A Gold Mine of Simple Ways to Improve Sales Team Productivity

By Michael J. Webb, President, Sales Performance Consultants

I just found 96 ways to "accelerate the methodical, relentless, continuous improvement of your sales process" in a cool new book by Todd Youngblood, founder of The YPS Group. You can use these practical ideas to get more sales and get them more easily.

Todd has been around sales process improvement for a long time, and his new book is like a bunch of gems: each one is a specific, tactical, implementable change you can make as the leader of your sales team. Most cost nothing. Some deal with interesting ways of using mathematics in day-to-day sales operations. Many simply deal with how you, the manager, think. ALL reveal tremendous street-savvy and practical insight. Here is an example:

Page 24: Most salespeople are average ... so your sales process better be good.

Consider Henry Ford. Undoubtedly, he was not average, but a genuine genius. ... Having invented and produced a viable car, he had two choices. He could focus on people (by hiring and training high-priced folks with the wherewithal to imitate his own craft), or he could focus on process by thoroughly understanding and documenting his know-how in bite-sized "average" chunks.

His pool of talent for option one numbered in the hundreds. For option two it numbered in the tens of thousands. He chose option two. The result was an assembly line-based car production process and the ability to produce a massive quantity of high-quality cars at a reasonable cost. ...

The same holds true for sales reps and sales process. Good process creates tremendous leverage!

Other gems in this cool little book provide practical ways of encouraging your team to get better results:

Page 38: Don't waste money on sales training

Ask any sales manager about the need for continuous sales training and you instantly get agreement that it is important. So why isn't there more of it going on?

The fact is, most money spent on sales training is wasted. Typically it annoys most reps, bores many, and is totally forgotten within 30 days.

... You can get around these issues and reap bigger payback from your training budget with a Sales Excellence Council. Put the best of your best reps on it (i.e., those who are most respected by the rest of the team). ... Next provide proof that you're serious about mining the brains of these folks for the benefit of all your reps. In other words, provide funding for and relentlessly conduct monthly 1/2 day "SEC" meetings. Their objective is to identify, clarify, and communicate sales best practices - the tactical actions that produce the fastest, most tangible results for your business. 

Among the topics in these short but wide-ranging essays are:

• How to force the evolution of your value propositions
• Applying SWOT to all your key customers
• Try Selling Them [Your Customers] a Better Buying Process
• Three Things that Kill CRM (and How to Counter Them)

What I like about this book is that Todd spends his time addressing situations sales managers face. Here's a last example:

Page 120: "I'm not going to do it unless it puts money in my pocket"

Right up front, let me make my position clear on two points.

• I agree emphatically with the "money in my pocket" sentiment
• I disagree emphatically that recording opportunity information and submitting accurate, realistic, monthly forecasts is administrivia.
  

I realize that after reading the above, many (maybe most) sales reps and managers have concluded that I must be schizophrenic, because they perceive the two points to be contradictory. Quite the contrary. ...

To learn what Todd has to say about that interesting position, you'll have to get his book by clicking here.

Think About It...
96 Challenging Ideas to accelerate the methodical, relentless, continuous improvement of your sales process

 Michael J. Webb, is president and founder of Sales Performance Consultants, and is a foremost expert on sales process improvement. Michael has helped business executives of both Fortune 500 and smaller companies apply the principles of Six Sigma and Lean to achieve greater sales and marketing results. http://salesperformance.com