What Did You Learn About Selling Today? 3 Steps To Ever-improving Sales Effectiveness.

Effective marketing and closing the potential sales that arise is clearly a vital part of any business.  If you want your revenue to grow, how will your sales skills grow?

As a solo business owner, this is not necessarily the main skill you brought to the table when launching your operation.  How and when do you learn and hone these skills?  Look for continual improvement.

Many business owners, particularly solopreneurs, tell me that making time for selling is a struggle.  But if the business is not making as much profit, turnover or whichever criteria is most important to you, selling is of course one of the tasks that must have a place in the calendar.

If time is the concern, it is even more difficult to see how we could make time to become more efficient or effective in our sales efforts.  Sometimes we have to take one step back to take two steps forward.

3 steps to ever-improving sales effectiveness.

Step #1 – Learn

Spend a specific, but limited time, perhaps just one hour looking for someone to learn from.  A sales coach or trainer that you know of or someone you find through simple search who offers tips in a language you find easy to absorb.  It could be a book, blog, website or newsletter.

Want you want are bite-sized pieces, individual ideas that you find easy to understand and implement.  A great number of so called guru’s online will offer large scale overhauls of your sales efforts, but these, though often outstanding, are often only practical for a student.  Once your business is up and running, these programmes will tend to inundate you and overwhelm.

You may find an online network that publishes articles regularly.  Within this, look for the contributor(s) that speak to you.

If the source is online, you may be able to set up an RSS feed, otherwise you may need to find a few minutes each week to check back to your source for the current tip.  This should only take you 10-15 minutes per week to pick up the nugget.

Spend a further few minutes working out how you will assimilate this new (or reminded) idea in to your everyday sales & marketing activities.

This way, your learning is limited to a few minutes at a regular time each week, but you know you will be improving some aspect, all the time.

Step #2 – Practice

Now for the discipline during your busy week.  You have to remind yourself frequently about adopting the new idea or initiative.  It must rapidly become part of your everyday work.

The tip may relate to how you interact with a prospect.  Where and when do you sell?  Do you make calls, respond to calls, do it through email, face-to-face visits or letters?  Whichever method(s) you use, put a post-it with a headline referring to the tip in a conspicuous place.

Perhaps the tip is to do with marketing initiatives or some other background work.  If necessary, set a reminder in your diary every day around the time you turn your attention to these tasks, to remember to incorporate or try out the idea.

Step #3 – Feedback

Incorporating this new idea must increase your productivity or effectiveness, so how do you know?  You will know from my other writing that I am a strong believer in record keeping and attention to the numbers.

The numbers may be able to reveal improvements in conversion rates or average sale sizes.  Perhaps the tip was designed to shorten the sales cycle.  Do your numbers reflect this?

If the numbers are not changing, time for reflection.  Are you following the idea as offered?  If so, can you work out why it is not working for you?  Is the effect going to take longer?  Do you need to persevere or tweak the idea to suit your situation better?  Ultimately, not all medicines work for all people.  It’s OK to conclude this and revert to the way you were  before, but only after giving the new idea a fair shot.

If the tip involves customer interaction, the way you say things, the things you ask etc., why not try it out on your accountability partner or some other willing friend.  Does it come across as you and authentic?  Get their feedback.  You can of course also ask your prospect or customer for feedback if appropriate.

One final thing here.  An advantage of this method of paced learning is that you will not be trying to change too many things at once.  If you are already bringing in a flow of new business, but would just like it to be quicker and for you to be able to spend less time focused on selling, it is going to be important to limit that changes you make.

If you change a large amount of our sales process in one go, great if the results go up, but if they don’t you won’t necessarily know which aspect is the culprit.