Your Sales Funnel’s Upside Down
As you may know, I have spent the last 32 years of my life helping salespeople and sales managers improve their production. One of the questions that I get frequently is, “How can I improve sales immediately?” Frankly, there is no magic when it comes to sales improvement. However, there are a couple of components of our “secret sauce” that will dramatically improve sales production very quickly.
My first suggestion is for you to turn your funnel attention upside down. Many sales teams get mired in working with opportunities in the funnel and ignore the need to constantly fill and refill the funnel. Put your attention at the level above the funnel. By doing that, your funnel will become more full, more rapidly.
The more opportunities you contest,
the more opportunities you’ll close…
It’s just that simple.
If you aren’t competing for all the decisions in your market at this time, then you have a tremendous opportunity for improvement. Remember: Someone’s buying something from somebody, right now. Make sure you are one of the “somebodies” that are considered.
A second strategy to improve sales is to dramatically increase the amount of selling time available to your sales team. Sales time is precious and, in today’s economic environment, we can’t afford to waste one minute of selling time.
Many companies have inadvertently created processes that suppress and limit the amount of selling time available to the sales team. When this is the case, top-line production is reduced, morale is decreased, and profits are either reduced or eliminated.
Identify any and all nonessential activities that your sales team is undertaking. As a rule, if the activity doesn’t help generate a new order and/or incremental order from an existing account, then it is by definition suspect and should be reviewed intensely.
Combine these two activities, and your sales will increase very quickly. As always, I wish you…
Good Luck & Good Selling!!
