Sales growth requires more than asking your team for bigger numbers. It requires leadership that helps individual sellers become prepared, productive, and effective at building relationships.
You cannot control every buying decision. You can influence the conditions that help your team earn more of them.
Put these four strategies into practice to create more opportunities for growth.
The Rainmaker 4
1. Support each seller’s Time Spent Selling™.
Rotate your focus during individual coaching conversations. Move beyond reviewing budgets and pending business to examining how each seller spends the day.
What steals time from prospecting, discovery and customer interaction? What support would help this person get in front of more potential customers?
Protect selling time. Help sellers plan meaningful contacts. Recognize the behaviors that create opportunities, even before those opportunities become orders.
2. Make doing business with your reps easier.
Every complication can slow a sale.
Review your process through the customer’s eyes. Are proposals clear? Do approvals take too long? Is the next step obvious? Can sellers quickly get answers?
Ask your representatives where customers get stuck. Then remove those obstacles.
Leadership should continuously make it easier for sellers to help customers move forward. Selling is challenging enough without your own systems adding resistance.
3. Place a premium on preparation and CNA practice.
Preparation should happen before the appointment, not during it.
Expect sellers to research the business, consider its customers and develop questions. Then practice customer needs analyses together.
Roleplay. Coach follow-up questions. Practice listening without rushing toward a package.
The goal is discovering something useful about the customer’s business. Better discovery gives your team a stronger foundation for ideas that deserve investment.
4. Recruit continuously in the marketplace.
Recruiting should never depend entirely on employment ads or a vacancy.
Meet people in retail, hospitality, community organizations and other businesses. Notice curiosity, initiative, follow through and relationship skills.
Build connections even when you are not hiring. Stay in touch. Introduce promising people to the possibilities of radio sales.
Your future team is already somewhere in your market.
Sales growth becomes more manageable when you manage what creates it.
