Is It Time to Make a Course Correction in Your Sales Strategy?

Have you been making your sales goals? Congratulations! If you're not, now is the time to reevaluate your current sales strategies and make some changes. Here’s what to consider doing differently to get better results.

What are your priorities?

Look back at your last six months. What have you been focusing on? Often when you set your priorities on less important objectives, your business suffers. You may find that you'll miss your sales goals when you are working on less important areas of business.

I suggest that you categorize your business accounts into A, B, or C accounts with the A accounts being the most important. To categorize your accounts, you need to identify certain criteria.

You might determine your criteria to be a specific product purchase potential, the growth potential for your business, or sales volume. Then define your categories. For example, purchase potential for an A account may be more than $100,000. As you look back at your last 6 months, were you spending most of your time on C accounts instead of A accounts? You can’t make sales goals by focusing on low priority business.

You will also miss sales targets if your task priorities are misplaced. Look at the sales call objectives you've set for each sales call. You are setting minimum and maximum sales call objectives that move your sales process forward, aren't you? It might be, however, that you've been setting low priority sales call objectives and your sales are stalling. This is a key step that I address when I work with my clients.

For example, do you allow too much time to transpire for agreed upon work to be accomplished? Perhaps your customer needs to get approval for a product test. You might need to shorten the time between follow up to move that process along. The phrase the squeaky wheel gets the grease is accurate. Unless you follow up and push some people, the work won’t get done and your sales will suffer.

Examine your priorities now so your sales get back on track.

What is your sense of urgency?

The idea of waiting until tomorrow to do something is a strategy that less successful salespeople implement. Don’t let that be how you work. You should always be asking yourself, “What can I do now?” or “What needs to be done now?”

Here are some tasks that you can do now that will help you generate more sales. Make one more quality sales call a day. Note the word quality. I used to work with a salesman who claimed to make 20 sales call a day. We were selling mostly to engineers. I calculated the travel time it took for him to get to his accounts and make 20 calls a day and determined what he was doing was either saying hi to the engineer and leaving, or simply not making the calls.

How do you use your lunchtime? Can you use the time to travel to the next account so you are ready to make another sales call at 1 p.m.? I have always found that salespeople who believe that now is the best time to sell, and who sell effectively consistently make their sales goals.

I know it’s difficult when you’re not making your sales goals, but you still have time to make a course correction. Recognize what’s not working and change it. Just remember that Einstein once said that doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity.