Sales Training Journal

Maximizing sales effectiveness and revenue growth is a challenge facing not just sales management but front line salespeople as well. If sales effectiveness is about the ability of a sales team to successfully convert prospects into customers and achieve sales goals, the question is, how does a company go about boosting sales performance? What are the various strategies, techniques, and tools the sales organization will use to improve the efficiency and productivity of the sales process?. In a nutshell, the sales strategy defines sales tactics, and sales tactics define sales effectiveness—the type of actions salespeople take to open opportunities, move deals forward, and then close. To maximize sales effectiveness, then you must first understand the externals in your business and then make choices about how your strategy proposes to deal with the opportunities and threats inherent in those market realities. In any business, value is created or...

  Sales playbook creation can seem like a burdensome business task in pulling all aspects of a sales strategy into a comprehensive template. So, it’s worth remembering that a sales playbook acts as a roadmap for salespeople and sales teams to guide them through the entire sales process. It documents all the steps from how to research and find a lead to qualifying an opportunity plus all the markers towards closing a deal. The sales playbook should also outline the sales methodology, techniques, and expectations for each salesperson’s role. 

 The  ultimate aim of the playbook is to make sure that everyone is aligned to the sales strategies and tactics and the sales efforts are all on the same page. Building detailed sales plays within the playbook will instill best practices into the sales process and make all the sales steps repeatable and scalable. Each sales play should include the approach, what qualifies as a genui...

  A sales pipeline is a representation of the steps a prospect goes through from initial contact to closing the deal. It helps any salesperson to track the progress of deals, quotes, and potential customers and manage all the sales steps effectively. Too often, salespeople have all of their customer information spread out across different channels. This practice not only is inefficient but also interferes with a consistent customer experience. What Is A Sales Pipeline? So, the sales pipeline will allow salespeople to monitor deals and track customer interactions alongside comments, feedback, and next steps. A steady pipeline of new business opportunities can be the secret to nurturing leads into clients. But where will they come from, and how do you go about converting them? Here is a breakdown of the typ...

Build your process with these easy and quick-to-understand steps. Having a documented sales process is one of the biggest contributors to sales success. An effective sales process helps you track your opportunities, create a common language around the steps of the sale, and make accurate forecasts. Different companies have different names and definitions for their sales stages. Depending on the size and complexity of the deal, sales processes can have between three and eight sales stages. But it doesn’t matter how many there are or what they’re called, as long as everyone agrees and understands each stage. What Are the Main Sales Process Steps? Regardless of whether you are new to sales or an experienced salesperson, the following easy-to-follow steps will guide you through a successful process that adds to your sales engagements. As what each company sells to whom is different, you should adjust or add steps as needed to accommodate your business, product, or prosp...

What is a sales cycle definition What is a sales cycle? Let us begin by explaining what is a sales cycle and why it is a critical component of any sales strategy. A sales cycle is a map that lays out the step-by-step process that salespeople will follow that maximizes the possibility of a sale.  They can be long (in enterprise sales a year is not unusual) or short (in transactional selling it can be less than 30 minutes). It is the roadmap for a salesperson as they undertake sales activity because it guides them along the path to reach their end destination. Most sales cycles are aligned to the buyer’s journey that a customer follows to buy a product. Understanding the Sales Cycle When sales activity is broken into steps, a business can gather information on where customers enter or leave the buying journey. The success of each step bec...