Guest Post by Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter”
Too many people see sales as nothing more than a single activity or at most a couple of activities. There even can be a tendency to think that a salesperson who is proficient in one aspect can easily excel in all areas. A better approach is to align members of the team with their strengths. This type of focus will lead to greater success – for the salesperson and the team as a whole.
We see this in sports as well. Whether you are looking at football, baseball or any other sport, we will see a team made up of specialists. I couldn’t imagine the level of injuries that would occur to a quarterback if he tried to be an offensive lineman.
Just as the football team is made up of individuals who specialize in certain aspects of succeeding on the football field, the same can be said of sales. The salesperson who specializes in account management can’t be expected to achieve great prospecting results, for example. Yet this is what far too many companies expect of their salespeople. They expect the person to know how to do it all proficiently just because they wear the words “sales” in their title or job description.
In companies that have more than one sales team, this same concept applies on a grander scale. Individual teams may have their strengths in the overall selling strategy for the company.
Companies that achieve the highest sales results are those that have well-disciplined and focused sales teams.
It’s only natural for someone to be able to achieve better results when they specialize versus the person who attempts to master everything.
Answering these questions can help you begin to realize whether or not you have a training problem, a hiring problem or a problem in resource utilization:
- Which activities do you or your sales team do best?
- What are the areas where there is a deficiency?
It’s easy to think something can be addressed with training, but how do you know? You don’t. And you won’t know sometimes for months or even years after a training program has been put in place.
Resource allocation or realigning your sales force to be targeted against a very tight process may very well be the most optimal solution.
This might mean developing new job descriptions and processes or it might mean using other resources or organizations to allow your own people to be deployed in the most effective manner.
This is all about having sales leadership with your organization and setting your team up to win both in the short-term and long-term. Sales is the engine of business and if your sales force is not operating effectively, then you don’t have a powerful engine.
Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” is author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price. He is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. Check out Mark’s blog at www.TheSalesHunter.com and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Reprinting of this article is welcomed as long as the following is included: Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” www.TheSalesHunter.com, © 2012