How To Use Sales To Propel Your Career & Business

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Contents

INTRODUCTION: .................................................................................................................................................... 3

1. EMBRACE SOCIAL MEDIA: ..................................................................................................................................... 4

2. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH: ............................................................................................................................... 4

3. DEVELOP DEEPER RELATIONSHIPS: ....................................................................................................................... 5

4. INVEST IN YOUR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT ......................................................................................................... 5

5. NETWORK WITHIN YOUR ORGANIZATION: ........................................................................................................... 6

6. MANAGE YOUR BOSS: ........................................................................................................................................... 6

7. FOCUS: ................................................................................................................................................................... 6

8. PLAN AHEAD: ......................................................................................................................................................... 7

CAREER ADVICE FOR SALES MANAGER AND VP OF SALES ...................................................................................... 8

1. TAKE YOUR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SERIOUSLY: .......................................................................................... 8

2. TRAIN YOUR TEAM: ............................................................................................................................................... 9

3. KNOW YOUR NUMBERS: ....................................................................................................................................... 9

4. FORECASTING: ..................................................................................................................................................... 10

5. HIRING AND FIRING: ............................................................................................................................................ 10

HOW TO LEVERAGE SALES AS AN ENTREPRENEUR ............................................................................................... 11

1. AS AN ENTREPRENEUR YOU ARE IN SALES: ......................................................................................................... 11

2. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TECHNOLOGY: ................................................................................................................. 11

3. KNOW YOUR NUMBERS: ..................................................................................................................................... 11

4. CREATE AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT: .............................................................................................................. 12

5. GET YOUR COMPENSATION RIGHT: .................................................................................................................... 13

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................................... 14

REFERENCE .......................................................................................................................................................... 15

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Introduction:

Thank you for downloading this eBook: How to Use Sales to Propel Your Career & Business. I want to applaud your decision, you are obviously committed to improving your career and business and I can tell straight away that you have a growth mindset (which in itself is the hallmark of all successful people).

I wrote this eBook as a refresher and reminder to all sales professionals and entrepreneur on the need to pay particular attention to the role of sales in their business. The market place which is ever changing is fiercely competitive and in order to excel as a professional and/or an entrepreneur (by the way you do not have to own a business to develop an entrepreneur mindset) you have to continually invest in developing yourself; which is what you are doing by reading this eBook.

Immaterial of the role you play in your organization whether you are the owner, middle manager or a front line sales person you will find the nuggets shared here useful and practical.

Wishing you happy reading

Suleiman Shaibu

@ SuleimanSpeaks

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1. Embrace Social Media:

55% of B2B Buyers search for information on social media

We are officially in the digital age. Customers are more knowledgeable than in years past; they have access to tons of information about your product, your competition, and clever ways of solving their problems. You therefore, cannot hope to use sales methods or techniques from 20-30 years ago to court your prospective customers.

Here is an interesting statistics you should keep in mind: 32% of your prospects will research information about a problem, product, and companies that can deliver the solutions before they approach you.

Take advantage of platforms like LinkedIn to research your customers and prospects, build relationships, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. In short make the search engine like Google and Bing your friend. It will help your business

2. Take Care of Your Health: Achieving top performer status in sales requires making a conscious effort to take care of your health. Sales is a high-pressure job; it is demanding since you have a quota to meet, customer demands (for services to be delivered), and normal work pressure demands for documentation.

Fact 1: Social sellers attract 45% more opportunities than their peers, are 51% more likely to achieve quotas, and outsell their non-social

counterparts 78% of the time1. (LinkedIn)

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There is a high propensity to develop diseases such as hypertension (caused by high blood pressure), fatigue (caused by lack of sleep and rest), insomnia, and obesity (caused by frequent eating, bingeing, overdependence on fast food, and entertaining clients).

Strange work hours, busy schedules, and taxing projects can interfere with eating patterns, creating unhealthy habits like mindless snacking and skipping meals.

Stress at work can lead to stress eating. This often coincides with overeating, and in both cases the foods eaten are usually lacking in nutritional value.

You need to take care of yourself by exercising, watching the type of food you eat, and going for regular medical checkups.

3. Develop Deeper Relationships:

To be effective, all salespeople know they must develop a deep and meaningful relationship with the customer. Customers buy from people who solve problems and, more importantly, whom they like and trust.

Use technology to research what your customer wants, see their lives outside the office, speak to them, and socialize with them to know them more intimately. This helps them feel comfortable sharing their pain points with you.

