SMARTER EVERYTHING 

Ever tried managing a sales team full of individuals? 

Happy days, months, quarters, pipelines, clients, and results when their differences and the differences of their sales manager brings them altogether. When they don’t, it normally ends up ugly, soon followed by very ugly, sometime after very ugly comes realisation. One realisation is that their differences divided them. It all starts with differences in their training.  

Too many organisations have salesforces that have been trained differently, have used different sales tools, have different approaches to sales, and have different sales philosophies.  

Put all these differences together in one sales team and what do you have? Different everything. Smart organisations struggle with ‘different’ because it often leads to inconsistent sales results, team conflict, and a sales culture of individualism. These practices are the bane of the Sales managers and often leads to ‘very ugly’.  

Expectations of Sales Managers 

Sales managers have high expectations of their sales team members. They expect them to understand themselves and how their behaviour affects others. They expect them to improve their sales strengths and reduce their sales weaknesses. One strength they want to see relentlessly is the practice of building trust between the sales team their clients.  

Another given is the sales team understand clients are motivated by different things, are in different financial situations, and play different roles in the sales process.  

So there’s a few expectations to mull over, let’s look at some of the bug-bears sales managers have to put up.  

Bug-bears of Sales Managers 

One bug-bear of sales managers are the questions they hear and read their sales staff ask, or don’t ask their clients during meetings, on the telephone or via email. There is often no structure, no purpose, and no strategy to their questioning. Just random questions that often have the client at best confused at worst repeating themselves while the meeting clock is ticking.  

Another bug-bear is how the sales staff actually sell the organisation’s products and services. Some present the ‘client-need’ they think they’ve found, others discuss the features of their products and services until the cows-come-home, others deride their competitors, and some just rattle off statistics that mean nothing to ‘that’ client. A few talk benefits without really knowing how there derived from the features of their products and services. An awful and dangerous approach.  

All big bug-bears! Which often leads to the biggest bug-bear of all, no reporting of client interactions, no update, no notes, no records, no data, and no nothing, which means no history! And we all know what no history leads to. Trouble! 

So where do I start and how do I bring my sales team together? 

How do you bring a team individual stars to form a star team? 

If  you would like more information on the Dynamics 365 training we provide, please visit our Dynamics 365 Training Courses page, or take a look at the Smarter Selling ®  course we offer. Contact us, today to speak with one of our Learning Solutions Advisors or visit our website.