Strategies for Keeping Your Employees Focused on the Sale

As with any process that takes time and diligence, it is easy for salespeople to lose focus on completing sales.

Lengthy selling cycles, distractions and time commitments can all get in the way. The following are some helpful strategies to help your employees overcome factors that cause them to lose focus on the sale.

Emphasize Research and Preparation

We’ve written about this quite often – research and preparation contribute to a focused selling cycle. It is easy to lose concentration when you don’t have a plan for going after the right buyers with the right strategies.

It is often looked upon as a tedious or boring task, but effective planning lets your sales teams target the right prospects with the right solutions.

This targeting allows for a more straightforward sale, as the pre-call research enables far more efficient introductions and conversations as well.

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Offer Consistent Coaching

The specific factors that distract reps can vary from person to person. Some reps get caught up spending too much time on appointment setting, while others struggle to concisely respond to buyer concerns.

Too much time spent on appointment setting can mean reps lose precious time that should be spent on closing deals.

Equally, not focusing on the issues facing a prospect means that reps are not addressing the concerns of buyers. Deals are won and lost on these details.

With a regular coaching system, you can address gaps in productivity for each rep.

Find out which factors derail their focus on a straight-line sale, and work with them to address these issues.

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Make the Sales Process More Efficient

A consistent selling process is easier to manage and improve, as inefficient activities can, and will, lead to longer selling cycles.

If your average sales cycle time is proving lengthy by industry standards, lack of focus is a possible problem.

Your sales reps have more time to get distracted or overwhelmed by the process, therefore, regular reviews of your standard process to find room for improvement should be on your own agenda.

In particular, look for waste or inefficiencies that you can eliminate. In many cases, waste comes when employees don’t have a repeatable process that flows naturally. It can take time for reps to stop and think about the next course of action so why not make it as easy as possible for everyone involved?

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Is Outsourced Appointment Setting an Option?

It is hard to focus or concentrate when you have many things to keep track of.

Typical sales representatives would prefer to avoid the time-consuming and often frustrating process of making initial calls to land appointments. Yes, you will get some who will say they love making calls and enjoy finding new business deals – but that’s not why you pay to have sales people, is it?

Go and ask your CEO. I guarantee he or she will tell you that your sales people are there to sign new profitable customers.

Therefore, isn’t one of the best strategies for enabling your team to focus on the sale to take appointment setting off their plate? Hiring a firm like Internal Results, which specialises in landing you qualified appointments, frees your team members to focus on building rapport and converting prospects.

Conclusion

The best approach for helping improve focus on the sale is to eliminate time-wasting distractions.

Isolate the critical components of the sale with which you want your reps to develop expertise and efficiency. Research and preparation, consistent coaching and optimised process efficiency are best practices for keeping your team focused.

Narrow the scope of the sales cycle for your reps and improve your team’s focus by investigating the benefits of an outsourced appointment setting campaign.

Contact us to find out why Internal Results is your best option for this approach.