If you're like most sales professionals then you read industry publications to stay on top of the trends, challenges and news taking place within your given industry. In our case that industry is the information technology industry. And if you're a top performing sales professional than you read what your customers read to stay connected with those trends and challenges. If you are not currently doing this than I strongly encourage you to quickly adopt this best practice into your daily or weekly routine.
Like many who decide to go on a diet January 1st, sticking to that diet and exercise routine is difficult just like it is for IT staffing sales professionals adopting and mastering consultative sales skills. With so much to know and learn it can be down right overwhelming and even frustrating. Take it from me, it took me years to master my craft and I am still learning every day.
Learn our proven 7 step methodology for turning cold calls into hot leads.
Over the course of the past several months I have been doing less sales training and more "business consulting." More to the point, clients are sharing with me their challenges in growing and scaling their business. Owners of IT staffing firms are getting stuck at various revenue plateaus and can't seem to break through. In short, these organizations are struggling to achieve scalable growth. In this blog post I share with you three reasons IT staffing firms struggle to scale
Sales onboarding is the process in which organizations apply to integrate new sales reps into their organization and help them gain the skills, knowledge and behaviors required to perform and meet and sales quota.
Sales forecasting can play a major role in the growth and development of your staffing organization. According to research from the Aberdeen Group, companies with accurate sales forecasts are 10% more likely to grow their revenue year-over-year and 7.3% more likely to hit quota than those with poor, inaccurate sales forecasts.
By definition, a process is a systematic series of repeatable actions or steps intended to achieve a result. When followed, these steps lead to predictable and expected outcomes. A sales process allows salespeople and sales managers to identify, qualify, diagnose, and measure opportunities and then determine the next step in the sales process. It also enables sales managers to quickly and easily identify bottlenecks and produce an accurate sales revenue forecast.
What sets top performing sellers apart from average sellers? Why are some salespeople more effective at closing deals or building customer loyalty over others? And how do some reps rocket-launch their career trajectory? Business acumen. Business acumen is a term often associated with leadership and thrown around boardrooms. But business acumen is also a key component to excelling new business development.
Like a lot of things in life, sales and certainly new business development is all about timing. If you called a prospect right after they signed a deal with one of your competitors, do you think they would have much appetite for discussing your offerings? Probably not.
One of the biggest challenges senior sales leaders face is how to onboard and train millennial salespeople. It’s a daunting task, and an expensive one. Getting new employees up to speed can cost up to 30 percent of a new hire’s annual salary. This is particularly true for more established organizations who have relied on more traditional, instructor-led classroom training as their primary means for training new hires.
Hiring "A" players is not a repeatable or scalable solution for growing your business because there simply isn't enough "A" players in the marketplace. Even if you could load up on talented "A" players, they still need a proven path to follow. What you need is a sales process. A sales process can scale as your organization grows and it will support all sellers, regardless of talent level to predictable success. In fact, a study conducted by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association found that B2B companies who had defined a formal sales process experienced 18% more revenue growth compared to companies that didn’t. But the benefits of a sales process go far beyond your bottom line, many of which I will touch in this post, your guide to understanding sales process.