Sales Performance: Six Keys to Improve Sales Performance
Sales Performance: By Michael Halper, Launch Pad Solutions, 5/01/11
Whether you are a business owner, sales manager, or sales profession, it is likely that a top priority is to improve sales performance. Below are some very practical and actionable keys to help drive results in that area.Â
1. Minimize Non-revenue Generating Activity
When working as a sales person or running a business, there is usually some sort of correlation between how busy we are and how much we are selling. Although, there is the possibility that we are being “productively unproductive”. This would be working busy on items that are not directly tied to generating revenue.If improving sales performance is our top goal, we must make sure as much of our time is spent in areas that will increase revenue as possible. It is key to find a way to delegate, automate, or outsource tasks that will not have an impact on the top line.
2. Automate Where PossibleÂ
It is important to automate as much of your business and sales processes as possible. It is amazing how much you can automate today with the use of software and different forms of technology. By successfully finding ways to automate different tasks and processes, a tremendous amount of time can be freed up and this can help to improve sales performance.
3. Focus on Employee Development
Whether you work for yourself, report to someone else, or have a team below you, it key to focus on employ development in terms of continuing to learn and develop. Sales is skill and it is a field where working hard does not necessarily lead to success. There are things we can do (and not do) to drive results and improve sales performance.A typical day and week for a sales person can be very full and very hectic. But to allocate at least a little time for sales training and sales coachingwill likely yield positive results.
4. Goal Setting
We must know where we are going in order to improve our chances of getting there. If we want to improve sales performance, we can increase our chances of successfully doing that by setting goals that lead to that end result.
5. Decrease Sales Staff Turnover
The cost of sales staff turnover is tremendous on an organization. When a sales resource walks out the door, they take a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience with them and that is very costly to replace.
If there is cost when employees leave, then there is a benefit when they stay. Finding ways to retain employees and decrease sales staff turnover is a key way to improve sales performance.
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6. Outsource Where it Makes Sense
In todayâs day and age, you can outsource just about everything. And with time as a business owner or a sales person being limited, it can be very advantageous to outsource areas where someone else may be able to perform a task better and cheaper.
For a business owner, one way to outsource to save time and improve efficiencies is to move any internally managed applications to software-as-a-service providers as this can save a tremendous amount of administrative time.
From a sales standpoint, sales tasks like cold calling can be outsourced through cold calling services and this move can help make a sales team more productive and drive positive results.
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Launch Pad Solutions helps businesses to drive positive results through sales consulting.
 http://www.coachingyou.org/keys-improve-sales-performance-a-142.html
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