Building your Sales Team

You may have a brilliant product, best price, great online and offline visibility but you may not necessarily have the best sales report that you can boast about. Normally companies consider the above mentioned factors to be the crucial factors that help a company to do well however, they have been proved wrong repeatedly through their poor performance. If all these factors do not bring success, then what is the deciding factor on our sales? Most obviously, it is the effectiveness of your sales team. Often it is the sales team that makes or breaks a company success. If you have not been paying attention to building a strong sales team so far, then it is highly crucial that you start paying attention to building an effective sales team.

If you want an effective sales team then it is vital that each member of the team is highly effective. By selecting top performers we can make sure of having an effective sales team. How do we identify the top performers? We can use effective tools such as SPQ Gold. It is one of the best tools available in the market, which is capable of measuring the ability of your sales people to initiate contact and to introduce themselves to the prospective buyers. It will also help us find out their ability to manage their visibility levels in a highly competitive market. Every sales person has to fight the temptations of call reluctance and most people succumb to the temptation and employ over 12 avoidance behaviors making themselves to be unfit for the job. SPQ Gold will help us identify candidates who are more likely to exhibit such unhealthy traits and find candidates with healthy traits who can work well even under pressure.

SPQ Gold is the only tool available in the market to assess sales call reluctance. Using the tool, you can hire a strong sales team that will perform well despite all odds against them. Sales profiles are not easy profiles; it requires a high level of resilience to work under pressure and under heavy competition. They should be able to work as a team and not have their own goals and agendas. They should be able to fit in to the new environment fast and come up with their own new strategies handing the new market. Of course, there is no substitute to hard work; but their hard work should be done diligently. Above all, they should be highly optimistic people despite the gloomy financial environment.

When you use SPQ Gold sales assessment you will be able to identify both strong traits as well as the weak traits of the candidate helping you to pick the best sales team. You will also know the kind of training that should be given to your sales team. One of the advantages of SPQ Gold sales assessment is that the tests can be run online. In addition, you cannot find another effective method that is as cost-effective as SPQ Gold.

About the Author

Richard Bonn is the owner of Awesome Web Marketing. For more information on Richard please visit http://www.buildsalesteams.com

For more information you can visit http://www.buildsalesteams.com

SPQ Gold and Sales Call Reluctance are registered trademarks of Behavioral Sciences Research Press.

Getting Great Results When Things Aren't Really That Great

Transition - it's the word of the times, isn't it? Right now, as so many organizations go through significant change, the phrase "business as usual" seems like an oxymoron. "Usual? There's nothing usual about the way I'm doing business in this economy," you might point out.

Your organization might be going through a merger, expanding or decreasing its employee base, or just operating in a difficult economy. Whatever the transition, the scenario affects your organization's business processes, sales, and employees. As a professional keynote speaker, what's interesting to me is that when times are tough, when there's an issue with the economy, some businesses do really well and some do not - and these are businesses in the same industry! For many, the economy is like pizza: When it's good, it's really good, and even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

Differentiators

What I see making a big difference are attitude and belief. If you're walking around thinking things are tough, that's the mind-set you have. What you focus your attention on is what your life looks like. It's the vibe people get from you. It's going to be the way you present things. Looking at life through loser-colored glasses can undercut your chances to succeed.

So can you just believe your way to a rosier picture? It's not really about thinking positive thoughts and then just watching and waiting as good things come your way. That's a simple way to state the premise of Rhonda Byrne's successful book The Secret, but I have to say I'm not buying it. In fact, I think The Secret is definably not the secret. It makes perfect sense that any book telling you that belief without action will create success is definitely going to be a best-seller. While I think it's important to have a belief system, there's more to success than that.

Most companies - and most people - who succeed when times are tough make sure they get more focused on the needs of the customer in the moment. To succeed, we can't be stuck in the long-term needs we've identified over the years. That's probably not where the customer's head is right now. You've got to sharpen your focus on what's really important to customers here and now. If your customer's treading water (which is nothing more than controlled drowning), throw him a life preserver. You can teach him to swim later. Once you're past the crisis, there's always time to get customers back on track with what you know will benefit them long-term.

