YourSalesManagementGuru by Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group
Blog archive
One Action You Can Do To Exceed Your Quota
Exceeding quota is never easy. In fact, studies have shown that large percentages of salespeople never achieve 100 percent of their assigned quotas.
However, if you are in a position of sales leadership, what can you do to improve your odds of success?
Ideally, the first action is to read the last two weeks' blogs on hiring high-performance sales teams (Part 1 and Part 2). However, the reality is it's the third quarter -- you have to work with the team that's already in place and your sales goal has been set.
What you can do is easy but, depending on the size of your sales team or location, may require some creativity or logistics: Instead of burying your sales pipeline in a CRM database, visually display the top 10 sales opportunities where they can be seen by yourself and or your team. This list normally is displayed in the sales manager's office and could be on a whiteboard or on a paper flip-chart.
What is the logic behind this recommendation?
- Typically, winning a few of the larger opportunities each month/quarter almost always ensures sales budgets are exceeded.
- Keeping the list visual puts them top-of-mind and allows for a constant review of strategies, tactics and updates.
- The visual list allows for the entire management team to be aware of those key opportunities and increases the number of potential sales ideas and availability of resources that could be used in closing the sale.
- The list can be used in sales meetings to brainstorm ideas and to teach the sales team the basics behind developing winning sales strategy ideas.
What do have to lose? Try this idea for the next 90 days and let me know your results. In the past 18 years of consulting with organizations, whenever this idea was executed, we always saw revenues jump!
Posted by Ken Thoreson on September 08, 2015