Saturday, June 27, 2009

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