Act in the moment

Attitude and belief can help you through a tough time, but not by flat-out ignoring difficult circumstances or willing them to magically disappear. You have to first recognize that tough times are temporary and then work quickly to address the needs that arise during difficult conditions. So don't let the media tell you what your life looks like; remember that good news does not sell newspapers. Have you ever noticed that really depressing news stories are often followed by Prozac commercials?

You can't just will a sluggish economy to pick up instantly, but you can believe that it will bounce back over time - it always does. With that attitude, it makes sense to take action to meet people's most pressing needs until things bounce back and you can return to "business as usual."

Suppose you work for a company that's going through changes and you're afraid your division is about to be cut or your job is in jeopardy. That's when you have to figure out what your boss really, truly needs … besides a vacation. You might have to forget for a moment how brilliant you are and how all your grand ideas can push the company in fabulous new directions. Instead, you need to ask: What's a big deal right now? You stand to benefit greatly by turning your focus to the company's immediate needs. If you're doing work that's really important to your employer here and now, then when the chopping block comes down your boss will be looking in the other direction. It's like if you and co-worker are being chased by a bear - you don't have to outrun the bear, just your co-worker.

Critical and even negative thinking can have great strategic benefit, allowing you to spot trouble on the horizon. But when you insist on looking at life through loser lenses, it prevents you from seeing the effort you need to make.

People and companies that are really successful during times of transition often hav

 

About the Author

Garrison Wynn is a nationally known motivational keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant. He is the CEO and founder of Wynn Solutions, specializing in The Truth about Success.

e to work a little harder, investing more thought, more time, and even more money to do as well as they did before. But even though they expend more resources to perform as well as last year, they're not losing ground in a company-wide shake-up or industry-wide slump. Odds are, they're still moving forward. When business picks up again, they will have cemented their usefulness to employers and customers and can resume a better version of "business as usual."

Listening Like a Leader

Our studies of the most effective people in corporate America show that the top 2 percent are effective not because they executed best practices well. They did not make the most phone calls or have the best processes. They simply understood the truth about trust:

People do business with people they like.
They like people they trust.
They trust people who have a detectable level of compassion and competence.

Does it take time to build trust? The truth is that you have known people for five years who still don't trust you, and you've known some for five minutes who do. Our research shows that trust is usually created by showing a detectable level of concern. When people truly believe you are concerned for them, they tend to think you possess good judgment. After all, if you care about them, you must know what you are doing.

So what is the fastest and most effective way to show people that you care and you're competent?

Make sure they feel heard, which is more than just listening. I call it listening like a leader.

You are not a leader unless you have followers; a leader without followers is called a failure. Regardless of your skills, if your staff doesn't feel heard and doesn't trust you, they will always do the minimum. They will watch the clock and be ready to leave at 4:45 every afternoon. They will do just enough each day to avoid getting fired, and they will hope the idea you came up with without their input fails. That's right”you can spend your life delegating to people who want your projects to fail. How smart is that?

OK, you have to listen; I am sure you already know that. The issue is, how well do people really listen? Most studies show that 75 percent of the world's population does not listen well.

Here is an insight that you won't find in many books, leadership speaker keynotes or training programs. As a whole, we don't listen very well and it's not our fault! That's right, I am sure you are used to hearing and reading that all of our communication problems are of our making. However, most experts agree that from birth to 5 years of age, we learn more than we will for the rest of our lives.

Even if you earn 15 doctorate degrees in your lifetime, you still acquired most of your knowledge in early childhood. In those formative years, if a child does not feel heard by the adults in its life, it does not possess good listening skills. The bottom line is that it's hard to listen when no one ever listened to you.

Listening is not hereditary.
It's an acquired skill.

Are we going to blame the parents? No! It's difficult to listen to young children when we are trying to look out for their welfare. When my stepdaughter was five, she asked me if Dracula drives a taxi cab. I said, Well¦, I guess if it's a night job. Uh, wait a minute! What kind of question is that?

