The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

You can make the best and the most spectacular recommendations to your prospects, but what use is it if the prospect doesn’t share your point of view?

In B2B sales, you’ve probably spent a lot of resources to score an appointment. You’ve generated leads, qualified them, answered initial questions. And you don’t want to lose your ideal prospects now. Consumer psychology can help you reel the prospect in to sign on that dotted line.

Is it even possible to organize time? Let’s look at six ways we can focus our time on the things that are most important to us. 

1. Consider Current Commitments

Take a look at what you have already committed to doing. Look at each appointment on your calendar and each item on your latest to-do list. What result do you want to see from each commitment? How does each one make you feel when you think about that use of your time? 

• No football coach helped his team win the championship by spending time with them in the locker room.

• No driver’s ed instructor added another safe driver to the roads by showing demo videos in the classroom.

• No sales manager helped her salesperson become an industry star by meeting with her weekly in the office. 

If you want to make a significant impact on performance, you need to be in the field where your people are engaging with prospects and clients and where the business happens. This means getting out in the field with your people on calls, joining them on shared-screen client calls (using GoToMeeting, joinme.com, etc.), and looking for other opportunities to be close to the action.

We all want to listen better. So why do we find it so hard to do? We are often either thinking too much about what we want to say next or talking too much. 

Let’s look at 6 things we need to remind ourselves to do in order to be a better listener.

The topic of sales productivity was introduced to me early on in my career when I was a Senior Financial Analyst at EDS (now HP). I can remember putting together the quarterly Strategic Business Unit (SBU) scorecards and having to come up with the sales headcounts and revenue per salesperson. I was always impressed by one business unit in particular that was able to keep their sales headcount down while maintaining a higher profit margin than any other division. The division was headed by one of the younger SBU leaders, and one late evening after reviewing his numbers I asked him how it was he could keep headcount down and sales up. His answer was very revealing.

For years we heard that the Millennials joining the workforce were chasing adventure. They wanted to work for cool start-ups, collaborate with other Millennials, and change the world!

Surprisingly, a new Inforsys and Future Foundation study of 16-25 year olds shows that this may not be the whole story. It appears that a large portion of this group of fresh faces is craving security and stability rather than spontaneous adventure in their jobs.

Knowing this, you might wonder, "If they want stability in their work, why do we have a retention problem with Millennials in our workforce? Why aren’t these younger workers settling in for the long-haul?" Good questions! A 2015 Gallup Poll found that Millennials are the least-engaged cohort in the workplace, with only 28.9% saying that they are engaged at work.

For most sales organizations, your sales team most likely represents a wide range of personalities, experience levels as well as performance levels. Organizations typically have top performers or “all stars” as well as those that struggle each month to meet their sales quota or budget for the month. If your organization has determined there are some areas where your sales team can perform better and resources of time and money are available, where do you invest these limited resources? Do you focus on coaching up your bottom performers, do you bring in new talent, or do you focus on maximizing the performance of your top performers?