TeleSales Mangement for Maximum Results

The Secrets to Running a High Performing Inside Sales Team

By Flyn L. Penoyer, CMC, TeleSalesGuru
www.Penoyer.com & www.TeleSalesUniversity.com
Tel. 408-460-7178 Email: Flyn@penoyer.com

"Salespeople do not perform at consistently high levels with out constant work!"

If you are interested in the truth about individual and team performance you will find what follows enlightening. I will tell it like it is, and should you have the courage to follow my simple advice you will see remarkable changes in your team's results.

Let's Set the Stage

Salespeople (in fact, all people) only perform at consistently high levels when they are constantly working on improving their skills. This is true of selling on the phone and everything else in life including. To make this key point I am going to bury you with examples.

1. Take a speed reading course or use one of the common techniques for raising your reading speed. Do this until you have gotten a nice increase in results. Now, take a 30 day vacation from practice of these skills. When you come back and re test your speed you will most surely find that you do not perform at your previously higher levels.

2. Involve yourself in any mental discipline for a period of time raising your skills. Chess is an excellent example. Playing at any specific tournament level requires constant study. When you stop trying to improve you will start to lose ground.

3. Why do you think that world's class athletes and competitors almost all have personal coaches - coaches that are not nearly as competent at the task as they are? It is not because they can learn some new advanced strategy or technique, but so they can continue to improve there basics and work on their game.

It is a stable datum that any skill to be maintained must be studied and or practiced. If you think your sales team will run at maximum revolutions per minute without constant attention, I hate to say it, but you are simply fooling yourself. If you think your team is currently doing well by comparison to their potential, and you are not doing regular sales skills training, coaching, and sales process tuning and development, you are very mistaken.

The Experience Excuse

Many sales managers I meet say the following: "Well my team is all very experienced, they don't need training. I only hire competent people."

To examine the issue of experience you should start with the following questions: Do you know people with less experience that are better than others with more? Do you know people with lots of experience that are not really that proficient?

Real world examples that show experience is not a primary component of skill are numerous and in almost every field of study. They are certainly apparent in sales.

Just because someone is experienced, doesn't mean they are skilled! In thirty years of working with inside salespeople it is clearly evident that experience is one of the least likely factors contributing to skill or performance. Although it can be agreed it is necessary in some quantity for high performance.

The Philosophy of "Basics Matter"

Most people are not aware of the value of mastery of the basics and fundamentals having never pursued the mastery of a subject. You might counter by saying that salespeople are endeavoring to master their jobs. I would contend that less than 10 percent of salespeople have read more than a book or two and even fewer have attended a training or seminar they were not sent to by their employer. Most salespeople are not serious.

Everything, including telephone selling, is made of fundamentals and basics that then combine to make up a more complex skill. I recently picked up a book on advanced selling skills and went through it searching for what would be considered an advance skill. What I found was a collection of very basic sales skills.

Selling on the telephone is based on communication and presentation skills, relationship skills, knowledge of sales techniques, mastery of the specific sales process, the ability to think and react quickly, and knowledge of your product or service. Leave any of these out and you have an unsuccessful sales person - especially if that missing skill is communication.

One of the primary reasons inside sales groups have so much latent potential is that they aren't trained in the most fundamental skill of selling, communication. In fact I will bet you've probably never sent your inside sales folks to a communication skills class. Unfortunately, you won't find the critical subject of communication in any seminar or book on telephone selling (mine excepted).

Chet Holmes in his wonderful book the Ultimate Sales Machine has it right. You must drill basics all the time; until your team can do them flawlessly in their sleep if you want high performance. A great analogy would be a pianist. What do they do in there spare time? Thy practice scales (basics) and not just a once in a while, but hours per day most of the days of the week.

Let me share a simple sales example that can even be tested if you wish. Let's talk about handling objections. There are a number of best practice steps that should be executed when handling any objection. Although we can debate what the exact list of steps is, we all must agree that there are some critical actions that must be taken to succeed in handling an objection.

Ask your team to send you in an email listing the key steps necessary to properly handle an objection. If you really want validity, ask this question face-to-face so you can observe them squirm to come up with an answer that should have rocketed right off the top of their head. Yes, even many of the guys with 10 years experience will squirm.

If you don't already have a list and explanation of the specific best practice steps necessary to handle an objection that you have force your team to memorize, then your sales team is likely not using best practices for most of the steps in your sales process leaving considerable cash on the table.

Focus your team on mastering the basics for just one month and you will not be able to stop the resulting increase in performance whether you are a skilled trainer or coach or not.

The Solution (Besides calling me.)

Let's say I teach you about "impact questions," and then show you how to construct them. When you go back to selling, you have to take that information and figure out how to apply it to your sales process. You must figure out both the wording of impact question and the correct situation in which to use it.

This is an example of how 90% of companies do training. I call it "adding skills to a sales process". I believe the effectiveness of adding skills to the sales process is quite low as salespeople frequently can't bridge the application gap between the data and the usage.

However, if I train you on the sales process using a detailed presentation guide that already incorporates the correct impact questions; you can now easily execute what you have learned and have the added help of the guide. There is no gap here between the technique and the sales process, they are one. This gap is frequently widened by learning breaks created by improper adherence to study and learning principles.

This is the proper way to train salespeople. You train them on a sales process incorporates the best selling practices. Then reps learn the use of the selling practices as they directly apply to the sales process. No application gap. With the guide present, it is also possible to train and coach to behavioral changes far more easily.

Conclusion

Here is what you should take away from this paper:

To run a inside sales group at maximum levels of performance for any period of time you must:

1. Have a detail sales process document that incorporates selling best practices
2. Be constantly training and coaching your team members on the basics and against that sales process document

The result is a significant increase in the use of best practices, a more consistent story and remarkable results.

It is that simple!

You may find the following resources useful.

A best practices training video on the 9 steps to handling objections (and others). Handling Objections Video Use your IE browser.

Chet Holmes book "The Ultimate Sales Machine" Get Book

A sales process evaluation tool that will give you more data on building a powerful best practice driven sales process. SalesProcessEvaluator

Here are a variety of free resources provided on our website to help you increase sales.

• Sales Quizzes you can use to test your skills and knowledge or test that of your group.
  
  
• Sales Sales Tools Check out our collection of sales tools to help you with your team.
  
  
• Free Sales Resources This page contains a wealth of free resources you can use.