Many of us sales professionals feel like we know our market well and what’s important to our prospects.  While this may be partially true we can’t forget that we aren’t the potential client.  It’s tremendously easy to lose the perspective of your targets without feedback on a regular basis.

One great way to mine what a prospect’s pains are is to send out a survey.  There are many tools out there to create surveys but one of the best and most cost effective is iContact®.  This easy to operate tool allows users to create and send surveys with an easy to use interface within minutes of opening an account after uploading a contact list.  You can find a link below for a free trial.

A few thing s to remember when creating your surveys are:

• AVOID LOADED OR LEADING WORDS OR QUESTIONS
• MISPLACED QUESTIONS

• MUTUALLY NON-EXCLUSIVE RESPONSE CATEGORIES

• NONSPECIFIC QUESTIONS
• CONFUSING OR UNFAMILIAR WORDS

• NON-DIRECTED QUESTIONS THAT GIVE RESPONDENTS EXCESSIVE LATITUDE.
• FORCING RESPONDENTS TO ANSWER

• NON-EXHAUSTIVE LISTINGS

• UNBALANCED LISTINGS

• DOUBLE BARRELED QUESTIONS

Getting started with email marketing is easy…and FREE! Sign up for iContact Free Edition and start reaching your customers!

As business owners and sales managers we are constantly looking for new ways to motivate our teams toward greater levels of success.  Many times our answers are simple and don’t require much more than changing the way we think about problems and our assets in the field.

Support For The Troops. Feeling like you’re alone in the trenches in never a positive scenario for salespeople.  Sure the job may require travel and long hours of working alone but that doesn’t mean that some level of support from home base isn’t appreciated.

Supervisors many times lose the perspective of sales professionals operating in the field.  While management has a methodology of its own, a good leader puts themselves themselves in the shoes of their charges and doesn’t forget how it feels to walk in them. Just as people buy from people, people will follow and produce for people they respect.  A manager who seems out of touch with the realities of making a certain quota will have sales professionals who excel when they are ahead but fall on their faces when they are in a slump.

It’s never a bad idea for managers to  make regular contact with their sales team and offer assistance.  Even if no support is needed the psychological effect of the offer being made can have a profound effect on team members.  In the end, if a sales professional feels like they have the support of their managers then many times they will come to them for solutions with problem before they are uncorrectable.  Business is about problems, fixing them before you damage the customer relationship is what successful business is about.

Tools That Work. There are tons of gadgets, apps, and tools out there that all proclaim they will make sales easier or volumes higher.  The first rule however is to make sure you have the basic equipment, reporting procedures, as well as the right people who know how to use them.

Once those items are squared away only then can you look at perform  and efficiency enhancing tools. Imagine having a team of ten sales professionals who all have company provided vehicles that never start.  Before you worry about giving them a lap top that will allow them to work from the field, a good maintenance and repair program needs to be implemented to get in the field.  If your reporting process is done completely through Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets, you need to make sure that everyone has the necessary programs and know-how to utilize the report.  You might this think this is all common sense but I can assure you it’s not.

Many organizations run despite having the Kool-Aid®  and no sugar but how much better could they operate with everything in place?  Nothing frustrates a sales professional more than having the “sales” portion of their job inhibited by their tools or their team.  A race horse wants to run and a sales person wants to sell, anything that interrupts that needs to be fixed immediately.

Coaching While It’s Relevant. We’ve all heard the old saying, “a stitch in time save nine” and it’s incredibly relevant in sales. The time to correct a problem is before it ever occurs, unfortunately many managers miss the signs of breakage in the process.  In sales customers solve their problems by finding someone else to take care of their needs.  You have few chances the earn the trust and admiration of a prospect so when you have it you must capitalize on it.

When your sales person walks away without the deal, sure you can review why they didn’t win but could you have better prepared in the first place?  As managers and sales people, we know when someone is ready for the field and when they aren’t.  I know many prescribe to the sink or swim mentality but this is just an excuse to avoid coaching.  You don’t send a soldier to war not knowing where the safety switch is located.  Coaching should be a regular item on any sales team’s agenda.  With regular coaching/training sales professionals get not only the coaching they may need but an opportunity to look at their tactics from another angle.  Perspective is incredibly important to sales professionals and being able to see it from another’s point of view.

Evaluate your sales people during coaching sessions and under stand their professional needs.  Once a an area is identified that needs improvement, work towards a proactive training program with input from the sales person.  Solutions are easily proposed but sometimes difficult to implement and maintain.  You must get buy-in from your sales professionals and coaching sessions are a great opportunity to get just that.

Nothing about selling or managing sales people is automatic.  It just makes sense to evaluate your team, their tools and methods to ensure consistent success.  That’s why they call it “managing” and not just “manage”.