Exceed your Company’s Sales Goals in 2021 by Focusing on These 4 Things

Here are the top 4 things to focus on to exceed your 2021 sales goals:

1. Sales Managers are your key to success or failure and should be your #1 priority for development and investment.

Too many sales managers do not execute their primary skills which are coaching, motivating, recruiting, holding the team to account and managing the pipeline of opportunities effectively. Most spend the majority of their time doing things that do not actually grow salespeople’s capacity to accelerate sales results.

Most sales managers either know how to coach and don’t do it often enough, or they don’t know how to coach effectively and are merely reacting to salespeople’s requests for help – giving advice instead of cultivating skills and working themselves out of a job.

Many never have personal conversations with their people and learn what gets them up in the morning, why achieving bonus or commissions would make any difference. They fail to pay attention to whether or not their salespeople are fully engaged and motivated.

Most allow HR to handle recruiting and are not actively utilizing their network of professional relationships to continually search for the next best member of their team.

Those that do discuss pipeline status often focus on the volume of the pipeline without skillfully asking questions to determine the probability of each opportunity closing. Most importantly, can they identify the patterns in the pipeline data that reveal the missing skills of their sales team? Too often sales managers focus on results, not the skills required to ask the right questions and uncover the right information to move opportunities smoothly and predictably through the pipeline.

2. Build, use and reinforce a customized milestone-centric sales process, tailored specifically for selling what you sell. Make sure it is taught, expected to be used, coached, reinforced and recorded effectively in a CRM.

In order for salespeople to improve, they must be taught a customized sales process for your company. This sales process should include not only WHAT the stages or steps are, but HOW to execute each step with examples of conversations, questions, role plays, techniques, tips, best practices, revealing your value proposition and how to address the most common objections, concerns and issues your salespeople face.

Next, this sales process should be observed by sales managers when observing their team interact with customers. The sales manager should know how to debrief sales calls, identify skill gaps, practice and role play them and reinforce learning by reviewing and following up.

The sales process should be continually updated and refreshed by gathering best practices and sharing tips and techniques from the sales team itself. Most salespeople reject ‘off the shelf’ sales training because they cannot relate to what is being taught, to what they encounter in their everyday conversations with buyers.

Finally, you CRM should reflect how a sale in your world actually evolves. It should take into consideration 1) your customer’s decision making and buying process, 2) your manufacturing or delivery process as well as 3) your sales process. Salespeople should not be able to advance opportunities in your CRM without following the process effectively.

3. Make sure your salespeople listen more than they talk, [at least at first].

Salespeople that know how to ask great questions, listen, discover, learn and add value BEFORE they start talking and describing your products/services are much more successful than those that ‘show up and throw up.’

My #1 pet peeve for most salespeople [myself included] is the fact that we fail to spend enough time learning about our customer and listening to what they need, what motivates their decisions, when they plan to purchase and what the implications are for a poor buying decision. When salespeople jump right into talking about themselves, their offerings, and describing what they are selling, they are doomed to be dismissed as ‘self-focused’ peddlers of another ‘nice to have’ rather than a trusted partner who is focused on the customer’s success. It’s far more effective to be a salesperson who becomes integrated into the ongoing success of the customer’s business and provides those highly valued ‘must have,’ offerings.

If you can break this habit in just 50% of your salespeople this year, your overall revenue will grow significantly in 2021. So will your closing ratios.

4. Remove your non-performers and upgrade your sales force by hiring salespeople with the capabilities you need.

Remember this: Your least performing salesperson IS your standard of performance at your company. When you allow non-performers to stick around, it lowers the morale of the team but more importantly it notifies everyone they only have to perform just a little bit above the worst performing person. Sales managers are notorious for avoiding confrontation and failing to hold non-performing salespeople to account. It’s time for this to end in 2021.

Your task this year is to hold those salespeople on your team who lack the drive, ambition, coachability and willingness to do what it takes to achieve results to account and move them out of your organization quickly if they do not respond to your attempts to coach and motivate them.

When you hire, use sales specific pre-hire assessments like the Objective Management Group’s sales pre-hire assessment – rated #1 for the past 10 years. It is the best predictor of B2B consultative selling performance in the world.

By focusing on these 4 areas, my experience tells me that your company will have a much higher chance of achieving and exceeding your sales revenue goals for 2021. Happy selling!