The Missing Link To Consistent Sales Growth

If your sales team is crushing it, meeting and exceeding their sales goals, month after month, congratulations!

For those struggling to bridge the gap to achieving consistent sales growth, here's what you need to know:

It's not your fault, it's not their fault, and you're not alone.

According to Salesforce, Forbes, Inc. and multiple other sources, an average of 50% of salespeople, across industries, fail to make quota consistently. While a multitude of reasons are cited, depending upon the publication and their sources, here is one key thing I've seen across industries, having worked with more than 200 sales organizations.

Assuming that a company has invested in product knowledge training and sales training, and assuming they have a proven, documented and reliable sales process, and they consistently coach to the behaviors of that sales process, the missing link is influence.

Many sales people do not have, nor know how to, influence their customers/prospects sufficiently to guide them to a win-win solution/outcome. Why? They don't know what they've never been exposed to, or taught.

What they've never been exposed to, or taught, is the glue that makes everything else work - the missing link. I call it Comprehensive Sales Influence™. Allow me to explain . . .

I've been brought in to do seminars, workshops and strategic work sessions, with sales professionals and sales leaders, to teach them supplemental (to selling skills) disciplines such as effective communication strategies, negotiation skills, leadership, presentation skills, how to add aligned value to the customer/prospect, how to take ownership and responsibility for their careers and many other critical skills they must have.

I've seen what works, what doesn't, and what's necessary to infuse into their current sales process and sales conversations. Bottom line here is product knowledge and selling skills are never enough to achieve ongoing, sustainable sales growth.

In many cases it's a waste of time and money to invest even a day in each one of these skills, and I would recommend against it.

However, when only the essential elements of all of these disciplines can be taught, against the background of the sales reps' biggest challenges, and supported by a mastermind of their peers and sales leaders, several days immersed in a productive learning experience can change their entire career for the better, yielding both immediate and long-term increases in sales and sales growth.