More Sales Gems

Here are some more sales gems as promised.

• If you don’t pay commission to your sales people then they are not sales people
  o Customer service people who up sell without commission are not sales people
  o Marketing people are not sales people
  o Accountants are not sales people
  o The closest thing to sales people are company owners. They are the only other category who only get paid if they exceed their job duties.
• Don’t limit commission
  o Decide beforehand that you are happy to pay for delivery. The quickest way to lose your best sales person is to start arguing after the sales is done.
• Do pay a percentage of last month’s billings(revenue or margin or both) as commission, if you are in an annuity business.
• For most industries, there is no such thing as seasonality, only lack of planning.
• The key to sales, as with any science, is research and research implies asking questions.

It is obvious that these gems, as with any gem, require to be viewed in the correct setting.

If you would like to delve deeper into this area, please visit www.intermizzi.com.au or send an email to paul@intermizzi.com.au And now you can follow me in www.twitter.com/intermizzi

Some Sales Gems

I was recently asked what I would present, as Sales Gems, in 20 minutes to a group of up and coming company owners. As I have not updated the blog for a while, I though they may be useful here.

Here are a few of them.

• Sales does not have to be an Art, it can scale through application of technology and process.
• Don’t let a sales team just happen. There is a skill and team balance just as there is in any team.
• Don’t be happy with 20% of your sales team delivering 80% of your sales. If this is the case then you’ve either a) Picked the wrong team, or b) Don’t understand your sales process
• If you, as the company owner, are the company’s best sales person then you haven’t been able to document your sales process.
• Don’t expect the sales team to share your values a) You built the company, they didn’t and b) Sales people are rarely in the office, they don’t get to share the daily banter and the daily examples of how you apply your values.

I've also put together a template for a sales plan.

If you would like a copy please email me at paul@intermizzi.com.au

The Art of Sales and when to use it.

Anyone in sales will know what it is like to have to put up with the all of the forms and systems that your company insists that you complete. I recall a sales person in a successful Telco telling me that he had to enter the same data in seven different forms each week and couldn't understand why. I admit that it doesn't make sense to me. This was a bureaucracy that had to produce reports and they didn't care that they were taking time away from revenue generation to obtain the data. At worst you should only have to enter the data once.

It will become obvious to anyone who cares to examine the sales process that it is better to spend money on a system than reduce sales time. So you still need to collect the data but make sure that any system is helping sales and is not designed to penalise the sales person for not wanting to spend time entering data into a system that will not help the sales process.

So where does the Art of Sales come into play? I've realised that the Art in a sale is the part of me that enjoys winning a deal. The Art of me in a sales process only needs to be engaged once I have a qualified opportunity. It is the sales process, or sales production system, that delivers the opportunity to me. And don't confuse an opportunity with a lead.

If you want to find out more about creating a sales process then visit www.intermizzi.com.au