The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

“We need to increase revenue” is something I frequently hear from Sales Leaders.

It often leads to a discussion around a Target Drive and how it can help. I’ve done a lot of Target Drive consulting over the years, and I commonly have to address the misconception that a Target Drive and a sales contest are the same thing.

So, how are they different?

The ability of a sales team to consistently achieve goals and exceed expectations hinges not only on the team's talent and determination but also on the quality of coaching they receive.

Identifying where your people need coaching is key. Without this insight, your coaching efforts might be well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective. By identifying specific problems or struggles, you can tailor your coaching to address these areas directly, leading to more meaningful improvements in performance.

Teams that intentionally track performance measures and leading indicators also tend to reach their goals faster and more consistently, especially those who study the data and communicate expectations to their teams.

While I have seen teams track this data in many ways, a CRM is a critical component to effectively tracking sales performance. Without it, sales leaders often make educated guesses about how their sales team is performing.

If that’s you, you owe it to yourself and your organization to use one of the dozens of good CRMs that work best for your organization.

I think we can all agree that securing appointments is foundational to achieving sales goals.

However, findings from the recent Media Sales Report found a persistent gap between the expectations and reality of salespeople and their managers when it comes to the actual number of scheduled appointments.

For as long as sellers have been selling, managers have tracked their activity. Over time, we've improved the tools we use to track that activity, from call sheets to spreadsheets to CRM.

But if all we do is capture the data and not study the data, what's the point? After all, the value is not simply in seeing how much activity we have but in understanding the trends within that data to help salespeople improve.

Studying the data allows you to identify where the bottlenecks in the sales process occur. It enables you to go beyond what you think is happening and confirm where that friction in the sales process lives. That confirmation allows you to develop specific strategies to improve your performance or the performance of your sales team.

As salespeople, we are trained to ask questions that uncover the needs of our prospects and then create a tailored solution based on the products we have to sell.

We present a solution and then explain why the products we recommend make sense. However, as a result of today’s complicated world of marketing, there is a need to evolve and improve because there is a key piece we often forget — consumer behavior.

The goal of any discovery meeting is to truly learn about the needs of a prospect or client.

So why doesn’t it happen on every discovery call?

Why do some meetings end without a clear understanding of the business results the account wants to achieve?

A Customer Relationship Manager, also known as a CRM, can be a powerful tool. It can help to streamline your sales process and provide benefits to complete sales teams.

Here are five ways using a CRM efficiently can help improve your sales process.

Implementing the right sales performance measures is crucial for success.

While there is little doubt in the minds of sales leaders that measurement is important to drive results with their salespeople, I often find the focus is too wide or shifts based on any change.

In other words, tracking everything doesn’t help you to see what is truly impactful, and improvement in performance only comes when you measure the same performance measures over time.

Have you ever met with a prospect for the first time and felt like the entire conversation was like pulling teeth?

Maybe they took a couple of calls or answered some urgent emails while you were waiting to ask your next question. Maybe you couldn’t meet in person, and you could sense they were distracted and not focused during the little time you had. 

In these situations, it's common to leave the appointment with little to no valuable information, no follow-up direction, and when you look at your notes it feels like a waste of your valuable time.

Not all first meetings go well, but you can prevent the train wreck first appointment with better pre-planning.