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Missed Sales Goals? You Have Choices to Make

Missed Sales Goals? You Have Choices to Make

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You have a few choices if any members of your sales team aren’t making their sales goals. You could fire them, or you could make changes that will help them sell. I vote for making changes. Here’s how.

Split your sales process.

Great sales professionals master both parts of their selling process -- they can find ideal prospects and they can also close business deals with them as they work on selling. Then there are those sales professionals who lack the range of skills to do well in both areas; often they are not meeting their goals and are weak in one or the other of these areas. A positive way to work with these weaker salespeople is to use their weaknesses to your advantage and split your sales process.

Fit people to process.

Assign the salespeople who are better at finding great prospects to the role of prospector. These are typically people who love the challenge of finding and getting appointments with new people. They are unafraid of hearing “no” and are persistent.

Assign the salespeople who are better closers to close the sale once the prospects are identified. Better closers typically are more risk averse. They are more comfortable getting referred to new business instead of developing it themselves. They are also good strategic thinkers who can develop effective strategies that close business.

Provide the right information.

Your job in management is to clearly define who you want your prospectors to find. Sales managers who say that everyone is a prospect are doing their sales team a disservice. Be as specific as you can with the criteria of the “ideal” prospect. Why? In this model it will hurt the results of two people if you provide bad information.

Other criteria you can consider to define your ideal prospect are:

  • Market segment like commercial or retail
  • Location like urban or rural
  • Years in business
  • Number of employees
  • Type of manufacturing
  • Company revenue
  • Size of a facility
  • Growth potential
  • Prospect's job title
  • Life event
  • Stage of growth
  • Age of your prospect

Set goals.

You will be working with your sales team to measure success. Set goals for their work. It will be number of quality leads generated for the prospectors; it will be sales for the closer. What you can improve on as you work with your prospector is to come closer to finding ideal prospects. That’s why it’s so important to first define your ideal prospect.

Just be sure to do something to address salespeople who are not meeting their goals. Choosing to do nothing is not an option.

Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.