Think Differently…
As you and your team start the 2017 planning process, step back and aggressively challenge the status quo. If you want to raise the bar, you will have to do things differently. That means change and evolve. Hoping that things will just get better is not a strategy for success; it is a formula for failure!
To help you and your team take on 2017, check out these 27 tips for turning it on in 2017:
Always be adding value, Never reduce targets. Welcome to the age of Always Be Helping, where the most successful salespeople act like consultants – not sellers. Buyers can easily compare pricing and feature lists themselves – what they need is a passionate sales expert to show them how all that come together into a solution for their needs. Make sure you’re providing value from day one. And this means real, objective value.
Business isn’t static. Business is always in motion. As a CEO, founder or business owner, your business either moves forward or it moves backward. But it never stands still. Business success doesn’t happen because of a good or a bad economy. It happens because of YOU, the business leader.
Call back enquiries within 2hrs max. A Total Sales Culture (TSC) is the cornerstone of every high performance business. Strengthening your sales culture is the number one ingredient to building a revenue machine. Remember: you could have a great product, awesome operations team, fantastic support and solid marketing, but if your sales warriors are not dominating, it’s most likely that you haven’t built a solid sales culture.
Daily Sales Reports – do them! A way of pushing your most important sales key performance indicators (KPI’s), in an understandable way, at every manager, team member and stakeholder in your business. It becomes addictive to try and achieve a target and this is tremendously motivational. In this way the daily sales report, can directly influence the way that people feel about their jobs. It can absolutely changes sales performance and culture for the better.
Expect others to quit – develop your persistence muscle. As Winston Churchill said “Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential” “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Fire underperforming suppliers, customers and staff. In other words STOP THE SABBOTAGE. This will create a better working environment for you, your team and allow you to focus on delivering great products and services to the customers that really count
Goals – make them bite sized: By starting with bite sized goals, our view of how much progress we’ve made shifts dramatically. The only way to get any sort of result is to take action towards a goal. By taking action by achieving a bite sized goal every single day you create momentum. As momentum increases, the results taken from your action will become much more substantial, and eventually you’ll be at a point where you actually can’t stop because you’ve reached the point of no return.
Hire the best. Understand who the best employees are – for you. Everyone has talent. It’s about attracting the right people to your organisation. Be very clear on the traits and competencies that the most successful people in your business have in common. In other words, one company may want to fill its ranks with out-of-the-box entrepreneurial thinkers, while another may value thoughtful, fact driven executives. There’s not one universal standard for the perfect employee. Thankfully!
Intensity—when you purposely direct your intensity to things that matter and give unimportant things a wide berth, your momentum grows. Intensity and passions are two of the hallmarks of maintaining momentum in business. If you pursue your goals with great intensity, you become unstoppable.
Just ask…for testimonials. Adding testimonials (reviews and comments from your satisfied customers) is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to improve your Website, Landing pages, Social Media, Direct Mail, Email – any place where your prospects are looking at you. A good testimonial can generate more selling power than some of the best sales copy out there.
Know where you are. Knowing where you are is the first step in creating unstoppable momentum in your business. You have to know where you are in order to get where you want to go. The most successful business owners are all over their numbers. They can tell you how much profit they made last week. They can tell you how that compares to their projections and forecasts. They know the latest profit margins of all their products. They can tell you which product sales are slumping, and the best of them can even tell you exactly why! These men and women know their numbers inside out. Do you?
Love what you do. Let’s be honest, business is not easy. If you are going to make a real success you have to absolutely love what you do. You have to obsess about your mission. You have to be hungry and hyper-focused and insatiable, and not listen to naysayers who tell you to tone it down. You also have to know how to harness that obsession so that you can use it to your advantage. When you become unapologetically obsessed, you’ll be at your very best: persistent beyond understanding, creative to the point of appearing magical, and with an insatiable determination to win that no lonely attracts great talent but also brings out the best in other.
Making it rain referrals. There is one simple rule when it comes to referrals. You can’t grow your business without them. You always need you customers, partners, colleagues and friends to tell the world what you do. In today’s super-competitive market most businesses don’t thrive without a consistent supply of fresh, qualified referrals. You need to keep working at it, you need a system. Getting the quantity and quality of referrals your business needs requires smart, ongoing effort. Here’s the second rule. Be aggressive! Have a real plan of attack, and consistent execution to ask for them.
