Imagine you are a master chef with a team of the junior chef. Your objective is to ensure that your junior chefs can create good dishes to wow the customers so that the customers will keep coming for more. Sales are the same whereas a sales leader, you want your salespeople to close sales and have returning customers. However, without giving your salespeople the correct sales recipe, they won’t be able to do it and you will end up going to your salespeople meeting each time to help them close sales. Here’s what a sales leader should do:
Your role is to lead, not close sales
As a sales leader, your main role is to grow your salespeople. How your team performs shows the quality of your leadership. Your team’s result is your result. Without handing over the techniques of closing sales, your salespeople will keep asking you for decisions. The most common thing they will ask is “Boss, this customer is asking for discounts. Can give ah?” If not, they will ask you to follow them to meet big clients expecting you to help them close.
Your role is to provide the resources for your team and empower them to do it, and not you running all over the city to close sales.
Your salespeople don’t even know what’s step #1
Many of the salespeople we meet find it hard to close sales because their clients are always not interested in what they are offering. This is very common especially for credit card salespeople where each time they try to approach someone, that person will try to avoid the salesperson. If you continue pushing your salespeople to close but your sales people do not have the techniques to do it, it’s going to be pointless. They may continue approaching people, but they just can’t close and in the end, your team will not hit their targets. Most of the sales leaders we met face this issue and they find that after sending their team to our Sales Ninja Masters training, they have successfully transformed their salespeople.
Motivate, not humiliate
There are so many times where sales leaders want their team to buck up and they start criticizing their salespeople in public. They hope that by doing that, other people will see it and learn from it. We always focus on motivating your salespeople instead and though there are times where the salespeople need to be disciplined, those should be done privately. It’s probably the same for you too, you wouldn’t want your superior to humiliate you in front of your peers. You would respect him more if he did it privately instead.
We found over the years that when a sales manager is a good motivator, the team performs better (also together with the proper sales tools). A team that is motivated is ready to hit its targets and will go all-out to achieve it.
If you want your salespeople to start hitting their targets, you need your salespeople to start having sales activities, have knowledge about their products, and finally to be motivated. We have a highly customized sales leadership and management training perfect for sales leaders who are struggling with salespeople who are having trouble hitting their targets. From this training, we will equip you to handle any salesperson in your team to transform them from underperforming to a target-hitting salesperson! Find out more here.
