According to HubSpot 41% of salespeople find prospecting the most difficult part of sales”
There are 3 things in sales that need focus, if you spend 50% of your time doing them you will get more revenue. It is that simple, but people like to avoid complicated tasks or ones that do not give instant gratification. Prospecting falls under this category.
The 3 things to focus on for Sales Professionals:
- Prospecting
- Sales conversations
- Closing
I have done timesheets with sales professionals and it is the same story repeatedly. Sales professionals spend less than 35% of their time on sales tasks. Look at the statistics around this.
Sometimes it is not the salesperson’s fault it is the companies wanting too much paperwork / internal meetings / unnecessary reporting that is too complicated. From my own experience, I worked with a PLC and spent most of my time having internal meetings and doing presentations for this manager and that manager. At the end of the day, management is going to look at your sales figures and all other tasks do not reap rewards.
“According to Salesforce todays sales professionals spend on average spend 34 % of their time selling”
Inevitably, most people will avoid tasks they do not like doing, for instance, prospecting. One of my top tips for sales professionals, therefore, is to assign a task and keep the process simple. This way your sales team are more likely to do it.
If you give anything focus you get results. Let me say that again, focus is the key to achieving any goal. Sales are about performance and focus increase performance.
Leads Generation Process for Sales professionals
My mission with Elevate Sales is to help companies achieve sales growth. However, there is one problem that keeps coming up repeatedly. Leads, yes lack of leads. Leads are not followed up or simply there is no process around lead generation and prospecting.
There are 24 ways to get leads and it gets complicated what to focus on. What is your strategy around this and who will take charge of the work? This big problem between sales and marketing is called Marketing and Sales Misalignment. For this reason misalignment of sales and marketing costs companies Trillions per year.
Although sales and marketing have a vast number of common goals and objectives, the two have always found it tough to work together. This is bad news for businesses. The inability of sales and marketing to collaborate and work together towards common goals can harm and hurt growth and performance: it has been estimated that lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget cost companies AT LEAST $1 trillion a year. (101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead)
To keep things simple, I often suggest a simple one-page strategy. This gives you much greater focus and keeps clutter away.
Below are 5 Tips for Sales Professionals to help you get leads:
- Where does your customer sit on social media, master these platforms
- Revise how you get your top ten leads last year? existing customer base first.
- Set outline plan and goals with outside help -see one-page strategy
- Assign someone responsible for these tasks
- Manage and Measure the tasks /actions /results weekly.
If you would like a copy of a one-page strategy email me at hello@elevatesales.ie
Adrienne is a Business Growth Advisor. On a mission to elevate your company’s growth, through building sales and leads blueprints that work time and time again. Do you want to find out how to build your own sales blueprint, to get more leads and sales for your company?
