A few weeks ago, 2 of my Vistage Groups had a wonderful speaker, Gerry Layo who talked about building a world class sales team. Don’t we all want one of those? Gerry has a systematic methodology to create the process and train the team, assuming, of course that you have one. And, by putting together a playbook, you can arm your team to be really successful in meeting customer needs and closing more sales.
Let’s stop here. We must have stumbled into doing some things right or we wouldn’t have customers and we wouldn’t have sales. Yet for many of us, we don’t have process, we don’t have training and some of us don’t even have real sales people. What we do have is a great product or service and when people stumble upon it we do really, really well.
Well, guess what? Systematizing sales, training sales people and developing a playbook are being done by companies all over America. Many of the biggest and the best have spent vast sums and taken a lot of time to do this well.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I went to a Vistage Training day this week and we spent the day on what could be called sales process. We talked about how our prospective Members “buy” and how to stay aligned with them in the process. What’s more, it looks like we now have a playbook for Member Acquisition. It is thoughtful and respectful of the customers’ needs and anticipates what they might be thinking as they learn about Vistage. The biggest take-away is to not get ahead of where our customer is. This is what annoys us so much when we are “Sold to” rather than being allowed to buy.
What could you do this week to reevaluate and improve your new customer acquisition process? It is more powerful than you might think.
BTW, if you know someone who should be invited to read my blog, please sign them up at the website or email me with their name and email address. I’ve been challenged by my Chair accountability group to triple my readership this year.
illustration courtesy of www.salesarchitects.com