She also asked me if she could have a tattoo”not a fake, stick-on tattoo from an ice cream parlor vending machine, but a real one. I said, No, because you're in kindergarten”and I'm taking the TV out of your room just for asking that question.

People are more likely to follow your example than to follow your advice. We create better listeners by being better listeners.

Unfortunately, we don't have much evidence of people returning from communication-training programs as better listeners. It doesn't take a lot of research to figure out that poor listeners get very little from seminars on listening.

So we don't listen and it prevents us from being effective leaders. If we can't do much to improve our listening skills, we have to focus on what we can do in the condition we are in.

The key, then, is to focus on making sure people feel heard. And the first step requires recognizing and recovering from distractions.

One day, as I listened to an employee talk about his wants and needs, my mind started to wander. There he was, sharing his core issues, and I'm thinking to myself, “Look at the size of this guy's head! It was hard to focus. Once I was trying to listen to a prospect on a sales call when I noticed he had red hair, blonde eyebrows and a black mustache. I remember thinking, “It's Mr. Potato Face! Something has to be a stick-on; that's not all him.

After we recover from our own distractions, we have to deal with the real issues at hand. The first of these issues is what I refer to as “the pitch in your head. It can be anything from a preconceived idea that a manager has about an employee, to a practiced presentation that you are dying to spew on your unsuspecting sales victims (prospects, I mean).

Sure, you ask a question just as you were taught to do in your sales or management training program—you know, a question like “Based on what criteria are your decisions made? As they talk and you diligently pretend to listen, the pitch in your head starts to play; and when the prospect says something that strikes a chord in you, triggering how much you know, your pitch finds the pause it was looking for and off you go.

“I know exactly what you are talking about because I have had many people just like you with this exact same situation. As a matter of fact, it was this time last year and they even looked a lot like you.

You then project your opinion, experience or spiel onto the person as a solution to his or her problem.

Instead of feeling heard, the person feels quickly judged, and communication does not take place. It was dead before the spew was finished.

The problem with this scenario is that you rob people of their uniqueness. When you tell them you know exactly what the problem is, they tend to want to show you how unique they are. You actually create your own resistance and prevent your skills and even your empathy from making their mark.

When people are talking, you are thinking about you or about what you can do to help them help you. It's a natural thing for us to do, and it forces us to pitch hard and focus on convincing rather than on gaining agreement.

So what do the most effective people do differently?

They make sure the people they are dealing with feel heard and can retain their uniqueness. If you make people feel important, you will be important to them!

But an even bigger realization comes from all of this.

When you focus on how people feel about what they are saying, you increase the level of true concern you have for others. You actually start to become the person you thought you were pretending to be: a true leader!

About the Author

Garrison Wynn is an author, motivational speaker and trainer providing business solutions for success.

Sitting on the Fence in this economy (BAD IDEA)

Every morning I turn on my TV and see what they are saying on CNBC about the economy. I usually love watching it and gather insights each time I view it. However over the past few months I am getting sick and tired of how the media is displaying the current economic situation, yes I agree we should take action on the things that need reform and regulation, but come on the more that we give in to what the media is feeding us the more we perpetuate the perceived economic crisis.

This also applies to sellers of businesses, I have noticed a lot people that are interested in selling their company are sitting on the fence "we are waiting to see what this economy will do, once it stabilizes then we will sell" Bad idea, their are more buyers than ever out there right now looking to buy good companies. More buyers means higher price for their business, when equity growth in an economy dries up people go back to what made them wealthy in the first place, CASH FLOW. Good steady cash flow is what investors want right now, equity growth is no longer on their mind if they can get 15-20% on the bottom line of a solid company, and will pay a great price for that cash flow.

If you own a business and have considered selling please call me for a free analysis, I am tuned into the market and I know what is going on now, and I am apart of deal that are actually happening NOW, and the deals have not stopped and sellers are still getting great prices for their businesses. Remember in a down economy all the small competition goes away, and mid-size businesses gain all those customers. So contrary to what you think should happen well positioned mid size companies can still grow in this economy.

Joshua Hadley
480-430-3894
jhadley@businessvlauez.com