5 Simple Tips to Quickly Improve Sales Performance

Here are my 5 simplest ideas to quickly improve sales performance.  They don’t solve bigger problems, but they usually work — and work quickly.

• Concentrate leads in those who can close. If you have a rep or two that just can’t close, that doesn’t work in the early days. Leads are too precious. Let them go. Not to save money, but to concentrate the leads you do have in those that can close them.

• Be more involved with sales. Prospects and customers love to talk to the CEO.  They love it.  If you get more involved at least in bigger deals, you will close more. A top mistake I see CEOs make is to scale back the amount of time they spend in sales once they hire a few reps. It doesn’t work that way. You never get that time back ? It’s just, the reps now do more of the grunt work. But you still have to be out there. Zoom’ing with prospects and customers, at least the bigger ones. Stewart Butterfield still does:

• Build them better collateral and get them more air cover. Most sales reps are pretty bad at building sales decks, tear sheets, etc. Most sales reps don’t know how to put on a webinar for prospects and customers. Do more marketing for them.
• Put an SLA in place. Make sure every lead is called back — fast. Prospects inbound when they have a need. Deploy Intercom. Get back to them ASAP. Get back to them right now, ideally. Time kills deals, on all levels.
• Pay more — per deal closed. Are you paying enough per deal? It’s OK to overpay per deal in the early days, when sales is harder. As long as the sales rep is profitable, or even break-even, that may be enough. Everyone needs to build up their confidence, and earn a fair wage.

Published on June 16, 2020