What are Your Strengths?

You can use a SWOT analysis to assess the effectiveness of your business and in particular your sales or telesales team. Here are three of the most important questions you need to ask yourself:

1. How do I judge the success of my team? Do you set targets for the whole team as well as for individuals? Do you use call records and performance management? Is success based on the number of sales calls or visits made by people within your team, or the quality of each call or visit?

2. What are the biggest difficulties I face within my team? Is it a management issue? You may have someone in the team who is very loud, upsets the rest of the team and is difficult to manage, but is extremely good at setting appointments.

Or is it based on results? When did your team last perform as you would expect them to? Is it more than six months ago?

3. What incentives do I use to make each call successful? Do you use commissions, prizes, points that can be collected and spent on treats, company merchandise or days off? Do you provide incentives for your staff?

When you have the answers to these questions, you can start to identify what your team is good at - their strengths - that you can capitalise on. You will also get an idea of their weaknesses that you need to address, in order to improve their performance.

Selling in Stages

Stage 6 - Matching Requirements to Selling Benefits

In the last issue of Outside Line we looked at how you establish that your customer has a need for your product or service. Once you've done this, you can move on to the sixth stage - explaining how you can meet that need. Here are two examples.

Your customer needs to buy a number of new office chairs. You find out that the chairs will be used by 10 different people of different heights, in different offices - these are their requirements. So you can tell your customer that your chairs are fully adjustable, which means that any of your chairs can be used by any of your client’s staff, without them worrying about getting a bad back.

Your client is looking for a training solution that will solve a particular problem within the organisation - this is their requirement. So you tell them that you provide bespoke training courses, which means that whatever staff training they require, you can provide it for them, developing a course to solve the particular issue.

Turn the feature of your product or service by using the phrase "which means that" and you will be able to match requirements to benefits

What Are Your Strengths & Weakness?

A SWOT analysis is made up of four parts:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

When you know what they are, you can turn your weaknesses into strengths. Instead of worrying about how a threat might affect your business, when you understand it, you can turn it into an opportunity.

To help find out where your strengths and opportunities are, we are offering a free two hour SWOT analysis to the first five people who respond to this offer. We will spend two hours with your business, asking you many important questions about your sales and telesales team. We will talk about how you judge their success, discuss the biggest issues you face and look at the incentives you use. When we have the answers to all these questions, we will be able to make some solid recommendations to you, as to what to do next. You might need to change the way you measure success; there may be a training issue you need to address; or you might want some ideas on more effective incentives to use.

At the end of the free consultation, we will leave you with some practical suggestions of where and how you can make improvements to the effectiveness of your team