ was good enough because everyone was spending up large. The challenge now is that reasonably good will turn into ‘average’ then ‘awful’ really quickly unless you start making some changes!

One place to start is to reintroduce a little structure back into your team. Good sales teams are always managed by the numbers… how many phone calls?, how many visits?, analysis of the outcomes etc so you could look at putting a formal sales reporting process in place if you don’t already have one. Weekly is good because then you can meet with them on Friday afternoon or Monday morning, go through the reports, discuss the outcomes and set some goals for the next week.

What you’ll find is that good sales people will rise to the challenge and get some structure back into their day and the slackers may well start to look elsewhere because they don’t appreciate the close scrutiny. Either way, you’ve got some accountability back into your team and some positive energy happening. There’s always opportunity in times like these and it’s those who keep ‘doing the do’ that will get the results.

Looking a little further ‘outside the square’ you could also consider a complete change of sales model! Why not look at investing in a very good inhouse B2B Telemarketer to cold call potential clients and ‘keep in touch’ with your existing ones. A sales organisation I worked with a few years ago developed such a model and it worked extremely well… in fact, it became market leading.

Professional Telemarketers, good ones, don’t get hung up on ‘no’s’ and simply move onto the next call. With potential customers, they can quickly qualify if there’s any need, now or in the future, and classify the target for a call back accordingly. If the target is ‘hot’ they can schedule the relevant sales person in for a visit immediately… and the sales person goes in with the right attitude because they know they are walking into a ’sales positive’ environment.

It also means you will probably need less sales people on the ground because they are only visiting ‘hot’ clients so, you could maybe look at cutting off the bottom 2 or 3 and focus on your best performers!

For this new model to work you’d really have to make a definite decision to change the way you do business … by using the Telemarketer to cover the ground quickly and efficiently and then bringing in your best sales people to close the deals!

A couple of different options there for you to consider… good luck.