Q4 is a time to hustle and throw all your efforts into closing the year strong. Ideally you did not wait until Q4 to start hustling, however we often get aggressive in the last few months to make up for the holiday slowdown period, right?
As you sit back and reflect on 2016, what are you seeing? Are you happy and winding things up with an amazing and record breaking year? If so, way to go! Do you have a game plan to do it again in 2017?
If you didn’t meet your forecasted sales for the year, what happened? How are you and your team taking responsibility for these missed goals? Are you questioning… “has the industry changed? Has the world changed? Is it the election and fear of the unknown throwing things off?” Or are you saying… “Wow, our sales team just doesn’t seem to be on fire like they once were. I wonder if there is anything we can do to help them get back to killing it again?“
I can tell you this… the world has changed. The buyer has more control of the sale, then they ever have. Often times they are 60+% through the buying process before your team even talks to them. Think about it… who isn’t using Google to solve all their problems or find solutions in the blink of an eye? How many people read multiple articles shared on blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook or some other social channel? People are comparison shopping even more now, because it is so easy.
So how does a sales team compete? Well one way is creating the content your buyer is reading through a marketing approach. Read this case study to see how you can use marketing to boost sales. This is not something the sales team often wants to be a part of and although it works, it takes time, money and manpower.
Another and potentially better way, to reach quicker results for a CEO, is to understand the sales culture of their organization. Without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the culture, of your sales management, of each individual salesperson, any answer or solution you come up with is going to be a guess or assumption at best. You know what they say about assumptions.
This often makes CEOs feel like they are flying blind and a little out of control in the business development side of the things. Yikes! Business development drives everything, right? Do you really want to leave business development to chance or a gut call? Or would you prefer to rely on science and proven practices that are scalable?
If you would like to learn about a few of the biggest issues holding salespeople back in today’s ultra-competitive global marketplace, I’d like to invite you to join me on a free webinar titled:
The 6 Hidden Weaknesses That Limit Sales Results
Date/Time: Wednesday, 7 December 2016, at 01:00 pm CST
Click here to get more details and to sign up to attend this event.