Part 4 of 6
After launching my eBook – How to Sell More in a Down Market – The Leadership Secrets to Dynamite Sales Results, and doing a number of related workshops, I’ve realized how difficult it is for many sales professionals to change to the changing environment.
Hopefully these brief excerpts will help inspire and motivate you to want to change because to maximize what opportunity exists for your products, services and systems … you must embrace change.
Additionally, accepting the basic premise of How to Sell More in a Down Market is vital for success in selling more in a down market. The premise is for you to “take a leadership approach to your sales responsibilities”.
This leadership approach is straightforward and practical. It has six elements.
1. Accept full accountability for your results
2. Adopt leadership attributes for success
3. Become inspired and motivated
4. Become a personal productivity champion
5. Learn to plan like a leader
6. Take responsibility in further developing your leadership and sales professional skills
Although a number of leadership elements comprise an exceptional leader, How to Sell More in a Down Market focuses on each of the elements of leadership mentioned above to help you improve your sales results.
From the Plan Like a Leader Section
Leaders spend a large portion of their time creating plans, implementing plans, measuring/monitoring plan performance and adjusting their plans.
In this section, we will cover the element of planning your business—your sales responsibility.
The components of a sales responsibility plan I recommend include:
• A mission statement,
• A SWOT analysis,
• A set of objectives that help you achieve your mission,
• Tactics or action plans to achieve your goals.
To develop a mission statement, here are the steps I typically recommend you process through:
Step 1: Brain Storming – Either sit down with a blank piece of paper, a white board, sticky notes or a flip chart paper, and start writing your values; your attributes; what you do; what you want to do; where you are; your strengths; what your customers like about you;, your company’s products, services and systems; and any other relevant issues specific and unique to you or your sales responsibility.
Step 2: Identify – Begin to identify key words that are actionable and unique, and separate those from the others. Group the others into obvious categories such as “products,” “services” etc.
Step 3: Form – Using the actionable and unique words, with one eye on the other word groups, begin to form a collection of different brief mission statements.
Step 4: Decide and Finalize – Using the process of elimination, select your favorite and tweak it if necessary; your mission statement is now finished.
As mentioned before, this is a process. It doesn’t and shouldn’t happen in an hour. It also helps to involve others to ensure you benefit from different perspectives.
To demonstrate my point—with over 30 year’s experience, I relied on a mentor coach to help me finalize the mission statement for my business. She asked me a few questions that triggered a spark of inspiration and BOOM, a direction was set.
To learn more about How to Sell more in a Down Market, or to read a section – Click Here
To learn more about our Sell More in a Down Market Workshop – contact me directly – randy@randallwade.com