This is a great article to get upper management to dislike me. Why because I blame them for the company not hitting their numbers. I believe sales teams fail because upper management does not have a good a) marketing plan b) sales plan c) sales training d) sales system.
I read all the time about how easy it is to succeed in business. Then please tell me why so many companies are begging for sales and business.
Is selling really this difficult?
It cost a lot of money to rehire a sales manager and sells people.
Why do we have so many sales people leaving their company? Then they go to another company and they are successful.
What happen? Did they magically get more training and get better?
List of problems, I think we need to discuss where the problems are and how we can fix them to put the sales team back on track. We know everyone in the company wants the company to grow and do well.
First the overall business plan is too general. The marketing department is trying to market to the world insist of finding a special market. The sales manager is taking general orders from above. His market is too large and too general to concentrate with a few people in both the marketing and sales departments.
Month after month they keep missing their numbers.
What most companies do at this point is to blame either the sales manager or the sales team. Therefore someone must be replaced.
I have going to help companies that continued this cycle for many years.
The question is always the same. Is it too late to save our company?
The answer is NO…
How do we fix such a mess? Well we start from the beginning. We re-examine the business plan. Then take the marketing plan and make it very specific. We followup with the same in our new sales plan.
Now the important part, we create a sales system. This new system must be measurable. The reason is if we cannot measure it, we cannot improve it.
Now we know why we failed. In part two we are going to discuss how we can turn the company around and increase the sales.
We will start with the marketing plan and discuss how we can make a better more successful one. The marketing plan is going to be very specific in the area we are going to be selling in.
The next step will be to create a sales plan. This will have the sales people calling on more specific market. The final step we will create a sales system that will help us know what is working and what is not working. This system we will be able to measure some of the more important steps the sales people will be doing everyday to help them become successful.