4. Invest in Your Personal Development Every salesperson knows they need to continually read about what is trending in their industry and find new ways of engaging the customer to be effective on the job. Other options include taking an online course on selling or finding information on topics like Social Selling or Challenger Selling, SPIN Selling

51% of sales leaders are focused on increasing customer retention through deeper relationships. They are nearly as focused on customer

retention as sales prospecting (56% focused on growing leads/new customers). Top sales teams care just as much about creating long-lasting customers through memorable experiences as they do about

making the sale.

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5. Network within your organization: This should seem obvious, especially since it has an impact on both your career progression and your ability to influence decisions in your organization. It is important to smoothen relationships with stakeholders such as Human Resources (they are custodians of things that affect some of your development within the organization), Finance (you may have to work with them to fast-track some of your customer deliveries or follow up with payments with Account Receivables), marketing (they help generate some leads and position your company and its products/services in the marketplace).

6. Manage Your Boss: How can you have a successful career as a salesperson without learning to work with your boss? Your boss can make or break your sales career (even though the sales numbers are all yours to deliver). It is important you know how your business is measured by the business beyond making quota. Even if you are the CMO or CSO, you still have a boss (in this case the CEO).

7. Focus: How can you succeed as a salesperson if you are all over the place? You need to be more strategic in your approach! Remember the 80-20 Rule, 20% of your customer list or territory will deliver 80% of your quota. You need to have a set of checklists or internal rules that helps you detect and eliminate anything (including prospects and accounts) sapping your energy and preventing you from meeting and exceeding your quota. Be Focused!

Three-out-of-four employees report their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job2.

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8. Plan Ahead:

The best time to prepare for war is during peacetime. To continue crushing your numbers you need to plan ahead and take your account planning sessions seriously. You need to research (that word again) your customers, know what their pain points are, and how your organization is better positioned than your competitors to solve the customers’ problems. Who are the key players in the accounts? Where are their own interests in relation to the services or products you offer? (This is called drawing up a relationship map.) Planning should not stop at your desk. Bring your plan forward, to your customer. (This is an excellent way of fending off the competition.) Show how your products or solutions can be used in their environment to address whatever pain points or concerns they face.

74% of salespeople increase win rates with account planning according to Altify3.

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Career Advice for Sales Manager and VP of

Sales

Everything I have said in the previous section about excelling in sales applies to Managers and VPs of Sales too, but there are things specific to those positions to consider.

1. Take Your Leadership Development Seriously:

You are the leader for several reasons. For starters, the company believes you are the most capable person to lead the sales team. The sales reps or account managers depend on you for leadership, direction, and support in all things related to sales. They all expect you to be a coach and, in some cases, a mentor. How do you lead this team? If you don’t have a good grasp of leadership (whether you can sell is no longer in question), then how can you lead this team? Training, coaching, and motivating them to meet and exceed their quotas.

◉ Read leadership books

◉ Take up leadership development programs within and outside your organization, please do not wait till your company pays for your training, invest in yourself remember you are next in line as possible candidates for the CEO position (depending on your company’s succession plan)

74% of leading companies say coaching is the most important role front-line sales managers’ play. Brainshark4

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2. Train Your Team:

Training is not a “one and done” activity. Conduct training in-house or get external consultants to conduct Sales Boot Camps. Do both! Give your sales team all the training they need to excel on the job.

Your success is dependent on your salespeople. If they don’t meet quota, you don’t meet quota – it’s that simple. Put in place a good onboarding process for your new sales hires. A horrible onboarding process is one of the quickest ways to lose a salesperson in your organization. (Train them on the products/services, teach them about the company’s culture.)

3. Know Your Numbers: Remember sales performance is still measured in numbers, but there are other indices outside sales value that businesses measure (such as the leading and lagging indicators) such as historical performance measured against current values. You don’t have to store all the numbers in your head, but you need to have an easier way of accessing it. Let Excel (e.g. Pivot tables) and other sales tools, like CRM, be your daily companion. The CEO and rest of the business’s leadership are counting on you to know the numbers.

Without follow-up, salespeople will lose 80-90 percent of what they learned in training within a month. –Sales Alliance, 20145

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4. Forecasting: Yep, that dreaded word “Forecasting.” It means taking a peep at the future. A good sales manager or VP of Sales must know their numbers (see above) and, by extension, have good judgment on which sales can close and when. The CFO and CEO depend on you to share the numbers with management. In the same breath, the quota is cascaded or apportioned to the sales team based on these numbers. So, you see, there is no escaping it, if you are a Sales Manager or VP you must know and love your numbers.

5. Hiring and Firing:

We have already pointed out why a salesperson should work with other departments. Well, hiring and firing of salespeople generally rests with the Sales Manager or VP of Sales (this applies in a big organizations) but in some cases, the company may be small or running lean staffing levels, so the decision rests with the CEO or a non-sales hiring manager. Either way, the Sales Manager or VP of Sales input on both hiring and firing is important.

