Your appointment setting has slowed down.
The meetings you do have are more “drive-by’s” than purposeful sales meetings and they are not converting or sales that do result tend to be small.
Maybe a few key accounts have moved on or previously reliable sources of good leads have slowed or degraded.
Uh oh.
Time to change. Time to bring in some new strategies and processes that work.
Makes sense. Not so easily accomplished.
How easy or realistic is it to think that you or your sales team can change behaviors and practices that will increase sales results?
Let me share some observations from a long career of sales training and coaching in the niche of lead generation and appointment setting.
Sales Training Results: Traits that support change and improved results.
There are some organizations or individuals that transform from qualified lead scarcity to a flowing faucet of opportunities.
Here are the circumstances that typically exist for that to occur. The more of these that are in place the easier it is to move from zero to 60. Vroooooom.
– Engaged leader that actively coaches and inspects.
– Self-motivated salespeople.
– Culture that recognizes, supports and rewards success in sales.
– Culture that supports change and understands that it is not always a smooth road to successs.
– Incentives that relate to the bottom line result and benchmarks that rationally relate to the target result.
– Proper tools are in place, setup for performance and used. CRM. List databases. Follow-up systems.
-Leaders and sales team members are curious and give proper consideration to behaviors and processes that work for others.
Sales Training Quicksand: Circumstances that roadblock progress and derail great intentions, solid ideas and the best strategies.
– Lack of engaged sales leadership. Little or no active coaching, no inspection. Management is not actively supporting the change. It might be too many responsibilities, ability or attitude but leadership is lacking.
– Salespeople resist change. It might be culture or individual personality but different behaviors, even no-brainer painfully obvious must-do’s are resisted strenuously.
– Incentives do not relate to results or what leads to results.
– Proper tools are not in place, setup correctly, used correctly or used at all.
– Knee jerk resistance/rejection of pretty much anything different.
– A “gotcha” culture where people seem to love to point out anything that doesn’t work perfectly. Stymies innovation, practice and new practices.
Sales Training and Appointment Setting Results Come not from “Great Strategies” or “Good Sales Scripts.”
I believe that sales results are far more influenced by an individual or organization’s ability to manage change than anything else.
It is amazing to me still how some sales leaders or organizations just get introduced to the core concepts that lead to sales successs and they are off to the races, running far ahead of any training, figuring out the details themselves and moving the needle. I have seen that situation many times and the common thread always seems to be actively involved and engaged sales leadership. They inspect, they coach, they support their team members as they try new things.
On the other end of the spectrum…. no matter how many great strategies are taught, no matter how much detail on what to do is provided, individuals or organizations don’t change.
Let’s be honest. What works in sales or appointment setting, lead generation is not some big hidden secret. Anyone with high self motivation, a willingness to be objective and just do what works, can figure it out. I believe that.
But change is not that simple as organizations and people have bias toward what is comfortable, familiar or done by most everyone else. Those are hard forces to resist.
Ask yourself “are we ready and able to change?” Be objective and realistic about the answer.
Sometimes core issues such as proper tools, incentive systems or proper management must be put in place before “better strategies” or “better scripts” are going to have an impact.
