One of the main business stories, in many industries, this year has been the difficulty in recruiting staff. This is especially true in sales. There are many reasons behind the lack of exceptional salespeople available but, the main question is how do you maximise your chances of attracting the best candidates for your role, and showing them that your business is the one they want to work for? There is a vast amount of advice on the internet about how to build a successful sales team, motivating salespeople but there is a word that is often missing from this advice… Support.

If you remember the 80s and 90s adverts for salespeople were full of the phrase “self-starter”, meaning that they were expected to operate with high levels of independence and initiative, generating leads, qualifying them, quoting, and closing. If they didn’t succeed there would be someone else ready to take their place. In the very different world of 2022 expecting a good salesperson to achieve all these tasks to a high standard is not viable, and more often than not there will be another company happy to take your best salespeople off you if they can.

There is a simple solution to recruiting the best talent to your team. It starts with a typical sales technique, surrounding your offer with benefits. The days of “treat them mean and keep them keen” are over in sales recruitment. The best people know their value and a great candidate will often have multiple opportunities to change role, so they can be questioning you as much as you are interviewing them. The Sales Assembly blog discovered that the most common questions candidates asked at interview were around availability of sales intelligence and prospects, and how the company’s sales process works. In the post pandemic marketplace fulfillment is as important as the package on offer. You are recruiting people who you expect to deliver increased sales, so in order to attract the best you need to give them the tools they need to succeed.

Your Business Development Team are experts at supporting sales teams. We help you create a pipeline of qualified leads, and nurture them until they are ready for your sales team to do what they do best, convert prospects to orders. The demands on a salesperson’s time can leave them pulled in so many directions that they don’t achieve as much as they are capable of. Using YBDT’s services to support your team, taking away the pressure, while delivering high-quality leads and maximising your return on investment in the best sales people. YBDT’s services make sure that they are focused on the critical path to orders. If you want results-driven services that are tailored to your specific business targets and goals, we can help. Get in touch to learn more about what we can do for your business.

You have great products and services, and a team to support your drive to growth. What you need to do now is connect the two, and that is where sales enablement comes in.

Simply put, sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organisation with the information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively. A sales enablement programme should equip your sales team with everything they need to engage and convert customers.

Building knowledge

The first aspect to consider is an understanding of three key areas.

• Firstly, defining your target markets and where they can be found and identifying the opportunities that exist within those markets.
• Secondly, competitor research and analysis. This will demonstrate how the rest of the industry is connecting with their target audience while highlighting the areas in your offer that need improvement.
• Lastly, isolate the key aspects of the buying journey that your clients will take.

Define objectives

Knowing what you want to achieve is critical point for any business. Putting numbers and key performance indicators to those objectives is also important. As the management guru Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Create the process

A survey form the CRM provider Salesforce suggests that nearly 40% of businesses have no identified sales process in place. YBDT’s gap analysis system will identify bottle necks and other blocks that obstruct your client’s journey to buying from you. By refining your sales process, you will simplify the route to an order for both the customer and your team. This can include introducing or improving CRM and other supporting systems.

Continuous training

With the sales process in place, you need you need to roll it out to your team. This is the start of continual training and mentoring activity. YBDT’s training framework includes sales skills development and sales process workshops along with long term mentoring to build confidence and resilience into your team.

All effective selling is a process of building and developing relationships. To yield results the nurturing process need to be made specific and based on a clear understanding of the prospects. Many companies fail to grasp this and let go of the process too soon, allowing sales to slip from their grasp. YBDT’s sales success consultancy is built on our own experience of lead generation and improving sales conversion for our clients.

By helping you build an understanding of your markets and then creating the processes that support your sales growth we can support you in creating content, generating, and nurturing prospects and guiding your team towards improved sales conversion. Why not start by joining our regular lunchtime webinars. You can revisit our past programme and book into the latest event here.

Get in touch to learn more about how we can support your sales growth into 2023.