Posted by Bridget Gleason on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 @ 12:09 PM
How would you rate your sales acumen? Take the SALES IQ test below to determine how you "rank" as a salesperson.
TEST YOUR SALES IQ
| 1. Great sales people like to "wing it" if they've been selling for several years. | True
| False |
| 2. Talking about features early in the sales call helps to reduce the number of objections. | True | False |
3. Every lead is a good lead.
| True | False |
4. Great sales people never have to ask for the order.
| True | False |
| 5. If there is more than one minute of silence after you ask for the order, re-state the benefits. | True | False |
| 6. In a business to business sale, product and seller may be inseparable in the customer's mind. | True | False |
7. Users respond more favorably to features than decision makers do.
| True | False |
8. Of all the sales skills in the book, good closing skills will put the most money in your pocket.
| True | False |
| 9. If you are sloppy and disorganized, your customer will assume that your company is also sloppy and disorganized. | True | False |
| 10. All great sales people like to cold call. | True | False
|
| Answers: TRUE (6,7), FALSE (1,2,3,4,5,8,10) |
|
|
Sales Gold Medal: 9-10 Correct
Sales Silver Medal: 7-8 Correct
Sales Bronze: 6 Correct
Practice Makes Perfect: Less than 6
The quiz is not to be taken too seriously, but does uncover some sales myths that are out there floating about.
Posted by Bridget Gleason on Thu, Jan 28, 2010 @ 10:59 AM
Repeatable Sales Process 
Are the ups and downs of sales really unavoidable? Is the sales roller coaster a given?
As I work with sales teams across the country, it seems that the roller coaster effect is not only accepted, it is expected. This is a dangerous attitude for individuals, teams and the companies that we work for.
And I'm here to tell you that roller coasters are NOT a necessary function of sales. In order to create consistent results, you need a repeatable sales process. And the first step is identifying the metrics required for success, and then putting together the activities to support the metrics.
As an example, one of my clients sells cloud services, and each sales representative has a quota of (7) cloud deals per day. In order to make that number, we worked backwards to get at their metrics.
Customers generally sign up only after they've had a demo. But 90% of the people who see demos, end up buying the product.
Quota: 49 deals per week
Demos (90% close ratio): 55 demos per week
For every person that a sales representative talks to, 75% of them agree to a demo.
Demos: 55 per week
Conversations (75% close ratio): 74 conversations per week
A Sales Representative will get a live person on the phone about 20% of the time.
Conversations: 74 per week
Dials (20% close ratio): 370 per week
Now we have the beginning of a repeatable sales process based on metrics.
| Quota | Week | Day |
# of Cloud Deals
| 49 | 7 |
| | | |
| Activities | Week | Day |
# of Outbound Calls (Dials)
| 370 | 74 |
# of Conversations
| 74 | 15 |
# of Demos
| 55 | 1 |
Once we have our baseline metrics identified, we can fine tune our sales skills to create efficiencies in the activities that we're identified as essential to success.