Never settle. Never be satisfied with your triumphs and instead use them as fuel to take you forward to your full potential.
Outsourcing – Smart business owners structure their organisation so they spend time growing their business. They focus on the high value tasks and get help with the rest. Outsourcing is your portal to some of the most impeccable talent in the world. It is no longer the lesser of two evils for businesses or talent. It’s a new economy. Everything has changed and, more than ever business is being fuelled by efficiency, innovation and thinking very differently. Get with it!
Premium products. 5% of your customers will buy a product or service with is 10X more expensive than anything you offer right now…because they can and you need to offer it to them.
Questions are what good salespeople use. Sales success usually begins with the ability to ask good questions and then listen — really listen — to the answers. Some salespeople fail to ask the right questions. Others ask the right questions but don’t listen properly to the answers.
Questions give salespeople control and credibility. They help the prospect uncover or reveal their real objections without any pressure from the salesperson. Questions also shift the focus from the salesperson to the prospect, where it belongs.
Remember, most troubles never happen. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time.
Spend at least 85% of your time selling or marketing your business. Nothing happens in business until someone buys something – and the reason they buy is marketing. The sooner you start thinking of yourself as a marketer of what you do – and not a doer of what you do – the sooner your profits will soar. That thinking has to manifest itself in how you think, feel and act – but when it does your sales will sky rocket.
Take massive action. Yes, taking action can lead to failure, rejection or making mistakes. There is always a risk for that. But if you do nothing then you are pretty much guaranteed that nothing will change or improve. Put simply, the difference between super successful high income businesses and ordinary low income businesses is implementation. If the effort is focused properly and channelled onto the right things then it can transform any business in a remarkably short space of time.
Unleash your inner Ninja! A great way to increase your profits is to enter into JV partnerships. The beauty of joint ventures is that they allow you to leverage your knowledge, products and services, through the power of unity – getting you on the fast track to more profits. Joint ventures are synergistic in nature, which means the partnership has far more value than the sum of its individual parts. This synergy means that you can reap far greater rewards together, than you could possibly do so alone.
Velocity matters. To win you have to get things implemented and done more quickly than anyone else. Do you research, understand your customers, markets and products and then move QUICKLY. Be willing to take risks, be innovative and do things nobody has done before. Speed matters today like never before. It’s making or breaking companies.
Weekly Sales Meetings – Do them. The most important one to two hours of your week is the time spent with your team in weekly sales meetings. The power of this event, when treated with the ”thou shalt never miss or be unprepared for the sales meeting” priority it deserves, includes motivating your sales people, building teamwork, developing skills, and staying on track toward your most important business objective: The revenue goal.
X-factor – David Standing! Working with me shouldn’t be seen as a cost but as an investment. Because it will deliver profit – fast! In other words I’ll deliver ideas that result in additional sales and streams of business that more than cover my costs. So you’ll be making more profit in less time.
You are responsible for absolutely everything. So, without doubt, the first step in making any business more resilient is to step up and take responsibility for everything that the business does and I really do mean everything: your bills, your products, your staff, your legal obligations and liabilities, your taxes, your ethics, your services and anything else that falls under the banner of your business. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. If the crunch comes, you can blame other people or circumstances that are out of your hands, but it won’t matter one bit. If your signature is at the bottom of the page, the buck stops with you.
Zoom in – Focus on results, not activities to accelerate your business. Too many of us confuse activity with results. We make ourselves believe if we stay active and are constantly doing something, we are moving our businesses forward. The key to success in business planning is to focus on FEWER things and do them very well. We only have so much creative energy. If we spread that energy across too many projects, we will not be able to devote full attention to the actions which will produce results and accelerate our businesses.
• Choose a SMALL number of projects to focus on right now
• Create no more than three measurable objectives to indicate success
• Determine your next actions on each project and execute them
• Review your progress daily and weekly
So number 27?
Know when to shut up and listen!
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FREE A to Z Sales Workbook