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Pull off a Sales Blitz
Another quarter down as we move into summertime.
Time to regenerate the team and shake up the
marketplace. Rally around a win, a new product
announcement, a white paper, a little positive PR. It's
a good enough excuse to orchestrate a Sales Blitz -
that tried and true cold calling campaign where all
appropriate hands on deck get on the phone and call
away.
It never fails to amaze me that these events generate
what they do. From outright leads and appointments,
to fresh market insights and input on resonating
messaging, scripts, targets, database quality, not to
mention boosting team morale and old-fashion fun
and games. Teams should be doing these once a
quarter, if not once a month.
Just pulled off another one for a client this past month
and yielded big fun, success, and new viable lead
generation. Jump-started the Inside team and
kick-started the Outside team with new
opportunities and revealing possibilities. Paid out
nominal cash prizes in a 1/2 day event that had the
team buzzing. Well worth the effort.
Got a Sales Blitz in your plans?
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Effectiveness Rule #20 |
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Rule #20 - Develop a Territory Attack
Plan
The worldwide #1 sales rep sat in his office in early
January and wondered how was he ever going to
repeat his record breaking $1.1M sales result from the
previous year. And what do they typically do with #1
sales reps? They shrink their territory and raise their
quota! So it was in this case. His 600 assigned
accounts got reduced to 400 accounts and the quota
went up by 20%. What did he do? He closed the door
to his office and spent the next 2½ hours that morning
developing a Territory Attack Plan. When he emerged
he set about executing that plan month to month,
quarter to quarter. By year end he far exceeded his
increased quota, hitting sales bookings over $2.4M
and was the worldwide #1 sales rep for the second
consecutive year. Let me tell you what I did that
January morning in my office....
(book excerpt)
Michael Griego, MXL Partners'
founder/president and sales consultant and trainer to
Fortune 500 firms and leading Silicon Valley
technology firms, has reduced
the keys to sales effectiveness to 42 rules in his
forthcoming book 42 Rules to Increase Sales
Effectiveness.
This book, to be released in September 2009
by
SuperStar Press, applies modern fundamentals to
sales and sales management.
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Quality, not Quantity |
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Better Calls, Not More
It's all about sales call effectiveness, not sales
call quantity. More calls are always good, but I'd rather
have a team cranking out fewer but quality-level calls
than large numbers of weak or mediocre calls.
With great quality calls:
- Key contacts want to meet
- A sense of urgency is created
- There's attractive competitive differentiation
- Prospects see value in the interaction
- A compelling business case is developed
You can't cut your way to sales effectiveness.
The challenge is to get more out the team you've got
or stretch the dollars and expand incrementally,
emphasizing quality not quantity. In a recent CSO
Insights study, 51% of Chief Sales
Officers rate "increasing sales effectiveness" as one
of their 2009 Top 3 objectives, second only
behind "increasing sales revenue."
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Process Beats Competition |
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Execute and Win
CSO Insights' 2009 Sales Performance
Optimization study points out that companies lose
to competition because 1) Competitor's Price, and 2)
Competitor's Relationships. In further correlation of
the results, it's shown that when companies win vs
these competitors it's because of their own high level
of sales process execution. Who would have thought
that the antidote to price competitors is sales
process execution?
Got process?
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Quote of the Month |
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The Grind
"Truly, I have never known a really successful man
who deep in his heart did not understand the grind,
the discipline it takes to win."
- Vince Lombardi
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