• Tenet One: Refine Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
  • Stop selling and start nurturing. Nurture marketing targets customers’ needs, as expressed in the multitude of social connections and interests they chart online.
• Tenet Two: Learn How to Maximize your Health Care Options
  • Use the changes in the landscape of employer-sponsored health care as an excuse to take a good look at your current benefits situation.

• Tenet Three: Go Green
  • Set a sustainability plan in motion by 1) assessing the baseline 2) indentifying best opportunities 3) formalizing what small steps you can immediately take.
• Tenet Four: Become an Efficiency Machine
  • Implement daily plannings, including scheduling time for priorities.
  • Get your business strategy onto a one-page document.

Source: Vistage International

The recession is technically over; however, sales teams are still facing more competitors going after the same projects, price pressures, or the new competitor—prospects doing nothing.

 The recession is also testing sales managers to see if they can provide sales environments that keep their sales teams’ heads up and hearts engaged. Here are six tips for leading your sales team in this post-recession economy.   

#1 – Seek out good news. Assign each salesperson with finding good news and sharing it with the rest of the team.  

#2 – Step up your coaching efforts. Conducted role plays with your sales team to see if they know how to quantify the cost of the problem or the gain of an opportunity? This selling skill is KEY in a buying environment where cost justification is king. 

#3 – Decrease desperation. In desperation, salespeople don’t take the time to build trust, make deposits in the relationship account, and practice the law of reciprocity. Remember: processes are efficient, while relationships are not.    

#4 – Balance something old and something new. Social media is the new mode of prospecting. Teach your sales team to integrate new social media with old principles of influence and selling skills. Social medial marketing tools create the opportunity, but selling skills close the opportunity.

#5 – Revisit negotiation skills and strategies. Discuss with your sales team the mindset they need to possess during tough economic times. If your sales team is not convinced on the value they  can bring, why would the prospect invest with your company? Work with the sales team on strategy and tactics. Many salespeople drop price without any concession from the prospect which is a win-lose strategy, and leads to a transactional sale versus a value sale. Caving in too quickly on price also creates distrust. The prospect is thinking, “If you lowered your price that quickly, why wasn’t it lower in the first place?”

#6 – Inspire and motivate. As a sales manager and share “tough times” stories with happy endings. Never underestimate the power of motivation. Leaders are made famous by their inspirational rhetoric. There is a time to train and coach. There is also a time to inspire and motivate.

Put your leadership hat on. Help your sales team keep their heads up and hearts engaged. Good sales leaders are needed now more than ever.  Now, that’s good news.  

Source: Vistage International