Salesopedia - Evaluating the Selling Skills of Your Sales People To Increase Your Team’s Selling Success

Evaluating the Selling Skills of Your Sales People To Increase Your Team’s Selling Success

Written by Jim Pancero

Article #5 in our 9 Article Series

Welcome to our fifth article in the series “You Can Always Sell More: How To Improve Any Sales Force!”

So how do you improve an experienced sales team who believes they don’t need any additional training?

One of the most significant challenges to improving a team is that most sales professionals believe “experienced = trained.” At the same time experienced reps are rejecting any additional training most still have, and continue to demonstrate, significant gaps in their selling skills.

The goal of this article series is to help you evaluate, design, implement, track and lead your team to increased selling skills and improved effectiveness. Helping your team complete a detailed evaluation of their selling skills (with your feedback and suggestions) is one of the best ways to increase their awareness and to begin leading them through a successful educational change process.

Evaluating…and strengthening the three major selling skill areas

Our twenty question sales evaluation measures your effectiveness in the following selling skill-sets:

Operational Selling Skills involve the fundamental skills of day-to-day selling. This includes mastering the steps of a sales call, personality flexibility awareness and solid product and industry knowledge.

Tactical Selling Skills include understanding and controlling the multiple stepped selling processes to win new accounts or to maintain and grow existing accounts.

Strategic Selling Skills involve your ability to communicate your company’s philosophy and competitive market positioning by answering a customer or prospect asking “Why, based on all of the competitive alternatives available to me, do I want to buy from you?” Strategic selling also involves your ability to understand and master each customer’s political environment.

Though all three skills are critical to selling success, most sales reps and their leadership are out of balance. The majority of sales people spend all day reactively responding to the operational demands of their territory, do little longer range planning for either prospects or existing customers and all have a different answer when asked why their company is unique.

Utilizing Your Free Sales Evaluation To Evaluate, Prioritize And Develop Your Team’s Abilities

Available free at GreatSalesSkills.com, this twenty question evaluation is aimed at helping your team increase their awareness of their strongest selling skills, as well as the skills that, if improved, could most help increase their selling abilities.

Your team will receive the best results by:

1st – Have each sales person complete an online evaluation of their selling skills.

2nd – As their manager, complete a separate evaluation on each team member evaluating how you see their skills.

3rd – Meet with each team member reviewing and discussing their selling skills evaluation.

Meeting one-on-one with each team member in a positive “looking forward” coaching environment will allow you to openly share answers to each evaluation question discussing any inconsistencies between your two scores. This can then help you develop a personalized list of “next best” skill areas that could provide the greatest payback if improved.

Improving your team’s Operational selling skills

One of the best ways to begin improving your team is to work on their Operational, or foundation selling skills.

A lack of strong operational skills is a major weakness in most, otherwise experienced and successful, salespeople. The majority of professionals learn to sell by trial and error--no training, no coaching, no direction, just raw experience trying to figure out how to sell and succeed on their own.

But their lack of training and structure leads to selling practices based on hunches and intuition. Intuitive salespeople can be successful, but they tend to lack consistency in their skills. On some calls they are brilliant, but on others they are ineffective or miss accomplishing all they could. A way to increase overall selling success is to build operational selling skills by adding more structure and consistency to daily selling efforts.

You don’t have to be a better sales person than your people in order to help, but you do need to understand all the steps, structures and philosophies of selling so you can coach even your best people to improve.

How to Prioritize the selling skills that can best provide the strongest improvement opportunities

All selling skills are not created equal. After completing your detailed sales evaluation your next step is to prioritize your answers. You want to select the areas that, if improved, could generate the most profound selling improvements to each member of your team.

Once each team member has identified and selected the skill areas they most want to improve it is time for you, as their leader, to help them develop a positive skill enhancement action plan.

In our next article we will continue our coverage of the sales evaluation by discussing how to evaluate and increase the tactical selling skills of your team.

Want even more ideas? Then read my book “You Can Always Sell More - How To Improve Any Sales Force.” This 300+ page book outlines the entire process described in these articles. Call 800-526-0074 or go to GreatSalesSkills.com

I congratulate you on working on your own leadership skills and now being ready to start work strengthening the skills and competitive advantage of your sales team. May you enjoy the process.

Reprint with permission “You Can Always Sell More – How To Improve Any Sales Force” ISBN #0-471-73915-4 John Wiley & Sons.

Copyright 2008 Jim Pancero, Inc.

Jim Pancero
		About the author:
		Jim Pancero has been directly involved in "business-to-business" selling for over 35 years. Six of those years were spent successfully selling the largest computer systems for the Data Processing Division of the IBM Corporation. During Jim's prestigious IBM career he earned several awards including the coveted "Golden Circle" designation annually awarded to the top 5% of their international sales force. In 1982, Jim founded his advanced sales training and consulting company. Since then, Jim has conducted over 2,500 presentations or consulting days for 500 companies providing a career average of five events per client. Over 90% of Jim's clients utilize his services more than once. www.pancero.com
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