You need to work with HR and line managers to execute these processes. So, to be truly successful you must have an eye (and brain) for selecting good salespeople. When the salesperson is not pulling their weight, and all forms of encouragement have failed, the tough role of letting them go still rests with you. Remember be slow to hire but be quick to fire (the more you deal firing, the more the problem festers)

On average, only 29% of sales reps hit performance milestones in their first year. –Aberdeen, 20136

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How to Leverage Sales as an Entrepreneur

Finally, if you have chosen to start your own business, or maybe you are already running one, the above advice still holds true.

Some of the advice given about Sales Managers & VPs of Sales applies here, but there are some things specific to an entrepreneur.

1. As an Entrepreneur You are in Sales: Whether you are a manufacturer, a designer, or a one-person business, do not be confused: you are first and foremost a salesperson. You are your company’s spokesperson and you are probably more passionate than any other person in your organization about your products/services, so you should be able pitch your product/service to prospects, customers, and investors. Even for people who do not like sales, it is in their best interest to know how to sell, given that this one activity has a tremendous impact on your top and bottom lines.

2. Take advantage of technology:

Your sales activities needs to be captured in one place (not on a sheet of paper) electronically. You need tools like Zoho CRM or Zoho One (Small and Medium Size business), Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamic CRM (Midsize business to large corporates)

3. Know your numbers: It is in your interest as an entrepreneur to know your numbers too, after all, if you don’t know who will? If you do not have a good grasp of your numbers, how do you intend to work with the VP Sales or Sales Manager (and where you have none, what about the Sales Reps or Account Managers you have employed)? Even if you have the software in place, how the information is organized and interpreted could still be a problem. To be effective as an entrepreneur take some sales lessons today!

High-Performing Sales Teams use nearly 3 times as much sales technology as underperforming teams. (Sales Force)

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4. Create an Enabling Environment: As an entrepreneur, you need to help your sales team succeed. Create the right working environment for the sales team to thrive. Encourage healthy competition amongst the salespeople by rewarding performing salespeople and encouraging the laggards. Put a work style in place that provides the salespeople with more flexible work options, like working from home some days. When I worked for Microsoft, most Fridays where I didn’t have any emergency meetings I could work from home. (I could join conference calls etc.) This gives room for the sales team to spend time with their families. Some salespeople are on the road away from home for a substantial amount of time.

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5. Get Your Compensation Right:

One topic that is dear to the heart of a salesperson is their compensation. (aka commission) How does the sales team get rewarded for their performance? is it clear and understood by both parties? Can their Commission be easily be computed or does your organization have a tool they can use to compute their commission? Are there any factors outside of the salesperson’s control that can affect or impact their compensation? All these questions asked here needs to be answered, if you don’t know how to handle or address the issues around the compensation for your sales team, hire a consultant who can help you and your organization address this issue.

A Globoforce Employee Recognition survey found that when companies spend just 1% or more of payroll on recognition, 85 percent of them see a

positive impact on engagement.

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CONCLUSION

We are all salespeople; we sell something either as a career professional or as an entrepreneur. The role of selling cannot be overemphasized, whether we are selling a physical product, services, a concept, or a personality. We all need to take sales seriously; our success depends on it.

You may like to check out the book I co-authored with Brian Tracy (a renowned speaker, author, and can read more about my thought on sales and entrepreneurship. Please share this link with a friend https://bit.ly/xmanbook

I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn Here is my profile address: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suleimanspeaks/

If you would like to get more information on Sales, Entrepreneurship and Leadership Matters then subscribe to my list. Register here: http://bit.ly/suleimansubscribe

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Reference

1. LinkedIn: Measure Your Sales Success with Social Selling Index https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling/the-social-selling-index-ssi

2. Jeffrey Fermin: 8 Unsettling Facts About Bad Bosses (Huffington Post Article): https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-fermin/8-unsettling-facts-about-_b_6219958.html

3. Altify knowledge study finds 74 percent of sellers increase win rates with account planning https://www.altify.com/company/press/altify-knowledge-study-finds-74-percent-sellers-increase-win-rates-account-planning/

4. Sales Statistics: 6 Coaching Facts Every Sales Leader Needs to Hear https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2016/august/sales-statistics-coaching-for-sales-leaders

5. Accent’s Sales Enablement Blog (Item 9) https://accent-technologies.com/blog/2016/08/16/10-powerful-statistics-sales-training/

6. Accent’s Sales Enablement Blog (Item 6) https://accent-technologies.com/blog/2016/08/16/10-powerful-statistics-sales-training/