Sales Management Information |
How to Maximize Account Penetration and Jump-Start Sales
Maximizing account penetration is one of the most critical functions in sales. Why? The depth of account penetration has an enormous impact on revenues and profitability. Think about it - if every one of your company's salespeople sold every product and service in their portfolio to every business unit, department, and division of every account, what kind of number would they produce? Something huge, right? From a sales management perspective, few things are more frustrating than having a bunch of "one trick ponies" on a sales team. These are salespeople that have developed a comfort level with one product or service, and that product or service makes up 80% to 100% of their sales. I used to work for a computer distributor that had numerous salespeople that fit this mold. They would congratulate themselves for selling servers to an account, completely oblivious to the fact that the very same account was also buying storage, networking equipment, software, and professional services. The distributor's salespeople only scratched the surface of the total available opportunity in most accounts. Here is a second huge frustration for sales managers and executives -- salespeople that don't produce "traction" with new products and services. When your company introduces a new product or service, you make a pretty sizeable investment to train your salespeople to sell the new product or service, right? Doesn't it drive you crazy when only a fraction of your salespeople actually sell the new product or service? The return on your sales training investment stinks, and your company never sees the revenue boost it expected to receive from the new product or service. Why do I bring up lack of account penetration and lack of sales traction for new products and services in the same article? Because the same problem is often at the root of both issues! That problem is an excessive focus on technical details. Many managers and salespeople believe that salespeople need to become experts in order to sell a product or service effectively. To develop this understanding, companies invest enormous amounts of time and money in exhaustive training to educate salespeople on product features and benefits, performance characteristics, industry information, pricing guidelines, promotional activities, available collateral material, etc. Unfortunately, when salespeople leave these training sessions, they often have no idea how to find or qualify opportunities for the product or service they were just "trained" to sell! This leaves the salespeople frustrated, as they feel the time spent in training was wasted. Management is equally frustrated with their sales team's inability to gain traction with new products and services, and their inability to learn to sell their company's entire portfolio of products and services. This mutual frustration results from a lack of recognition of one very important fact: When a salesperson identifies a qualified opportunity, there is usually no shortage of knowledgeable resources that can assist the salesperson with converting the opportunity into a sale. These resources may include technical or other specialists from the salesperson's own company, or similar resources that are employed by suppliers or channel partners. If salespeople have access to product/service experts, why should they spend time learning technical details? Instead, why don't they laser-focus their learning on how to find and qualify opportunities? Your company can facilitate this kind of focused learning by redesigning product and service training curriculums to address the following topics:
Copyright 2005 -- Alan Rigg Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: Why Most Salespeople Don't Perform and What to Do About It. To learn more about his book and sign up for more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020performance.com.
MORE RESOURCES: Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting |
RELATED ARTICLES
Hire A Six, To Consistently Produce Sales Success For many years as a sales manager, I would only hire the stereotypical sales representative. You know the type-on a human relations continuum or scale of zero to ten, with the ten representing a candidate who is totally gregarious and outgoing and the zero, someone who is introverted with few people skills, I'd always recruit the ten. Sales Coaching... Fact or Fiction? The old adage in selling has always been, "Find out what they want, then, give it to them." The fundamentals of selling are clearly that elemental. How to Sharpen Your Sales Message with Do-it-Yourself Focus Groups - Small Business Power Tools You've probably heard of focus groups. It's a tool that the big guys use to quickly test a new product or service or to get fast feedback from potential customers. The Top 5 Issues Facing VPs of Sales A recent study of 2,663 sales organizations by Think Training, Nightingale Conant and Trainique uncovered five areas that shed light on what separates the best from the rest (visit http://www.revegrowth. How You Can Raise Your Business Earnings By 50% With An Age-Old Magic Truth Imagine increasing your business earnings by 30, 40, or 50%.And this just by putting into use a fundamental truth of life. The Effective Executive What does it mean to be an "effective executive"? Well very simply it means achieving the goals you set out to achieve in an efficient, creative and effortless manner. Some of the benefits that ensue from this self efficacy are: feelings of self confidence, self esteem, self worth, a sense of personal empowerment, feeling invigorated and passionate about everything you choose to do, a sense of resilience, more energy, personal emotional and physical health and for some a great sense of purpose. How To Build A Worldwide Distributor Network When your product is market ready and has a good bargain, it will be no value to you if you don't know who's going to buy it, or how you are going to tell the world about it. Your product will only sell if it has a good wide distribution network. Raise Concern About Sales Competition, Not About Yourself As you are reading this sales article, read very carefully. Because I wouldn't want you to think of a pig right now. Finding A Sales Force That Pays For Itself The elements involved in building a sales force, especially one that pays for itself and also adds value to any business, are many and varied. The whole purpose and direction of a sales manager needs to be directed to creating a sales force that causes the employing company to expand through increasing sales. 8 Line Items of a Trade Show Budget Budget Guidelines for Trade Show MarketingB'techa didn't know - Trade shows are the second largest expenditure of corporate marketing dollars in the US. Only the field salesperson costs a company more. Rotten to the Core: The Story of How the Best and Brightest can be Ruined The objective of an incentive is to incite action within an organization using a device or mechanism that that allows the rewarding or recognition of behaviors. This can be accomplished by offering preferential treatment, money, privileges, promotions, verbal praise, or complements. Back-to-School List - 10 Tips for Trade Shows There's a new year beginning now - the school year. Whether you have children attending for the first time or finishing university, it's always hectic to get into the back-to-school routine. The Benefits of Catalog Sales For Your Business Things to watch out for when selling your product in catalogs.Giving away the farm. 10 Things to Help Your Business When Sales Are Slow During the Holidays Twiddling your thumbs and waiting for some business to come in? Why not use this downtime to set yourself up for greater success in the new year? Here are my 10 picks, but you don't have to do them all. Even doing just one will get you another rung higher on your business ladder. Franchise Sales; Recruiting of Laid Off Employees Because of corporate downsizing, many people have been laid-off or voluntarily taken early retirement packages and/or incentives. This happens when times are good due to mergers and acquisitions or when the economy is in the dumps and corporations are working to cut payroll costs. Never Trust a Silent Customer Imagine you run a pizza parlour. You have all these neighbourhood families that pop in at least once a week for some pizza, garlic bread and Coke. Sex, Drugs, & Rock-n-Roll at Trade Shows Here's the Scenario.. Business Career, Executive Coaching Article - Perfection vs. Excellence "(Howard) Hughes never learned how to convert his knowledge to practical application. Instead he sought a perfection that assured failure. Pointless Targets I recall a heated discussion with a sales director some time ago where I proposed that the long-term effect of setting activity targets for salespeople would eventually lead to failure. He vehemently made the point that he had systematically imposed activity targets on his sales force and that the result had been to treble average income per salesperson within 18 months. Outsourcing the Sales Function Small to medium companies that want to increase sales or profits and find it is possible to outsource sales should - do it! At this point most business owners and executives either become overwhelmed with doubt or fear.Here's what we hear: "We can't give up control of sales, that's too risky. |
home | site map | contact us |