When you hear the word “team,” you think about a group of people working together toward a common goal. If a football team is to win, everyone in the organization – from the last player on the roster all the way up to the owner – has to be on the same page. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s the same way in sales. For your company to succeed in a brutal marketplace, everyone needs to be moving in the same direction. But in many instances, that is not the case.
A good place to start is with communication. Some salespeople use the same words and phrases to mean entirely different things – for example, one person’s “lead” may be something entirely different from another’s “lead.” When building a cohesive sales force, that level of confusion is simply not acceptable. Members of the team have to be able to communicate clearly with one another, or else unnecessary mistakes can be made.
Luckily, this is a problem with a simple solution: get your team talking in the same language. Find a selling system and someone who knows how to teach a sales language to get everyone talking.
Now that the sales team has a rock-solid base for communication, you can begin having conversations about what exactly it is that they’re doing. Your team should have a standardized approach to selling. Do some salespeople succeed while others are failing? Are some prospects dropping out of your sales pipeline? Take a look at your sales process and analyze what’s working and what is not. Refine it and simplify it, and start doing the things that work over and over again. Make your sales language a part of the process. And stick with tested, proven methods – don’t get too creative and start relying on processes that may not be effective in the long run.
Establishing a rubric for sales – in process and in language – will strengthen the structure of your sales team, and will help make them more efficient and successful.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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