Sales Development

> Sales Management & Planning
> Sales Coaching
> Sales Skills Development
> Motivation & Peak Performance

Sales Management & Planning

“One definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result”

Albert Einstein

Most businesses are interested in continually improving their results, so effective sales management involves a focus on what generates those results - activity. In those organisations which do understand the importance of activity planning, many of them follow a ‘top-down’ process, often with the emphasis on how much activity. In our experience this has, at best, limited effect and, at worst, can result in damage to both morale and customer relationships as sales people ‘tick the box’ on activities for which they have no real ownership.

However, when you provide both managers and sales people with a framework for planning their own activity to achieve agreed levels of business, they are able to do so in a way which works best for them.

“Never tell people how to do things, tell them what you expect and they will amaze you with their ingenuity”

General George Patton

At Real World we help both your managers and your salespeople to understand and use the three ‘control levers’ for effective sales activity planning: Quantity of activity - how much; Direction of that activity - where it is aimed; Quality of the activity - how effective you are when you get there (measured by ratios etc.)
This framework for individual sales planning then becomes the platform for any sales coaching and development.
We can provide structured management training, either in workshops or one-to-one, to improve your team’s sales management skills in areas such as:

• Sales activity planning (QDQ)
• Sales performance management (handling good, average and poor performance)
• Sales coaching (see below)
• Sales recruitment
• Motivation
• Effective management communication

Sales Coaching

Most sales managers do not spend enough time coaching their people – we hear this regularly from both business leaders and sales managers themselves. Given that they seem to want to do more coaching, the real questions are - what stops it from happening? And what would happen if it did?
A key difference between coaching in the world of sport and coaching in business is the fact that in sport, the sportsperson ‘owns’ the coaching – an environment exists within which they see the value of personal coaching, they think about the specific areas in which they want to be coached, and they even pay for the best coaches. In business, all too often, coaching is something which is perceived to be imposed on people from above, often to address underperformance. If people in the business come to believe that coaching is only for underperformers, it is not surprising that they wish to avoid it!

Firstly, we can help you and your managers to create the right environment for effective coaching so that everyone throughout the organisation sees the value and how it can generate peak performance. Secondly, we can support you and your team in using effective coaching structures – great coaches don’t necessarily have to be as skilled as the performers they coach, but they do need to know the structures of exactly what it takes to be a great performer.

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others…it is the only thing”

Albert Schweitzer

Sales Skills Development

‘Selling’ is often seen, in the UK at least, as a dirty word: most of us have experienced at some time the manipulative and often transparent tricks and techniques used to pressurise us into making buying decisions. These tricks and techniques are ineffective, often damaging to customer relationships and also unnecessary – indeed, in our experience, most of the sales people who have been trained in them feel, rightly, uncomfortable in using them.
At Real World we believe that selling, influence, persuasion - call it what you will - is actually very simple:

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”

Dr Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)

The fact that selling is simple does not mean that it is easy, because to truly understand another person – their business, their opportunities, their challenges, what motivates their behaviours, how they make decisions – takes a very high level of interpersonal skills. It is those skills which we help our clients’ front line people to develop.

All consistently successful human behaviour has a structure to it. We will work with your sales people to help them discover, individually, the structures that work best for them. We use a suite of proven sales frameworks, tools and exercises to enable each individual to improve their own ability to understand and communicate effectively with their customers in a way which will not compromise either their own, or their customer’s, values and beliefs.

Depending on the particular development needs of your sales people these may include:

• Lead generation – customer referrals, networking, direct approaches

<< Networking Video

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• Qualification of leads, pre-call planning
• Positioning and rapport building

<< Rapport and Sensory Acuity Video

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• Consultative selling skills – questioning structures to elicit different responses (information, needs and wants, motivation, decision making, certain states of mind)
• Listening as a state of mind, not just a skill

<< Listening as a State of Mind Video

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• Effective presentation structures

<< Sales Proposition Video

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• Handling concerns and barriers
• Price positioning and negotiation
• Advanced communication skills using NLP – representation systems used by customers, linguistic patterns, filters used by customers, eye accessing cues, pacing and leading, tonality, the use of metaphor and hypnotic language structures – all of which act to raise the sensory acuity of the individual so that they notice everything.

“People do not resist their own thought patterns…they may resist yours…”

During our sessions to improve the communication skills of the individuals with which we work, we also work concurrently on a deeper level – ensuring that they can easily access the right state of mind for the most effective customer dialogues (athletes call it ‘going into the zone’) and that they go into that dialogue with a set of beliefs and values which will not only be congruent with those of their organisation and their customer, but will also empower them and increase their confidence.

Motivation & Peak Performance

Leadership, sales management and sales can sometimes be lonely roles and things don’t always go as well or as quickly as we would like. To succeed, it is important that we are able to access and maintain the right level of internal motivation at all times, not just when we get a good result. Peak performance from your sales people does not just involve higher level skills – it also requires the right state of mind, underpinned by belief (in their own ability, in your organisation’s ability and in the value of your products and services) and a clearly defined set of goals and objectives which motivate and excite them. At Real World, we believe that every human being already has all of the internal resources they need to accomplish most of what they want in life – but sometimes they have difficulty in accessing those resources when they need them. In our work with our clients we help leaders, managers and front line staff to explore a range of personal mental strategies and techniques to ensure that they are in control of, and able to make choices about, their responses to external events. These include areas such as:

• Internal States – how they affect us, how we can control them, how to generate positive states; confidence, wanton motivation etc.
• Beliefs – the building blocks of perception; identifying and dealing with limiting beliefs, stepping into the powerful beliefs of high performers
• Goal Setting – mental techniques for effective goal setting including; the use of visualisation, understanding values, the importance of sensory-based markers and time-line

All Real World consultants are licensed NLP Practitioners and we  make use of the latest NLP techniques and language patterns to harness the unconscious as well as the conscious mind and to teach those with whom we work to programme their own minds with the behaviours they want.