Do you have the right salespeople?

Our last TEC Advisory board meeting we discussed the usual things such as how is business been this past month, what major issues are on the table & what you’re doing about it, and what major issues do your clients have at this time.  Nothing out of the ordinary, except sales cycles are taking longer which leads me to ask the question how many companies out there currently have salespeople who have not been trained for those bad times? We all know its easy to sell during good times, for many it was make a couple of calls and get the deal signed, but now I would say that consensus around the table is that we haven’t seen sales cycles like this in over the past decade!

The point that was being made was that we need to start training our younger sales staff the art of sales and getting to the real needs and objectives of the prospect and letting them know that it will take longer to close sales in today’s business environment.  The alternative is that are you leaning on your more experienced sales staff, or in other words people probably in their 40’s or 50’s who have been through tough economic times and know that they have to do a lot more digging to qualify prospects and know more sales techniques to better meet the needs of prospects?

Sales are tough today, do you have the right people, invested in the right systems, and training and touching customers more often to maintain those relationships?  If not, your shareholders, owners, and bankers could be asking the more difficult questions of you.

Written by Richard Wong, CMA          email: rwong@firstchoicecapital.ca