How to sell ? when you're not a sales person ? The Sales Manager

I?ve spent most of the selling part of my career working in largish corporate environments working as part of a sales team. Most large and medium size companies understand the need for?and have the resources to employ a dedicated sales team(s). The purpose of any sales team, be it new business or account management is grow revenue, acquire new customers and protect the companies existing customer base from churn. Without quality sales people, these companies would simply end up with very few (if any) customers.

Now I am a strong believer that almost every company should have one dedicated salesperson on their payroll. However, prior to?my career in sales I worked for some small organistations where sometimes this simply wasn?t a financial viability. So what then? How does a small business with no dedicated salespeople grow its customer base?or revenue?streams?and therefore be more profitable?

Quite simply they need their existing staff, whether it?s an IT company?s on-site engineers or beauty spa?s therapists to act as their salesforce. Now, when I say act as their salesforce, I don?t mean they need to be salespeople. It is unlikely to be something that would come naturally to them and it would quite possibly, if they were given a sales target, it would?be something they would feel uncomfortable with. The question has now become; how does a small company enable its staff to be a salesforce without making them into salespeople?

The answer is relatively simple; it comes down to changing their mindset around what constitutes sales, enabling them with some basic skills and giving them an incentive to bring on new business.

Firstly the mindset change; you are likely to scare your staff if you just come out and say ?go out and sell stuff?, partly because that isn?t what their job is and secondly they probably have very little idea how to. So instead of doing that, encourage your staff to problem solve. Get them to look for problems in their day-to-day interactions with customers and potential customers where they can see that your company can help them. For instance:

If?you are a food?logistics company and one of your delivery drivers?is visiting a cafe on a break. They may notice that the way that the cafe?s?logistics company?is handling its customer deliveries is a lot more inefficient than the way your business normally does it. That?s a mindset change, rather than just going about their daily business in?their usual way;?try to get them constantly observing the way potential (and current) customers could do things better.

The next step in getting them to act as your salesforce is giving them the skills to have a conversation to flesh out an opportunity. I?ve talked in previous blogs about these question asking techniques, so I won?t go into too much detail here, but it?s about enabling them to ask the customer questions so that both they and the customer are aware that there is a problem that can be solved.

To give you some basic structure to that questioning technique think of it as a 3 stage process:

1. Open: Ask an open-ended question that will uncover the problem: ?Excuse me, I come here all the time as a customer and I work for ABC logistics, do you mind telling me what you guys do for sending deliveries?
2. Probe: Probe further to highlight the problems they are facing: ?So what happens if the deliveries are late?? ?Does that happen very often?? ?What impact does that have on you as a business?
3. Confirm: Confirm to the potential customer you?ve understood what they have said: ?So if I understand correctly, your current couriers are late about 30% of the time, it makes your customers unhappy, you have to give them free produce the next time they order and that is costing you about $950 a month??

Once they have done that, that?s where you come in, if you don?t have a full-time sales team, as the owner it is up to you to close the deal. Get your staff to ask for a meeting:

?I really think my company can help you reduce that $950 a month significantly as well as maybe even saving you money on your current deal, would it be ok for to get my manager to give you a call to set up a meeting??

Lastly, you need to give them an incentive to behave as above. So, give them a $100 voucher for every opportunity they uncover and maybe $500 for each one that becomes a customer. Those simple steps above should really help mobilise your existing staff as a sales force.

As always I?d love to hear your comments and feedback.

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